Category: Iran

Has an opening appeared for a diplomatic resolution to the Iranian nuclear weapons standoff? Mahmoud Ahmadinejad acknowledged that Iran might have a neutral third party such as Switzerland perform their uranium enrichment in order to appease Western nations who insist Iran wants to develop nuclear weapons:

Iran’s President President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad told Dow Jones Newswires Sunday that he would be consulting with Arab nations on a plan to enrich uranium outside the region in a neutral country such as Switzerland.
Such a plan would allow Iran to develop its nuclear energy program while potentially easing fears that it is seeking to develop nuclear weapons.
“We will be talking with our (Arab) friends,” he said in exclusive comments to Dow Jones Newswires on the sidelines of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries’ heads of state summit in Saudi Arabia.
Under a proposal put to Tehran by the six-member Gulf Cooperation Council, a multinational consortium established by the GCC will provide enriched uranium to power plants in Iran, the Middle East Economic Digest reported earlier this month, citing Saudi Arabia’s Foreign Affairs Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal.

The GCC would not just operate for Iranian benefit. Arab nations interested in peaceful nuclear power would also receive nuclear fuel from the consortium. It would relieve these nations of the cost of developing and maintaining enrichment capabilities, and hopefully would eliminate the potential for a costly arms race in the Middle East.
Could it work? It might, although Iran eventually rejected a similar offer from the Russians in 2005 to settle the dispute. Arab nations do not want Iran’s mullahcracy to get nuclear weapons any more than the US does, and they don’t want to have to create a regional MAD scenario to keep them from using one against their Sunni counterparts. The GCC would have to have robust capacity to meet the eventual demand, but with the French and Russians involved — both would like to export their nuclear expertise under the right circumstances — that capacity is achievable.
The sudden flexibility of Ahmadinejad may signal that the economic and diplomatic sanctions have begun to bite deeply into their power base. Iranians want the option for peaceful nuclear power, but they don’t want war or bad relations with their neighbors and the West, and many feel that Ahmadinejad has bungled the entire issue. As economic sanctions tighten, the mullahcracy will worry about their population demanding dramatic political change — and they may be looking for a face-saving path out of the corner in which they’ve stuck themselves.

Iran has claimed for years that it only pursues nuclear technology for peaceful power generation, and that the West has no reason to suspect that they have any nefarious purposes in building centrifuges and reactors. Western critics of the Bush administration’s tough policy on Iran insist that the entire issue may be manufactured entirely, and that Iran has the right to pursue nuclear power. They may have a more difficult time offering apologias for Teheran after today’s release of plans for uranium warheads from the mullahcracy:

Iran has met a key demand of the U.N. nuclear agency, handing over long-sought blueprints showing how to mold uranium metal into the shape of warheads, diplomats said Tuesday.
Iran’s decision to release the documents, which were seen by U.N. inspectors two years ago, was seen as a concession designed to head off the threat of new U.N. sanctions.
But the diplomats said Tehran has failed to meet other requests made by the International Atomic Energy Agency in its attempts to end nearly two decades of nuclear secrecy on the part of Iran. …
Both the IAEA and other experts have categorized the instructions outlined in the blueprints as having no value outside of a nuclear weapons program.

Iran’s explanation? Parents of teenagers will find some familiarity with this — they have no idea how those blueprints got into their files. That somehow evades the important fact that Iran would not release those blueprints in the two years since IAEA inspectors “stumbled” upon them, as the AP puts it. They claim the plans must have come with the illegal equipment they purchased from the AQ Khan network, from which they used to create their own reverse-engineered equipment.
The IAEA still believes the Iranians have held back even more damning information and evidence. While they plan to report the cooperation in getting these documents, they will likely judge them as less than fully cooperative. That will give the West an opening for tightening the economic and diplomatic sanctions even further, and the Russians and Chinese an excuse to stall them again.
Coincidences seem rather unlikely in this case. If this was a filing mistake, the Iranians would have released these plans long ago. It’s almost literally the smoking gun that shows their true intent for nuclear technology.

Many people point out the relative sophistication of the Iranian people as a contrast to their 7th-century leadership as a reason why the mullahcracy is doomed. The British got a taste of this disconnect in a ministerial meeting at a recent peace conference when treated to the Iranian perspective on homosexuality. The big question for the Iranians is whether a noose works better as a cure, or a brick wall:

Homosexuals deserve to be executed or tortured and possibly both, an Iranian leader told British MPs during a private meeting at a peace conference, The Times has learnt.
Mohsen Yahyavi is the highest-ranked politician to admit that Iran believes in the death penalty for homosexuality after a spate of reports that gay youths were being hanged.
President Ahmadinejad, questioned by students in New York two months ago about the executions, dodged the issue by suggesting that there were no gays in his country.
Britain regularly challenges Iran about its gay hangings, stonings and executions of adulterers and perceived moral criminals, Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) papers show.
The latest row involves a woman hanged this June in the town of Gorgan after becoming pregnant by her brother. He was absolved after expressing his remorse. Britain said that this demonstrated the unequal treatment of men and women in law and breached Iran’s pledge to restrict the death penalty to the most serious crimes.

See how modern the mullahcracy is? They even support abortion — in fact, they support it by killing both the mother and the fetus at the same time.
The strange and brutal nature of shari’a law provides a wedge between the mullahs and the people they oppress. The Iranians had much more contact with the West before the 1979 revolution than the Wahhabists in Saudi Arabia or the other Arabic tribes of Southwest Asia. They knew a more modern Islam, similar in nature to Turkey, where secular law prevailed over the harsh imposition of chauvinistic strictures by so-called holy men. They know a life outside of shari’a.
When will they rise up to put an end to this despicable regime? So far, although reports have them very unhappy with life under a Persian Taliban, the Iranians seem reluctant to act on their opposition. They don’t want to risk the tumult a people-power revolution will cause, or the military reaction it might provoke, if they don’t see much risk to anyone else but homosexuals, adulterers, and people who want to dress like they were born after 1450.
The application of economic sanctions is therefore critical, as it puts another pressure point on ordinary Iranians. If their economy collapses, they will have to act in one way or another to resolve the crisis. They will resent the need to act, but eventually they will have to act or starve. Most people in that situation choose to act — and they act on their own accord, without having to have someone invade their country to make the changes they should make themselves.
Stories like this need to be reported widely. The application of sanctions requires support from the peoples of the world for the long haul. Only by seeing the true nature of the regime will that support remain constant.
CORRECTION: I wrote “Iraqis” where I meant “Iranians”. Thanks to Anon in the comments.

Admiral William Fallon, the commander of CENTCOM, throws some cold water on hard-Left conspiracy theories and hard-Right wishes. He tells the Financial Times that CENTCOM has not plotted imminent attacks on Iran, and thinks that the rumors abounding on the subject do not help the diplomatic efforts on which the Bush administration has concentrated (via Memeorandum):

The Pentagon is not preparing a pre-emptive attack on Iran in spite of an increase in bellicose rhetoric from Washington, according to senior officers.
Admiral William Fallon, head of Central Command, which oversees military operations in the Middle East, told the Financial Times that while dealing with Iran was a “challenge”, a strike was not “in the offing”.
“None of this is helped by the continuing stories that just keep going around and around and around that any day now there will be another war which is just not where we want to go,” he said.
“Getting Iranian behaviour to change and finding ways to get them to come to their senses and do that is the real objective. Attacking them as a means to get to that spot strikes me as being not the first choice in my book.”
Adm Fallon did not rule out the possibility of a strike at some point. But his comments served as a shot across the bows of hawks who are arguing for imminent action. They also echoed the views of the senior brass that military action is currently unnecessary, and should only be considered as an absolute last resort.

Top military analysts worry that the idea of a limited strike suffers from far too much optimism. It assumes that the strikee won’t expand the theater of war after an attack, which seems more than just overoptimistic but extends to the absurd. In the first Gulf War, Saddam Hussein launched several Scud missiles into Israel in order to produce a regional war. The US managed to keep Israel from responding, but if Iran had Hezbollah initiate attacks across the northern border, that would be almost impossible to even ask of Israel.
Fallon doesn’t appear to be talking out of school, either. The US has just released nine Iranians from custody, suspected members of the terrorist al-Quds force of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, in exchange for an agreement to stop arming militias in Iraq. That agreement may have helped reduce the number of attacks in Baghdad and the south in recent weeks, as Americans continue to discover arms caches at higher rates. While maintaining its hard-line rhetoric, the White House appears to be pushing the diplomatic path vigorously, including with tough economic sanctions.
This news will not make some conservatives happy — but it should. We can hardly afford to expand the shooting war outside of Iraq at the moment, nor should we do so except in the last extremity. Iran is not Iraq. It’s much larger, with a terrain that negates many of our military advantages, similar to that in neighboring Pakistan and Afghanistan. Their military has not had the same degradation that Saddam Hussein’s suffered in twelve years of no-fly zones and neglect.
We have to leave the military option on the table to have diplomacy taken seriously by our enemies, and make no mistake, the Iranian mullahcracy is an enemy of the US. That being said, we can’t simply expect to have even the most surgical of strikes go unanswered, and a shooting war with Iran will have grave implications for Iraq, especially in the Shi’ite south. We need to solidify our gains in Iraq before looking for another adventure — and we need to act in the best interests of our nation while ensuring that we don’t make the Middle East exponentially more explosive than it already is. Admiral Fallon offers some excellent advice in this instance.

A decision by the State Department to transfer funds for Iranian democracy activists to its Iranian Affairs office spells the end of the American effort to support democratic change in the Islamic Republic, its former director said. Scott Carpenter, in an interview with Eli Lake of the New York Sun, says that the end of independent operation of this project signals that the money will no longer support efforts to get past Internet censors and other means of information reporting that is critical to the success of democratic movements:
The former director of President Bush’s flagship democracy program for the Middle East is saying that the State Department has “effectively killed” a program to disburse millions of dollars to Iran’s liberal opposition.

In an interview yesterday, Scott Carpenter said a recent decision to move the $75 million annual aid program for Iranian democrats to the State Department’s Office of Iranian Affairs would effectively neuter an initiative the president had intended to spur democracy inside the Islamic Republic.
“In my view, this pretty much kills the Iran democracy program,” Mr. Carpenter said of the decision by the State Department to subsume the program. “There is not the expertise, there is not the energy for it. The Iran office is worried about the bilateral policy. I think they are not committed to this anymore.”
Mr. Carpenter, who headed the Middle East Partnership Initiative and was a Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs until he left the Bush administration this summer, predicted the $20 million devoted to supporting the activities inside the Islamic Republic would be relegated to what he called “safe initiatives” such as student exchange programs, and not the more daring projects he and his deputy, David Denehy, funded, such as training for Web site operators to evade Internet censorship, political polling, and training on increasing recruitment for civil society groups.

Lake notes that this transfer comes at a time when the Bush administration is considering its diplomatic options with Iran regarding Iraqi security. Some of the captured Quds forces have been released, and at the same time American commanders have noticed a slowdown in the number of Iranian-manufactured copper disks used for EFPs by terrorists. The Iraqis have pressed the Iranians to end their support for the militias, and they appear to be responding, at least in part.
The money has generated controversy in the past, especially this year. One of the most prominent democracy activists, Akbar Ganji, wrote in a recent Washington Post column that the money should stop coming directly to the activists. It brands them as spies and traitors, Ganji explained, and ruins their credibility as Iranian patriots who only want freedom. However, Ganji did want the US to amplify its communications to the Iranian people, putting that money into efforts to get around the Iranian censors and get truth and vital information to Iranians.
This step by State appears headed in the wrong direction. Carpenter makes some assumptions about where the money will go, but he’s probably not far off. The Radio Farda and VOA Farsi service have not been terribly effective, mostly because they see themselves as analogs to American radio stations — entertaining first and foremost, instead of the vanguard of truth to their listeners. The program needs refocusing, and not just for Iran. It needs more resources and some enthusiasm from the Bush administration.
The most effective way to end oppressive governments is to show their subjects just how completely the oppressors lie to maintain power. It takes a lot longer to do that than to bomb, but in the end it’s much more effective. The end of the Iron Curtain came through economic warfare and the fax machine. We seem to have forgotten the critical data effort that helped sweep the Soviet Union into the dustbin of history. If the cash can’t be given to the Iranians, and Ganji makes a good case for that, then it needs to get applied to a robust information system on which Ganji and his compatriots can rely for support.

Iran announced that it has expanded its working centrifuge system to 3,000, making uranium enrichment to weapons-grade fissile material achievable within a year. The Iranians announced this as an intermediate goal nineteen months ago on the way to 54,000, at which point they could produce a bomb every two weeks:

Iran has achieved a landmark with 3,000 centrifuges fully working in its controversial uranium enrichment program, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said Wednesday.
Ahmadinejad has in the past claimed Iran succeeded in installing the 3,000 centrifuges at its uranium enrichment facility at Natanz. Wednesday’s claim was his first official statement that the plant is now fully operating the 3,000 centrifuges.
“We have now reached 3,000 machines,” Ahmadinejad told thousands of Iranians in Birjand in eastern Iran, in a show of defiance of international demands to halt the program believed to be masking the country’s nuclear arms efforts.

In April 2006, the State Department estimated that a 3,000-unit centrifuge cascade could produce enough highly-enriched uranium to produce one working nuclear bomb within 271 days. This announcement starts the nuclear clock. That schedule puts the buzzer at August of next year at the earliest.
The Iranians don’t plan on stopping at 3,000, either. Despite their rhetoric about only desiring peaceful applications for their nuclear program, they built Natanz to run the much larger, industrial-size 54,000-centrifuge cascade. Their one uncompleted reactor at Bushehr would have no need for the kind of output produced by such a cascade for the less-enriched uranium used in power plants, but it would allow them to start cranking out nuclear weapons on a much more regular basis than once every nine months.
People used to say that we had years before Iran could build a nuclear weapon. Now we have months. And while they could stick it on top of a Shahab-3 missile and hit as far away as eastern Europe, don’t expect them to waste it on one of their rockets when they have suicidal terrorists eager to make a big exit from this world – preferably taking thousands of Israelis or Westerners with them.

Democrats have objected to the Bush administration’s pursuit of sanctions against Iran as a precursor to war. They have ignored the Iranian intransigence on nuclearization and treated the White House as the source of the problem. In doing so, they have given signals to Russia and China to continue their obstructionism on sanctions at the UN Security Council. Jim Hoagland explains why Russia, China, and the Democrats are pushing the Bush administration to the war option as the sole remaining recourse:

And by mid-November, Mohamed ElBaradei, director of the International Atomic Energy Agency, will report on whether the Iranians will now admit that they received and then developed P-2 centrifuges and got other nuclear technology from Pakistan, as was reported in this column in 1995 and as the IAEA has charged since 2002.
This is one basic that Bush critics frequently overlook — in part because it gets lost in the overheated “World War III” rhetoric of the president: The IAEA and the U.N. Security Council have determined that Iran has lied about its nuclear activities and has therefore at least temporarily forfeited its right to enrichment for peaceful purposes. That Iran has gone to great, secretive lengths to create and push forward a bomb-building capability is not a Bush delusion. …
Paradoxically, time is running out on the diplomatic track, where Russia and China are blocking a third round of U.N. sanctions against Iran. This allows Cheney and other hawks to argue that waiting on diplomatic results is a waste of time. Blocking sanctions actually increases the pressure on Bush to move unilaterally and militarily.
China, blithely ignoring the potentially perverse effect of its actions, wants to maintain financial advantage and access to Iran’s energy. Chinese participants emphasized that basic point to me at an IISS-sponsored gathering in Beijing in June. China would expect to be compensated if sanctions cost it business — an attitude that would appall Germany’s Merkel, Italy’s leaders and other Europeans who have seen their trade with Iran plummet as a result of joining the U.S. financial campaign against Tehran.
The administration has too often pitched the confrontation with Iran as one that Bush alone will decide. Russia, China and Europe should do everything they can to prevent this from becoming necessary. Not backing the new U.N. sanctions brings it a scary step closer.

This may be the best mainstream media column on Iran I have yet read. All sides have a hand in allowing this crisis to spin out of control. The Bush administration could have been more circumspect with its rhetoric, which allowed its domestic and international opposition to paint it as too war-like, when in fact the Bush administration has spent the last several years avoiding a military confrontation with Iran, and for good reasons. However, the White House has some reason to believe that only the escalated rhetoric will get the attention needed on the crisis the world faces with the world’s biggest Islamist terrorism sponsor acquiring nuclear weapons.
So far, Russia and China clearly have not gotten the message, and it’s not for a lack of American patience. The Bush administration wisely chose to allow Britain, France, and Germany lead the negotiations with Iran for over two years on ending their pursuit of nuclear weapons. We publicly supported the initiative, and we also publicly endorsed Iran’s membership in the WTO and an end to economic sanctions — a big concession — if they abandoned their nuclear aspirations. The Iranians not only rejected all of these offers from their tradining partners in Europe, they continued to lie about their program the entire time.
The world has three choices. We can allow Iran to develop nuclear weapons, with all of the terrorist access that will create, allowing deployment anywhere in the world without the use of rockets or missiles. We can go to war with Iran, striking the facilities we believe house their nuclear research programs, with all of the death, destruction, and radicalization that entails. Lastly, we can use economic and diplomatic sanctions to force Iran back to the table for honest negotiations to end their pursuit of nuclear weapons. There isn’t a fourth option.
Which option do the Democrats want to take? Are they seriously considering the first option? If so, then they have no claim to understanding global security. Barack Obama offered the rather silly notion that we should negotiate directly with a nation with whom we have no diplomatic relations, primarily because they issue genocidal threats against our ally and conduct low-level war against us through their terrorist proxies. If they didn’t negotiate in good faith with their economic partners in Europe without sanctions being applied then, why would Obama assume they would negotiate in good faith with the nation they call the Great Satan?
The Russians and the Chinese don’t have a problem with the first option, because they don’t see themselves as the primary target of nuclear terrorism and nuclear extortion. If the Democrats don’t like the third option, it leaves only one avenue left, which Hoagland correctly asserts leads us by elimination to military action.

Eli Lake offers a recap of the Democratic approach to Iran, calling it the “ask nicely” approach. Leading Democrats in Congress and in the presidential primaries have latched onto the word “diplomacy” as if it has never been tried with Teheran. They offer no reason to hope that another round of sweet talk alone would have any more success than previous attempts:

Finally, at least for Democrats who say they are nominally interested in halting the Mullah quest for nukes, there is the Mohammed ElBaradei option. Perhaps, the time is ripe, as the director general of the International Atomic Energy told CNN on Sunday, for “creative diplomacy.” Time to lower the temperature and accept for now Iran’s enrichment of uranium in exchange for the cooperation they promised back in 2003.
Senator Boxer, a Democrat from California, is intrigued. She said everyone wants to avoid a confrontation with Iran. “We don’t want to go that way. Let’s calm down the rhetoric. Let’s work through diplomacy. There’s lots of back channels. I think ElBaradei was right when he said, look at North Korea.”
The problem with the approach favored by what might be called the “Ask Nicely Democrats,” is that it runs the risk of — in the words of the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan — “defining deviancy down.” According to the commander of our troops in Iraq, David Petraeus, Iran’s Quds Force has orchestrated the murder of our soldiers and funded and armed the worst terrorists in the country. As I reported in July, the Iranians host senior Al Qaeda leaders who meet regularly in the eastern part of the country, in a tactical alliance with whom they share a common foe today. In addition to all of this, Tehran has snubbed numerous offers from the west to obtain nuclear fuel in exchange for real guarantees they will not build nuclear weapons.
Had it not been for the invasion of Iraq, politicians of both parties would call this kind of behavior what it is: acts of war. As it stands, six years into what the president insists is a war on terrorism, we can’t bring ourselves even to speak plainly about our enemies.

The approach has more problems than that — it also has a history of failure. Over the last few years, the Bush administration allowed our European partners to take the lead in efforts to stop Iran’s nuclear program. This made sense, at least for a start, as Britain, Germany, and France all had commercial and diplomatic ties with the Iranians, and had more leverage. Democrats at the time derisively referred to this as “outsourcing” the issue, a strange complaint given their accusations of unilateralism against the White House on Iraq.
Talks between Teheran and the EU-3 went exactly nowhere for more than two years. They offered domestic nuclear power solutions for the Iranians that avoided the use of breeder reactors and centrifuge systems, which the Iranians rejected. The Europeans had Vladimir Putin offer to build and run the nuclear power plants while allowing Russia to control the fuel, and the Iranians stalled for months before rejecting that offer as well. The US publicly offered to restart diplomatic contacts and remove economic sanctions if the Iranians settled the issue with the EU-3, and Teheran shrugged.
Faced with that record of intransigence and obstinacy, the EU-3 and the US finally went to the UN for action. It took months before the Security Council would impose any kind of penalty against the mullahs, finally agreeing to a weak set of economic sanctions at first. When Iran stopped cooperating with the IAEA, the UNSC upped the ante on sanctions. Iran has not budged since, nor do they give any sign that they intend to stop developing nuclear fuel with a potential use in weapons.
Barbara Boxer and her clueless colleagues may want to pretend that asking nicely has not yet been tried, but the EU-3 tried it for years. The Iranians will not be dissuaded by sweet nothings whispered in their ears. Bribes and payoffs have been refused. It will take tenacity and tough sanctions that strike at the base of the mullah’s power to get their attention, if the world wants to avoid war. A failure to recognize the meaning of the process failures in the recent past will bring us to war faster than any sanctions regime could possibly manage.

We have argued in the US for outreach to Iranian activists for democracy as a means of ending the mullahcracy and stabilizing the Middle East. Many of us feel that the US has not done nearly enough to bolster the disaffected Iranian people who have more affinity to the West than most of the rest of the peoples in the region. The Bush administration has proposed sending money to those who work to end the oppression of the mullahs and their front men in the government.
Not so fast, says one of the men on the front lines of the struggle. Akbar Ganji, an Iranian journalist and dissident, writes that American cash will discredit the dissidents. What they need is American moral and media support to get the truth to the Iranian people:

Of course, Iran’s democratic movement and civil institutions need funding. But this must come from independent Iranian sources. Iranians themselves must support the transition to democracy; it cannot be presented like a gift. Expatriate Iranians can assist the transition. Many of the social prerequisites of democracy exist in Iran today, but dollars cannot produce the bravery or love of freedom that individuals need to make the transition possible.
So here is our request to Congress: To do away with any misunderstanding, we hope lawmakers will approve a bill that bans payment to individuals or groups opposing the Iranian government. Iran’s democratic movement does not need foreign handouts; it needs the moral support of the international community and condemnation of the Iranian regime for its systematic violation of human rights.
What else does the pro-democracy movement in Iran want?
The Iranian government is using technology it has purchased from Western companies to block Web sites and otherwise keep Iranians from using the Internet. The West has profited at the Iranian people’s expense by selling these technologies to Tehran. The regime’s extensive censorship and media hegemony must be ended. We want the Iranian people to have access to the Internet and free television to be able to hear criticism of the regime’s policies and learn about alternative models of government.

In the column, translated from the original Farsi, Ganji makes clear that negotiations with the Iranian regime won’t help. It establishes them even more as legitimate and it damages the morale of those who work to rid Iran of oppression. In the end, a negotiated settlement won’t work anyway, Ganji says, because despotic regimes simply don’t keep their word.
On the other hand, he doesn’t want American bombs raining down, either. All that will accomplish is the radicalization of the Iranian people, setting democracy back even further. He objects to the increasingly hostile position of the US, saying it plays into the hands of the mullahs. They need a bunker mentality to keep the people from rising up against them, and the US has provided them with the excuses they need to perpetuate that state of mind.
Instead, we need to start helping them communicate and organize to get the truth to everyday Iranians. That means allowing them to get past the censorship shamefully enabled by Western companies on the Internet. The West could assist them in establishing an independent media system to compete with the mullahs, which would allow free and fair reporting both into and out of Iran. This prescription should have been followed all along, and certainly needs to start immediately.

Iran has spent years hiding their development of nuclear weapons, followed by years of refusing to negotiate on ending their program. The EU attempted a two-year conversation with Teheran to shut down their efforts; the Russians offered to build and run nuclear power plants for Iran while controlling the fuel. All of these efforst came to nothing. Faced with an intransigent theocracy determined to build nuclear weapons while spouting genocidal rhetoric, the Bush administration has pushed for an escalating series of sanctions intended to force Iran into serious negotiations.
Does he get support from the Democrats, who have complained loudly about the “rush to war” with Iraq? Not exactly:
In approving far-reaching, new unilateral sanctions against Iran, President Bush signaled yesterday that he intends to pursue a strategy of gradually escalating financial, diplomatic and political pressure on Tehran, aimed not at starting a new war in the Middle East, his advisers said, but at preventing one.

Bush believes Tehran will not seriously discuss limiting its nuclear ambitions or pulling back from its involvement in Iraq unless it experiences significantly more pressure than the United States and the international community have been able to exert so far, according to administration officials and others familiar with the president’s thinking.
With yesterday’s actions, which included the long-awaited designations of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps as a proliferator of weapons of mass destruction and of the elite Quds Force as a supporter of terrorism, Bush made clear that he is willing to seek such leverage even without the support of his European allies. …
Even so, the administration’s actions yesterday immediately rekindled fears among Democrats and other countries that the administration is on a path toward war. Bush’s charged rhetoric in recent months, including a warning that Iran could trigger a “nuclear holocaust,” and his close consultations with hard-liners — such as former Commentary editor Norman Podhoretz — have led many outside the White House to conclude that the president will order airstrikes to eliminate any Iranian nuclear capability.
“The choice of words has given rise to concerns about just how serious the president is about stopping Iran from crossing the nuclear threshold on his watch,” said Suzanne Maloney, an expert on Iran.
Sen. Robert C. Byrd (D-W.Va.) said in a statement yesterday that Bush’s action “not only echoes the chest-pounding rhetoric which preceded the invasion of Iraq in 2002, but also raises the specter of an intensified effort to make the case for an invasion of Iran.”

What else would the Democrats do? The US allowed the EU to take the lead on negotiations with Iran throughout 2005-6, given their closer relationship with Teheran. Democrats, who had griped about Bush’s “unilateralism” on Iraq, called this “out-sourcing”. Bush went to the UN twice and got two rounds of sanctions. This year, our allies told us that they could not support tightening sanctions, so Bush instead tightened them on Iranian military financial connections.
We have only a couple of more options. We could go to war, or we could allow Iran to have nuclear weapons. Bush has continued to use the only other option, which is continued sanctions and diplomatic pressure designed to return Iran to the bargaining table as a serious participant. He managed to succeed with North Korea using the same tactics and without resorting to war — something these Democrats don’t apparently want to recognize.
If the Democratic policy on Iran involves surrendering, then let them say so. A nuclear Iran would exponentially amplify the danger from terrorism not just in the Middle East, but around the world. If the Democrats don’t wan’t war — I don’t either — then let them explain why they oppose stricter sanctions and diplomatic pressure as an intermediate step. The Democrats have become a group of hysterical screamers with nothing positive to add except to throw their hands up at the first sign of difficulty and to declare defeat before all options have been exhausted. (via Memeorandum)