Iran closer than ever to nuclear bomb

Will Israel be forced to take unilateral military action to stop Iran's nuclear weapons program? With every passing day, this becomes more likely. The consequences of Israeli action against Iran -- or inaction -- will undoubtedly be global. Count on it. - R.O.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Netanyahu: Iran closer than ever to nuclear bomb

Jerusalem Post - February 22, 2013

IAEA report: 180 centrifuges hooked up at Natanz, Iran's main uranium enrichment plant; PM calls findings "very grave."

Centrifuges unveiled in Natanz. Photo: REUTERS

Iran is closer today than ever before to obtaining the necessary enriched uranium for a nuclear bomb, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu said on Thursday evening.

He was reacting to the publication of details of a confidential report by the International Atomic Energy Agency that Iran had begun installing advanced centrifuges at its main uranium enrichment plant.

The Prime Minister’s Office said that preventing Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons would be the first issue on the agenda when US President Barack Obama came to visit in less than a month’s time.Netanyahu termed the report “very grave,” and said it proved that Iran was moving swiftly toward the red line he had set out at the United Nations in September. He said during that address that Iran must be stopped before it crossed the line, something he said at the time could happen as early as the spring.

According to the report, 180 so-called IR-2m centrifuges and empty centrifuge casings had been hooked up at the plant near the central town of Natanz. They were not yet operating.

Such machines could enable Iran to significantly speed up its accumulation of material that could be used to make a nuclear weapon.

It was not clear how many of the new centrifuges Iran aims to install at Natanz, which is designed for tens of thousands.

An IAEA note informing member states late last month about Iran’s plans implied that it could be up to 3,000 or so.

Iran has for years been trying to develop centrifuges more efficient than the erratic 1970s IR-1 model it now uses, but their introduction for full-scale production has been dogged by delays and technical hurdles, experts and diplomats say.

Iran has also started testing two new centrifuge models, the IR-6 and IR6s, at a research and development facility, the IAEA report said. Centrifuges spin at supersonic speed to increase the ratio of the fissile isotope in uranium.

Iran’s defiance is likely to anger world powers ahead of a resumption of talks with Tehran next week. Six world powers and Iran are due to meet for the first time in eight months in Kazakhstan on Tuesday to try again to break the impasse, but analysts expect no real progress toward defusing suspicions that Iran is seeking nuclear weapons capability.

US State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said in Washington Thursday that Iran's installation of new-generation centrifuges would be "yet another provocative step."

White House spokesman Jay Carney warned Iran that it would face further pressure and isolation if it fails to address international concerns about its nuclear program in the Feb. 26 talks with world powers in the Kazakh city of Almaty.

In a more encouraging sign for the powers, however, the IAEA report said Iran in December resumed converting some of its uranium refined to a fissile concentration of 20 percent to powder for the production of reactor fuel.

That helped restrain the growth of Iran’s higher-grade uranium stockpile since the previous report in November, a development that could buy more time for diplomacy and delay possible Israeli military action.

The report said Iran had increased to 167 kg. its stockpile of 20-percent uranium – a level it says it needs to make fuel for a Tehran research reactor but which also takes it much closer to weapons-grade material, which could be obtained if it were processed further.

The Death of Truth: Dangerously Doubting the IAEA Report on Iran's nukes

By: Robert D. Onley

Fallout from the misleading intelligence that led to the 2003 War in Iraq is now leading the international community into dangerous, reactive scepticism of the IAEA's damning report on Iran’s now exposed nuclear weapons program.

This ill-founded scepticism extends to American allegations last month of an Iranian government-backed plot to assassinate the Saudi Arabian ambassador to the United States.

Despite the comprehensive, wide-ranging IAEA Report on Iran’s covert nuclear arms research, Russia and China have already rejected the possibility of increasing punitive sanctions against Iran, arguing on disingenuous grounds that the UK, France and US will use sanctions as an “instrument for regime change in Iran.”

Major news outlets across the world and particularly in the Middle East are similarly casting complete doubt on American and Israeli claims that Iran is actively working on nuclear weapons. 'The Americans are lying once again,' is the commentators’ chorus.

There is no arguing that the release of the IAEA Report was preceded by loud sabre-rattling from the American and Israeli political establishments, with leaked pronouncements that Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is allegedly preparing Israel for unilateral air strikes against Iran’s nuclear sites.

The timing of the release of these statements was certainly no accident, designed both to spark global discourse on Iran prior to the IAEA Report and concurrently to intentionally expose the Israeli government’s willingness to undertake military action.

But since his election in 2009, Netanyahu has repeatedly stated Israel’s deep existential fears about the Iranian nuclear weapons program. As such, none of his recent statements should in any way discredit the catastrophic implications of the IAEA Report, which sets out in unprecedented detail the extent of Iran’s covert nuke research and experimental nuclear detonator testing.

Some critics have been quick to point out that Iran’s research into the design of nuclear weapons is not in-and-of itself a breach of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), of which Iran is a signatory state and is thus internationally bound not to “manufacture” or otherwise “acquire” nuclear weapons. However, such a suggestion completely misses the point, and highlights the dangerous naivety of the international community’s reactive scepticism toward intelligence on Iranian nukes.

In contrast, the indisputable facts about Iran’s covert nuclear weapons research are as follows. According to the November 8, 2011 report by the IAEA, since 2003 the Government of Iran has:

1. Repeatedly, openly claimed its nuclear program is for “peaceful” purposes only, while it simultaneously…
2. Conducted covert research into nuclear weapons designs
3. Continued development of intercontinental ballistic missiles
4. Covertly constructed numerous weapons-related facilities, notably the Fordow uranium enrichment facility – built inside of a mountain, itself inside a military base – revealed by US President Obama in September 2009.

Finally, and most importantly, the Government of Iran did all of the above while blatantly obfuscating and lying about its nuclear intentions, in an obvious effort to stall for time and thus deliberately impede all hope of progress during years of nuclear negotiation efforts with Western powers (namely the P5+1).

Apparently burned by the botched intel that justified war with Iraq, Russia and China (and many in the West) have dismissed the IAEA report as a manufactured casus belli to attack Iran, and have painted Yukiya Amano, the head of the IAEA, as a pro-Western dupe.

Despite the fact that their own intelligence services likely also possess damning evidence of the Iranian nuke project, Russia and China are firmly backing Iran, with Russia's Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov warning the United States and Israel that attacking Iran would be “a very serious mistake.” The West can only guess as to what this warning could mean.

The most tragic casualty in all of this misguided scepticism is the truth itself. The fact that a 25-page report from the IAEA – the one global institution tasked with protecting the planet from the proliferation of nuclear weapons – can so blithely and reactively be dismissed as a lie, emphasizes the abject depravity of the international community’s moral core.

A country – the Islamic Republic of Iran – with a president who openly, repeatedly and callously denies that the Holocaust ever occurred, is now at the threshold of possessing the very weaponry that could cause the Second Holocaust.

In the face of this utterly malignant, horrifying historic juncture, the international community’s instinctive reaction is to render the IAEA’s years of painstaking intelligence gathering on this nuclear threat not as a terrifying truth, but rather as an unremitting lie.

Beset with widespread protests, a faltering global economy, and a Middle East already in turmoil, hesitation to green-light another conflict in the region is wholly understandable, and certainly with merit.

However for these same nations to then simply ignore the threat of another country gaining nuclear weapons capability, out of fear of causing temporary instability in the Middle East, is to abandon the world’s future to the enemies of peace. Moreover, if Iran develops the Bomb, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty will effectively be destroyed, instigating a nuclear arms race in the world’s most volatile region.

Israel, the one nation most directly threatened by the potential of a nuclear-armed Iran, is today at the greatest of geopolitical crossroads since coming into existence.

If Israel decides to undertake unilateral military action against Iran, Netanyahu must convene with the United Nations Security Council and reveal all of Israel’s intelligence on Iran's nuke program. Now is the time to irrefutably prove to the world that Iran is developing nuclear weapons and thus represents a threat to the peace and future stability of the world.

The truth on this matter cannot be left in any doubt, because the truth -- about Iran’s nuclear weapons program and the threat from Iran’s theocratic Shia 'Twelver' leadership -- is Israel’s only ally in the longstanding fight for its very survival as the world’s sole, immovable, Jewish State.
-------------------------------------------------------------
By: Robert David Onley

The Socially Networked Future of International Diplomacy

By: Robert D. Onley
In a world enveloped by unsolvable crises, national leaders of the Boomer Generation continue to practice politics and diplomacy using methods little changed over the centuries. Responding to their stasis, a new flock of 20-something student leaders – the “Facebook Generation” – are spearheading efforts that will forever reshape the dynamics of international diplomacy and global governance.

This stark contrast in methods was seen as one Middle Eastern government after another fell to popular uprisings this spring. Arab leaders who had viewed Facebook and Twitter as mere "websites" were blindsided by the organizing and unifying power of social networks.

But the inherent ability of these networks to mobilize people into action came as no surprise to the Facebook Generation, whose young leaders deployed the networks' tools as digital weapons and brought down the dictators.

While the Arab Spring will be remembered for the Internet’s effectiveness in instigating short-term ground-level political change, the long-term transformation of international diplomacy and the networked future of global governance was on display at the 2011 G8/G20 Youth Summit, held in Paris, France in early June.

At the Youth Summit, aspiring world leaders from the most economically powerful nations on earth met each other, exchanged ideas, and debated serious global problems in a professional, high-profile setting. Unlike the upbringings of their forebears, these young leaders are digitally connected, instantaneously communicating, and constantly updating each other on their personal, political and educational progress.

Critically, they have established permanent online networks of highly engaged, driven students who seek to bring change to the world, and who remain connected long after the Youth Summit is over. It is this transformative reality that is far more potent than the Arab Spring protests; a diplomatic sea change which will have deep ramifications for the future global order.

Chambre de commerce et d'industrie de Paris

Renaissance 
Paris, June 2011.

160 university students from all over the world gather at the École Supérieure de Commerce de Paris for the 2011 G8/G20 Youth Summit. The event, organized by a French non-profit initiative aptly called 'Youth Diplomacy', was planned entirely by undergraduate and graduate students.

The 5th annual Youth Summit sought to cultivate global dialogue between youth leaders through intensive negotiations over international affairs. Among the keynote speakers opening the event were the newly appointed Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund, Christine Lagarde, as well as an address by Christophe de Margerie, the President and CEO of Total S.A., one of the world's largest oil companies. Adding a layer of geopolitical credibility, Youth Diplomacy secured formal sponsorship for the Youth Summit from the Office of the French President Nicholas Sarkozy.

Beyond simply mimicking their respective national government's policies, the organizers encouraged delegates to propose their own innovative solutions. By week’s end the delegates had collaboratively drafted a consensus “Final Communiqué” of realistic proposals, a 54-page document which was then presented to the French Presidency and the actual leaders of the G8.

A Universe of Change
While international youth leadership events are nothing new, unlike any other era, social networking websites allow today's brightest youth to continue their dialogue, share their knowledge, and interact together on a daily basis. All of this is happening now, well before any of them enter into positions of real political power.

Critically, these up-and-coming world leaders understand that the influence of street-level social unrest only goes so far. What is needed is the genuine decision-making authority that comes with political office. These aspiring statesmen and women recognize that combining the organizational capability of social networks with their global networks of fellow young leaders will altogether reshape the future of global power and diplomacy, by equipping leaders with extraordinary communication tools.

The result is that social networks will soon become, in and of themselves, an additional lever of diplomatic power to world leaders. Tomorrow’s leaders, who today are establishing genuine international relationships through simulated diplomatic environments, will be able to leverage relationships from their youth that they cultivated over the coming decades.

Think about that for a moment. What if Barack Obama and Muammar Gaddafi had met 25 years ago and had been Facebook friends ever since?

Knowledge as power
The likelihood of such a scenario may be slim, but the plausible by-products of a such a relationship are as follows.

Tomorrow's world leaders will know more about each other than ever before. Like no other time, regular users of Facebook are provided – free of charge – with a deluge of personal, social and educational information about anyone they have ever added as a friend on the network. In many cases, this information is available for everyone that they have effectively ever met. (If you have added someone on Facebook that you only met once, raise your hand.)

Whether it is the latest degree, achievement, or new employer, Facebook allows for the completely legal “monitoring” of friends’ professional developments. By using Facebook just as the typical user does, sharing periodic life updates, Facebook Friends can know effectively everything that you, and concurrently, they, are doing and have done.

Intelligence briefing notes, the product of exhaustive research and once an indispensable primer for international negotiations with rival diplomats, could wind up becoming redundant relics of the pre-social-networked era of diplomacy.

Accordingly, relationships will be nurtured outside of regular diplomatic circles. Delegates at the 2011 G8/G20 Youth Summit in Paris warmly greeted returnees from the previous year's Summit in Vancouver. Like old friends, they had kept abreast of each other’s latest news, published articles and global travels – all through Facebook and Twitter.

Many of today's young leaders, including almost all of those who aspire to political office, are members of the jet-setting, globe-trotting crowd. Some delegates in Paris had even met up in far-off locales during the year in between Youth Summits – yet another externality facilitated by cheap travel and immediate communication tools.

While other delegates had not physically seen each other in over a year, the steady communal, ongoing dialogue enabled by social networks helped create a comfort and familiarity that only deepened the genuineness of their now renewed personal interactions in Paris.

Mental, digital shift
Empowering all of this is the fact that Facebook is effectively hard-wired into the day-to-day existence of tomorrow’s future leaders. Teenagers and 20-somethings possess a fundamental grasp of how Facebook “participates” in their daily lives.

Facebook’s all-pervasiveness is manifest in the hyper-connected reality of perpetual communication with --and information from-- anyone they have ever known. The social networks’ infiltration into the lives of the 'Facebook Generation' is due primarily to that fact that the Generation has literally grown up with the unprecedented power of instantaneous digital interaction.

For today's crop of young leaders, Facebook launched at the beginning of their undergraduate studies, allowing the sharpest among them to utilize the Groups feature to great effect when organizing campus events, clubs and parties.

But it is the omnipresence and ease-of-use of these technologies that will also enhance international dialogue in the near future. Facebook and Twitter are apps on every smartphone, and this will increasingly be the case as smartphones inevitably become ‘normal phones’. Facebook’s recently released Messenger app for iPhone and Android allows any user, anywhere in the world, to immediately contact anyone they have in their social network. And unlike international text messaging, Messenger’s chat feature is completely free.

Beyond Facebook, Twitter’s unique ability to #hashtag ideas, Tweet @ other users and their followers (thus bringing the Tweet to the attention of the 'targeted' user) is an instant accountability mechanism that today’s Boomer leaders are late to recognize, but one that tomorrow's leaders innately grasp. As these websites evolve and expand, so too will their abilities.

Gala dinner at UNESCO Headquarters in Paris

Hacker's delight
There are undeniably serious concerns regarding the security and privacy of Facebook, the legitimacy of social news outlets like Twitter, and their overall vulnerability to hacking. Recent scandals and security breaches have emphasized this, most notably the abhorrent hacking by Rupert Murdoch's "News of the World" paper.

However, the social networks are no more vulnerable than any other website. In fact, neither has ever been publicly hacked or catastrophically exploited. Broadly, every website on the Internet is subject to potential attack. The ongoing efforts of the hacking group ‘Anonymous’ to knock out the websites of major transnational corporations emphasize this ruthless reality.

Except given that ‘Anonymous’ concurrently supports opposition movements around the globe by hacking “enemy” government websites, it seems unlikely that the world’s highest profile hacking group would target the very social networks that pump oppressed protestors with the lifeblood needed for their movements to survive.

Move Beyond Sharing, into Shaping
The challenge for Facebook and Twitter is to move beyond merely lumping people into an interconnected universe filled with massive Groups and Events. Simply providing pages with common interests does little to push regular users to do anything more than read articles, watch videos and look at photo albums.

But Facebook can and must create legitimate social change, simply because it has the capability to instigate genuine discussion on global issues. What is required is motivated thinking.

In order to evolve beyond merely 'sharing', users should have the ability to opt-in to a "Dialogue" channel, one where "Strangers" (not Friends) with similar interests all over the world can comment on identical articles, ideas and proposals which have been mutually shared by several different people.

Often incredibly insightful comments and ideas on shared articles are forever “lost” on the Walls of Facebook users, whose ideas will never escape the restrictive confines of their profile's individual security settings. These lost ideas represent a tragedy for the progression of collective global discourse, and are untapped resources in the pursuit of tangible, results-oriented dialogue.

OneMidEast.org is an excellent example of a platform for constructive cross-cultural debate, featuring opposing views on contentious issues, presented on equal footing. Google's recently launched "Ideas" think-do-tank (in Google parlance) is another effort at encouraging discussion on intractable, real world matters.

The great advantage Facebook has in developing a similar platform, of course, is that it can exploit its exponentially larger userbase. With so many deeply troubling global problems requiring immediate action (just read the news), Facebook's competitive advantage cannot be wasted by simply staying complacent as an outlet for sharing silly YouTube videos and gawking at friends’ party pictures. Future generations cry out that Facebook’s 750,000,000+ users do far better than this with their time.

Facebook has already invaded the entire Internet, allowing users to log-in on practically every website imaginable, letting users "Like" pages and comment publicly on news articles using their personal profile. Such an unrivalled, ever-present platform for constructive communication with strangers can be taken a full step further, through the establishment a permanent think-tank structure for global dialogue, one that is operated within and populated by the entire Facebook universe and all of its shared content.

Only then can the overwhelmingly inane, narcissistic nature of Facebook today, be overhauled into a substantial, altruistic vehicle for shaping solutions to the myriad issues plaguing the planet.

Start now
Indeed with great power comes great responsibility. Possessing the largest, most influential websites in the world, Mr. Zuckerberg and his friends at Twitter and Google are burdened with, and challenged to begin, establishing a positive, lasting legacy using the very behemoths they now control.

Tomorrow's future leaders are ready to join them in this effort, today. Indeed, as the G8/G20 Youth Summit showcases, they have begun this dialogue by establishing influential networks of student leaders who are already initiating change. These young minds have been raised in an era where technological limits simply do not exist.

One spark and one Tweet started a revolution that is still sweeping the Middle East. The capacity to achieve has never been greater. Let’s get to work.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Robert D. Onley represented Canada as the Minister of Defence at the 2011 G8/G20 Youth Summit. Robert is a UTSC graduate (Honours Bachelor of Arts, 2009) and a freelance writer in Toronto. He is the President of the Students' Law Society at the University of Windsor, Faculty of Law. Follow @RobertOnley on Twitter.

© 2011 Robert Onley, World Assessor.com


Click here for the Official G8/G20 Youth Summit Website.

Netanyahu's Warning

Writing in Jerusalem, the Washington Post's George F. Will provides a compelling examination of the threats to Israel's existence today as perceived by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in his article "Netanyahu's Warning". Will takes readers on a very brief journey through Israel's tumultuous struggle for existence and concludes with a profoundly unnerving assessment that "If Israel strikes Iran, the world will not be able to say it was not warned."

As Iran is set this week to launch its first nuclear reactor at the Bushehr power plant with the help of Russian engineers, Will's article is both timely and perceptive. It is unlikely that Israel would undertake air strikes to stop the launch, as the nuclear site itself is likely an entirely peaceful enterprise. Iran would not be so stupid as to hide any military applications of its nuclear technology inside this location, one which has undergone rigorous IAEA scrutiny.

Of course it is the numerous other nuclear research sites, scattered throughout Iran, many buried deep underground, which provide the substance for Will's ominous title, "Netanyahu's Warning", no doubt implicitly directed at the Iranian leadership.

One must not forget that the Washington Post is arguably one of the pre-eminent American newspapers internationally, alongside the New York Times. If there were any paper to be actively observed by the Iranian leadership, the Washington Post is certainly one of them.

Thus an article such as this, emerging likely from an interview with Netanyahu, serves two important purposes: First, is clearly to remind the Iranian Regime that Israel means what it says about stopping Iran's nuclear program. Second, is to send a strong signal to the Obama administration to ratchet up its own efforts to halt Iran's drive for nuclear weapons, or else Israel will take the matter into its own hands, on its own watch.

Nothing could be more politically and internationally destabilizing for President Obama than for Israel to unilaterally bomb Iran's nuclear facilities some time before this November's mid-term Congressional elections. An Israeli strike could spin the sputtering global economy into a tail-slide on the back of skyrocketing oil prices. The American voter would likely blame Obama for both failing to press Iran hard enough and for failing to persuade Israel not to act alone.

So what might Obama do with Netanyahu's warning? Surely this warning is not the first iteration of the Israeli government's fears and intentions toward Iran. Obama is well aware of Israel's intensive pre-occupation with Iranian nukes. What is disturbing however, is that Obama appears unwilling to either publicly assuage Israel's fears, or to call Iran to heel for its international disobedience and dishonesty. Netanyahu is left to make his case in American newspapers so that the American populace at least tacitly understands what may soon transpire.

In what is an increasingly shrinking time frame, Will says that Netanyahu may decide to undertake targeted air strikes against Iran "within two years." Diplomatically, this does not leave much more time for Obama to bring Iran to the table, nail the Iranians to their seats, and force a peaceful resolution to this nuclear stand-off. For years the Iranians have been playing a deceitful game of diplomatic chess, both with the Americans and the rest of the P5+1, throughout negotiations over its nuclear program. But tiny Israel has not blinked for a second, it's eyes firmly fixated on Iran's growing stockpile of enriched uranium and ongoing construction of yet more underground nuclear military facilities.

The West long ago called the Islamic Republic's bluff when Iran's secret underground uranium enrichment at Qom was revealed last September. The West knows Iran is building nuclear weapons. The question is whether the West has the guts to do anything to stop Iran from completing the development of their very own Persian Bomb.

For Israel, and for Netanyahu, the question is not if they will stop Iran, but when. For Obama, this looming reality should keep him up at night.

"Netanyahu's Warning" : http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/08/13/AR2010081304474.html