Proliferation

We try to keep things civil around here, but I feel pretty comfortable saying that Israeli foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman is either an idiot or a morally bankrupt asshole. Or both. He seems to think a Cuban-style embargo is the best policy against Iran.

"I think that from now on Israel should perhaps change its Iran policy a little, and we should ask the United States to adopt the Cuban model ... Here the United States alone can do everything in order to stop this (Iranian) programme."

The obvious rejoinder is to point out that the U.S. embargo on Cuba, which was imposed in the early 1960s to topple the Castro regime, still hasn't toppled the Castro regime. El jefe ceded power to el hermano, and the Castro family is still living a pretty good life, by all accounts -- which is more than we can say for the Cuban people, who are caught in between Havana's bad economic policies and Washington's brutal embargo.

A leaked report prepared by the International Atomic Energy Agency says that Iran may have continued testing detonators and missile re-entry systems associated with atomic weapons beyond 2004 and has already enriched a small amount of its uranium to a nearly 20 percent level suitable for a crude nuclear bomb, according to multiple news reports on Thursday.

The IAEA paper, scheduled to be presented to the organization's 35-country board on March 1, is the first to be issued under the leadership of newly minted chief Yukiya Amano, who took over from Mohamed ElBaradei in December.

In an anonymous background briefing to reporters, a senior Obama administration official sounded a stern line. He said that Iran's "pattern of behavior is one that is very disturbing" and noted that "this is the first time that [the IAEA has] now raised a question that there may be ongoing activities related to weaponization."

Over at Informed Comment, Juan Cole wants everyone to breathe deeply and think about whether Iran's latest nuclear announcement is really that threatening. Cole called "bizarre" remarks made on Sunday by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who equated Iran and North Korea as both being "nuclear-armed" and "a real or a potential threat":

The US intelligence establishment continues to doubt that Iran has or wants a nuclear weapons program. Tehran does have a nuclear enrichment program, which is permitted by the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Iran allows United Nations inspections of it nuclear facilities. Although Iran is not as transparent as the UN International Atomic Energy Agency would like, there is no dispositive evidence of a weapons program. For the Secretary of State to frame Iran as she did is just muddled or dishonest.

I'm a big believer that solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will have ripple effects throughout the region. It will increase the chances of peace between Israel and its other neighbors (Lebanon and Syria); it will take away a major terrorist recruiting tool, and a distraction that oppressive regimes use to avoid discussing their own problems.

But when I hear things like this, from Jordan's King Abdullah, I cringe.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, speaking Sunday at a conference to showcase advancements in laser technology, ordered the head of his country's Atomic Energy Agency to find a way to enrich uranium to a more easily weaponized level.

The speech has made waves in the Western media, though the news is fairly light: Ahmadinejad told Ali Akbar Salehi, the atomic energy chief, to begin drawing up plans to produce more highly enriched uranium, not to actually do it. But as with all things Iran-related (e.g. last week's news about accelerating U.S. deployments in the Gulf) the slightest bit of change becomes magnified.

Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki told the annual Munich Security Conference that a deal on shipping Iranian uranium out of the country to be enriched could be reached in the "not too distant future," according to the BBC.

"Under the present conditions that we have reached, I think that we are approaching a final agreement that can be accepted by all parties," he said.

American Secretary of State Hillary Clinton brushed aside Mottaki's remarks, which were welcomed by China, saying: "The fact is we haven't really seen much in the way of response ... Sometimes we see a response from a part of the government that is then retracted from another part of the government."

Western diplomats are apparently pushing ahead with new sanctions on Iran, despite Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's offer to ship low-enriched uranium out of the country for several months.

US and European diplomats are pushing for an expanded travel ban on officials connected with Iran's nuclear program, and tougher restrictions on Iranian banks.

By now you've probably heard that Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad offered to export Iran's low-enriched uranium for further enrichment.

In an interview with Iranian state television, Ahmadinejad said he has "no problem" with sending Iran's LEU out of the country. This is more-or-less the same deal the IAEA offered back in October, with one key difference: The original IAEA deal called for roughly a 12-month enrichment window, but Ahmadinejad said yesterday Iran would only part with its LEU for "four or five months."

Iran's foreign minister, Manouchehr Mottaki, expressed his support for the plan today after a meeting in Ankara with Turkish foreign minister Ahmet Davutoglu. "[This is] a formula which could build confidence," Mottaki said.

If you believe the latest meme going around Washington, Arab states are fed up with Iran, and willing to set aside their enmity towards Israel and the United States in order to confront the perceived Persian menace. Tom Ricks summed up this thinking quite nicely in what has to be the most muddled blog post he's ever written.

I wonder if something fundamental is going on in the Middle East. That is, Iran is getting more powerful, and that scares the Arab states. So they seem to be turning away from worrying about Israel and focusing more on Iran as it moves toward becoming a nuclear power.

Michael Totten makes a similar argument over in Commentary, though he at least tries to substantiate it with some polling data; Ricks just typed up a dorm room bull session and slapped a vaguely offensive picture on the top.

The Obama administration announced over the weekend that it's speeding up the deployment of missile defense systems in Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. The White House leaked the news through David Sanger of The New York Times and Joby Warrick of the Washington Post -- two of its favorite conduits for leaking news related to Iran.

The administration didn't put a timetable on the deployments, and it insisted the new weapons are purely defensive in nature.

When Tony Blair sat down today to take questions from a panel created by the British government to investigate the justifications for and execution of the Iraq War, it was a moment those of us in the United States seem destined never to see: the former leader of the nation, one of the most powerful men in the world when he was in office, subjected to hours of questioning over one of the defining military and foreign policy events of the past two decades and likely decades to come.

Gregg and I consider ourselves political agnostics, and certainly for the purpose of journalism we are behooved not to take partisan positions, but suffice it to say that we believe strongly in the need for rational skepticism and inquiry. We'd love for there to be an Iraq Inquiry in the United States, one that could call George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleeza Rice and others to explain exactly why and how we invaded Iraq and overthrew Saddam Hussein.

For now, we'll have to live with the testimony of Tony Blair. And that's not half bad; Blair wasn't lampooned by the British press as Bush's "poodle" for no reason. His thinking, I believe, opens a window onto the post-September 11 chain of events in the Western world, one in which the United States played the foremost role.

Correction: Michael Rubin, quoted below, e-mailed me to point out that I misrepresented two of his statements. First, he didn't suggest that the U.S. bomb Iranian nuclear facilities; he said Israel would consider "entombing" Iranian nuclear scientists; second, he didn't say explicitly that Ali-Mohammadi was assassinated because of nuclear work, only that it was "reasonable to suspect" such a motive. Careless mistakes on my part.

Original post: Massoud Ali-Mohammadi, an Iranian physics professor, was assassinated today by a bomb hidden on a motorcycle outside his home in north Tehran.

If we limit ourselves to the facts, that's really all we can say about this case. Nobody has claimed responsibility. The Iranian regime blamed the usual suspects: the Mujahedin-e Khalq, working in concert with the U.S., Israel, and other unnamed Western powers. A spokesman for the State Department said claims of U.S. involvement were "absurd."

There's been a depressing amount of dubious reporting on Iran's nuclear program: The breathless reports of a "classified annex" to the IAEA's research on Iran, for example, or the Times of London's thinly-sourced report on Iran's alleged neutron initiator work.

But the Associated Press deserves some kind of award for this story, which claims that Iran wants to buy 1,300 tons of uranium from Kazakhstan -- allowing it to ignore U.N. demands and continue enriching uranium. Who's the source?

I'm not really sure why Iranian foreign minister Manouchehr Mottaki made this announcement on Christmas Eve, when nobody in the West would be paying attention:

Iran would be willing to swap nuclear material with the West in Turkey, the Iranian foreign minister said in the country's latest counteroffer to a United Nations-drafted deal aimed at thwarting Tehran's ability to produce atomic weapons.

The U.S. floated this idea back in November -- Turkey would act as an intermediary, a trusted repository for Iran's low-enriched uranium. Iran rejected the proposal.

The Tehran Times says Mottaki still has concerns: He said Western countries need to "build confidence" and prove that they will deliver on their promise to deliver high-enriched uranium.

Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad sat down with ABC News' Diane Sawyer for an interview over the weekend.

Ahmadinejad grabbed headlines by denying reports that Iran is working on a neutron initiator, the trigger for a nuclear weapon. He claimed the reports -- based on an allegedly leaked Iranian document -- were fabrications ginned up by the American government.

2009 winds to an end in ten days, and with it, the Obama administration's self-imposed window for full-fledged diplomatic engagement with the Iranian regime. 2010 will likely see a major push for tougher economic sanctions, as Spencer Ackerman reports in the Washington Independent this morning.

The conventional wisdom is that Obama made an unprecedented gesture to Iran, and the regime swatted him down. There's some truth to that belief: Obama engaged with Iran far more than any American president since Jimmy Carter, and he offered Iran a path to relaxed sanctions and better diplomatic relations.

But, as we like to do around here, let's push the conventional wisdom a bit, shall we?

The U.S. House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed a bill last night authorizing President Barack Obama to sanction companies that sell refined petroleum to Iran.

The final vote was 412-12, with 4 people voting "present." (Here's the roll call.)

The House vote came just hours after a hearing in which four witnesses said the sanctions bill would hurt U.S. policy in the region. That has long been the consensus among Iran experts, who fear the bill will hurt ordinary Iranians without changing the regime's behavior.

The Times of London published a report yesterday based on a confidential Iranian document -- the full document and translation are here -- which says the regime is close to developing a neutron initiator, essentially the "trigger" in a nuclear bomb.

Am I the only one who's lost count of how many "smoking gun" reports we've seen this year? Obligatory caveats: There's no way to establish the authenticity of the document, or who leaked it, or why.

No surprises here: The U.S. has rejected Iran's nuclear offer because it sends out Iran's low-enriched uranium in tranches, rather than all at once.

The Iranian regime appears to be inching back towards a deal on its nuclear program. Foreign minister Manouchehr Mottaki today said that Iran would accept, in principle, a U.N. proposal that allows Iran to exchange its low-enriched uranium for more highly-enriched fuel rods.

"We accepted the proposal in principle," he said through a translator. "We suggested in the first phase we give you 400 kilograms of 3.5 percent enriched uranium and you give us the equivalent in 20 percent uranium."

If the regime is serious, this would be an encouraging change from the brash rhetoric of the last few weeks -- a recognition, perhaps, that Iran has pushed the envelope too far.