Bernard Kouchner - Tag Search

The Iranian regime's announcement that it plans to build ten new uranium enrichment plants prompted a surprised reaction from the West. French foreign minister Bernard Kouchner described it as "very dangerous"; Russian officials say they're "seriously concerned" with the announcement.

That was clearly the goal: As Julian Borger wrote this morning in The Guardian, Iran doesn't actually have the capacity to build those plants. The Christian Science Monitor quotes one expert who says the plan, announced yesterday by Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, will take decades. It will also be hugely expensive; Iran, already facing massive budget deficits, can ill afford to spend billions more on uranium enrichment.

So the regime's threat, for now, is an empty one, an act of political theater intended to provoke a reaction.

From AFP: "Iraq surge could be model for Afghan war: US admiral."

I'm sure you're all sick of hearing me explain why the surge is not yet a success story (most recently here) and why it's a faulty model for Afghanistan, so I won't repeat myself.

Iran's foreign minister, Manouchehr Mottaki, says his country may ship at least part of its uranium stockpile to Russia for further enrichment.

That would mean the Iranian government is willing to at least partially accept the draft IAEA deal announced last week. But Mottaki said Iran will also continue to enrich its own uranium. The IAEA deal is designed to buy time for further negotiations by temporarily taking away Iran's capacity to enrich uranium.

French foreign minister Bernard Kouchner said as much today during an interview with the Daily Telegraph. Kouchner said Israel "will not accept" an Iranian bomb, and said the IAEA deal is designed to head off a potential Israeli attack.

I'm glad to see French foreign minister Bernard Kouchner talking sense on the proposed embargo on Iranian gas imports.

"I think this is a bit dangerous," Mr. Kouchner said in an interview here, where he is attending the United Nations General Assembly. A blockade would harm the Iranian people, he said, "and mainly poor people."

"This is a choice; we have to study it also," he said. "But it is not my personal favorite at all."

The embargo idea is still taken seriously in D.C.'s foreign policy community -- it was endorsed just yesterday in an op-ed in the Washington Post. But I haven't talked to a single actual Iran expert who thinks it would influence the regime's behavior. In the short term, it would increase fuel prices and hurt Iran's poor; in the long term, it would impel Iran to build more refineries and achieve self-sufficiency.

Ha'aretz reports that an Israeli radio station said a Lebanese newspaper interviewed Lebanese diplomats who told it that the French foreign minister told them that U.S. officials told him that they told Israel to freeze settlement construction within six months.

Story like that's gotta be true.