David Sanger and William Broad of the New York Times have a story detailing new intelligence, sourced anonymously from Western officials, about a purported effort by Iran to begin building two new uranium enrichment sites.
The story follows on an admission made to the Iranian Student News Agency by the country's top nuclear official, Ali Akbar Salehi, that work would soon begin on the new sites, which would be built "inside mountains."
Spencer Ackerman thinks David Sanger's Iraq-surge-vs.-Afghanistan-surge piece, which I panned earlier this morning, is useful -- particularly this paragraph:
Both surges aimed to knock back an insurgency that had gained territory and caused high casualties, and to buy time and space to train local forces for combat. "Neither one of these surges," said one officer involved in both decisions, "was born to exploit success. They were designed to reverse momentum."
"That's an overlooked point and a useful, precise concept," Spencer writes. But is it, really? Sanger says nothing about the reasons why the insurgency is ascendant, or why U.S. strategy isn't working, or about the success of training foreign forces, or about the insurgency's sources of funding, or its ideology... he simply says that both surges aimed to deal with strong and growing insurgencies.
That's a similarity, to be sure, but I don't see how it informs strategy, or how it suggests that an Iraq-style escalation is the best course of action for Afghanistan.
David Sanger has a piece in the New York Times today, headlined "Similarities to Iraq Surge Plan Mask Risks in Afghanistan," which is truly one of the dumbest pieces of "analysis" I've ever read. His argument is that the Obama administration might have been fooled by the "striking" similarities between the Iraq surge and the Afghanistan surge -- and thus overlooked the key differences between the two. What are the similarities, you ask?
Wondering what's in Iran's formal response to the IAEA's draft proposal, which it submitted to the agency this morning? So is the U.S. State Department!
"We need to hear a formal response from Iran," spokesman Ian Kelly said, hours after the International Atomic Energy Agency said it had received a response from Tehran without giving any details of its contents.
The IAEA, in other words, has been quite tight-lipped about the Iranian response. IAEA director Mohamed ElBaradei did describe it as an "initial response," suggesting that the Iranians are looking for further negotiations.
David Sanger and Bill Broad have a front-page story in today's New York Times that is attracting a lot of attention. Their story claims that the IAEA believes Iran has "sufficient information to be able to design and produce a workable" nuclear weapon.
The story is based on an internal IAEA report, the so-called "classified annex" we've been hearing about for months. The Institute for Science and International Security obtained the relevant excerpts from the IAEA report and posted them online (pdf).
