A line in the sand

A line in the sand

Chicago Tribune: President Barack Obama and the leaders of France and Britain on Friday revealed the bombshell news that Iran has been building a secret nuclear facility to enrich uranium. U.S. intelligence officials said the small dimensions and design of the plant all but rule out any civilian nuclear purpose.

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said: “The level of deception by the Iranian government and the scale of what we believe is the breach of international commitments, will shock and anger the entire international community.”

Anger? Yes.

But shock? Anyone shocked that Iran is secretly building its nuclear capabilities, stonewalling inspectors and thumbing its nose at the “international community” as it drives to become a nuclear power hasn’t been paying attention the last seven years.

Iran concealed its nuclear ambitions for 18 years until dissidents revealed Tehran’s plans in 2002. In 2007, we learned that Iran had secretly sought to design a nuclear warhead. Tehran stonewalled European negotiators for so many years that it now has enough fissile material to build a bomb, although it must be further enriched.

From what we’re learning, American intelligence agents tracked the plant’s development for years, possibly since 2006. Which leads to the inevitable and chilling question: What else is Iran building that we don’t know about?

But let’s be clear: This is more than just a matter of preventing Iran from going nuclear. This is a matter of preventing a war in the Middle East.

Stopping Iran’s march to the bomb is not an academic debate about whether Iran can be deterred, as the Soviet Union was, from using nuclear weapons.

It’s an existential imperative for Israel. The Jewish state is directly in Tehran’s sights. Iran’s Holocaust-denying president has called for it to be wiped off the map.

The longer the talks drag on, the more feckless the world powers appear to be, the more likely that Israel will send its warplanes to blunt the threat. And that could easily ignite a wider war.