Iran’s leadership is working feverishly to develop nuclear weapons, and has been doing so for the past two decades.  President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamanei have repeatedly pledged to use whatever means they have at their disposal to wipe Israel off the map.

Just about everyone except Israel’s right-wing politicians and John McCain has been denying, distorting, or downplaying these hard truths for years.  Even though the U.S. State Department has listed Iran as the biggest state sponsor of terror for decades, and even though evidence has been piling up that Iran is working to acquire weapons, President George W. Bush did nothing to encourage military strikes against Iran’s nuclear facilities during his eight years in office, even after the attacks on 9/11.  President Barack Obama is not likely to deviate from this course.

Israel has been undermining Iran’s progress via indirect channels, including deploying the sophisticated Stuxnet worm, which sabotaged Iran’s uranium enrichment centrifuges and set their capabilities back a year or two; and authorizing a covert assassination program to take out top Iranian nuclear scientists.  These strategies have been helpful, but they only buy so much time.  They are not enough to prevent Iran from succeeding at its ultimate goal.  Economic sanctions are also not enough to halt Iran’s work.

The United Nations’ nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), is about to release its most detailed report yet documenting Iran’s secret nuclear weapon development at a site near Tehran called Parchin, its uranium enrichment at a facility in Natanz, and its installation of centrifuges at Qom.  All of this activity has been going on, despite Iran’s lies that its technology will be used only to generate electricity.  read more »