Wednesday, October 10, 2012

The Mysterious Affair of the Leaping Red Line

Haaretz's intrepid security reporter Amos Harel (via Richard Silverstein) reports a shocking-shocking finding:
[Israeli] defense sources say Israel has received additional information that reinforces the IAEA's conclusion that Iran is using enriched uranium for medical purposes.

The report, which the Israeli intelligence community considers highly reliable, states that on a number of occasions in the recent past, Iran has allocated uranium enriched to 20 percent for another purpose: the manufacture of fuel rods for a research reactor in Tehran, where isotopes can be manufactured for cancer treatment. 
Wonder what that additional information might be? Maybe they read it in the New York Times on September 27? No, what's most likely is that the angel Gabriel whispered it into the prime minister's ear.
The Red Line. By Lozha at Deviant Art.

That's what made the red line jump, you see. One day the red line was practically right here, and it looked as if Netanyahu and Barak were going to have to go bomb Iran all by themselves by Halloween, and the next day it had slid way back down to next June or so, and Netanyahu was able to assure President Obama that there would be no bombing until after everybody's elections were over. Whew, that was a close one!

In other words, Netanyahu was having a hard time explaining why he had decided not to have this war, after months of screaming about how necessary it was, and people were starting to talk: and what they were starting to say was that Obama made him do it, and we can't have that! So instead Netanyahu told a story about how how he scared the Iranians into depriving themselves of all that 20% uranium.

But what really happened, I figure (because it's what I've been saying all along), is that the Iranians were telling the truth in the first place. They aren't building a nuclear weapon. And that's the measure of how desperate Netanyahu is to save face, that he needed to speak something like the truth.
Red Line, by Gene Davis, 1952 . From Wikipaintings.

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