Remember all the flak about the discovery of the so-called "SECRET" Iranian nuclear facility a few weeks ago, just before the tealks with Iran were going to be held in Europe. It turns out that the US and Israel have known about this facility for three years.

"Israeli intelligence was involved in editing and creating the sanitized version of information about Iran's recently revealed secret uranium enrichment facility near Qom.The revelation comes in an interview given by the director of the Central Intelligence Agency Leon Panetta to TIME magazine.

Panetta said that the CIA had known about the facility for at least three years, and in recent was, together with British Israeli and French intelligence agencies, preparing a dossier which would be presented if necessary to the UN's nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy, and to be used in briefings for the international community.

Fearing that some of the info would be leaked, and in order to protect sources the dossier was edited and sanitized by the CIA, aided by Israeli intelligence officials. Panetta also revealed that the U.S. intelligence community shared its knowledge about the Qom facility with British and French intelligence agencies months ago, adding that those agencies had also been on the lookout for the secret plant."

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1119615.html

Sorry to say, there appears to be an element of diplomatic duplicity here by the United States and its allies which looks more like George Bush than what we might have expected from Barack Obama. What's especially galling about the whole episode is the way that the Israeli lobby in the US has tried to push the theme that Iran can't be trusted because they say it violated a Protocal of the UN's IAEA, a treaty which Israel, with its estimated stash of 80 atomic bombs and secret nucear facilities, has refused to sign or cooperate with for 40 years. I think that's chutzpah in any language, whether it comes from George Bush or Barack Obama.

If Obama's tenative approaches to Iran prove anythiing, it's that the jury is "still out" on whether this new President has the will or power to try to break the lock on American foreign policy that Bush surrendered to Israeli lobbyists and apologists during his eight years in the White House. It's a group that wants the United States to do Israel's bidding, no matter how many American lives and fortunes are lost in the process. Let's hope Barack Obama has the integrity, will and guts to change course to suit American, not Israeli, interests.

So what's the big deal? According to what I've read, the US and a couple of the European countries have had some knowledge of the site for 3 years and have been combining intelligence resources to verify what was at the site and to monitor the construction progress. The problem is that Iran failed to disclose it to the IAEA as they were required to do under the treaty they signed. And, according to what I've read, Iran disclosed the site only after finding out that the US, France, the UK, and Germany knew about it.

The issue (other than blaming Israel for everything) is whether Iran is secretly weaponizing, whether that's a desirable thing, and whether the western powers can stop it through negotiations.

You two seem to forget that the Security Council (which, last I looked, consisted of a few other countries besides the US - and each of those countries has a veto power on any action taken by the council) has already imposed sanctions on Iran for it's nuclear activities and those sanctions were imposed because of violations of the treaty Iran signed. And, if Iran doesn't change it's course of action, more stringent sanctions are likely coming.

Suggesting that the big deal is that the western intelligence agencies have partially known about the non-disclosed nuclear site so that what Iran did wasn't a true "secret" or a treaty violation or some evidence of an intent to weaponize totally misses the point.

I think Hedda's point what exactly that. The US and its Jewish ally tried to make a big deal out of something that they knew about for years. I suppose you think that God gave Abraham those atomic bombs and that's why Israel has the right to do exactly what the US constantly condemns Iran for doing: having secret nuclear facilities that make bombs. If you're not Jewish as you say, you should have been. How can you spout that crap with a straight face.

Again, obfuscating the entire point by slamming the US and Israel.

Did the French, English, and Germans have something to do with this? Did you happen to read what their leaders said about it (which, by the way, was significantly more belligerernt than what the US had to say about it)? And do you condemn them with equal gusto?

Anybody else have concern that Iran has violated it's treaty obligations with respect to the nuclear activities?
Anybody else have a concern with respect to whether Iran obtains nuclear weapons? Guess not.

And a rational answer to those questions is not:
(1) So what, Israel has nuclear weapons;
(2) It's no problem or big deal at all because other intelligence agencies uncovered the secret activities (thus, it's not a secret or a problem); or
(3) Bob should have been Jewish.

Oh come on Bob, stop playing games. If anyone has been obfuscating in this thread, it's you.

I am as firm a supporter of Israel as anyone here but I am not so blind as to refuse to recognize that the US is applying a double standard when it comes to nuclear weapons in the Middle East. The Israelis are an American ally who do not pose any threat to use nuclear weapons against America or their neighbors under any forseeable circumstances. Iran is a potential enemy of America's whose radical leaders might do unspeakable things with an atomic bomb. It's that simple. We fear Iran's intentions; we don't fear Israel.

But it's still a double standard, as far as most of the world sees it, no matter how you slice it.

I disagree. The thread was initially about Iran's activities and the exposure of those activities by the US and others, and, so far, other than perhaps some comment by you, there's been no concern expressed about Iran's activities or intentions. I'm not defending the US's or Europe's double standards (which certainly do exist but may not be all that irrational) nor defending Israel. But responding to the issue of Iran's activities or the disclosure of same by saying "oh yea, Israel is worse" or the "US is bad" doesn't address the issue in my view.

Eschew obfuscation

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/16/opinion/...edcohen.html?em

October 16, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
An Ordinary Israel
By ROGER COHEN
NEW YORK — Is Israel just a nation among nations?

On one level, it is indeed an ordinary place. People curse the traffic, follow their stocks, Blackberry, go to the beach and pay their mortgages. Stroll around in the prosperous North Tel Aviv suburbs and you find yourself California dreaming.

On another, it’s not. More than 60 years after the creation of the modern state, Israel has no established borders, no constitution, no peace. Born from exceptional horror, the Holocaust, it has found normality elusive.

The anxiety of the diaspora Jews has ceded not to tranquility but to another anxiety. The escape from walls has birthed new walls. The annihilation psychosis has not disappeared but taken new form.

For all Israel’s successes — it is the most open, creative and dynamic society in the region — this is a gnawing failure. Can anything be done about it?

Perhaps a good place to start that inquiry is by noting that Israel does not see itself as normal. Rather it lives in a perpetual state of exceptionalism.

I understand this: Israel is a small country whose neighbors are enemies or cold bystanders. But I worry when Israel makes a fetish of its exceptional status. It needs to deal with the world as it is, however discomfiting, not the world of yesterday.

The Holocaust represented a quintessence of evil. But it happened 65 years ago. Its perpetrators are dead or dying. A Holocaust prism may be distorting. History illuminates — and blinds.

These reflections stirred on reviewing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to the U.N. last month. The first 30 paragraphs were devoted to an inflammatory conflation of Nazi Germany (the word “Nazi” appears five times), modern Iran, Al Qaeda (a Sunni ideology foreign to Shiite Iran) and global terrorism, with lonely and exceptional Israel standing up against them all.

Here’s Netanyahu’s summary of the struggle of our age: “It pits civilization against barbarism, the 21st century against the 9th century, those who sanctify life against those who glorify death.”

That’s facile, resonant — and unhelpful. Sure, it’s an outlook that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s unacceptable Holocaust denial and threats comfort. (Several Iranian leaders have also spoken of accepting any deal on Israel that the Palestinians agree to.)

There’s another way of looking at the ongoing struggle in the Middle East — less dramatic and more accurate.

That is to see it as a fight for a different balance of power — and possibly greater stability — between a nuclear-armed Israel (an estimated 80 to 200 never-acknowledged weapons), a proud but uneasy Iran and an increasingly sophisticated and aware (if repressed) Arab world.

Some of Israel’s enemies contest its very existence, however powerless they are to end it. But the death-cult terrorists-versus-reasonable-Israelis paradigm falls short. There are various civilizations in the Middle East, whose attitudes toward religion and modernism vary, but who all quest for some accommodation between them.

One casualty of this view, of course, is Israeli exceptionalism. The Jewish state becomes more like any other nation fighting for influence and treasure. I think President Obama, himself talking down American exceptionalism, is trying to nudge Israel toward a more prosaic, realistic self-image.

Hence the U.S. abstention last month at a U.N. nuclear assembly vote calling on all states in the Middle East to “accede to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear weapons” (N.P.T.) and create a nuclear-weapon-free Middle East — an idea Obama administration officials have supported in line with a nuclear disarmament agenda.

A shift is perceptible in the decades-old tacit American endorsement of Israel’s undeclared nuclear arsenal. This is logical. To deal effectively with the nuclear program of Iran, an N.P.T. member, while ignoring the nuclear status of non-N.P.T. Israel is to invite accusations of double standards. President Obama doesn’t like them.

I’d say there’s a tenable case for Israel ending its nuclear exceptionalism, coming clean on its arsenal and joining the N.P.T. as part of any U.S.-endorsed regional security arrangement that stops Iran short of weaponization.

It’s also worth noting the sensible tone of Defense Secretary Robert Gates — in flagrant contrast to Netanyahu. “The only way you end up not having a nuclear capable Iran is for the Iranian government to decide that their security is diminished by having those weapons as opposed to strengthened,” Gates says.

In other words, as I’ve long argued, Iran makes rational decisions. Rather than invoking the Holocaust — a distraction — Israel should view Iran coolly, understand the hesitancy of Tehran’s nuclear brinksmanship, and see how it can gain from U.S.-led diplomacy.

Cut the posturing and deal with reality. This can be painful — as with Justice Richard Goldstone’s recent U.N. report finding that both Israeli forces and Palestinian militants committed possible crimes against humanity during Israel’s military operations in Gaza.

But it’s also instructive. Goldstone is a measured man — I’ve known him a long time. The Israeli response to his findings strikes me as an example of the blinding effect of exceptionalism unbound. Ordinary nations have failings.

The Middle East has changed. So must Israel. “Never again” is a necessary but altogether inadequate way of dealing with the modern world.