April 08, 2008
Good News : Iran Expands Enrichment Project
Via CNN:
Ahmadinejad made Tuesday's announcement as he toured the Natanz facility in central Iran.Meanwhile, the Bush Administration is in denial:"The president announced the start of the phase of installing 6,000 new centrifuges in Natanz," state television reported.
The television also quoted Ahmadinejad as saying that "we have reached new achievements" in Natanz that he would announce later Tuesday.
The president's trip was scheduled to coincide with Iran's National Day of Nuclear Technology, marking the second anniversary of when Iran first enriched uranium on April 8,2006.
On that day "Iran stepped into a path that will put the country in a more deserving position in the world," the television quoted Ahmadinejad as saying.
Ahmadinejad is widely expected to confirm for the first time Tuesday that Iran has installed hundreds of more sophisticated centrifuges that can enrich uranium faster.
It's an alarming sign for U.S. foreign policy when Central Intelligence Agency Director Michael Hayden says, as he did last month on NBC's Meet the Press, that, personally, he believes Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons, but officially he stands by the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate that maybe they aren't.So America sails on, under the fiction that nothing dramatic need be done, despite Hayden's further warning that in Iran, "the development of fissile material, the development of delivery systems, continue apace."
Likewise, the administration's special envoy for human rights in North Korea, Jay Lefkowitz, warned in a Jan. 17 speech that the Six-Party Talks with North Korea have failed. That, too, was shrugged off by the administration as his personal opinion. His speech was briefly posted on the State Department Web site, then deleted.
In this final year of the Bush presidency, what was once a doctrine of preemption has given way to the weird presumption that threats that Washington does not officially acknowledge somehow won't hurt us. Nowhere is this approach more marked than at the State Department, whence Secretary Condoleezza Rice is betting her legacy - and the president's - on dreams of dialogue that have little to do with realities.
