In a piece entitled "Decision Time For US Over Iran Threat," the Guardian is reporting Friday that the International Atomic Energy Agency has stated that Iran has successfully installed 3000 centrifuges for enriching uranium, "enough to begin industrial-scale production of nuclear fuel and build a warhead within a year."
The installation of 3,000 fully-functioning centrifuges at Iran's enrichment plant at Natanz is a "red line" drawn by the US across which Washington had said it would not let Iran pass . . . .
The IAEA says the uranium being produced is only fuel grade (enriched to 4%) but the confirmation that Iran has reached the 3,000 centrifuge benchmark brings closer a moment of truth for the Bush administration, when it will have to choose between taking military action or abandoning its red line, and accepting Iran's technical mastery of uranium enrichment.
According to the Guardian:
UK officials are nervous about pressure from the US vice president Dick Cheney and other hawks for military action against Iran before a new administration takes office in January 2009.
I, personally, do not believe a US attack on Iran imminent, because of this man, Admiral William Fallon, quoted from the Financial Times in this sadly neglected diary:
"Getting Iranian behavior to change and finding ways to get them to come to their senses and do that is the real objective. Attacking them as a means to get to that spot strikes me as being not the first choice in my book ... None of this is helped by the continuing stories that just keep going around and around and around that any day now there will be another war which is just not where we want to go ... It astounds me that so many pundits and others are spending so much time yakking about this topic."
As that diary noted, Christopher Hedges has identified the struggle over an Iranian attack within the Bush adminisration as follows:
The battle is between the Cheney camp, which would like to carry out strikes on Iran before Bush leaves office, and Gates and his senior generals. Cheney, who has always been able to push aside the feckless Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, is having a tougher time with the military. Fallon, for example, was successful in his attempt to block efforts by Cheney to move a third aircraft carrier into the Persian Gulf earlier this year and bluntly said that "there would be no war against Iran" as long as he was chief of CENTCOM.
Fallon, who controls most of the weaponry in any Iranian area of operation, has vowed this:
A source who met privately with Fallon around the time of his confirmation hearing and who insists on anonymity quoted Fallon as saying that an attack on Iran "will not happen on my watch".
Asked how he could be sure, the source says, Fallon replied, "You know what choices I have. I’m a professional." Fallon said that he was not alone, according to the source, adding, "There are several of us trying to put the crazies back in the box."
My guess (and fervent hope): the crazies will be kept in the box. But what do I know? The Guardian frames the issue as the Iranians defiantly stepping across a line George II has drawn in the sand. And we know how bully-boy George looks upon such dastardly rascality.
So speculate away.