New York Times Article on Possible Iranian Invasion

By Teractys Merkaba, Editor-in-Chief

The United States is looking more and more likely to invade Iran after U.S President Barack Obama turned up the political rhetoric on Iran by demanding that Iranian areas be opened up to American inspection.

Barack Obama has mentioned his desire to invade Iran during the 2008 U.S Presidential campaign.

This demand to open up Iran to U.N weapon inspectors was the same methodology used by both Bill Clinton and George W Bush before the failing neoliberalist oilvasion of Iraq began in 2003. This was despite overwhelming evidence that Iraq had no Weapons of Mass Destruction.

Weapons of Mass Destruction were never found and George W Bush was forced to later admit that there had never been any in existence.

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From the New York Times
September 27, 2009
U.S. to Demand Inspection of New Iran Plant ‘Within Weeks’
By DAVID E. SANGER and WILLIAM J. BROAD

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration plans to tell Iran this week that it must open a newly revealed nuclear enrichment site to international inspectors “within weeks,” according to senior administration officials. The administration will also tell Tehran that inspectors must have full access to the key personnel who put together the clandestine plant and to the documents surrounding its construction, the officials said Saturday.

The demands, following the revelation Friday of the secret facility at a military base near the holy city of Qum, set the stage for the next chapter of a diplomatic drama that has toughened the West’s posture and heightened tensions with Iran. The first direct negotiations between the United States and Iran in 30 years are scheduled to open in Geneva on Thursday.

American and European officials say they will also press Iran to open what they suspect are nuclear-related sites to international inspectors, and to turn over notebooks and computers that they think may document efforts to design weapons.

President Obama has repeatedly said that Iran must show significant cooperation by the end of the year, establishing what officials say is effectively a three-month deadline. Interviews with American and European officials, however, suggest differences of opinion about how much time Iran should be given to show full compliance.

On Saturday, Iran’s nuclear chief, Ali Akbar Salehi, said the International Atomic Energy Agency would be invited to visit the site near Qum that American intelligence agencies estimate was designed to house 3,000 centrifuges, enough to produce about one bomb’s worth of material a year. But he did not say when, nor did he say whether Iran would meet any of the other American and European demands.

Mr. Salehi, who spoke on Iranian state television, added that Mr. Obama’s dramatic release of the information about the site at a global economic summit meeting was a “plot” meant to “unite the whole world against us.”

Iranian officials have long maintained that their nuclear program is designed to produce energy, not weapons, and they said the facility near Qum is for peaceful purposes. They have not explained why it was located inside a heavily guarded base of the Revolutionary Guards.

From the White House to Europe, senior officials were pushing to exploit the disclosure of the covert facility as a turning point in negotiations to try to get Iran to halt its nuclear program.

“This is the most important development in the three and a half years since the U.S. has offered negotiations with Iran,” said R. Nicholas Burns, a Harvard professor who served as the Bush administration’s chief strategist on Iran. Mr. Burns said Mr. Obama “now has much greater leverage to organize an international coalition to confront” the country’s leaders with sanctions should the negotiating effort fail.

David A. Kay, a nuclear specialist who led the fruitless American search for unconventional weapons in Iraq, said the discovery “reopens the whole question of the military’s involvement in the Iranian nuclear program.”

For now, the most urgent issue, current and former officials agree, is gaining immediate access to the hidden tunnel complex that Iran now acknowledges is a uranium enrichment plant still under construction. Quick access to the facility is considered crucial because of fears that Iran would move incriminating equipment or documents.

It is still unclear what kind of incentives the United States and its allies might offer Iran if it completely opened, and ultimately dismantled, its nuclear program. On Saturday, Mr. Obama, in his weekly radio address, said he remained committed to building a relationship with Tehran.

“My offer of a serious, meaningful dialogue to resolve this issue remains open,” he said. “But Iran must now cooperate fully with the International Atomic Energy Agency, and take action to demonstrate its peaceful intentions.”

Now that the clandestine site has been revealed, however, American and European officials say they see an opportunity to press for broader disclosures. Iran will be told that to avoid sanctions, it must adhere to an I.A.E.A. agreement that would allow inspectors to go virtually anywhere in the country to follow suspicions of nuclear work.

Iran would also have to turn over documents that the agency has sought for more than three years, including some that intelligence agencies obtained that they say appear to suggest work was done on the design of warheads and technologies for detonating a nuclear core.

The negotiators would also insist, officials say, that Iran abide by I.A.E.A. rules, which Iran agreed to and then renounced, requiring it to announce in advance any plans to build nuclear facilities. Iran says it will adhere only to an older rule, requiring notification when a plant is about to become operational.

For several years, Iran has deflected I.A.E.A requests to interview key scientists, presumably including those who ran the highly secret Projects 110 and 111. American intelligence officials, after piercing Iran’s computer networks in 2007, said they believe that those projects are at the center of nuclear design work. Iran has denied that the projects exist and has denounced as fabrications the documents the United States has shared with the agency, and with other nations.

Administration officials acknowledge that it is unlikely that Iran will accede to all of their demands. But they say this is their best chance to move the seven-year standoff over Iran’s nuclear program sharply in their favor.

In interviews and public comments, the administration’s tone has clearly changed in recent days, becoming tougher and more confrontational.

In an interview to be broadcast Sunday on ABC, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said the hidden facility was “part of a pattern of deception and lies on the part of the Iranians from the very beginning with respect to their nuclear program.”

But he deflected a question that has been circulating inside the government: Is the Qum facility one of a kind, or just one of several hidden facilities that were intended to give Iran a covert means of enriching uranium, far from the inspectors who regularly visit a far larger enrichment facility, also once kept secret, at Natanz.

“My personal opinion is that the Iranians have the intention of having nuclear weapons,” Mr. Gates concluded, though he said it was still an open question “whether they have made a formal decision” to manufacture weapons.

In recent years, Tehran has slowly and systematically cut back on the access of atomic sleuths. Early in 2006, for instance, it unilaterally began redirecting the international inspectors from dozens of sites, programs and personnel all over the Islamic republic to a single point: Natanz, where Iran is enriching uranium.

Pierre Goldschmidt, a former I.A.E.A. official who is now a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said the revelation of the secret enrichment plant drove home the urgent need for enhanced legal authority for tough inspections. “It’s proof that, without additional verification authority, the agency cannot find undeclared nuclear activities,” he said.

Beneath the dry language of reports issued every three months by the international agency lies the story of an intense cat-and-mouse game in which inspectors seek documents or interviews with key scientists.

The I.A.E.A.’s agenda of inspection is already huge, as is its record of failing to get the Iranians to address the most serious clues and charges, inconsistencies and suspicions.

The departing chief of the agency, Mohamed ElBaradei, recently argued that the case for urgent action against Iran was “hyped,” even as he acknowledged that the country has refused, for two years, to answer his inspectors’ questions about evidence suggesting that the country has worked on weapons design.

In May 2008, the atomic agency in Vienna issued an uncharacteristically blunt demand for more information from Tehran and, even more uncharacteristically, disclosed the existence of 18 secretly obtained documents suggesting Iran’s high level of interest in atom bombs.

But the wording of the public portion of the 2007 United States National Intelligence Estimate had already frozen the effort to force Iran to reveal more. Its conclusion that weapons design work was halted in 2003 was a surprise that ended talk of sanctions.

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has called the report an exoneration.

In fact, the classified portion of the intelligence estimate listed more than a dozen suspect locations, though officials last week would not say whether the list included the site that was revealed Friday. It is also unclear if Washington and its allies believe they have enough evidence to justify demanding access to those sites.

David E. Sanger reported from Washington, and William J. Broad from New York. Mark Mazzetti contributed reporting from Washington.