In its leading editorial piece Wednesday, the influential Wall Street Journal called on U.S. President Barack Obama to “get serious” about Iran now or face a potentially broader Middle Eastern war started by an Israeli pre-emptive strike.
The paper notes that as a presidential candidate, Obama called for direct, high-level talks in the hopes of persuading Iran’s mullahs to abandon their nuclear aspirations.
“We've never held out much hope for those talks, which would inevitably be complicated and protracted,” the paper wrote. “Mr. Obama is already trying to lure Russian help on Iran by offering to trade away hard-earned missile defense sites in Eastern Europe. Russia's President claims to be unimpressed. And now it turns out that the rate at which Iran's nuclear programs are advancing may render even negotiations moot.”
The WSJ cites the U.N.'s International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) report, which found that Iran has produced more than 1,000 kilograms of low enriched uranium and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Michael Mullen's weekend acknowledgment that the U.S. believes Iran has enough fissile material to make a bomb.
Iran now possesses 5,600 centrifuges in which it can enrich uranium and plans to add 45,000 more over five years. “That will give Tehran an ability to make atomic bombs on an industrial scale,” the paper notes. The Arak heavy water reactor, scheduled for completion in 2011, “can have no purpose other than to produce weapons-grade plutonium.”
The WSJ says that the IAEA report “is the latest in a long line of reports that should have sounded alarms but instead have accustomed the world to conclude that a nuclear Iran is something we'll just have to live with. Well, not the entire world: Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak warned last week that ‘time is slipping through our fingers’ when it comes to stopping Tehran. ‘What is needed,’ he added, ‘is a two-pronged course of action which includes ironclad, strenuous sanctions . . . and a readiness to consider options in the event that these sanctions do not succeed.’”
“Nobody -- Mr. Obama least of all -- can doubt what Mr. Barak means by ‘options,’ the New York paper warns. “Nor should the Administration doubt that an Israeli strike, however necessary and justified, could put the U.S. in the middle of a broader Middle East war. If Mr. Obama wants to avoid a security crisis in the first year of his watch, he will have to get serious about Iran now.”
The Concise Encyclopedia Britannica calls the Wall Street Journal “the most influential American business-oriented paper and one of the most respected dailies in the world.”