Sometimes one plus one does equal two

Troubling news from Tehran today.

Radical Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad declared on Tuesday that Iran had officially joined the group of countries with nuclear capabilities commonly known as the Nuclear Club.

"I officially announce that Iran has joined the world’s nuclear countries", Ahmadinejad said in a speech that was broadcast on state television.

"This is the start of greater progress and achievements", he said.

Earlier, Iran’s nuclear chief announced that Tehran had recently managed to enrich uranium to the level required to make nuclear fuel.

"We successfully enriched uranium to 3.5 percent on April 9", Gholamreza Aghazadeh, who heads Atomic Energy Organisation of Iran, said.

As Vital Perspective highlights today, Iran has crossed a threshold in its nuclear program.

This announcement highlights what we have repeatedly said, that the pace of diplomacy is simply not keeping up with Iranian advancements. Precious time is passing the international community by. Stalling from Russia and China gave Iran an additional thirty days to work. Just as frustrating is that some - such as the New York Times - still incorrectly frame the debate in terms of actual production of a bomb. That is not the issue, because once Iran masters the process and reaches the technological point of no return, then it's not a matter of if, but when.

Also today, in one of his finest pieces, and that's saying something, Mark Steyn argues forcibly that we shouldn't blithely assume Iran doesn't mean what it says. And beyond that, what Iran does ought to more than give us pause.

So any retaliation would be down to others. Would Washington act? It depends how clear the fingerprints were. If the links back to the mullahs were just a teensy-weensy bit tenuous and murky, how eager would the U.S. be to reciprocate? Bush and Rumsfeld might—but an administration of a more Clinto-Powellite bent? How much pressure would there be for investigations under UN auspices? Perhaps Hans Blix could come out of retirement, and we could have a six-month dance through Security-Council coalition-building, with the secretary of state making a last-minute flight to Khartoum to try to persuade Sudan to switch its vote.

Perhaps it’s unduly pessimistic to write the civilized world automatically into what Osama bin Laden called the "weak horse" role (Islam being the "strong horse"). But, if you were an Iranian “moderate” and you’d watched the West’s reaction to the embassy seizure and the Rushdie murders and Hezbollah terrorism, wouldn’t you be thinking along those lines? I don’t suppose Buenos Aires Jews expect to have their institutions nuked any more than 12 years ago they expected to be blown up in their own city by Iranian-backed suicide bombers. Nukes have gone freelance, and there’s nothing much we can do about that, and sooner or later we’ll see the consequences—in Vancouver or Rotterdam, Glasgow or Atlanta. But, that being so, we owe it to ourselves to take the minimal precautionary step of ending the one regime whose political establishment is explicitly pledged to the nuclear annihilation of neighboring states.

The barn door is opening. Do we have the courage to act?

Tick tick tick...