NEW WARNING ON IRAN – AT 8:15 A.M. ET:  We've taken the eye off the ball on Iran.  Its nuclear program has faded into the media background, and the Obama administration barely mentions it.  Obama's recent "major" speech on the Mideast hardly brought it up.

That doesn't change the facts on the ground, and the potential extreme danger to us.  From Reuters:

The UN atomic watchdog has received further information regarding activities that "seem to point to the existence" of possible military dimensions to Iran's nuclear program, the agency's head said on Monday.

"There are indications that certain of these activities may have continued until recently," Yukiya Amano, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), said in a speech to the agency's 35-nation governing board.

The phrasing is odd.  I assume that what he means by "continued until recently" is that he doesn't have information after a certain date.

Amano's statement underlined the UN body's concern that the Islamic Republic may be working to develop a nuclear-armed missile. Tehran rejects such suspicions, saying its nuclear program has only civilian aims, mainly generating electricity...

...For several years, the IAEA has been investigating Western intelligence reports indicating Iran had coordinated efforts to process uranium, test explosives at high altitude and revamp a ballistic missile cone so it can take a nuclear warhead.

COMMENT:  Of course Iran has a military nuclear ambition.  There'd be no other reason for the kind of nuclear program it has developed.  And none of the sanctions regimes that have been directed at Iran have worked.  An ideological regime will absorb the sanctions damage and push on with the program.

I've always believed that the danger from Iran isn't necessarily in nuclear-tipped missiles, but in the placement of a nuclear device aboard a ship, and sailing it into an American harbor, then setting it off.  As an alternative, Iran might fire a short-range missile, much easier to develop than an ICBM, from a ship 50 miles off our shore.

The Iranians do not seem to be stoppable at this stage.  I suspect that only regime change – the toppling of the mullahs by a revolution – can alter the Iranian course.

June 6, 2011