Iran seen to need 3-8 yrs to produce bomb
Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), has stepped into the nuclear row between the US and Iran by telling Le Monde newspaper that Iran are nowhere near developing a nuclear bomb.
The very fact that ElBaradei feels the need to make this kind of public statement shows how much people fear that Bush and Cheney are looking for a chance to attack Iran."I cannot judge their intentions, but supposing that Iran does intend to acquire a nuclear bomb, it would need between another three and eight years to succeed," ElBaradei told Le Monde. "All the intelligence services agree on that.
"I want to get people away from the idea that Iran will be a threat from tomorrow, and that we are faced right now with the issue of whether Iran should be bombed or allowed to have the bomb," the Nobel peace prize winner said.
"We are not at all in that situation. Iraq is a glaring example of how, in many cases, the use of force exacerbates the problem rather than solving it."
Olmert immediately stepped into the fray to state that he thinks ElBaradei should be more worried than he appears to be.
Now, of course, there was nothing in ElBaradei's statement which suggested that he would not find it extremely troublesome were Iran to possess a nuclear weapon, he was merely trying to point out that Bush and Cheney's recent statements suggested an urgency which is not appropriate to the facts."If Baradei thinks Iran can have a bomb in three years and it doesn't bother him, well it bothers me," Olmert told reporters after meeting French President Nicolas Sarkozy.
"The Iranians are not as close to a bomb as they would lead people to believe but they are not as far away as I would like them to be," he added.
And Olmert's statement that, "The Iranians are not as close to a bomb as they would lead people to believe" implies that Iran have been boasting that are near to having a nuclear weapon when nothing could be further from the truth. Ahmadinejad has repeatedly said that he will not enrich uranium beyond 5% and that Iran does not want the bomb, it simply wants nuclear energy; and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has issued a fatwa saying that the production, stockpiling and use of nuclear weapons was forbidden under Islam. And yet Olmert continues to imply that the devious Iranians have been caught out boasting about something, implying they are nearer to having a nuclear weapon than they actually are. Covering stuff like this is like looking into a different quantum universe.
Of course, watch this space, Mohamed ElBaradei's statement will have no effect at all on the way Bush and Cheney continue to talk about the Iranian threat.
They have always spoken as if Iran is weeks away from possessing nuclear weapons - despite every statement ever made by Ahmadinejad and despite Khamenei's fatwa - so a simple statement from the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency is hardly going to make them change their rhetoric.
Reality to them has always been what they say it is and they will continue to talk as if the Iranians are on the brink of developing nuclear weapons and the world is on the brink of World War Three. That is simply what these two men do.
The two men who were 100% wrong about the Iraq war will again insist that they know more about Iranian intentions than the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency. And they will, once again, offer no proof to back their assertions.
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