Iran on Thursday drew a “red line” on preserving its “right” to produce enriched uranium, less than a week before the “PT5+1” begins another round of negotiations for Iran that are expected to stretch several months, plenty of time for it to race across Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s red line.
One-minded mass media this week enthusiastically reported Iran’s offer to limit the number of centrifuges operating, restrict its amount of enriched uranium and accept verification but has totally ignored Iran’s “red line.”
Seyed Hossein Naqavi Hossein, a senior Iranian legislator and rapporteur of the parliament’s National Security and Foreign Policy Commission, was reported by the government-run Fars News Agency on Thursday as saying, “The Iranian nation’s right to peaceful nuclear technology and uranium enrichment up to whatever level required by the country’s nuclear industry are regarded as our red lines.”
He said that no one is allowed to cross the red lines of the Islamic system.
The road to a nuclear-armed Iran is virtually the same one used by the Palestinian Authority to tire out the West and win all of its political and territorial demands.
First, both Iran and PA chairman Mahmoud Abbas have learned to say the right word at the right time to the right people.
Second, they have made cosmetic changes while hardening their single-track objectives.
Third, both entities deliver a message at home that is 180 degrees opposite what they tell the West.
Fourth, the United States and its allies are willing to talk and talk so long as Iran does not have the bomb.
That is what scares Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, and rightly so. He said in the United Nations two weeks ago that the most dangerous situation would be allowing Iran to have the capacity for manufacturing a nuclear warhead and while sitting idly by until it decides to go ahead with a doomsday weapon, by which time it will be too late to stop it.
The Prime Minister has stayed on the good side of President Barack Obama and has not directly challenged his approach. Instead, he used his visit to the United States last week to go on a media blitz to take his case into the homes of Americans.
Now he is doing the same in Europe.
He conducted no less than six interviews Thursday with media outlets from Britain, Germany and France, three of the PT+1 countries that will meet next week with Iran in Geneva. The others are the United States, China and Russia.
“No deal is better than a bad deal, and a bad deal would be a partial agreement which lifts sanctions off Iran and leaves them with the ability to enrich uranium or to continue work on their heavy water plutonium, which is what is needed to produce nuclear weapons,” Prime Minister Netanyahu told the London Financial Times.
Targeting his audience, the Prime Minister referred to Nazi Germany and reminded listeners that Churchill said, “Don’t let the Nazis arm themselves. Don’t let an implacable, radical regime have awesome power. And he was right, and there is a lesson to be learned here [to] be tough, be strong, be consistent… Europe should stop looking for excuses why it does not take action against Iran. If you want to be soft, be soft.”
Netanyahu stands almost alone against Iran, but there is still one very strong force that understands that Iran and the Palestinian Authority share the same concept of “negotiate,” which to them means, “You give and we take.”
That strong force is not a country; it is the U.S. Congress.
Republican Rep. Trent Franks of Arkansas is signing up co-sponsors to a new bill to authorize war against the Islamic Republic if it does not cease all enrichment of uranium.
There is little chance the bill will pass Congress, but a strong Congressional voice would act as brakes on President Obama’s “engagement,” just as it has acted to slow down Obama’s eagerness to give Abbas whatever he wants.
The New York Times, a regular grandstander for the president, is leading the bandwagon of “let’s trust Iran” just as it has done for 20 years to trust the Palestinian Authority, explaining that every terrorist attack only proves that Israel should surrender “land for peace” and if it turns out to be “land for war,” well, that’s Israel’s problem.