Down to the Wire

According to this Jerusalem Post report Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon urged President George Bush (between chocolate bars) that Iran is fast approaching the point of no return in its nuclear aspirations:

Prime Minister Ariel Sharon met Vice President Dick Cheney and Deputy National Security Adviser Elliott Abrams for the second time in two days Tuesday, with the focus this time on the entire Middle East, not the Palestinians. Officials in Sharon's entourage said Tuesday's talks dealt with the whole range of regional issues, with particular attention paid to Iran's nuclear threat, and possible responses if Teheran continues its march toward nuclear arms capabilities.

Senior Israeli officials said Tuesday that the decision on when to bring the Iranian issue to the UN Security Council for possible sanctions should not be dragged out indefinitely. The important time issue to keep in mind, they said, was not the date when Iran would acquire a nuclear bomb, but rather when it would pass the "threshold of no return" and develop the technology that would allow it – in the future – to build such a weapon. Sharon told US President George W. Bush on Monday that Iran was only one technological step away from enriching uranium and, from that point, achieving nuclear capability was just around the corner, Channel 2 reported.

Sharon's military secretary, Maj.-Gen. Yoav Galant, presented to Bush updated documents and satellite images of Iran's nuclear program. According to Israel Radio, the images showed that the Iranian nuclear program was at a "very advanced" stage. Israeli officials called on the US urgently to present the issue before the Security Council, which would enable the imposing of sanctions on Teheran.

However, US officials told The New York Times that the evidence Sharon presented to Bush was already known to the president. "The Israelis consider the Iranians a big threat and they saw this as another opportunity to convey that to the president," The New York Times quoted an American official as saying, but, the official added, "no one thinks this was earth-shattering.”

Even if the intelligence presented by the Israeli’s is not news to the US Administration one has to wonder why a US officials would think this information is not “earth-shattering”. Certainly a nuclear armed Iran is a credible and viable threat to freedom in the Middle East and beyond.