"Iran nuke work seems slow, puzzling West"

Iran's uranium enrichment program appears stalled despite tough talk from the Tehran leadership, leaving intelligence services guessing about why it has not made good on plans to press ahead with activities that the West fears could be used to make nuclear arms, diplomats said Thursday.

Of course there's tough talk--Bush's speech last night deliberately excluded diplomatic language, likely provoking Iran to go on the offensive, rather than seek deterence as defense against preemptive strikes from Isreal and the U.S. I'm always reminded of the catch-22 posed by the original premise for invading Iraq--if WMD had really existed in the first place, a U.S. attack would have never happened, for fear of nuclear retaliation.

Fmr. weapons inspector Scott Ritter describes how Israeli leadership have ignored the facts and jumped to conclusions just as the Bush White House did in 2003:

All of this intelligence that’s being done has uncovered a nuclear enrichment program, not a nuclear weapons program. But the Israelis have already concluded, thanks to Amos Gilad and his konseptsia, that a nuclear weapons program exists. Therefore, if you’re not finding evidence of it, it means you’re not looking in the right places. So then you begin to speculate. How many people here remember underground facilities in Iraq, Saddam’s tunnels, everything buried? Well, there weren’t, were there?

More from the AP article:

IAEA inspectors arrived at Natanz on Wednesday for a routine round of monitoring. But one of the diplomats said they were unlikely to find anything but the status quo — two small pilot plants assembled in 164-centrifuge "cascades" but working only sporadically to produce small quantities of non-weapons grade enriched uranium and other individual centrifuges undergoing mechanical testing. That has essentially been the situation at Natanz since late November, he said.

Add that to a 2005 U.S. intelligence report that put Iran 10 years away from the bomb, and the manufactured hype becomes more obvious.

Howard Zinn described how far off Iran is from fully enriched uranium:

The International Atomic Energy group of the UN flatly contradicts a congressional report which talks about the danger of Iran’s nuclear weapons, and the international group, which has conducted many, many inspections in Iran, says, well, you know, you need to -- and they give the American people a kind of half-education. That is, they say, they use the phrase, “They’re enriching uranium.” Well, that scares me. You know, they’re enriching uranium. I don’t really know what it means, you see, but it’s scary. And then you read the report of the International Atomic Energy group, and you see, well, yes, they are. They’ve enriched uranium to the point of 3.5%. In order to have one nuclear weapon, they have to enrich it to 90%. They’re very, very far from even developing one nuclear weapon, but the phrase “enriched uranium” is repeated again and again.

If everyone were aware of how hollow the threat of Iran's uranium enrichment is, there'd be no basis for Bush's increasingly aggressive rhetoric justifying escalation already in motion.