It's been almost a month since Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh was assassinated in Tehran without any military response from the Iranians. The Iranian military today issued a fresh series of threats, waning Israel that a "calculated response" by Iran was coming.
Israel has been expecting an attack for weeks. But Iran's economy is so decrepit that Tehran fears that anything more than a token response will draw fresh sanctions. This, the Iranians cannot afford. They would rather take the hit to their prestige than have more crushing sanctions imposed on them by the West.
"There is a shift in the Tehran's [sic] narrative from notions of a significant retaliation to a calculated and measured response," Hamidreza Azizi, a research fellow at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs told Newsweek on Thursday.
"The dilemma that the Islamic Republic has is they believe that to restore deterrence and prevent further attacks by Israel, they need to show a response," Azizi said. "But on the other hand, given how delicate the situation is in the region, they need to organize it in a way that wouldn't ignite a bigger war."
Meanwhile, the Iranians continue to process more and more highly enriched uranium (HEU). According to the latest International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) report, Iran has enriched 363 pounds of uranium to 60% That's almost enough to build four bombs once the enrichment process is complete.
It should be noted that there is absolutely no commercial use for HEU enriched to this level. It's been spun up for the sole purpose of tickling the nuclear threshold of 90% enrichment.
Enriching 60% uranium to 90% would take two weeks, U.S. experts say, thanks to Iran's highly advanced centrifuges they were able to build courtesy of Barack Obama's 2015 nuclear deal. All it needs now is a workable bomb design and a way to marry the device to a missile warhead, and the planet will be in a world of hurt.
The IAEA report also showed Iran amassing more uranium enriched to 20%. If it were to spin up its centrifuges for a couple of months to enrich that stockpile, it could eventually possess nine bombs.
Iran’s march to become a threshold nuclear-weapons state has intensified arguments in Washington over how to deal with Tehran. Republicans say that much of Iran’s nuclear expansion has come on President Biden’s watch, while some Democrats say Tehran’s nuclear program would have remained hemmed in had former President Donald Trump not pulled the U.S. out of the 2015 nuclear deal.
Biden, like his predecessors, has pledged to stop Iran from developing a nuclear weapon, and administration officials say they continue to look to diplomacy to resolve the nuclear standoff.
Joe Biden is talking through his nether regions. There's no way that Biden or any Democrat is ever going to go after Iran's nuclear program in order to destroy it.
But Israel would definitely try to destroy Iran's nuclear infrastructure. And it wouldn't wait until a bomb or a series of bombs became operational. I'm reasonably sure that Israel has a timetable with a clock ticking somewhere at IDF headquarters. It also has a far better handle on how far along Iran really is in building a bomb and where it is.
As long as the world gives a milquetoast response to Iran's obvious plans to build a bomb, the Islamic Republic will continue to thumb its nose at the West.
In a separate report released Thursday, the IAEA said Iran still isn’t complying with an investigation into undeclared nuclear material discovered in the country. The IAEA also said Tehran has shown no sign of reversing its decision to bar some IAEA inspectors from the country or improve the agency’s access to nuclear-related sites.
That should worry the IAEA and the West. If not, we're going to wake up one day and watch as a mushroom cloud blooms over the Mediterranean Sea.
