SecDef Gates:"Iran Policy? What Iran Policy?"

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates just revealed what I have suspected for a long time now...Obama has no Iran policy worth mentioning!

Several officials said the highly classified analysis, written in January to President Obama’s national security adviser, Gen. James L. Jones, touched off an intense effort inside the Pentagon, the White House and the intelligence agencies to develop new options for Mr. Obama. They include a revised set of military alternatives, still under development, to be considered should diplomacy and sanctions fail to force Iran to change course…

Pressed on the administration’s ambiguous phrases until now about how close the United States was willing to allow Iran’s program to proceed, a senior administration official described last week in somewhat clearer terms that there was a line Iran would not be permitted to cross.

The official said that the United States would ensure that Iran would not “acquire a nuclear capability,” a step Tehran could get to well before it developed a sophisticated weapon. “That includes the ability to have a breakout,” he said, using the term nuclear specialists apply to a country that suddenly renounces the nonproliferation treaty and uses its technology to build a small arsenal…

Mr. Gates’s memo appears to reflect concerns in the upper echelons of the Pentagon and the military that the White House did not have a well-prepared series of alternatives in place in case all the diplomatic steps finally failed.

Zero's 'unclenched fist' diplomacy fail? With Khamenei and Ahmadinejad? Who woulda thunk it?

Meanwhile, Iran has a new generation of centrifuges happily spinning away and is already enriching uranium to weapons grade at 20%. Russia and China are nowhere near on board for any meaningful sanctions (as if they would do any good at this point), the Russians are telling us that Iran's Bushehr reactor will be online by August and Ahmadinejad is already crowing that the Iranians are past the point of no return.

As a matter of fact, the Iranian government, in an interesting side story is calling for up to five million people to move out of Tehran and is offering generous subsidies for them to do it.

The reason given is that Tehran sits on earthquake faults and diluting the population would make it easier to deal with what Ahmadinejad calls 'an incident'.

But at the same time,the official Iranian Fars News Agency is reporting that Iran will 'join the nuclear club' within a month's time:

No country would even think about attacking Iran after Iran’s membership in the club,” Deputy Head of AEOI for Research Behzad Soltani said on Tuesday.

Behzadi, who is also Secretary of the AEOI’s Scientific Cooperation Council, further pointed to the construction of 360 MW nuclear power plant and a 40 MW research reactor in Iran’s central city of Arak, and added that the projects are complete by 70%.

Are the Iranians planning a nuclear test and want to evacuate the population to avoid casualties if an earthquake occurs as a result? It could very well be later than we think.

It's been obvious to me for some time that the Obama Administration not only had no concrete plan to stop Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons but had apparently decided at some point that they could live with a nuclear armed Iran. What that means is that the Israelis are going to have to do the job for their own survival - after which of course, Prez Zero will undoubtedly lead the charge against them in the UN for daring to defend themselves.

Allah however, makes a point worth noting:

No need to put all the blame on Obama here, though. Bush knew what it would mean to hand this issue off to a Democratic president and he went ahead and did it anyway. Invading Iraq necessarily left him with fewer military options against other threats; now the bill is coming due. As for Europe, Russia, and China, here’s the Times’s almost poignant description of the White House’s naivete: “Administration officials had hoped that the revelation by Mr. Obama in September that Iran was building a new uranium enrichment plant inside a mountain near Qum would galvanize other nations against Iran, but the reaction was muted.” The fact that western powers had been waltzing with Iran over its nuke program for fully seven years at that point might have given them a clue that no action would be taken, but that’s “smart power” for you.

Gates memo was written in January, but is only being leaked now,presumably by elements in the Obama White House, even though it's horrifically embarrassing for Prez Zero. That's another indication that the hour is late and certain people want to cover their bureaucratic behinds before the nasty stuff hits the fan.

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