Investors.com // IBD Editorials  |  June 28, 2010

Fessing Up

Iran: We now have it on high authority from within the Obama administration that the new sanctions against the regime will not stop Tehran's nuclear weapons ambitions. They're all about show, not substance.

CIA Director Leon Panetta, when asked if sanctions will deter
Iran from developing a nuclear weapon, replied chillingly:
"Probably not."  AP

All the think tank reports by foreign policy experts, all the on-background quotes to reporters from anonymous "Western diplomats," all the defiant taunts from Iranian officials — none of these has the weight of Sunday's confession from President Obama's own CIA director that intensified economic sanctions are not going to prevent Tehran's terrorist regime from getting the bomb.

On ABC News' "This Week," CIA chief Leon Panetta, a former senior Democratic congressman and White House chief of staff for Bill Clinton, admitted of the sanctions passed earlier in the month by Congress: "Will it deter them from their ambitions with regards to nuclear capability? Probably not."

So the sanctions are just a charade. We're "doing something" that doesn't really do anything.

The rest of what Panetta had to say was chilling. "I think they continue to work on designs" in weaponization, he said, adding "we think they have enough low-enriched uranium right now for two weapons. ... It would probably take a year to get there, probably another year to develop the kind of weapon delivery system in order to make that viable."

There was also a possible cat that Panetta let out of the bag regarding proof of Iran's intentions. Addressing the technical troubles Iran has run into with its nuclear enrichment, he said that "we continue to urge them to engage in peaceful use of nuclear power. If they did that, they wouldn't have these concerns. They wouldn't have these problems."

That sounds like the U.S. has intelligence showing Iran's technical enrichment problems are connected to weaponization efforts — otherwise how would they not "have these problems," as Panetta put it, if they stuck to the "peaceful use of nuclear power"?

The news on Iranian nukes sometimes reads like black farce. Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, for instance, on Monday called Panetta's statement about Tehran having two bombs in a year or two "alarming." But who is it that over so many years has built Iran's nuclear program? Russia.

Meanwhile, Israel's Ynet News reports of a scheduled secret meeting between a U.S. envoy and representatives of the Iranian-backed Hamas terrorist group in an Arab country, where they will be handed a letter from the Obama administration. Talk those terrorists into submission.

The speaker of Iran's parliament on Monday responded to a G-8 statement against Iran: "You will take this wish to grave if you think that nuclear technology in Iran will stop." And Iran president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Monday warned, "Iran's huge energy is about to be released, meaning that even sanctions will have no effect."

The president knows that the two elements of his Iran policy — talk and new sanctions — won't prevent a nuclear-armed Iran. That means official U.S. policy is: toleration of a nuclear terrorist state.

Is this what Americans thought they were getting when they elected a new president?

Original article here.