Do the ayatollahs feel that life in Tehran is too quiet? The excited declaration by Iranian leaders that they plan to build ten uranium enrichment facilities is, of course, designed to shore support at home after a year of near revolution.
The more interesting question is what they intend by it abroad — and the most obvious answer is that they have not thought it through.
Ten. It is a figure of rhetorical fantasy. Perhaps it sounds within the realm of possibility to the audience within Iran. But it is clearly outside Iran’s ability. Its existing enrichment work at one main location has been plagued by technical mishaps — in essence, the problem of preventing this old design of centrifuge from wobbling and crashing. Iran is also said to be running out of stocks of uranium.
However, the declaration is clear defiance of international pressure although it is unclear, as ever, how far Iran intends to take this.
It was coupled with a threat by the senior nuclear negotiator that Iran might pull out of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and by others, more vaguely, that it might stop co-operating with inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency, the UN watchdog, — although it has repeatedly stopped short of this step.
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As a welcome message to Yukiya Amano, the new director-general of the IAEA who begins work today, it is unlikely to work to Iran’s advantage. Amano, a scientist specialising in nuclear proliferation, is not expected to be as indulgent towards Iran as his predecessor Mohamed ElBaradei was in all but his final few weeks.
Does Iran want to pick a real fight; an airstrike or war? It is possible, given the pressure the regime is under since its abuse of the elections in the summer, that it would consider this a useful distraction. A military response from the US or Israel however — an immediate one, anyway — still seems unlikely.
President Obama, who will announce today a troop increase in Afghanistan, does not want to open another front — and he needs Iran’s help to avoid losing there. The possibility of a strike is always there with Israel. Israeli officials say often in private (but they would, wouldn’t they), that the air force has completed all the planning it would need. Israeli politicians across the spectrum say often, too, that they consider a nuclear-armed Iran to be an existential threat.
Airstrikes on known Iranian facilities continue to look like an imperfect way of denting the nuclear capability. Worse, they look like the gateway to an unpredictable regional war — the reason why Obama has discouraged Israel from that course.
It comes back to more sanctions for the moment, and that comes back to Russia, most of all. Of all the incomplete projects on which Obama has embarked, warming up relations with Russia is high on the list. He needs to crack that one in order to salvage his sanctions strategy, which is still the best response by far to the incoherent threats from Tehran.