Last week Benjamin Netanyahu, prime minister of Israel, announced that he will be addressing a joint meeting of Congress in early March to discuss actions to be taken against Iran’s nuclear program should the diplomatic approach prove fruitless. House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, invited the prime minister to make these proposals to Congress with little excitement from the White House. Josh Earnest, the Obama administration’s press secretary, said that Obama will not be meeting with Netanyahu when he visits in March because they want to steer clear of him during Netanyahu’s election campaign. Earnest went on to explain that they want to avoid “the appearance of any kind of interference with a democratic election.”
The real reason Obama is refusing to meet with the Israeli leader is that he doesn’t want to show a decisive and direct allegiance to our only ally in the Middle East. He is afraid that will “all but guarantee” nuclear talks with Iran will fail.
New sanctions against Iran will all but surely ruin any developments that have been made with Iran, according to the president. In his State of the Union address Tuesday, Obama said that “for the first time in a decade, we’ve halted the progress of [Iran’s] nuclear program and reduced its stockpile of nuclear material.”
If only that were true.
The day after the president made those seriously false statements regarding the dwindling of Iran’s nuclear program, a satellite image showed a 90-foot-long intercontinental ballistic missile on a launch pad near Tehran, the Iranian capital. According to the Israeli Channel 2 News, which broke the story, Iran is rapidly developing its manufacturing of long-range missiles that poses a threat “far beyond Europe.”
In addition to satellite imagery that proves the progress of Iran’s weapon development, there are no facts to support Obama’s claim that Iran’s nuclear program is being halted. According to Olli Heinonen, who headed the International Atomic Energy Agency’s safeguards section during the 2003-2005 talks between Iran and three European powers, “it is true that 20-percent enriched uranium stocks have decreased, but Iran is still producing uranium enriched up to 5-percent uranium.
The latter stocks have actually increased when you talk about stocks of uranium hexafluoride and other chemical compounds.” Heinonen went on to comment about Iran’s centrifuges, which are devices responsible for enriching the uranium for nuclear capabilities. He said that while there have been no new installations of centrifuges, “it appears that the production of centrifuge components continues” which means that they could be put together in a very short amount of time if all the other necessary parts are completed.
It is troubling that Obama would make such bold claims that Iran’s nuclear program is deteriorating when all the evidence shows that is not the case. David Albright, who heads the Institute for Science and International Security, agrees and says that the president’s language in this State of the Union address was “a little bit odd” given the fact that it is not correct that the 3.5-percent enriched stock has been reduced. Instead it has been converted from hexafluoride to oxide, a political gesture that means nothing as the process can be reversed and used to develop a nuclear weapon on very short notice.
Of course during Obama’s State of the Union Address, he couldn’t have gone into such great technical detail about all of this as it would be language not readily understood by the majority of the public. Actually, unless you’re an expert, none of it really makes sense at all. But all the experts are saying that Iran’s nuclear program is full steam ahead. I trust their judgment, and Obama should too. When he makes claims that Iran is being stopped, he is being disingenuous and making Iran out to be the good guy in this fight.
More needs to be done to seriously hinder Iran’s nuclear abilities and protect Israel from a possible devastating strike, but that is hard to accomplish when we have a president who seems to think no battle is necessary and turns his attention to less pressing issues such as paid sick leave and free community college.
It’s very worrisome and downright embarrassing when interviews with YouTube personalities take precedence over the safety of Israel. Obama has spoken with GloZell Green, but taking time to discuss serious international security matters with Netanyahu is too troublesome for the president.
Nick Eagle is a UF economics and political science senior. His column appears on Mondays.
[A version of this story ran on page 7 on 1/26/2015 under the headline “President Barack Obama needs to lead against Iran"]
