Update: Iran's Foreign Ministry has replied to Mullen's comment, ""All these statements regarding the production of a nuclear bomb are very baseless. It is baseless from a technical point of view and has propaganda connotations."
On Friday, after President Obama's speech on Iraq and its recommendation for talks with Iran and Syria,
we wrote, "Watch the manoeuvres of those who are hostile to any engagement not only because they don’t like 'rogue states'."
And so it goes.
In a travesty of an interview on Sunday, CNN's John King led Admiral Mike Mullen (pictured), the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, down the sensational road to Mullen's statement that Iran "has enough fissile material to make a nuclear bomb": "And Iran having a nuclear weapon I’ve believed for a long time is a very, very bad outcome for the region and for the world."
Unsurprisingly,
those sentences have become bold-letter headlines this morning. Here, though, is the essential context for what was either 1) an Admiral being manoeuvred into a very silly mistake or 2) another example of the US military trying to bump others in the Obama Administration into a harder line.
Near the end of
an interview which was devoted mainly to Iraq and Afghanistan, King and Mullen stood in front of one of those multi-coloured plasma maps that CNN uses as eye-candy as the CNN anchorman said, "If we come down to the right here, Iran, obviously, the International Atomic Energy Agency said last week they think that they were wrong in the past, that Iran might now have enough fissile material to make a bomb. Does Iran have enough to make a bomb?"
King, who has risen through the CNN ranks because of chiseled looks and broad shoulders rather than any detail of knowledge, had asked an question based on a falsehood. The IAEA did not say "they were wrong in the past".
Their report explained that quantities of Iran's enriched uranium were one-third higher than previously stated because the amounts were verified by observation rather than estimates. And the IAEA, while saying that Iran might soon have a quantity of uranium sufficienct for one bomb, also said that the uranium was not of sufficient quality (
it is enriched to 4% and 90% is the magic number needed).
Mullen could have said, "The Administration is currently conducting a review of policy towards Iran" (or, in a dream world, "John, you're a mannequin posing as a reporter"). He could have left it at that, as there was little time left in the interview. Instead, he nodded at King and the multi-coloured map and said:
We think they do, quite frankly. And Iran having a nuclear weapon I’ve believed for a long time is a very, very bad outcome for the region and for the world.
And that was it for Tehran. CNN spun the lights and the geography to North Korea so King could ask about their bomb, to which Mullen gave a more sensible response, one guaranteed not to make headlines:
Secretary Gates and I have made no recommendations. But it’s -- it’s an area that we watch with great concern. And I would hope that North Korea would not be provocative.
It is notable that
Mullen did not say a word about Iran in his other Sunday interview with Chris Wallace of Fox News. And it's even more notable that
Secretary of Defense Robert Gates slapped down Mullen's claim when he talked with David Gregory on NBC's
Meet the Press:
[The Iranians are] not close to a uranium stockpile. They’re not close to a weapon, at this point, and so there is some time.
Indeed, Gates' much-longer answer on Iran is the one that deserves to be dissected this morning. He effectively laid out the "engagement" strategy. Negotiate with Tehran --- if the talks aren't satisfactory, then Washington has the cause for tougher economic sanctions:
GATES: I don’t think that either the last administration or the current one have been distracted from the growing problem with Iran and its nuclear program in the least over the last number of years. We worried about it well before even the Bush administration.
So I -- I think that there has been a continuing focus on how do you get the Iranians to walk away from a nuclear weapons program?
They’re not close to a stockpile. They’re not close to a weapon, at this point, and so there is some time.
And the question is whether you can increase the level of the sanctions and the cost to the Iranians of pursuing that program at the same time you show them an open door if they want to engage with the Europeans, with us, and so on, if they walk away from that program.
Our chances of being successful, it seems to me, are a lot better at $35 or $40 oil than they were at $140 oil because there are economic costs to this program, they do have economic challenges at home.
GREGORY: You do see the need, though, for a -- some kind of strategic relationship between the U.S. and Iran?
GATES: Well, I think that -- that’s really up to the Iranians. I’ve been -- as I like to say, I’ve been in this search for the elusive Iranian moderate for 30 years. I’m still looking.
Unfortunately, it's Mullen who has played into the more-established, if inaccurate, media line that Iran is about to get The Bomb. And with newspapers like
The Times of London running hysterical campaigns on the Tehran threat --- see analyst
Bronwen Maddox's Friday scenario of an Iranian invasion of Bahrain and
Sunday's article claiming Tehran is funneling missiles to the Taliban --- it is that wave that could sink the Obama strategy of engagement.
Monday, March 30, 2009 at 9:02 
Sunday morning is special in US politics. It's the time when Administrations can sell their policies on political talk shows (and, in due course, when opponents can have a shot at the President and his advisors).
John Bolton.