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Tehran’s Weapons of Mass Distraction
An Iranian flag is pictured near in a missile during a military drill, with the participation of Iran’s Air Defense units, Iran October 19, 2020. Photo: WANA (West Asia News Agency) via REUTERS/Files
JNS.org – In 1993, a massive truck bomb exploded at the World Trade Center, the first major international terrorist attack on American soil.
Five years later, two massive truck bombs struck two American embassies in East Africa. That was not long after Osama bin Laden, in an interview in southern Afghanistan with reporter John Miller, vowed to continue waging jihad against the United States.
Two years after that a boat packed with explosives struck the USS Cole off the coast of Yemen.
Despite all this and more, it came as a terrible shock when, on Sept. 11, 2001, Al Qaeda operatives hijacked passenger jets and used them to murder nearly 3,000 Americans on American soil.
“This country simply was not on a war footing,” then-White House National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice later told the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States.
This brings me to the recently issued “Annual Threat Assessment” of the U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
In it, the ODNI acknowledges that the Islamic Republic of Iran “has greatly expanded its nuclear program, reduced IAEA [International Atomic Energy Agency] monitoring, and undertaken activities that better position it to produce a nuclear device, if it chooses to do so.”
But the assessment adds: “Iran is not currently undertaking the key nuclear weapons-development activities necessary to produce a testable nuclear device.”
Are you sure, guys?
Because my FDD colleagues, Andrea Stricker, a nonproliferation expert, and Behnam Ben Taleblu, an Iran expert, are dubious.
Last week, the Institute for Science and International Security (known as “the good ISIS”) revealed that at Natanz, south of Tehran, the regime is constructing deep tunnels and underground rooms in which it could produce weapons-grade uranium.
“If Tehran is allowed to complete this facility and move its enrichment infrastructure inside, we will enter a new and potentially irreversible era of the Iranian nuclear threat,” said Richard Goldberg, who served as the Director for Countering Iranian Weapons of Mass Destruction for the National Security Council and is now a senior advisor at FDD.
He added: “Completion of this facility must be added to the list of red lines for the United States and its allies.”
Iran’s rulers seem unconcerned. Ali Akbar Salehi, the former chief of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization, recently boasted that Tehran has surpassed “all thresholds of nuclear science and technology. Imagine what a car needs. It needs a chassis, an engine, a steering wheel, a gearbox. You’re asking if we’ve made the gearbox. I say yes. Have we made the engine? Yes.”
The good ISIS calculates that Tehran could produce enough weapons-grade uranium for seven nuclear weapons in about a month.
Should that happen, it would represent a significant failure of diplomacy, policy and strategy over many years by both Democratic and Republican administrations.
The only significant pause in Tehran’s nuclear weapons program came in 2003, in the wake of America’s invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan.
Iran’s rulers then agreed to suspend uranium enrichment, declare their other nuclear activities and grant the IAEA broader access to their nuclear facilities. But as soon as they perceived that American guns weren’t aiming at them, they violated these agreements.
In 2015, President Obama concluded the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, under which Iran effectively got paid to temporarily limit its uranium enrichment while advancing other aspects of its nuclear-weapons program.
In 2018, President Trump withdrew from the JCPOA and, over the two years that followed, exerted significant pressure on the Iranian economy. In 2020, he ordered the killing of Tehran’s terrorist mastermind, Qassem Soleimani, and suggested he might target the regime’s nuclear program, too.
President Biden began lifting pressure on Iran’s rulers in 2021. Since then, he’s delivered tens of billions of dollars of Iranian frozen assets and waived other sanctions. Unsurprisingly, Iran’s expansion of highly enriched uranium production has occurred entirely on Biden’s watch, not Trump’s.
At the same time, Biden’s envoys have been attempting to persuade Iran’s rulers to agree to a watered-down version of the JCPOA.
Last Friday, Rafael Grossi, director general of the IAEA, suggested that would be useless. “The spectrum of that agreement is clearly superseded at this point,” he said. “The Iran of 2015 is not the Iran of 2024.”
My FDD colleague Mark Dubowitz worries that the wars now being waged against Israel by Tehran’s proxies and clients in Gaza, Lebanon, Syria and Yemen are “weapons of mass distraction”—impeding a competent assessment by both Israelis and Americans of the threat that would emerge should Iran’s rulers obtain atomic weapons of mass destruction.
Yes, some Israelis perceive only too well that they are wrestling with the multiple tentacles of an octopus while the beast’s head rests comfortably in Tehran. But, at the moment, they don’t appear to be acting on that perception.
And is anyone in Washington giving serious thought to what it will mean for America’s national security if the Islamic Republic goes nuclear right now, as it strengthens its alliances with the anti-American rulers of China, Russia and North Korea?
Is anyone imagining the possibility that these regimes might—sooner or later—demand the United States end its support for Ukraine, Israel, Taiwan and South Korea, and perhaps also acquiesce to Houthi control of the Red Sea, Iranian sovereignty over the Strait of Hormuz and Beijing’s dominance in the South China Sea?
The alternative, they’d imply, might be nuclear war.
No doubt some voices on the right would then call for “restraint,” while some voices on the left would insist on a “diplomatic solution”—both euphemisms for American surrender, defeat and decline.
Osama bin Laden would get that. And he would be pleased.
The post Tehran’s Weapons of Mass Distraction first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Security Warning to Israelis Vacationing Abroad Ahead of holidays
A passenger arrives to a terminal at Ben Gurion international airport before Israel bans international flights, January 25, 2021. REUTERS/Ronen Zvulun
i24 News – Ahead of the Jewish High Holidays, Israel’s National Security Council (NSC) published the latest threat assessment to Israelis abroad from terrorist groups to the public on Sunday, in order to increase the Israeli public’s awareness of the existing terrorist threats around the world and encourage individuals to take preventive action accordingly.
The NSC specified that the warning is an up-to-date reflection of the main trends in the activities of terrorist groups around the world and their impact on the level of threat posed to Israelis abroad during these times, but the travel warnings and restrictions themselves are not new.
“As the Gaza war continues and in parallel with the increasing threat of terrorism, the National Security Headquarters stated it has recognized a trend of worsening and increasing violent antisemitic incidents and escalating steps by anti-Israel groups, to the point of physically harming Israelis and Jews abroad. This is in light of, among other things, the anti-Israel narrative and the negative media campaign by pro-Palestinian elements — a trend that may encourage and motivate extremist elements to carry out terrorist activities against Israelis or Jews abroad,” the statement read.
“Therefore, the National Security Bureau is reinforcing its recommendation to the Israeli public to act with responsibility during this time when traveling abroad, to check the status of the National Security Bureau’s travel warnings (before purchasing tickets to the destination,) and to act in accordance with the travel warning recommendations and the level of risk in the country they are visiting,” it listed, adding that, as illustrated in the past year, these warnings are well-founded and reflect a tangible and valid threat potential.
The statement also emphasized the risk of sharing content on social media networks indicating current or past service in the Israeli security forces, as these posts increase the risk of being marked by various parties as a target. “Therefore, the National Security Council recommends that you do not upload to social networks, in any way, content that indicates service in the security forces, operational activity, or similar content, as well as real-time locations.”
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Israel Intensifies Gaza City Bombing as Rubio Arrives
Displaced Palestinians, fleeing northern Gaza due to an Israeli military operation, move southward after Israeli forces ordered residents of Gaza City to evacuate to the south, in the central Gaza Strip September 14, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Mahmoud Issa
Israeli forces destroyed at least 30 residential buildings in Gaza City and forced thousands of people from their homes, Palestinian officials said, as US Secretary of State Marco Rubio arrived on Sunday to discuss the future of the conflict.
Israel has said it plans to seize the city, where about a million Palestinians have been sheltering, as part of its declared aim of eliminating the terrorist group Hamas, and has intensified attacks on what it has called Hamas’ last bastion.
The group’s political leadership, which has engaged in on-and-off negotiations on a possible ceasefire and hostage release deal, was targeted by Israel in an airstrike in Doha on Tuesday in an attack that drew widespread condemnation.
Qatar will host an emergency Arab-Islamic summit on Monday to discuss the next moves. Rubio said Washington wanted to talk about how to free the 48 hostages – of whom 20 are believed to be still alive – still held by Hamas in Gaza and rebuild the coastal strip.
“What’s happened, has happened,” he said. “We’re gonna meet with them (the Israeli leadership). We’re gonna talk about what the future holds,” Rubio said before heading to Israel where he will stay until Tuesday.
ABRAHAM ACCORDS AT RISK
He was expected to visit the Western Wall Jewish prayer site in Jerusalem on Sunday with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and hold talks with him during the visit.
US officials described Tuesday’s strike on the territory of a close US ally as a unilateral escalation that did not serve American or Israeli interests. Rubio and US President Donald Trump both met Qatar’s Prime Minister Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al-Thani on Friday.
Netanyahu signed an agreement on Thursday to push ahead with a settlement expansion plan that would cut across West Bank land that the Palestinians seek for a state – a move the United Arab Emirates warned would undermine the US-brokered Abraham accords that normalized UAE relations with Israel.
Israel, which blocked all food from entering Gaza for 11 weeks earlier this year, has been allowing more aid into the enclave since late July to prevent further food shortages, though the United Nations says far more is needed.
It says it wants civilians to leave Gaza City before it sends more ground forces in. Tens of thousands of people are estimated to have left but hundreds of thousands remain in the area. Hamas has called on people not to leave.
Israeli army forces have been operating inside at least four eastern suburbs for weeks, turning most of at least three of them into wastelands. It is closing in on the center and the western areas of the territory, where most of the displaced people are taking shelter.
Many are reluctant to leave, saying there is not enough space or safety in the south, where Israel has told them to go to what it has designated as a humanitarian zone.
Some say they cannot afford to leave while others say they were hoping the Arab leaders meeting on Monday in Qatar would pressure Israel to scrap its planned offensive.
“The bombardment intensified everywhere and we took down the tents, more than twenty families, we do not know where to go,” said Musbah Al-Kafarna, displaced in Gaza City.
Israel said it had completed five waves of air strikes on Gaza City over the past week, targeting more than 500 sites, including Hamas reconnaissance and sniper sites, buildings containing tunnel openings and weapons depots.
Local officials, who do not distinguish between militant and civilian casualties, say at least 40 people were killed by Israeli fire across the enclave, a least 28 in Gaza City alone.
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Turkey Warns of Escalation as Israel Expands Strikes Beyond Gaza
Turkey’s President Tayyip Erdogan speaks during a press conference with Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis (not seen) at the Presidential Palace in Ankara, Turkey, May 13, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Umit Bektas
i24 News – An Israeli strike targeting Hamas officials in Qatar has sparked unease among several Middle Eastern countries that host leaders of the group, with Turkey among the most alarmed.
Officials in Ankara are increasingly worried about how far Israel might go in pursuing those it holds responsible for the October 7 attacks.
Israel’s prime minister effectively acknowledged that the Qatar operation failed to eliminate the Hamas leadership, while stressing the broader point the strike was meant to make: “They enjoy no immunity,” the government said.
On X, Prime Minister Netanyahu went further, writing that “the elimination of Hamas leaders would put an end to the war.”
A senior Turkish official, speaking on condition of anonymity, summed up Ankara’s reaction: “The attack in Qatar showed that the Israeli government is ready to do anything.”
Legally and diplomatically, Turkey occupies a delicate position. As a NATO member, any military operation or targeted killing on its soil could inflame tensions within the alliance and challenge mutual security commitments.
Analysts caution, however, that Israel could opt for covert measures, operations carried out without public acknowledgement, a prospect that has increased anxiety in governments across the region.
Israeli officials remain defiant. In an interview with Ynet, Minister Ze’ev Elkin said: “As long as we have not stopped them, we will pursue them everywhere in the world and settle our accounts with them.” The episode underscores growing fears that efforts to hunt Hamas figures beyond Gaza could widen regional friction and complicate diplomatic relationships.