While You Weren't Paying Attention...

This has gotten completely lost because the news churn has been so enormous over the past week or so, but the IAEA quietly disputed Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's boast that over 3,000 centrifuges were operating at its nuclear facility.

The head of the United Nations' nuclear watchdog agency said Thursday that Iran was operating only several hundred centrifuges at its uranium enrichment plant at Natanz, despite its claims to have activated 3,000.

Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said Iran's nuclear program was a concern but discounted its claims of a major advance in uranium enrichment, a process the U.N. demands Iran suspend or face increasing sanctions.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said Monday that the Natanz facility had begun "industrial-scale" production of nuclear fuel [...]

Experts say that 3,000 centrifuges would be enough in theory to develop a nuclear warhead in about a year, but they doubt Iran has that many devices successfully running.

ElBaradei said, "Iran is still just at the beginning stages in setting up its Natanz enrichment facility."

This is the kind of information that winds up in the back of the paper when it should be on page 1. It's glaringly obvious that the President of Iran is not a reliable narrator of Iran's nuclear program, nor is he even in charge of it. Yet our media, and certainly the conservative movement, appears to take him at face value, and uses his claims to push for more war. And when the most knowledgeable people in the field dispute the claims, it doesn't get broadcast widely.

I saw Henry Waxman speak in Los Angeles over the weekend, and he reiterated the same neocon-framed rhetoric that "no option can be off the table" regarding Iran. Waxman was on the tour of the Middle East with Pelosi, and in general his thoughts on the region were right in describing the interconnectedness and the complexity. But he feels the need to sound belligerent on Iran, and in so doing he stokes the fires for war from the liberal side of the aisle. Waxman also said that he rejected the notion that an amendment requiring Congressional approval for any funds used for an attack on Iran because he felt that the Congress has that authority anyway and Bush would subvert it, besides. If Congress has the authority, where's the harm in reiterating it? If "Bush would subvert it" was a decent answer to why not to pass a law, why pass any law? This is self-serving rhetoric that allows the drumbeat for war with Iran to continue. And even though it's been obscured over the past week, it's sure to bubble up again.