Iran's Secret Nuclear Plant and Obama's Bad Judgement

On Friday, flanked by the French President Sarkozy and prime minister Gordon Brown, Obama announced that Iran had been maintaining a secret nuclear enrichment plant that the Iranians believed they had successfully kept hidden from the world.

On Monday the Iranians informed the IAEA of the existence of the plant but only because they knew its existence was about to be revealed at the G20. We were told that US and European intelligence have known about the plant for some time and that Obama had known about the secret plant since he was president-elect.

That information makes Obama's strategy during the Iranian protests seem like an even bigger miscalculation and lost opportunity.

I and others had takenObama to task relentlessly for his muted response to both the rigged election, the protests and the government crackdown on the protesters, since it seemed like a very real opportunity to weaken Ahmedinejad, strengthen the resolve of the demonstrators and fuel the possibility of replacing the Ahmedinejad regime.

France, the UK, Germany and Italy all strongly condemned Iran and made statements in support of the protesters and honest elections, but Obama chose "not to meddle" in the affairs of Iran.

The purported reason was to preserve the possibility of negotiating with Ahmedinejad to resolve the issues of Iran's nuclear program. But by that time, not only had Ahmedinejad shown himself to be an intractable mad man, but rigged an election to return him to power and then cracked down on protesters with deadly force. One would think that all that would be a not so subtle signal that any kind of rational negotiation was not possible. But it was a real opportunity to weaken, or even get rid of Ahmadinejad.

But now we learned that Obama knew at the time that Iran had a second, secret nuclear enrichment plant it was trying to hide from the world in violation of UN resolutions and previous agreements. So, on what basis did Obama think he had a negotiating partner in Ahmadinejad?

At the time I wrote that Obama's response to the upheaval in Iran showed a serious lack of judgment since it seemed that events had presented a potential opportunity to replace the Ahmadinejad regime or at worst seriously weaken it,. Certainly it was the best opportunity to present itself in decades to replace Iran's regime with something more moderate. But the news that Obama knew that Iran had a secret enrichment plant at the time makes his actions and judgement even more questionable..

Those defending his stance said he struck just the right note in his responses to the Iranian election upheaval. I thought at the time that his responses seemed more tone deaf and that an opportunity to resolve the Iranian nuclear problem by getting rid of Ahmedinejad was getting away. And in the end Ahmedinejad accused Obama of meddling anyway.

Now there is a stronger Ahmedinejad to deal with than the one back in June.. And while Obama is now talking tough in terms of imposing sanctions on Iran, talking tough was something he should have done three months ago when Ahmedinejad was on the ropes.

Obama said Friday that the secret plant showed " a disturbing pattern by Iran". An Iranian official on Saturday said that the enrichment facility would soon be operational and "make the enemies blind".

For the moment we may have a situation where it's the blind leading the blind.