Jeffrey Goldberg
The Atlantic
December 2, 2011
Adam Chandler, the Goldblog deputy-editor-for-monitoring-Iran-obsessively-even-though-Goldblog-himself-also-monitors-Iran-obsessively, pointed out to me the other day that perhaps the West has already begun the attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities, that perhaps we ought to reframe this issue a bit. The attacks he mentioned are not the usual sub-rosa, eyebrow-raising tech and computer virus sort of attacks, but outright physical attacks. This is more a semantic issue, I suppose (and yes, I realize the Iranian regime is virulently anti-semantic), but operations against Iran are seeming to move away from the pure Mossad-in-the-70s-style attacks to straight-up military confrontations. I don’t know if this is a sign of escalation or desperation or both, though it seems to fair to say that less subtlety on the part of Israel, the U.S. and whoever else is doing this suggests that the previous tactics were deemed insufficient.
Following a (perhaps not-so-mysterious) explosion on a military base last month that took with it the life of Gen. Hassan Tehrani Moghaddam–one of the Iranian missile program’s most distinguished OGs–comes news of a second explosion in Isfahan this past Monday, which according to sources “struck the uranium enrichment facility there, despite denials by Tehran.”
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