Israel in bind over Iran resuming uranium enrichment

With perfect timing, worthy of a virtuoso scriptwriter, Iran announced Jan. 4 that it had resumed enrichment of bomb-grade uranium to a 20% purity level in yet another gross breach of its 2015 nuclear agreement with world powers. The move was carried out on the direct order of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, after Iran announced its intention to do so on Jan. 1.

No one in Western intelligence, certainly not Israel, was overly surprised. “The Iranians are analyzing the timetable with great precision,” an Israeli security source told Al-Monitor on condition of anonymity. “They have probably concluded that two weeks before [US President Donald] Trump leaves office, they have acquired immunity against a surprise American attack.”

Iran’s violation of the nuclear deal is twofold, according to a senior Israeli diplomatic source. “They are both enriching uranium to a 20% level and doing so at an underground facility, which the agreement prohibits them from doing,” said the senior diplomatic source on condition of anonymity.

Could this Iranian assessment be premature? This week, Acting US Defense Secretary Christopher Miller reversed the decision to recall the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz from the Persian Gulf and ordered it to remain in place. This move, in addition to the dispatch of the US nuclear submarine Georgia to the Strait of Hormuz last month (and the deployment of an Israeli sub to the region as previously reported on this site), and the maneuvers of heavy US bombers over the Middle East in recent weeks are raising tensions to new records ahead of the Jan. 20 end of Trump’s term. The US decision regarding the Nimitz appears to have been prompted by threats issued on Twitter by Maj. Gen. Hossein Dehghan, Khamenei’s top security adviser, who warned that US moves in the Gulf could “turn the new year into a mourning for Americans.”