The time has come for Obama to admit he has been wrong on Iran

If there was ever a time for the American President to come out and apologise to his people and indeed the world at large for his failings regarding helping to facilitate the emergence a nuclear Iran then this week seemed like a pretty good one. First it was announced by the Atomic Energy Agency that Iran has activated a second centrifuge for the enrichment of uranium and then Iran itself came out boasting to the world that it already had the necessary mass graves for US servicemen freshly dug. Well i think we can safely say that that's well over a years worth of softly softly Obama style appeasement diplomacy exposed for what it really was all along; a farce.

The UN security council may well have forbade Iran's continued enrichment of uranium but as usual the rulings issued by the UN have been taken about as seriously as the latest Katie Price autobiography. By putting a second centrifuge into service Iran has been able to dramatically increase the efficiency with which it can enrich uranium so speeding it towards attaining levels of enrichment that would produce weapons grade materials. As of the beginning of this week we all just moved dangerously closer to living in a world in which Iran has the nuclear capabilities for dominating the region, holding the world to ransom and erasing those of its neighbours that it took a disliking to. Indeed this would be no cold war scenario, given the Islamist mentality that the Iranian regime operates under the prospect of doomsday visions are no deterrent for Iran's leaders. Should Iran achieve nuclear capabilities then the best possible scenario we could hope for would be a nuclear arms race across the Middle East, a situation in which the likes of Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Syria would all be pointing nuclear weapons at one another.

But have no fear, in response to all of this the US military has revealed that it does indeed have a contingency plan for a military strike on Iran after all. The only issue is, as the chairman on the US Joint Chief of Staffs Adm. Mullen explained; the US military thinks a strike would 'probably be a bad idea'. Oh well in that case we'll all just sit around and wait for Ahmadinejad to go off the idea of nuclear weapons then shall we? Either that or try another round of appeasement; perhaps if we all offered to convert to Shia Islam.......

Ahmedinejad clearly isn't about to experience some sudden change of heart, indeed in response to the idea of a US military strike Iran promised that it would retaliate with attacks on US bases across the Gulf. Clearly those terribly tough economic sanctions that Obama was holding back as a last resort if his policy of talking nicely somehow failed to bare fruit have left the Iranians completely undeterred. What should really by now be obvious to all those concerned is that the Iranian problem is one that only gets worse the longer it is left. There is no point putting off the inevitable, especially when the inevitable intervention is going to become increasingly ever more perilous the longer it is delayed.

Now is the time for the Obama administration to admit that its policy on Iran was ill conceived from the start and that the time has come, and indeed came some time ago, for a new more proactive approach.