By Cernig
When the IAEA issued its latest report on Iran's nuclear program on Friday, there wasn't much noise about it from the right side of the blogosphere. They were too busy worrying about Obama's patriotism and McCain's "Cheney".
But now that the neocon mothership - the American Enterprise Institute - have spoken via the WSJ, they're all falling over themselves to get in lockstep and call it a "whitewash".
The truth, however, is that the IAEA's new report is a carefully parsed compromise between what the IAEA knows, what it's being told but cannot itself verify and political pressure from these very same neocons. It included an urgent call to Iran to agree implementation of a new Additional Protocol and gave the UNSC good cause to proceed with new sanction should it wish to. It repeated the good news that Iran's current centrifuges and their low-enriched product cannot be diverted to produce highly-enriched uranium useable for a weapon without IAEA knowledge.
It also connected the infamous "smoking taptop" to the Iranian nuclear program which ended in 2003 according to the last American NIE.
What the neocons are unhappy about is that it didn't contain a call for war. If any report on Iran's nuclear program doesn't contain that, it's a whitewash that makes the producing agency "irrelevant" according to them.
Could they be more transparent?
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