On August 31 2012 a new IAEA report on Iran provided that Iran had converted parts of its 20% enriched Uranium into fuel plates it needs for the Tehran Research Reactor.
On September 28 2012 Israels prime minister Netanyahoo came to the United Nations with a cartoon bomb that depicted a spurious “red line” that, he said, Iran should not be allowed to cross.
Today a Washington Post editorial warps that timeline:
[T]he Israeli leader’s explicit setting of a “red line” for the Iranian nuclear program in a speech to the U.N. General Assembly in September appears to have accomplished what neither negotiations nor sanctions have yielded: concrete Iranian action to limit its enrichment.
A host of commentators both in the United States and Israel scoffed at what they called Mr. Netanyahu’s “cartoonish” picture of a bomb and the line he drew across it. The prime minister said Iran could not be allowed to accumulate enough 20 percent enriched uranium to produce a bomb with further processing, adding that at the rate its centrifuges were spinning, Tehran would cross that line by the middle of 2013.
Iran, too, dismissed what its U.N. ambassador called “an unfounded and imaginary graph.” But then a funny thing happened: The regime began diverting some of its stockpile to the manufacture of fuel plates for a research reactor.
Funny indeed. We had pointed to an early Wall Street Journal piece that had made the same false claim.
This warping of the factual reality leads to false arguments, conclusions and, in the end, war. In this case it is also used to imply a Netanyahoo “success” where none has been made. It is just another sorry example of why the Washington Post is about to die.