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He would draw the red line before "Iran gets to a point where it's a few months away or a few weeks away from amassing enough enriched uranium to make a nuclear weapon." He concluded, "The red line must be drawn on Iran's nuclear enrichment program because these enrichment facilities are the only nuclear installations that we can definitely see and credibly target. I believe that faced with a clear red line, Iran will back down."
Mark Dubowitz of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies has been involved in drafting sanctions legislation. He thinks Netanyahu is right, e-mailing me: "It's a red line that can be easily verified by the IAEA [International Atomic Energy Agency]. It forces a decision point. Otherwise you have endless rounds of diplomacy and rhetoric about sanctions working, and no one is ever willing to say, enough! Netanyahu made it clear that the nuclear red line is spring or summer of 2013. That's when Iran will have enough medium-enriched uranium, at 20 percent, which is 90 percent of the way to military grade uranium, to build an atomic weapon." Has time run out for sanctions? He says, "Given Iran's large foreign exchange reserves, still sizable oil export earnings, and ability to restrict capital outflows, the economic cripple date will likely occur many months if not years after that nuclear threshold date."
Others have argued that the U.S. administration should get authorization from Congress use of force legislation to up the credibility of the military threat. These are not mutually exclusive.
Right now Obama holds a losing hand, with ownership of an Iran policy that has failed. At a time when his national security image is eroding, his stance toward Israel is being roundly criticized and he has no plausible alternative policy, why not agree with Netanyahu on a red line? There's no credible explanation about why that should be a problem — unless he never will be prepared to use force or harbors the fantasy that a negotiated agreement is still possible.
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