"France Covers Obama's Middle East Retreat"

Wall Street Journal:

Fed up with U.S. waffling, France may be ready to take a harder line on Iran

In an interview with the Associated Press on Oct. 4, Barack Obama depicted Iran as a country living with sanctions "put in place because Iran had not been following international guidelines, and had behaved in ways that made a lot of people feel they were pursuing a nuclear weapon."

For French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius, that was a pastels-and-wispy-brushstrokes rendering of reality. Two days later, in an interview with Europe 1 radio, Mr. Fabius drew a darker, edgier picture. "As we speak," he said, Iran keeps the centrifuges turning that are needed to make enriched uranium for nuclear bombs. But Iran is also pursuing a second, separate track toward atomic weapons with the construction, at Arak, of a heavy-water reactor producing plutonium.

That project might take "around a year" to complete. And "if it is completed, you won't be able to destroy it," Mr. Fabius said, "because if you bomb plutonium, it will leak." At that point, he said, for "the Americans, the Israelis and others," there would no longer be adequate sanctions to stop Tehran.

He gave no hint of who those "others" might be. But here was the French foreign minister talking about a possible military engagement against Iran in a more forceful manner than anything summoned so far by the U.S. president. Mr. Fabius was not advocating a strike, volunteering eventual French participation, or indulging in simple Obama-bashing. But he was expressing a kind of French contempt for the U.S. administration's evasive vocabulary about the Iran endgame.

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