Jeffrey Goldberg, Columnist

For Iran, 2013 Was a Very Good Year

Remember that interim Iranian nuclear agreement forged in Geneva on Nov. 24, the one accompanied by blaring trumpets and soaring doves?

December 31, 2013 at 3:43 PM UTC

By Jeffrey Goldberg

Jeffrey Goldberg is a columnist for Bloomberg View writing about the Middle East, U.S. foreign policy and national affairs. He is a national correspondent for the Atlantic, the author of "Prisoners: A Story of Friendship and Terror" and a winner of the National Magazine Award for reporting. He has also covered the Middle East as a staff writer for the New Yorker. Goldberg began his career at the Washington Post. He later wrote a column for the Jerusalem Post, covered the Mafia for New York magazine, and wrote for several years for the New York Times Magazine. He has been a public policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and a fellow of the Jerusalem Foundation. He was born in New York, and now lives in Washington with his wife and three children.

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Remember that interimIranian nuclear agreement forged in Geneva on Nov. 24, the one accompanied by blaring trumpets and soaring doves?

Would it surprise you to know that the agreement -- a deal that doesn't, by the way, neutralize the threat posed by Iran's nuclear program, just freezes the program, more or less, in place -- has not yet been implemented? Would it surprise you to learn that this deal might not be implemented for another month, or more? Or that in this long period of non-implementation, Iran is free to do with its nuclear program whatever it wishes? And that one of the things it is doing is building and testing new generations of centrifuges? Ali Akbar Salehi, the head of Iran's Atomic Energy Agency, recently said, "We have two types of second-generation centrifuges. We also have future generations which are going through their tests."