Iran's second nuclear facility...

We've all heard, I assume, that the cat's out of the bag about Iran's second nuclear facility (Iran announced it to the IAEA after becoming aware that the it was no longer secret, with the US having known about it for a year).

Beyond all the other discussion of it, I thought this tidbit from NBC's First Read was interesting:

*** We’ve known about this for a year: Per NBC’s Andrea Mitchell, officials say it was U.S. intelligence that learned of the secret plant more than a year ago -- before President Obama's election; Israel also knew about it, too. They most likely would not have gone public if Iran had not discovered that the U.S. was onto them and had it not notified the U.N.'s international inspection agency on Monday. By the way, Mitchell adds, the site is 30 kilometers outside of Qum, Iran’s holy city. That means that any military strike would be very difficult politically, because it would around[sic] huge reaction throughout the Muslim world. Also today, watch for Russian and Chinese reaction. Yes, they were notified of our intelligence this week, but their reaction is unknown.

From my perspective, if it becomes necessary to use military strikes to eliminate the Iranian threat (which I think it will be), I don't think it's even a question that the threat outweighs the risk of inflaming Muslim animus (as if we haven't already).

And of course, if Iran really cared about the sanctity of Qum, they wouldn't have placed an obvious military target right next door. In a rational world, the responsibility for any damage to Qum would fall on the party that uses it as a shield.

On the other hand, they may assume a lack of will on the part of the West to risk an attack, and consider it likely that its location is a protection. On this point, their perspective is pretty understandable if recent examples of Western resolve are considered.