[Mb-civic] FW: Europe's Iran Moment

[villasudjuan]

------ Forwarded Message
From: Samii Shahla <shahla at thesamiis.com>
Date: Wed, 3 Aug 2005 11:38:38 -0400
Subject: Europe's Iran Moment

I

Wednesday, August 03, 2005

Europe's Iran Moment


August 03, 2005 
The Wall Street Journal
Review & Outlook


The Bush administration has justified its softly-softly approach to the
Iranian nuclear program on grounds it has firm commitments from the
Europeans to get tough should diplomacy fail. Those promises are about to be
put to the test now that Iran has informed the International Atomic Energy
Agency of its intention to resume uranium enrichment.

The suspension agreement was inked last November after what turns out to
have been nearly 20 years of Iranian deception vis-a-vis the IAEA. And it
can be argued that diplomacy has at least bought time, assuming -- and it's
a big assumption given how many times Iran has already been caught lying to
inspectors -- that there has been no clandestine program going on in the
interim. But the desire of the EU-3 (Britain, France and Germany) to find a
negotiated solution seems only to have encouraged Iranian intransigence on
the central issue, which is its repeatedly claimed "right" under the Nuclear
Nonproliferation Treaty to enrich uranium for what it says is a civilian
power program. 

The existence of any such right is debatable, given that the NPT forbids
using a civilian nuclear program as cover for a military one. But to the
extent Iran is able to plausibly make this claim, it only highlights the
problematic moral equivalence at the heart of the U.N. system, of which the
IAEA and NPT are a part. Put simply, Iran is not a democratic country. And
it is patently wrong to treat the ruling mullahs as if they were likely to
observe international law.

This should be all the more clear after June's sham presidential elections,
which were rigged to the extent that Hashemi Rafsanjani -- who has said that
Iran should have the bomb so it can destroy Israel -- came off as the more
moderate of the final two candidates. Most Iranians themselves (as
suppressed poll results indicated) see the nuclear program for exactly what
is -- a means of keeping their oppressors in power.

We were encouraged to see the Europeans talking tough yesterday, saying any
Iranian move to restart enrichment would result in an emergency IAEA meeting
and possible referral to the U.N. Security Council for sanctions. But it's a
fairly open secret that many European diplomats think that the best we can
expect even after such action is further delay, and that the world will
ultimately just have to "get used to" the idea of the mullahs having the
bomb. 

This would be a historic mistake, starting with the fact that it would mean
the permanent discrediting of the multilateral arms control system these
very same diplomats claim to hold dear. North Korea has already gone nuclear
under the IAEA's watch. If Iran follows, the world can be assured the U.S.
will never again look for answers to the IAEA's shiny new Vienna
headquarters. 

The strategic consequences are also hard to overstate. Iranian leaders such
as Mr. Rafsanjani have spoken openly about wanting the bomb to thwart U.S.
"colonialism" in the Middle East. At a minimum, a nuclear umbrella would
remove any inhibition they might still have about using conventional
terrorism in an all-out assault on U.S. democracy-promotion in the region.
World oil supplies could be threatened. And it is not inconceivable they
might hand such a weapon to terrorists, since the further proliferation that
would undoubtedly follow might make such an act plausibly deniable.

We're hardly reassured by yesterday's Washington Post report that Iran might
be 10 years from the bomb, or five years longer than previously thought. It
was reportedly based on information from a still-classified U.S. National
Intelligence Estimate. But as we've argued in the past, leaning too heavily
on NIEs is dangerous because they tend to be lowest-common denominator
assessments that create the illusion of actual knowledge where there is
often much uncertainty. The government would be better off without them.

Exhibit A are the NIEs that said we'd find WMD in Iraq. But the intelligence
consensus also missed by a long shot how close Saddam was to the A-bomb
before the first Gulf War, and it missed again on North Korea. The best
policy practice with countries obviously intent on acquiring a bomb, as Iran
is, is to act as if the prospect is any day now, not to look for reassurance
that the problem can be put off until later.

It's no exaggeration to say that everything we've been trying to achieve in
the Middle East and beyond is at stake here. The mullahs know it, which is
why they risked international censure through sham elections to consolidate
their power and are now risking a confrontation with the Security Council.
The potential consequences of an Iranian nuke for the Western democracies
are an order of magnitude graver than backpack bombs on subways.

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