All of a sudden, Iran
All of a sudden Iran seems to have gone from a back-burner topic to one that suddenly seems imminent. Jackson Diehl in the Washington Post has taken a look at current American policy and apparently doesn’t much like what he sees:
What of Thursday’s talks in Geneva? Iran agreed to international inspections of its new nuclear facility and to ship out of the country some of the uranium it has enriched. Yet those modest concessions may complicate the negotiations and the prospects for sanctions. The headlines about them already obscured the fact that Tehran’s negotiator declined to respond to the central Western demand: that Iran freeze its uranium enrichment work…
In the meantime, talks about the details of inspections and the uranium shipments could easily become protracted, buying the regime valuable time…The Obama administration and its allies have said repeatedly that they will pursue diplomacy until the end of the year and then seek sanctions if diplomacy hasn’t worked. That sets up a foreseeable and very unpleasant crossroads. “If by early next year we are getting nothing through diplomacy and sanctions,” says scholar Kenneth Pollack of the Brookings Institution’s Saban Center, “the entire policy is going to be revealed as a charade.”
What then? Pollack, a former Clinton administration official, says there is one obvious Plan B: “containment,” a policy that got its name during the Cold War. The point would be to limit Iran’s ability to produce nuclear weapons or exercise its influence through the region by every means possible short of war — and to be prepared to sustain the effort over years, maybe decades. It’s an option that has been lurking at the back of the debate about Iran for years. “In their heart of hearts I think the Obama administration knows that this is where this is going,” Pollack says.
I suspect he’s right. I also don’t expect Obama and his aides to begin talking about a policy shift anytime soon. For the next few months we’ll keep hearing about negotiations, sanctions and possibly Israeli military action as ways to stop an Iranian bomb. By far the best chance for a breakthrough, as I see it, lies in a victory by the Iranian opposition over the current regime. If that doesn’t happen, it may soon get harder to disguise the hollowness of Western policy.
One of the very strange aspects of the current situation is that in December of 2007 the controversial new NIE said that Iran “was less determined to develop nuclear weapons than we have been judging since 2005.” NIE’s have been known to err, of course; dissenters from the 2007 NIE said that Iran did not stop its weapons program in 2003, but dispersed it and hid it better.
Maybe we’re wrong, but it seems to us that the level of anxiety in the Western powers seems a lot greater in recent days. What do they know that they are not telling us? Is it the IAEA’s secret annex, as this NYT piece says, revealing “that Iran has sufficient information to be able to design and produce a workable implosion nuclear device”? (And what’s the deal with the strange report that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is Jewish?)
October 4th, 2009 at 2:55 pm
A post at Politico points out the Iranians previously agreed to ship some of their enriched uranium to Russia in 2005 during negotiations with the Europeans. They never performed on their promise. Why is this being reported as a “breakthrough”, and “accomplishment”, this time?
It all sounds like ‘same song, side two’ to me.