WORLD POWERS TO IRAN: KEEP BUILDING NUKES
P. David Hornik
FrontPage, April 16, 2012
On Saturday the P5+1 countries (the U.S., Britain, France, Russia, and China plus Germany) met with Iran in Istanbul for what is being called a “first round” of nuclear talks. By all accounts, it was a “round” with little or no substance—except one major result: the parties agreed to reconvene for another “round” in Baghdad in another five weeks, on May 23.
No one seriously concerned about Iran’s ongoing enrichment of uranium, its ongoing transfer of centrifuges to its deep-underground Fordo site, its ongoing work on nuclear-weapons development, could be pleased with this result. As Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu put it bluntly: “My initial impression is that Iran has been given a freebie. It’s got five weeks to continue enrichment without any limitation, any inhibition.”
Some, though, were indeed happy with the meeting’s outcome. One was EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton—who not long ago made waves when she reacted to the Toulouse terror attack, [which killed four Jews, including three children], by equating the Israeli army with mass murderers. Ashton called Saturday’s talks “constructive and useful” and rhapsodized: “We expect that subsequent meetings will lead to concrete steps toward a comprehensive negotiated solution which restores international confidence in the exclusively peaceful nature of the Iranian nuclear program.”
Another party that reacted with great satisfaction was the Iranians themselves. Their chief negotiator Saeed Jalili exulted that the talks were a “positive sign” compared with “the language of threats and pressure that do not work on the Iranian people.” And AFP reported on Sunday that “Iran’s media, including outlets close to the leadership…hailed renewed talks with world powers as positive.” The government-run, English-language Iran Daily trumpeted on its front page: “EU Reaffirms Tehran’s Nuclear Rights.…”
Ominously, various Western reports say that the P5+1, while probably aiming to demand that Iran remove its stockpile of 20-percent-enriched uranium from the country, is now prepared—unlike in the past—to allow it to keep its 3-percent-enriched stockpile. Ephraim Kam, deputy head of Israel’s Institute for National Security Studies, notes that the latter stockpile already has enough uranium for three to four nuclear bombs.…
The winner of the first “round” is Iran. Even if the reports…on leniency toward its 3-percent stockpile turn out to be wrong, Iran gains time. May 23 is only a little more than five weeks from July—when the EU’s intensified sanctions on Iranian oil are supposed to start. It is all too easy to picture Iran introducing “proposals” on May 23 that Ashton and others will delightedly find “constructive”—while agreeing to schedule another convocation for, say, about July 1, and also agreeing to put off the ramped-up sanctions while such exciting “progress” is being made.
Meanwhile, of course, Iran will keep its centrifuges spinning while remaining immune from any military attack—unless, of course, Israel were to go very much against the “consensus.…”
THE TALKS WITH IRAN
Elliott Abrams
Council on Foreign Relations, April 14, 2012
Happy talk is one of the great concerns we should all have about the negotiations with Iran in Istanbul, which just concluded with an agreement to meet again on May 23 in Baghdad.
What happened in Istanbul? Judging from the account in the New York Times, not much…: “The decision to meet again appeared to reflect what European and American officials saw as a serious commitment from Iran to negotiate. However the initial statements from the delegates after the talks ended did not suggest that any concrete proposals or confidence-building measures had been made or agreed to.” Right. In fact, the problem is made even more obvious in this comment: “I don’t think they would come if they weren’t serious,” one Western diplomat said.
Really? Looking back on all the negotiations with the North Koreans, including those of the Obama Administration…would we judge that the North Koreans “wouldn’t have come if they weren’t serious?” Serious about what, one might ask? About delaying a possible Israeli military strike, or about negotiating an end to their own nuclear program?…
The late May meeting will be in Baghdad, because that is where Iran wants it to take place. What will happen there? The Times notes that “There will be enormous pressure on the parties for the Baghdad meeting, since very little of substance appeared to have been discussed here. The Istanbul meeting was intended, according to the six powers, mainly to test Iran’s willingness to engage in a serious process to resolve doubts about whether its nuclear program was aimed at producing nuclear weapons.” This is a bit mysterious: how was it that Iran’s seriousness was tested in a meeting where no concrete proposals appear to have been made, much less agreed to?…
It appears that all present have at least one common goal: making an Israeli strike harder. This suggests that the next meeting will not “end in failure” either; it will agree to yet another meeting.… After all, if concrete proposals are tabled one mustn’t rush the Iranians; they must have time to take them home to Tehran and think them through.
It is hard to know what the Iranians make of all this, except perhaps that diplomacy is fun. Note that the head of the U.S. delegation, Wendy Sherman, requested a private one-on-one meeting with the head of the Iranian delegation.… Her request was…rejected.… This action ensures that the United States appears to Iran as a suitor, anxious for these talks to succeed—and apparently more anxious than is Iran.…
IRAN’S NUKE ‘VICTORY’
Amir Taheri
NY Post, April 16, 2012
‘An important reversal of America’s position!” is how Tehran’s government-mouthpiece daily Kayhan described the outcome of the latest talks between Iran and the P5+1 group of nations.… The talks…supposedly tried to persuade Tehran to comply with UN Security Council resolutions it has ignored for years—the key demand of which is that Iran stop uranium enrichment and open its nuclear sites to regular International Atomic Energy Agency inspection.
Yet both sides said the Istanbul session dealt only with “confidence-building” measures.… The way Tehran sees it, Istanbul showed that the P5+1 group has dropped the UN resolutions’ demand for ending uranium enrichment.…
Both Iranian “Supreme Guide” Ali Khamenei and President Obama have several reasons for being happy about Istanbul. Both want Iran’s nukes—the No. 1 foreign-policy issue in the US presidential election—to be pushed to the sidelines. That would let Tehran buy time to dramatically increase its stockpile of higher-grade enriched uranium while completing five sites built deep in mountains to be less vulnerable to airstrikes. Iran also needs some 18 months to finish the heavy-water plant at Arak that would provide it with an alternative route to a bomb, with plutonium rather than enriched uranium.
Meanwhile, creating the impression that a peaceful solution is within reach would make it harder, if not impossible, for Israel to take military action against Iran’s nuclear sites, something that neither Obama nor Khamenei wants. On the eve of the Istanbul talks, the Obama administration sent a signal to Tehran by leaking information about an Israeli “air-force facility” in Azerbaijan, close to Iran’s borders. Earlier, Khamenei had signaled Washington by praising Obama’s March speech to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee as containing “good and positive elements.…”
Obama has often called for “unconditional talks,” in effect setting aside the UN resolutions, a longtime Tehran demand. Obama wants something—anything—that would let him claim a diplomatic victory.… He also knows that if Israel attacks Iran before the US presidential election, he’d have to side with the Jewish state or risk losing part of his electorate in such battleground states as Florida and Ohio. After the election, he’d no longer feel obliged to back Israel in action against Iran. Iranian leaders think that if Obama is re-elected, the threat of Israeli attack would fizzle out.…
Washington welcomed the outcome of Istanbul as “positive.” But positive for whom? The main beneficiary seems to be Tehran, although it may also help Obama’s re-election.…
OBAMA’S TOUGH TALK MASKS IRAN FREEBIE
Jonathan S. Tobin
Contentions, April 16, 2012
President Obama responded sharply yesterday to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s claim the P5+1 talks with Iran constituted a Western “freebie” to the Islamist regime because it gave it five more weeks to continue to enrich uranium. Speaking during his visit to Colombia, the president let loose with another barrage of tough talk about his intentions to halt Iran’s nuclear program. Warning “the clock is ticking” for Iran, he directly addressed criticism of the talks by saying he wouldn’t allow it to turn into a “stalling process” and that far more draconian sanctions would be put into place against the regime if it didn’t take advantage of the diplomatic process.
That’s reassuring rhetoric, but the problem with America’s policy on the Iranian nuclear issue remains the same as it has always been: the disconnect between President Obama’s public rhetoric and the process by which U.S. diplomatic efforts has allowed Tehran to do the stalling that he claims he opposes.…
The president’s continued discussion of his desire to press Iran and refusal to let them off the hook ought to have encouraged the Israelis. But given the clear desire of America’s P5+1 negotiating partners—a group that includes Iran’s friends Russia and China—to treat the talks as merely a method for preventing an Israeli attack on Iran, it is difficult to fault Netanyahu for his skepticism about a process that, despite Obama’s comments, seems to have no clear agenda or deadline for success. Indeed, accounts of the meeting seem to have confirmed his fears that the whole point is about defusing tension over Iran’s nuclear ambitions and creating a process that will continue until well past November.
What is perhaps most discouraging about the accounts of the talks and the preparations for the next meeting is that they do not at all seem informed by the fact that the West has been down the garden path with Iran before. This is not the first diplomatic contact with Iran. Several years of talks dating back to the Bush administration and including President Obama’s ludicrous effort at engagement with Tehran all sought to get the Iranians to export their stockpile of enriched uranium as well as to prevent it from creating more. Each time, the Iranians agreed to the discussions and then even gave the impression that a deal was in place before reneging.… By buying into the current process and allowing the Russians and the Chinese an equal say in the negotiations, [Obama] has set himself up for a repeat performance.…
While Netanyahu is being criticized for going public with his concerns about the talks, his comments about a “freebie” merely indicate that this diplomatic process fools no one in Jerusalem.… All the tough talk from the White House doesn’t change the fact that there is little reason to believe there will be genuine progress toward eliminating the Iranian threat.
LESSONS FROM NORTH KOREA FOR ISRAEL AND IRAN
Rick Richman
Pajamas Media, February 8, 2012
On January 20, President Obama told a New York reception that “we’re not going to tolerate a nuclear weapon in the hands of this Iranian regime.” Four days later, in his State of the Union address, he issued this declaration: “Let there be no doubt: America is determined to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, and I will take no options off the table to achieve that goal.” The words were as direct as presidential language gets.…
But this is not the first time an American president declared he would not “tolerate” a nuclear weapon, insisted on dismantlement of a nuclear weapons program, applied crippling sanctions—and then declined to act after the regime violated an explicit presidential warning. George W. Bush said it in 2003 with respect to North Korea; issued the warning in 2006; failed to act in 2007; and left office with a North Korea nuclear weapons program in place, which expanded dramatically under Barack Obama.
The North Korea story is important not only in itself, but because of its obvious implications for the current face-off with Iran.… From the memoirs recently published by George Bush, Dick Cheney, and Condoleezza Rice, we can now piece together what occurred [with North Korea]. The story places Obama’s words in a context that leads to an important conclusion.
In 2001, the Bush administration inherited a failed North Korea policy. The Clinton administration had negotiated an “Agreed Framework” in 1994 after North Korea threatened to withdraw from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. The Agreed Framework provided $4.5 billion in aid and assistance in exchange for North Korea’s promise to suspend work on its covert nuclear weapons program, but the promise was not kept. The incoming Bush administration was told that the most pressing national security question was North Korea, which was threatening again to expel all inspectors and restart its facilities.…
There were raucous debates within the Bush administration about how to respond to North Korea.… Vice President Cheney and Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, together with John Bolton in the State Department, favored regime change, believing the existing regime would never make a deal (or at least not one worth making).… On May 23, 2003, at a joint press conference with the Japanese prime minister, Bush declared the U.S. would not “tolerate” nuclear weapons in North Korea, and he defined what that meant: “We will not tolerate nuclear weapons in North Korea.… We will not settle for anything less than the complete, verifiable, and irreversible elimination of North Korea’s nuclear weapons program.”
Secretary of State Rice, however, favored a policy of “tailored containment”—combining pressure with sending a U.S. envoy and expanding the group of nations to negotiate. She personally prevailed on Bush to support that approach, recounting in her memoir that she had a “heart to heart” talk with him, telling him it “was surely a long shot, but maybe Kim Jong-il could be induced, step by step, to give up his nuclear ambitions in exchange for benefits, which would also be doled out step by step.” Her approach was to unite other countries on a strategy of insisting not on regime change but simply a change in regime policy, while developing defensive measures.
The “Six Party Talks” began in 2003 and from the beginning made almost no progress. But in September 2005, Rice’s envoy, Christopher Hill, reported he was close to getting agreement on a “Joint Statement” that would set a “framework” for denuclearization of the Korean peninsula. In her memoir, Rice calls the Joint Statement a “breakthrough” document. But here is how she describes what happened after that: “Unfortunately, the North Korean issue would soon settle into a kind of predictable pattern; cooperation from Pyongyang and progress in negotiations followed by misdeeds and stalemate.…”
[The stalemate was interrupted] on July 4, 2006, when North Korea test-fired seven missiles, including an Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM), ignoring multiple warnings not to do so.… A few months later, North Korea exploded an underground nuclear device.
The next day, Bush went before cameras at the White House and declared that North Korea was “one of the world’s leading proliferators of missile technology, including transfers to Iran and Syria.” Then he issued this warning: “The transfer of nuclear weapons or material by North Korea to states or non-state entities would be considered a grave threat to the United States, and we would hold North Korea fully accountable of the consequences of such action.”
Rice thought the North Korean missile tests and underground explosion gave the U.S. the “upper hand” in public relations, and that it was therefore time to—engage. She argued for a strategy of offering North Korea a “grand bargain” (her words)—a peace treaty recognizing the regime if it would give up its nuclear weapons. In early 2007 she pushed ahead, sending Hill back to North Korea in hopes of moving the process forward, and the U.S. agreed to ease sanctions and provide fuel oil in exchange for North Korea agreeing once again to a process for dismantling its nuclear weapons program.
In the Spring of 2007, however, the U.S. also learned that North Korea was secretly assisting Syria in building an undeclared nuclear reactor—one capable of producing weapons-grade plutonium. The head of Israeli intelligence met at the White House with Vice President Cheney and National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley, going over photos and other intelligence material. The pictures showed the reactor had a “striking resemblance” (the same phrase is used by Bush, Cheney, and Rice in each of their books) to the North Korean one.
Israel asked the U.S. to destroy the reactor—something Bush in his memoir says would have been “no sweat,” and which Cheney writes could have been accomplished “with ease.” Cheney supported the Israeli request for reasons going far beyond the reactor itself: “I believed an American military strike on the reactor would send an important message not only to the Syrians and North Koreans, but also to the Iranians, with whom we were attempting to reach a diplomatic agreement to end their nuclear program. An American strike to destroy the Syrian reactor would demonstrate that we were serious when we warned as we had for years against the proliferation of nuclear technology to terrorist states.… [O]ur diplomacy would have a far greater chance of being effective if the North Koreans and Iranians understood that they faced the possibility of military action if the diplomacy failed.”
Cheney held a private lunch with Bush and urged him to act, and Rice recounts that the national security team met on the issue “for the better part of two months.” Cheney made a formal presentation to the National Security Council, but both Rice and Defense Secretary Gates were opposed, and no one else supported Cheney.… The [White House] recommended a diplomatic course to Israel—multilateral action to expose Syria, with the possibility of military action later if Syria did not dismantle its plant. Rice told Bush she thought Israel would accept this advice; Cheney predicted that Israel would act if the U.S. did not. A few months later Israel struck the Syrian reactor, without seeking or receiving a green light from Bush. Israel removed the threat to itself, but the U.S. failure to act sacrificed the broader impact an American strike would have had on North Korea and Iran.
Rice writes that by 2008, opponents of continued diplomacy with North Korea were asking how the U.S. could negotiate with a country that had lied about its nuclear facilities, was still pursuing nuclear weapons, and had engaged in proliferation with Syria. She acknowledges this was “a very good and penetrating question,” but she “felt strongly that we had to go the last mile.” She decided to try one more time to get a “breakthrough.” She persuaded Bush to remove North Korea from the list of state sponsors of terrorism in exchange for a “verbal commitment” from North Korea to address its uranium enrichment program. Bush removed it from the list; the commitment went unfulfilled; talks collapsed again; and the Bush administration ended.…
In February 2011, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper told the US Senate…that “we do not know whether the North has produced nuclear weapons, but we assess it has the capability to do so.…” One year later, Clapper testified again before the same Senate committee. This time, he told the Senate flatly that North Korea “has produced nuclear weapons.…”
What happened with North Korea was a U.S. president declared he would not tolerate a nuclear weapons program, but allowed a naive secretary of state to pursue “breakthroughs” for four years. No options were taken off the table, but none were used—not even when there was blatant North Korean proliferation in violation of an express presidential warning. Under the successor—and current—U.S. president, the North Korean program continued unabated.
As Iran’s nuclear program heads toward a possible point of no return, the U.S. inaction in 2007, and three years of continued North Korean nuclear activity under the Obama administration…may complicate the effort to persuade either Iran or Israel of the credibility of Obama’s words.…
