IRAN’S LATEST ‘LAST CHANCE’
Jacob Laksin
FrontPage, April 10, 2012
After years of failed talks, the international community has come up with a familiar strategy to halt Iran’s rapidly growing nuclear program: more talks.
On April 13-14, UN Security Council members Britain, China, France, Russia, and the United States, along with Germany, will hold the latest round of negotiations with Tehran over its nuclear program. As in previous versions, the goal will be to convince Iran to scale back its uranium enrichment program, and with it its drive for a nuclear weapon. As in the past, too, there is little evidence that Iran has come to the negotiating table in good faith.
The last time that the so-called P5+1 powers held talks with Iran, in January 2011, the talks collapsed in an impasse. Despite a warning from President Obama that the upcoming talks represent “perhaps the last chance” for diplomacy to succeed, early signs suggest that this outcome is likely to be repeated. Not only did Iran reject “preconditions” for the talks, but it could barely bring itself to agree on a venue for holding them.
Substantively, too, Iran is offering little in the way of compromise. Iran’s nuclear chief, Fereidoun Abbasi, recently announced that Iran could eventually stop its enrichment of uranium to the 20-percent level, the highest level acknowledged by Iran, even as it would continue to enrich uranium to lower levels of about 3.5 percent for the purpose of generating power. On the surface at least, this is supposed to alleviate international concerns that Iran could continue to increase its enrichment toward the more than 90-percent level required for a nuclear warhead.
Yet there is less to this concession than meets the eye. Iran’s insistence on keeping some level of enriched uranium is already a hardening of its negotiating stance from 2009, when it agreed “in principle” to export most of its low-enriched uranium in exchange for foreign-made fuel rods. Today, Iran has reneged on that position, refusing to transfer enriched uranium out of the country. Not only that but last month it made a defiant display of inserting its first domestically made fuel rod into a research reactor in northern Tehran. The point was to show that Iran is fully capable of carrying out the cycle of nuclear production on its own and in the face of international pressure and sanctions.
Iran has also spurned demands that it shutter its underground enrichment facilities. Just this week, Iran announced that it would not close its heavily fortified Fordo nuclear site. The site is built in tunnels deep inside a mountain located about 20 miles from the city of Qom, thus making it less vulnerable to destruction from bomb strikes. Recent revelations that Iran has begun enriching uranium at Fordo have further heightened concern that, left unchecked, it could become the birthplace of Iran’s nuclear bomb.
That concern is particularly grave given Iran’s recent announcement that it has powerful new centrifuges that allow it to enrich uranium even faster, a move that could see Iran complete a nuclear bomb in a matter of months. The news comes just as the annual CIA report to Congress makes clear that Iran in the past year has expanded its nuclear program, building new infrastructure and forging ahead with uranium enrichment.…
All the available evidence suggests that Iran has not been deterred from pursuing its nuclear project. Given that reality, Israeli officials have pushed for a more aggressive response to Iran’s nuclear activities than the talks that have failed in the past. In Israel’s assessment, Iran is nearing a “zone of immunity” that could see Iran complete its nuclear program inside bunkered facilities.… At that point, there would be no stopping Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.
The Obama administration’s view is that point has not yet been reached. The administration claims that U.S. intelligence will clearly signal when Iran has decided to move from the enrichment phase toward a full-fledged nuclear weapon. Considering the track record of U.S. intelligence in recent years, that confidence seems excessive at best.…
Ultimately, the major problem with this week’s talks is not that they are unlikely to be successful, although that seems almost certain. Rather, it is that, as in the past, they will afford Iran more time to make continued progress with a nuclear program that it has no intention of stopping.…
KICKING THE IRAN CAN PAST ELECTION DAY
Benny Avni
NY Post, April 11, 2012
Hope springs eternal that diplomacy will end Iran’s nuclear-weapons quest, but the latest talks with Tehran seem aimed more at kicking the atomic can down the road—preferably until the fall. Iran hopes to stall so that it can advance its nuclear-weapons program. The West still flinches at confrontation. And President Obama isn’t eager to risk a major foreign-policy crisis before Election Day.
Starting Friday, diplomats from America and five other leading powers will powwow with their Iranian counterparts in Istanbul, resuming negotiations that last collapsed a year ago. Obama’s aides say the Iranian regime will sooner or later realize that the only way to save itself from collapse, as world pressure rises, is to abandon its nuclear project.
As proof, they point to signs that Iran is already buckling—or at least that some elements within the regime can pull Tehran in the desired direction. For example, ex-President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, still influential, is criticizing current President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s extremist anti-American stance.… Iranian nuclear chief Fereidoun Abbasi…said this week that Tehran might consider suspending some enrichment of uranium to the 20 percent level, while continuing enrichment to 3.5 percent “for scientific purposes.…”
[But] Iran is always ready to bargain. Bargaining—while honing its nuclear expertise and amassing enough nuclear fuel—is what Tehran does best. The question is for how long we will allow futile talks to go on. White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said Monday, “It is important for Iran to understand that the window is closing.” He added: “Our bottom line is the cessation of uranium enrichment.…”
And how long will it take that window to finish closing—if Iran comes up with new (or even recycled) ideas for “compromise”? After all, sanctions are biting now, and may bite more after a European ban on the purchase of Iranian oil kicks in this summer.…
Menashe Amir, director of Israel Radio’s Farsi service, predicts that the mullahs indeed will present some kind of compromise at the first round of negotiations—“just enough to assure that this won’t be the last round, and that the dialogue will continue.” But the sole decision-maker on the issue, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, has spent billions of dollars on the nuclear project; he plainly thinks that nuclear status is essential for establishing Iran as a regional, if not global, superpower. That’s why many Iran-watchers reject the idea that the current pressure is enough to push him into abandoning the project.
Sadly, Washington—and to a lesser degree the Europeans and everyone else—is also playing for time. The president plainly thinks the status quo is good enough to let him highlight his national-security credentials on the campaign trail. He just needs Iran (and other potential crisis points) not to erupt before November. That, more than any supposed shifts inside Tehran, is why we can expect “encouraging” progress reports from Istanbul.
SQUANDERED LEVERAGE OVER IRAN
Michael Singh
Washington Post, April 9, 2012
The United States holds a strong bargaining position going into Friday’s scheduled nuclear talks with Iran. An Israeli military attack seems imminent. U.S.- and European Union-led sanctions on Iran’s Central Bank and oil exports are wreaking havoc on the Iranian economy. And yet, despite these massive pressures on the Iranian regime, it is not Tehran but the United States that is signaling that it is prepared to make concessions—setting the stage for Washington’s unprecedented leverage to be squandered.
The United States and its Western allies reportedly plan to demand that Iran suspend its higher-level enrichment activities, a position Secretary of State Hillary Clinton previewed in comments to the press April 1. The New York Times, citing American and European diplomats, also reported last weekend that Washington plans to insist that Iran close its Fordo uranium enrichment facility, which is buried beneath a mountain near the holy city of Qom.…
This approach has two big flaws. One, it would be a strategic error to focus narrowly on the near-term concern of an Israeli military strike. U.S. negotiators should be looking at the underlying threat posed by Iran’s nuclear program. While Iran’s production of highly enriched uranium and its work at Fordo are worrisome, they are just two manifestations of a much broader nuclear program that lacks any compelling civilian rationale.…
Two, even if Iran acceded to such demands, the status quo would largely return to the point at which the Obama administration pitched its first compromise proposal in October 2009. The difference is that, since 2009, Iran has amassed a large quantity of enriched uranium and conducted further research and development on new centrifuges and ballistic missiles.…
In exchange for its return to an enhanced status quo ante, Iran would receive major benefits. Washington is likely to offer some combination of commitments to refrain from new sanctions and to ease existing sanctions. This would give Iran a break from the withering pressures it has faced of late, while also providing an even more valuable incentive: implicit legitimization of Iran’s lower-level uranium enrichment activity, which has long been the target of Western ire.… Iran could use the lull to enhance its technical capabilities and prepare to later resume its nuclear march at an accelerated rate.
Rather than maintaining a narrow focus on closure of the Fordo plant and suspension of Iran’s program of highly enriched uranium, the United States should insist that Iran suspend all of its uranium enrichment activities, take steps to address International Atomic Energy Agency concerns about its nuclear work, including coming clean about its weaponization research, and submit to intrusive monitoring and verification. Far from extreme, these points are what are required by U.N. Security Council Resolution 1929 and preceding resolutions, to which Britain, China, France, Russia, the United States and Germany (the P5+1) have previously agreed. The Obama administration should also insist that Iran roll back the work it has done since those resolutions passed.…
Only if Iran takes these steps can the United States and its allies be sure that it will not use negotiations to buy time or perfect its nuclear weapons capabilities.…
(Michael Singh is managing director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.)
RUSH TO WAR?
John Podhoretz
Commentary, April 2012
The discussion of the burgeoning Iranian nuclear program took a peculiar turn last month. There was talk of a “rush to war.” The [US] president himself decided he could use the discussion to his political advantage by attacking his Republican rivals for talking far too loosely about going to war. He accused them of “casualness,” of “popping off,” of failing or refusing to recognize the gravity of the situation. “This is not a game,” Barack Obama said.
No, it’s not. And there is no “rush to war.” Quite the opposite, in fact. It has been a decade—a decade—since the West became aware Iran was going nuclear. The discussion of the need to do something about the Iranian nuclear threat had already become so commonplace in April 2007—five years ago—that John McCain made an odd and antic joke about it on the campaign trail, warbling the words “Bomb Iran” to the tune of “Barbara Ann.” The first major article in Commentary magazine on the subject, Norman Podhoretz’s “The Case for Bombing Iran,” was published in June 2007.…
[Yet] even for those who expressed early and profound concern about all this, there was no talk of war. The discussion centered on covert actions against the Iranian regime that might help spur political change in Iran, due to the fact that there had been a hopeful election in 2000 and that Iranian youth chafing under the boot of the mullahs had become very pro-Western. Parliamentary elections in 2004 empowering Islamists and the election of the fanatic Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2005 suggested the regime was tightening its grip. Perhaps encouraging those who wanted to elude that grip would be a fertile strategy.
Ahmadinejad’s increasingly terrifying rhetoric about wiping Israel off the map and the acceleration of Iran’s nuclear program—as reported not by evil neoconservatives but by the sainted United Nations—altered the calculus. The dangers posed by a nuclear Iran were horrific enough, given the likelihood that others in the unstable region would nuclearize and that Iran would disseminate fissile material to terrorists. But Ahmadinejad’s airy certainty that Israel’s destruction was at hand—which immediately raised the possibility of a nuclear exchange for the first time in history—suggested the world could not wait to see whether he was serious.…
But how could it be prevented? Trying to answer that question was what led to the initial discussions of the need to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities in their adolescence. Doing so would have required using the tools and weapons of war, of course, but no one—no one—was actually proposing an Iraq-style war. As Norman Podhoretz put it in his 2007 article, “Since a ground invasion of Iran must be ruled out for many different reasons, the job would have to be done, if it is to be done at all, by a campaign of air strikes.”
No one takes this lightly. Nearly every scenario you can imagine that involves a direct engagement with the Iranian threat is a bad one. But it remains as true today as it was when John McCain said it, without music, in 2007: “There’s only one thing worse than the United States exercising a military option. That is a nuclear-armed Iran.”
Obama says he endorses this view. Strange that he should attack others for holding it.
HISTORY AND TODAY
Ben Stein
American Spectator, April 5, 2012
The gunman who killed a rabbi and his two children in front of a Jewish school in Toulouse, France, a few weeks ago chased his fourth victim, an eight year old girl, into the school playground. He cornered her against a fence and grabbed her by her hair. Then he pointed a .45 caliber automatic at her head and tried to shoot her but the gun jammed. So he took a 9 mm automatic out of his pocket and shot her point blank in the head, killing her instantly.
The decent people of the world are right to be horrified about this latest example of Jew hatred and murder. But let’s bear this in mind. Europeans and other persons have loved to kill Jews for a long time. During the roughly 2,000 days of World War II in Europe, the Nazis and their many, many local helpers killed an average of 3,000 Jews each and every day—the vast majority of them women and children, all of them civilians.…
If you wonder why the Jewish state of Israel believes that it is in deadly peril from an Iranian nuclear bomb, just look at history. People who truly hate Jews, who believe that Jews are not human or are the spawn of the devil, will use any means they can to kill Jews. Questions of morality or retaliation do not enter into the matter at all. The Nazis were still using every tool at their disposal to murder every Jew in their grasp just days before the Reich collapsed.
The rulers of Iran have already said they want to wipe Israel off the map, and look forward to what they call “martyrdom” in return. History has shown that the Jews can only depend upon themselves. Even a truly staggeringly great man like Churchill did nothing to stop the Holocaust. Why would Israel think Obama would go to war for Israel?
If you wonder why Israel is so deathly afraid about an Iranian bomb, think of that hand of the Toulouse gunman holding the eight-year-old Jewish girl by her hair and calmly shooting her in the head. Think of the hand of Ahmadinejad pressing a button to destroy Tel Aviv. Think of the Nazis’ industrial machine killing 3,000 Jews a day while the world did nothing. Think if it were your children under the gun. Think and remember.
