A TWOFER ON IRAN IN THE WSJ
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703315404575250172000040654.html?mod=WSJ_article_
IRAN’S NUCLEAR COUP
What a fiasco. That’s the first word that comes to mind watching Mahmoud Ahmadinejad raise his arms yesterday with the leaders of Turkey and Brazil to celebrate a new atomic pact that instantly made irrelevant 16 months of President Obama’s “diplomacy.” The deal is a political coup for Tehran and possibly delivers the coup de grace to the West’s half-hearted efforts to stop Iran from acquiring a nuclear bomb.
Full credit for this debacle goes to the Obama Administration and its hapless diplomatic strategy. Last October, nine months into its engagement with Tehran, the White House concocted a plan to transfer some of Iran’s uranium stock abroad for enrichment. If the West couldn’t stop Iran’s program, the thinking was that maybe this scheme would delay it. The Iranians played coy, then refused to accept the offer.
But Mr. Obama doesn’t take no for an answer from rogue regimes, and so he kept the offer on the table. As the U.S. finally seemed ready to go to the U.N. Security Council for more sanctions, the Iranians chose yesterday to accept the deal on their own limited terms while enlisting the Brazilians and Turks as enablers and political shields. “Diplomacy emerged victorious today,” declared Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, turning Mr. Obama’s own most important foreign-policy principle against him.
View Full Image
EPA
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
The double embarrassment is that the U.S. had encouraged Lula’s diplomacy as a step toward winning his support for U.N. sanctions. Brazil is currently one of the nonpermanent, rotating members of the Security Council, and the U.S. has wanted a unanimous U.N. vote. Instead, Lula used the opening to triangulate his own diplomatic solution. In her first game of high-stakes diplomatic poker, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is leaving the table dressed only in a barrel.
So instead of the U.S. and Europe backing Iran into a corner this spring, Mr. Ahmadinejad has backed Mr. Obama into one. America’s discomfort is obvious. In its statement yesterday, the White House strained to “acknowledge the efforts” by Turkey and Brazil while noting “Iran’s repeated failure to live up to its own commitments.” The White House also sought to point out differences between yesterday’s pact and the original October agreements on uranium transfers.
Good luck drawing those distinctions with the Chinese or Russians, who will now be less likely to agree even to weak sanctions. Having played so prominent a role in last October’s talks with Iran, the U.S. can’t easily disassociate itself from something broadly in line with that framework.
Under the terms unveiled yesterday, Iran said it would send 1,200 kilograms (2,646 lbs.) of low-enriched uranium to Turkey within a month, and no more than a year later get back 120 kilograms enriched from somewhere else abroad. This makes even less sense than the flawed October deal. In the intervening seven months, Iran has kicked its enrichment activities into higher gear. Its estimated total stock has gone to 2,300 kilograms from 1,500 kilograms last autumn, and its stated enrichment goal has gone to 20% from 3.5%.
If the West accepts this deal, Iran would be allowed to keep enriching uranium in contravention of previous U.N. resolutions. Removing 1,200 kilograms will leave Iran with still enough low-enriched stock to make a bomb, and once uranium is enriched up to 20% it is technically easier to get to bomb-capable enrichment levels.
Only last week, diplomats at the U.N.’s International Atomic Energy Agency reported that Iran has increased the number of centrifuges it is using to enrich uranium. According to Western intelligence estimates, Iran continues to acquire key nuclear components, such as trigger mechanisms for bombs. Tehran says it wants to build additional uranium enrichment plants. The CIA recently reported that Iran tripled its stockpile of uranium last year and moved “toward self-sufficiency in the production of nuclear missiles.” Yesterday’s deal will have no impact on these illicit activities.
The deal will, however, make it nearly impossible to disrupt Iran’s nuclear program short of military action. The U.N. is certainly a dead end. After 16 months of his extended hand and after downplaying support for Iran’s democratic opposition, Mr. Obama now faces an Iran much closer to a bomb and less diplomatically isolated than when President Bush left office.
Israel will have to seriously consider its military options. Such a confrontation is far more likely thanks to the diplomatic double-cross of Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Brazil’s Lula, and especially to a U.S. President whose diplomacy has succeeded mainly in persuading the world’s rogues that he lacks the determination to stop their destructive ambitions.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703315404575249983860369158.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_BelowLEFTSecond
BRET STEPHENS
There’s a hoary cliché about how Western diplomats are always playing checkers while their (invariably) smarter adversaries play chess. In the matter of yesterday’s nuclear agreement between Iran, Turkey and Brazil the line doesn’t quite work. The game Tehran is playing isn’t any more complicated than checkers. The trouble is, they’re whipping us at it.
As I write these lines, it isn’t yet clear how the Obama administration will respond to the deal, which reportedly is similar to the one the U.S. and its allies proposed, and Iran spurned, last October. Since then, the administration has rotely insisted that the original offer stands, albeit on a take-it-or-leave-it basis. But what do you do with a deal that was spoiled milk to begin with, and is now eight months past its sell-by date?
The ostensible virtue of the original bargain is that it would have required Iran to park 1,200 kilograms of its civilian-grade, 3.5% enriched uranium—the bulk of its total stockpile—in a third country. The uranium was then to be enriched to a 20% grade, to produce medical isotopes from a small research reactor in Tehran. In the meantime, the West would have bought itself at least a year of time before Iran could make the 1,900 kilos of civilian-grade uranium needed to produce the 20 kilos of high-enriched uranium it takes to build a bomb.
For Iran, at least, this should have been too good an offer to refuse—which is precisely why they did refuse it. The deal would have allowed them to continue to enrich uranium, never mind three binding U.N. Security Council resolutions calling on them to stop. It would have given them access to a significant stockpile of 20% enriched uranium, from which they could make a bomb in a matter of weeks rather than months. And it would have allowed them to kick the sanctions can another year down the road.
But Iran’s leaders have learned that the West—and the Obama administration in particular—never closes the door on a diplomatic “opening,” no matter how slight, and it never exacts much of a price for bad behavior. They’ve learned that they can always play to the anti-American peanut gallery, which if anything has grown larger since Barack H. Obama succeeded George W. Bush. And like Raskolnikov in Dostoyevsky’s “Crime and Punishment,” Iran also knows that “man will get used to anything—the scoundrel!”
In short, Iran’s leaders have learned the uses of what the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan called “defining deviancy down.” What was once considered deviant Iranian behavior—calling for Israel to be wiped off the map; enriching uranium in defiance of U.N. resolutions; even becoming a nuclear power—is increasingly seen as unremarkable, or understandable, or inevitable.
No wonder Mahmoud Ahmadinejad keeps emerging the winner in his diplomatic duels with the West. However the administration reacts to yesterday’s agreement, Iran has all but guaranteed that the Security Council, on which both Turkey and Brazil currently sit, will not approve another round of sanctions.
Those sanctions were never going to be particularly effective, but at a minimum they were supposed to isolate Iran and generate a global consensus against its nuclear bid. Now it looks like the engagers in the Obama administration will fail where the unilateralists in the Bush administration succeeded three times.
The U.S. will also be hard-pressed to explain why a deal they never withdrew from the table—and which they insisted remain unaltered—no longer makes sense. The answer, of course, is that it never made much sense to begin with. But it is complete nonsense now that Iran has enriched several hundred additional kilos of additional uraniun and, according to the Rand Corporation’s Gregory Jones, is doing so at a rate of 78 kilos a month, considerably faster than what they were capable of only last year. So much for all those technical problems Iran was said to be encountering, supposedly delaying the day of nuclear reckoning for at least three years.
If anything, that reckoning may be much nearer than most people, including U.S. government officials, realize. In a recent analysis for the Washington-based Nonproliferation Policy Education Center, Mr. Jones notes that “Iran could have enough low enriched uranium to process into one weapon’s worth of [high enriched uranium] by the end of July and could then produce this HEU by mid-November.”
It’s time the administration take stock. In yesterday’s phony triumph of diplomacy, any real hope for a diplomatic outcome ended. In its most crucial foreign policy test, the administration has lost, or ceded, control of the process. Iran is either going to become a nuclear power, or it will be stopped from doing so by military action. Either a war will be upon us, or a cycle of Mideast nuclear proliferation.
The administration fancies it can contain all this—Iran’s ambitions, Arab insecurities, Israel’s existential anxiety—via more smart diplomacy. The record so far does not inspire confidence.
Write to bstephens@wsj.com
Comments are closed.
