France, Obama and the Ayatollah
http://www.wsj.com/articles/france-obama-and-the-ayatollah-1433198925
Fabius talks tough about inspections, but he’s fallen in line before.
The Iranian nuclear talks are resuming with the June 30 deadline approaching, and right on time here come the French talking tough. If history repeats, however, our Gallic allies will take a hard line right up until they agree to whatever President Obama wants.
“The best agreement, if you cannot verify it, it’s useless,” French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius told our Journal colleagues in an interview on Monday from Nigeria. “Several countries in the region would say, OK, a paper [has been signed] but we think it is not strong enough and therefore we ourselves have to become nuclear.” He no doubt means Saudi Arabia and Turkey, and perhaps Egypt and the Gulf Sunni Arabs.
Mr. Fabius referred specifically to access by United Nations weapons inspectors to Iran’s military sites and other secret facilities as crucial to a credible agreement. That’s significant because Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khameini has repeatedly said that Iran will never allow access by the “enemy” to its military sites. By “enemy” he means America—never mind Mr. Obama’s faith that a nuclear deal will turn Iran into a normal country.
Mr. Fabius is at least right about military sites, and it’s good to see him be so explicit. But then France has already agreed to the inspection terms of the “framework” nuclear accord that are also inadequate. The framework doesn’t allow on-demand, go-anywhere inspections, which means Iran could hide a weaponization program at a military site or at some other new secret facility not near a military base. Recall how Iran hid its underground Fordo enrichment facility before the U.S. exposed it.
We’d like to think Mr. Fabius is laying down a marker for Mr. Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry as much as for the Ayatollah. He knows how eager the Americans are for a deal. But Mr. Fabius has taken a harder line before, only to fold in the clinches. In 2013 he said the West risked being drawn into a “fool’s game” by the Iranians, but he and President François Hollande have since gone along step by step with every new U.S. concession to keep Iran at the negotiating table.
It speaks volumes that preventing the breakout of nuclear proliferation in the Middle East may depend on French fortitude, but this is where we are.
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