Option For Iran
Option For Iran
Option For Iran
with George W. Bush’s policy on nuclear nonproliferation. Obama and his team
believed that the only way they could get allies to support a tough line against
countries like Iran or North Korea that were seeking to acquire nuclear weapons
was to comply with the United States’ own obligation under the Nuclear Non-
days of the administration that this sounded very much like "an article of faith"
You could read the report on Iran’s nuclear program released this week by the
Iran is "making rapid headway toward its goal of obtaining nuclear weapons." In
fact, the report dwells almost entirely on events that happened long before Obama
took office and essentially offers an official imprimatur to the widespread view that
Iran has been seeking for years to develop a nuclear warhead and is continuing to do
so.
2. Neither Bush nor Obama has stopped Iran from pursuing a goal to which
Iranian leaders are single-mindedly dedicated — nor could they have. But Obama’s
strategy has thrown a spanner into Iran’s nuclear works. On balance, the proposition
survives.
produce four bombs. Enriching uranium to the level required for a weapon is the
hardest part of the nuclear process; the advances in hardware uncovered by the
IAEA only confirm the belief that Iran is going to the immense trouble of
number of centrifuges spinning at the Natanz fuel enrichment plant peaked at 9,000
in November 2009 and has since fallen. What’s more, the average productivity of
each centrifuge has fallen over the past year. And Iran may no longer be able to
build more centrifuges. There are various reasons for these problems: the Stuxnet
virus, which crippled Iran’s productive capacity; poor centrifuge design; metal
fatigue; and the shortage of key materials owing to U.N. sanctions passed in 2010.
4. Obama doesn’t get credit for metal fatigue, but he probably does for Stuxnet,
which appears to have been a joint Israeli-American venture. In fact, Obama’s Iran
policy is less rule-abiding, and more sophisticated, than the administration lets on
and its critics allow. But it would be a mistake to think that it’s only the dark arts
that matter. Obama’s initial efforts to engage Iran through diplomacy went nowhere,
but allowed U.S. officials to argue inside the United Nations and the IAEA board of
governors that they had made a good-faith effort to end the isolation that the Bush
countered the argument, common throughout the developing world, that the United
States was a nuclear hypocrite — that it was violating the same international rules
that it was insisting that Iran observe. The combination of engagement and NPT-
compliance has helped Obama persuade Russia, China, and other states to pass
I asked Nicholas Burns, the career diplomat who handled the Iran file as
Burns argues that both Bush and Obama pursued a "two-track" policy of carrots and
sticks, but says that Obama "has been very effective in gaining the upper hand in
terms of public opinion over [President Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad and the rest of the
heroic status in Bush’s last years. Now he is almost wholly isolated. Burns describes
the Obama strategy, with something like professional admiration, as "very artful."
I can hear Romney sputtering, "Who cares if Ahmadinejad has no friends if Iran
is still enriching uranium?" The goal, after all, is not to be artful but to stop Iran
from producing a bomb. But isolating the Iranian leadership, like slowing down the
centrifuges, is a means of buying time. And time does not have to be on Iran’s side,
though it has been so far. David Albright, founder and president of the Institute for
Science and International Security, compares the struggle against Iran to that
has stripped away the Iranians’ global standing, while sanctions have begun to
a Washington Post story that quotes Ahmadinejad defending his economic record
before Iran’s parliament by complaining that "our banks cannot make international
transactions anymore." The U.S. goal is to make Iran pay a high enough price for its
nuclear program — while at the same time holding out the possibility, however
remote, of a diplomatic rapprochement — that the leadership will ultimately agree
on some face-saving solution that allows Iran to pretend that all it was seeking all
along was access to nuclear fuel for civilian purposes. Ahmadinejad may even have
been making such a bid in his recent offer to stop enriching uranium in exchange for
Or maybe Ahmadinejad was messing with the West, as he has in the past.
6. it is both a rising regional power and a revolutionary state, and its leadership,
ideological and geopolitical necessity. Iran may be more like the Pakistan of the
1970s, whose people were prepared to "eat grass," as Zulfikar Ali Bhutto famously
said, to get the bomb. Neither carrots nor sticks may induce the Iranians to abandon
their quest. If that’s so, then nothing save war, or at least the credible threat of war,
will work. Obama, of course, has not foreclosed that option, but Romney vows that
rules in order to gather and preserve a coalition, gradually raising the pressure,
buying time, and putting off the day of reckoning in the hopes that something will
change and the Iranians will decide they’d rather not eat grass — or prepare for war.
But you can’t threaten a war unless you’re willing to launch one; and an aerial
assault on Iran, whether carried out by the United States or Israel, would provoke a
spasm of revenge attacks against America, and wreck the country’s standing in
much of the Islamic world and above all among the pro-American people of Iran —
all to the end of damaging, not destroying, Iran’s nuclear infrastructure. It would
purchase delay at an unimaginable cost. And it would guarantee that the Iranians