Getting Serious About Iran

By George Melloan
January 17, 2006
The Wall Street Journal
Original Source: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB113746052357748117.html
Failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq after the Anglo-American conquest was cited by invasion critics as evidence that the Bush administration had overreacted or even lied to the world about the Saddam Hussein threat. It was confidently asserted as well that Saddam had no connection with al Qaeda terrorists.
The first charge was over the top. Available intelligence, Saddam's resistance to United Nations inspections and the existence of a nuclear weapons program prior to 1991 supported the suspicions of U.S. and foreign intelligence analysts that he had WMDs. Some still believe that Saddam spirited lethal poisons out of the country before the invasion, perhaps to Syria.
About the terrorist connections, the critics were dead wrong. A Journal editorial quotes Stephen Hayes of the Weekly Standard, a public affairs magazine in Washington, who collected exhaustive evidence that Saddam trained thousands of terrorists between 1999 and 2002. It is well known that he provided sanctuary for al Qaeda's Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who now directs a bombing and assassination campaign against Iraqis and coalition forces.
The likelihood that the administration was more right than its critics about the Saddam threat has relevance to today's most pressing question: What to do about Iran? Just as with Saddam, a prudent government must consider unpleasant possibilities, such as a future in which wild-eyed Iranian mullahs will threaten their neighbors with nuclear bombs.
If anything, the Bush administration has been too circumspect about this danger -- perhaps because of the firestorm it had to endure from critics of the Iraq invasion. Initially, the task of dealing with Iran was handed over to Europe, with Britain, France and Germany taking the point in trying to talk the Iranians down from their atom-bomb ambitions.
Last week after many months of palaver, the EU-3 threw in the towel, agreeing with the U.S. to ask the board of governors of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to refer Iran to the United Nations Security Council. The last straw for the EU-3 came on Tuesday when Iran brazenly removed the IAEA seals from a uranium-enrichment facility at Natanz, in central Iran. It resumed research on nuclear fuel after an IAEA nonproliferation freeze. The Institute for Science and International Security, a Washington antiproliferation group, released a Jan. 2 satellite photograph on Friday showing extensive new construction at the Natanz facility, along with the disguised entrance to an underground labyrinth.
Natanz employs large arrays of gas centrifuges to enrich uranium. Some experts estimate that Iran will master weapons-grade enrichment sometime this year, clearing the way for a bomb a few years hence. If the IAEA votes referral to the Security Council there will then be the question of what action the Security Council will take.
Fortunately, the mullahs themselves are providing an incentive for U.N. action, although quite unintentionally. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a revolutionary firebrand handpicked last year by Ayatollah Khamenei to head the Iranian government, has cast himself as Adolf Hitler reincarnated. His declarations that the Holocaust is a myth and that Israel should be wiped off the map scare even Bush-baiters. A remarkable consensus has been developing in much of the international community in recent days that something must be done to curb the mad mullahs.
Even Russia is offering lip service, maybe waking up to the discomfort Russians might feel with nuclear-armed religious zealots next door to Russia's restive Islamic peoples in the Caucasus. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on radio last week that he does not exclude the possibility of referring Iran to the Security Council. This newspaper reported Thursday that Mr. Lavrov had told the U.S. that Russia would abstain from any vote by IAEA governors to take the Iranian issue to the Security Council.
Russia sells weapons to Iran, has nearly completed a nuclear power plant at Bushehr in Iran and has contracted to build more. It has proposed to take over the reprocessing of nuclear fuels from power plants to give the outside world some assurance that the fuel won't be used for bomb making.
China is a supplier of weapons to Iran in return for oil and liquefied natural gas. China's U.N. ambassador, Wang Guangya, was dragging his heels last week, saying that referring Iran to the U.N. might complicate the issue. But Belgian Foreign Minister Karel De Gucht, with a seat on the IAEA board, said on TV Sunday that serious efforts will be undertaken with Russia and China to persuade them that some sort of action is needed. At least Europe seems to be on board, which offers some comfort.
China and Russia would no doubt prefer to keep their ties with Iran intact through means more subtle than the potentially unpopular use of their Security Council vetoes on Iran's behalf. Iran has shown interest in Russia's reprocessing offer, no doubt because it would do little to prevent Iran from enriching uranium elsewhere.
Of course, U.N. economic sanctions would be the usual two-edged sword. Any hint that Iran's huge shipments of oil and gas might be sanctioned sends shivers through stock markets, an effect of which the mullahs are well aware and which they cite every chance they get.
Sen. Evan Bayh, a Democrat with presidential aspirations, recently returned from the Middle East raising alarm about Iran's intentions. We had better deal with this sooner rather than later, he said, adding that it's still possible to use peaceful means, such as limited sanctions on Iranian participation in sports competitions or on airline flights. But if we don't act now, we'll need to confront a very difficult dilemma at some future date.
What peaceful means would deter the mullahs is not easily divined, considering the huge investments they've made. The time may come sooner than we think when it is necessary for the protection of Iran's neighbors and the world to interrupt their bomb-making plans through unpeaceful means, by blowing up Natanz and similar operations. There would be howls in the U.S. and Europe, just as there were about Iraq. But the world would be a lot safer.