Options for Iran

February 19, 2006
The Boston Globe
Original Source: http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/editorials/articles/2006/02/19/options_for_iran/?page=1

BY ANNOUNCING Tuesday that it has resumed uranium enrichment and will no longer permit quick inspections of nuclear sites, Iran appears to be deliberately provoking a showdown with the international community. As Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Wednesday to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Iran's pursuit of a nuclear weapons option has become ''our single biggest strategic challenge in the region.

Repeated threatening statements from Iran's zealot president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, have persuaded other countries that Iran intends to become a nuclear power and might not hesitate either to use nuclear weapons or to transfer them to terrorists. Ahmadinejad's frightening of other governments has had a positive effect. His apocalyptic ranting has made it more likely that the international community will take diplomatic measures that may save it from having to choose between two repellant options: allowing Iran to become a nuclear power or taking military action to prevent that nightmare.

If such a choice is to be avoided, a coalition of major powers, including Russia and China, will have to be welded together. And the members will have to develop a lucid understanding of Iran's tactics and strategy.

The immediate task is to decipher Iran's aim in escalating toward a crisis. Its resumption of uranium enrichment is tantamount to daring the International Atomic Energy Agency to refer Iran's case to the UN Security Council for punitive action. The ruling mullahs may simply believe that the outside world lacks either the will or the means to stop their pursuit of a nuclear weapons capability. If this is the case, their gamble is that the IAEA as well as the Europeans, Americans, and Russians will back down in the face of Iran's tactic of responding to pressure by raising the stakes.

Recent pressure on Iran has come in diverse forms. The most obvious was the IAEA decision on Feb. 4 to report Iran to the UN Security Council if Iranian authorities do not comply with their obligations by March 6, when the IAEA governing board meets again. Tehran's gambit of defiance may also have been a reaction to the IAEA's showing Iranian officials material from a defector's laptop computer.

Documents on the computer included design information for modifying Iran's Shahab-3 ballistic missile to be able to carry a nuclear warhead; drawings of an underground shaft fitted out with sensors and a control booth that suggest preparations for nuclear testing; and a set of drawings for a small clandestine uranium conversion facility that might be used if Iran's known site was destroyed in an airstrike.

Confronted with these indications of a military nuclear program, Iranian policy makers seem to have decided it was more important to plunge ahead with uranium enrichment than to go on pretending their nuclear program is for peaceful purposes only. That decision to go on the offensive could have also been a response to the IAEA's chief investigator referring twice to ''nuclear weapons work in Iran during a report to the agency's governing board earlier this month -- an unusually conclusive description for cautious IAEA inspectors.

The purpose of agressively resuming enrichment would be to force a stark choice on the foreign powers pressuring Iran: Either those powers accept Tehran's claim of a right to enrich uranium and pursue research inside Iran or they can take the risk of trying to coerce Iran's hardline regime, by means of isolation and UN sanctions, into backing down.

If there is any chance that Iran's leaders might indeed back down, they will have to be confronted with a stark choice of their own. Russia and China will have to indicate that they are ready to join in a UN Security Council move to impose sanctions on the Iranian regime if it continues to defy the IAEA and refuses to resume its suspension of enrichment activities. If the decision makers in Tehran do not want to step through that door, they should have the choice of receiving guaranteed access to a nuclear fuel cycle for civilian power generation -- the essence of an arrangement that Russia is now offering Iran.

The Kremlin has proposed creation of a Russian-Iranian consortium to enrich Iran's uranium in Russia to the low levels suitable for peaceful uses and then ship it back to Iran. This deal could call Iran's bluff insofar as it would provide, at market prices, all the nuclear fuel for civil power plants the Iranians might need. To meet the nonproliferation requirements of the rest of the world, however, any such deal would have to include provisions that prevent Iran's nuclear engineers from using the Russian program to solve some of the technical problems that have kept them from being able to produce highly enriched uranium for nuclear weapons.

There should also be an intensive effort to inform people inside Iran that the regime is lying to them when it pretends that foreigners want to deny Iran its right to civil nuclear power. This is crucial, since knowing the truth about the Russian offer would make it clear to the Iranian populace that the regime is to blame for any Security Council resolutions that isolate Iran or impose travel bans and an asset freeze on its officials.

If those officials do not respond to such limited sanctions, council members should be prepared to call another of the regime's bluffs by imposing sanctions not on Iran's exporting of crude oil but on the importing of refined oil products into Iran, a measure that could quickly cripple the corruption-ridden, statist economy. This kind of international action might entail short-term costs, but the world would have been much better off standing up to the Third Reich when Hitler occupied the Rhineland in 1936 rather than waiting until he invaded Poland in 1939.