Deadlines and defiance

August 7, 2006
The Chicago Tribune
Original Source: http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/chi-0608070160aug07,0,7088006.story?coll=chi-newsopinion-hed

After months of futile negotiations and diplomatic parlor games with Iran, the UN Security Council stamped its feet last Monday and said, No, this time, we really mean it. It set an Aug. 31 deadline for Iran to shut down its nuclear program. Iran's response: So what? Tehran rejected the deadline before the ink was dry.

Even so, the council's move was hailed by many, including U.S. Ambassador John Bolton, as evidence of strong progress. Bolton stressed that if Iran doesn't comply with the resolution's demands, We will be back here in a month looking at a sanctions resolution.

There's reason to hope, but also to doubt. For one thing, this latest deadline doesn't trigger sanctions, as the U.S. and some allies had suggested, but more discussions on sanctions. This after Iran has swatted away proposal after proposal for years. Apparently Russia and China didn't want to rush things with any automatic punishment for Iran.

Amazing.

Tehran is strutting these days, secure in its belligerence, convinced that it can arm terrorists and build a nuclear weapon without much resistance from the rest of the world. It's sponsoring Hezbollah in its war against Israel. It's meddling brazenly in Iraq. So far, it has rejected every offer to stand down from its nuclear program, threatening to shut off its oil exports to those who would stand firm against the mullahs. Given the price of oil these days, it's fair to wonder what kind of appetite the council might have to actually enforce its demands against one of the world's leading oil producers.

How steely, for example, is the resolve of Security Council member France? There's talk that France may lead an international UN-sponsored force to help the Lebanese army enforce a cease-fire. What do the French say about Iran? Well, the French foreign minister, visiting Lebanon, recently hailed Iran as a great country, a great people and a great civilization, which is respected and which plays a stabilizing role in the region.

Huh? Is this some sort of translation error? What's the French definition of stabilizing? Plotting to develop nuclear weapons, likely setting off a new nuclear arms race? Supplying terrorists such as Hezbollah and Hamas with rockets to fire into Israel, killing innocent civilians and igniting a regional crisis? Or continuing to suggest, as Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad did again Thursday, that the solution to the Middle East crisis is simple: Destroy Israel. Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger outlined the stakes for the council in a recent op-ed in the Washington Post: If the permanent members of the Security Council plus Germany are unable jointly to achieve goals to which they have publicly committed themselves, every country ... will face growing threats, be they increased domestic pressure from radical Islamic groups, terrorist acts or the nearly inevitable conflagrations sparked by the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.

Nearly inevitable conflagrations. That's a phrase to remember. If Iran continues to defy the council's demands, the sanctions must come quickly. And they must be painful.

To be effective, they must be comprehensive; halfhearted, symbolic measures combine the disadvantage of every course of action, Kissinger wrote. We must learn from the North Korean negotiations not to engage in a process involving long pauses to settle disagreements within the administration and within the negotiating group, while the other side adds to its nuclear potential.

Sanctions that are painful to Iran will also likely be painful to many if not all the countries of the Security Council and beyond. The day Iran announces that it has built a nuclear weapon will be more painful.