Love of the Land: Can the US Contain a Nuclear Iran?

Can the US Contain a Nuclear Iran?

Emily B. Landau
INSS Insight No. 171
24 March '10

With any hope of a new round of UN Security Council sanctions on Iran now postponed until June, and the understanding that if at all, these will be weak and ineffective measures, Obama's diplomatic initiative is slowly grinding to a halt. Taking into account Iran's steady progress in developing fissible material, its work on producing a nuclear warhead, and its ever-improving missile capabilities -- together with low expectations that anything in this dynamic will impress upon the Obama administration the need to ultimately take military action -- part of the discourse on this topic is changing track. Instead of focusing on the stinging failure to curb Iran's nuclear ambitions, some are arguing that it's now time to move on. They say that in the likely scenario that Iran becomes the next nuclear state, the US will simply resort to its ultimate strategy that has worked in other cases: it will contain a nuclear Iran.

But will the US indeed be able to contain a nuclear Iran? The answer to this question involves two levels: first, US credibility vis-à-vis Iran, and second, what the US will be seeking to contain. On both counts, there is little room for optimism.

Containment (and deterrence) of an adversary necessarily depend on a state's ability to transmit to the adversary credible threats of consequences for certain behavior on the part of the adversary. In this regard, the idea that the US can contain Iran cannot be divorced from what has transpired over the past year vis-à-vis the diplomatic initiative that Obama has pursued from his first day in office. The lesson that Iran has learned from the Obama administration is that while there has been no shortage of threats of consequences, there have been little to no actual consequences. Iran has seen that the US sets red lines and deadlines that in practice are virtually meaningless. The US has undermined its own ability to present a credible threat by saying outright that it has no intention of taking military action because it is overstretched in Iraq and Afghanistan. And it has clarified through its actions that broad multilateral agreement is more important than demonstrating resolve to Iran in the economic realm as well. Why should we assume that the US will be any more successful in projecting credibility toward Iran when this state becomes a nuclear state than it has been in the period before Iran crossed this line?

(Read full report)

Love of the Land: Can the US Contain a Nuclear Iran?

Israel Matzav: Security Council to meet on Goldstone next Wednesday

Security Council to meet on Goldstone next Wednesday

Another paragon of 'human rights' - Muammar Gadhafi's Libya - has managed to push through a United Nations Security Council meeting to discuss the Goldstone Report next Wednesday, October 14.

The council met behind closed doors Wednesday to discuss Libya's request for an emergency meeting on the report, written by legal experts chaired by eminent South African jurist Richard Goldstone.

The council agreed to advance its monthly meeting on the Middle East to Oct 14 and focus on the war crimes report. The meeting was originally scheduled for Oct. 20.

Riyad Mansour, the Palestinian U.N. observer, said the Palestinians, Arab nations, and the 118-nation Nonaligned Movement of mainly developing countries strongly support the Libyan initiative.

Say 'bye-bye peace process.'

The Christian Science Monitor adds:

By bringing the report to the Security Council – a body Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi just last month said was more accurately called the "terror council" – Libya sets up a clash with the United States. He also creates a golden opportunity for Libya to raise its diplomatic star in the developing world, and for Colonel Qaddafi to refurbish his image with the Arab world.

"Libya will only be on the Security Council through December, so this was an opportunity [Libya and Qaddafi] would be loath to miss," says Melissa Labonte, an expert on Libya at Fordham University in New York. "If the P-5 [the council's five permanent members] say, 'We aren't talking about this,' it allows Qaddafi to say, 'This is what I meant by a terror council.' But if they do take it up," she adds, "what a coup for Qaddafi."

...

"The US has to be very careful about this," says Fordham's Professor Labonte. "The US will look bad in regions of keen interest to it if it comes off as obstructive on a human rights issue airing in the Security Council.

"On the other hand, [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu has said the peace process will go nowhere if this report is acted on," she adds, "so all the options pose real problems."

Aren't you glad the UN exists Barry?

Israel Matzav: Security Council to meet on Goldstone next Wednesday

Love of the Land: Why this man is laughing fit to explode

Why this man is laughing fit to explode

Melanie Phillips
The Spectator
05 October 09

There are clearly no lengths to which the world will not go to facilitate Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons.

Consider. A couple of weeks ago, the world was stunned to discover that Iran had a second uranium processing plant at Qom, thus proving beyond doubt that its pursuit of nuclear technology was to make not nuclear energy but a bomb.

Actually it wasn’t stunned at all, since this information was known to Barack Obama before he was even elected President. But anyway. This coup de théâtre was revealed, it seemed, to strengthen the world’s hand in dealing with Iran. After all, this autumn is the deadline set by the Obama administration for Iran to halt its nuclear weapons programme, after which the US said it was finally going to get really tough with Iran and do ... oooh, really tough things like sanctions.

So what happened when the five permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany met Iran (its chief nuclear negotiator, Saeed Jali, pictured above)? A deal was reached which has been described as a ‘breakthrough’ and caused the IAEA head Mohammed al Baradei to pronounce himself ‘delighted with progress’. Unfortunately, it was Iran that made yet more progress in its path to the bomb.

Its agreement to allow the nuclear inspectors into Qom is worthless. As theWall Street Journal mordantly observed:

Inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency won't find anything incriminating at the Qom facility. Having lied about it for years, the Iranians now have plenty of time to clean the place out.

The real excitement was over Iran’s ‘agreement in principle’ to send approximately one nuclear-weapons worth of Iran's low enriched uranium to Russia for enrichment and then on to France for fabrication into fuel rods for Tehran’s research reactor. The point of this is that the uranium would be returned to Iran in the form of fuel pellets inside the rods, which could not be further enriched to weapons grade purity.

But in another WSJ article John Bolton points out what a farce this all is:

Iran’s Ambassador to Britain exclaimed after the talks in Geneva, ‘No, no!’ when asked if his country had agreed to ship LEU to Russia; it had ‘not been discussed yet.’ An unnamed Iranian official said that the Geneva deal ‘is just based on principles. We have not agreed on any amount or any numbers.’

... By endorsing Iran’s use of its illegitimately enriched uranium, Mr. Obama weakens his argument that Iran must comply with its ‘international obligations.’ Indeed, the Geneva deal undercuts Mr. Obama’s proposal to withhold more sanctions if Iran does not enhance its nuclear program by allowing Iran to argue that continued enrichment for all peaceful purposes should be permissible. Now Iran will oppose new sanctions and argue for repealing existing restrictions.

The president also said last week that international access to the Qom nuclear site must occur within two weeks, but an administration spokesman retreated the next day, saying there was no ‘hard and fast deadline,’ and ‘we don't have like a drop-dead date.’

Meanwhile, the Institute for Science and International Security has posted up on its website excerpts from the internal IAEA Document on Alleged Iranian Nuclear Weaponization, parts of which have already found their way into the media. This material was allegedly based on documents obtained by German intelligence, smuggled out of Iran by the wife of an Iranian nuclear scientist. Apparently there have been arguments inside the IAEA about how to interpret this document, but it states:

The Agency has information, known as the Alleged Studies, that the Ministry of Defence of Iran has conducted and may still be conducting a comprehensive programme aimed at the development of a nuclear payload to be delivered using the Shahab 3 missile system. The information, which originates from several Member States and the Agency’s own investigations, points to a comprehensive project structure and hierarchy with clear responsibilities, timeline and deliverables. The information, which has been obtained from multiple sources, is detailed in content and appears to be generally consistent. The information refers to known Iranian persons and institutions under both the military and civil apparatuses, as well as to some degree to their confirmed procurement activities.”

Alleged Studies

“The Alleged Studies conducted by Iran refer, inter alia, to the development work performed to redesign the inner cone of the Shahab 3 missile re-entry vehicle to accommodate a nuclear warhead. The Studies further describe the development and testing of high voltage detonator firing equipment and multiple exploding bridge wire (EBW) detonators as well as an underground testing infrastructure and the probable testing of one full-scale hemispherical explosively driven shock system that could be applicable to an implosion-type nuclear device.

As Sky News’s Tim Marshall observed:

This new information, added to what was already known, suggests the Iranians now know how to make a nuclear bomb, have enough enriched uranium to make one, and have the capacity to deliver it. What is lacking is the finishing touches, and the testing.

The response of the world body to this terrifying and grim development has been to turn itself, in the eyes of the terror regime in Tehran, into a total laughing stock. It reached a transparently meaningless deal with the Iranian regime which it can flick aside with contempt – and in return for which the US, Britain and the rest have now accepted Iran back into the civilised world again, and all talk even of sanctions is now off the table. Thus America, Britain and the rest reward terror and ensure that it has the time to realise its terrible aim.

This is presumably what Obama meant when he said recently of Iran:

I'm not interested in victory. I’m interested in resolving the problem.

Well, if he doesn’t achieve victory over Iran, then Iran will achieve victory over America.

Business as usual in the genocide business!

Love of the Land: Why this man is laughing fit to explode

Love of the Land: It takes much more than talk to stop Iran's stonewalling

It takes much more than talk to stop Iran's stonewalling

by Michael Rubin
New York Daily News
September 30, 2009

Tomorrow, U.S. diplomats and their Russian, Chinese and European counterparts will join Iranian officials to discuss the Islamic Republic's nuclear program. The meeting follows new Iranian missile tests and exposure of a second covert Iranian nuclear enrichment facility. Iran enters the negotiations defiant. "The announcement of the enrichment facilities will be Iran's winning card," Kayhan newspaper, the mouthpiece of the Supreme Leader, editorialized last Sunday.

The meeting will be a nail in the coffin of the Obama doctrine. Throughout his campaign, President Obama preached unconditional diplomacy. "We need a President who'll have the strength and courage to go toe-to-toe with the leaders of rogue nations, because that's what it takes to protect our security," Obama declared during his campaign.

Within a week of his inauguration, Obama offered Tehran an olive branch, promising that should Iran unclench its fist, it would find a willing partner in him.

The President sought a fresh start. In order to neutralize historical baggage, he apologized for real and perceived American wrongs, such as the 1953 CIA-sponsored coup that overthrew Iran's populist prime minister. He reached out with letters, interviews and intermediaries.

The President's aides - Secretary of State Clinton, for example - described Obama's strategy as nuanced. Negotiating without precondition would not only force the Islamic Republic to show its true face, but it would give Washington time to construct a united international front. Diplomats scurried the globe, courting Moscow and Beijing, whose UN Security Council veto threat has watered down sanctions for years.

The administration also imposed a time line: If Iran did not respond constructively to negotiation offers by last week's G-20 meeting, then the administration would impose, in Clinton's words, "crippling" sanctions.

Two mistakes, however, will condemn Obama's diplomacy to failure: First, the President assumed that other leaders share his goodwill. If Iranian leaders did not respond to diplomacy offered without preconditions, what reasonable state would not support the U.S. position? Governments, however, are not neutral arbiters; they act in their own interests. Russia's refusal to compromise its position after Obama this month rescinded a U.S. pledge to build an anti-ballistic missile base in Poland is a case in point.

As devastating to diplomacy's success has been the administration's insistence on sequencing talks, sanctions and military preparation. The Obama administration has delayed consideration of sanctions let alone anything more robust during this grace period. Some - Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) for one - suggest the White House should extend the deadline for diplomacy because summer unrest distracted Iran.

Any delay in sanctions is dangerous. Failure to abide by deadlines and red lines heightens the chance of miscalculation as Tehran will only conclude that it can act with impunity.

Proponents of diplomacy may chafe at labeling Obama's rush to engage as naive. After all, President Richard Nixon flew to China and, at the height of the Cold War, President Ronald Reagan talked to the Soviet Union. The comparison, however, underlines Obama's weakness. Even as they talked, neither Nixon nor Reagan suspended military preparations. Indeed, it was Reagan's willingness to build and use both the U.S. military and covert capacity that catalyzed Soviet defeat.

If the world is to avoid war or a nuclear Iran, talk is not enough. Engagement is a tactic, not a strategy. If Obama waits to prepare militarily until talks run their course, then the United States will fail. Military preparations take months.

The Iranian leadership will not engage sincerely until faced with a credible threat, nor will European allies - let alone Russia and China - make concessions if they see the commander in chief twiddling his thumbs. The military option should be the last resort. The irony is that without a finger on the trigger, diplomacy will fail.

Michael Rubin, a senior editor of the Middle East Quarterly, is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a senior lecturer at the Naval Postgraduate School.

Love of the Land: It takes much more than talk to stop Iran's stonewalling

Love of the Land: The IAEA's Iran Failure

The IAEA's Iran Failure

JINSA Report #: 920
September 1, 2009

The latest IAEA report on Iran has a short summary:

• Iran keeps its nuclear material neat and tidy

• Iran has not suspended enrichment as required by the UN Security Council

• Iran is not cooperating with the IAEA

No surprises, but an oddity. Mention is made in the body of the report of the "alleged green salt project." The IAEA appears to have shown Iran evidence of such a project and suggests a problem with Iranian honesty regarding both the project's existence and Iran's intentions. Noting its own inability to get answers, the report says:

With respect to the letter with handwritten annotations which was part of the documentation related to the alleged green salt project, Iran has confirmed the existence of the underlying letter, has shown the original to the Agency and has provided the Agency with a copy of it. The existence of this original demonstrates a direct link between the relevant documentation and Iran. As already requested of Iran, the Agency needs to see further related correspondence and to have access to the individuals named in the letter.

This is not a small matter. "Green salt" is uranium tetrafluoride, which can be used to make fuel for a nuclear reactor or fissile material for a bomb. According to American sources, in 2004 the CIA came into possession of an Iranian laptop computer with data on tests for high explosives, a design for a missile re-entry vehicle and a diagram of a green-salt production line. Time magazine wrote at the time, "Separately, those areas of research could imply fairly benign intentions. But if an Iranian military agency has been coordinating all the research, the U.S. assessment is 'you're talking about a nuclear-tipped missile,' says a senior official with access to the intelligence reports."

Five long and unsatisfactory years later, during which Iran has presumably been working away on the "alleged" green salt project, the IAEA proposes the following:

The Agency believes that it has provided Iran with sufficient access...to enable Iran to respond substantively to questions...However, the Director General urges Member States which have provided documentation to the Agency to work out new modalities with the Agency so that it could share further documentation with Iran, as appropriate, since the Agency's inability to do so is rendering it difficult for the Agency to progress further in its verification process.

In other words, because the IAEA has failed to get the Iranians to cooperate, or even acknowledge the evidence in front of it, the United States (the "Member State") should share more ("new modalities") of its intelligence information, so the IAEA can share it with Iran.

The IAEA summary includes two final points:

• Iran must cooperate

• The Director General will continue to report

Love of the Land: The IAEA's Iran Failure