As Iran pushes the international community to the brink
of crisis over its nuclear program, eminent organizations
and individuals will propose 'compromises' as if the burden
is not on Iran to rectify its serious nuclear
transgressions. Compromise will be appealing compared to
war, which is the alternative that many observers and UN
Security Council members believe Washington would pursue.
But there are many alternatives short of war, and the wrong
'compromise' today will only lead us all back to the brink
tomorrow.
The leading compromise proposal is for the international
community to endorse Iran's operation of a small research
and development facility for enriching uranium. Iran would
run an agreed number of centrifuges "less than 500 under the
International Crisis Group plan released this week" while
suspending fuller-scale applications of this technology
until the International Atomic Energy Agency can resolve the
serious doubts that Iran's nuclear activities have been and
will be exclusively for peaceful purposes.
This is a bad idea, albeit the menu to choose from does
not include any good options. (Endorsing enrichment in a
country with Iran's still unresolved nuclear record and
threatening international behavior would be unwise even if
enrichment made economic sense; the fact that Iran has no
need for homemade nuclear fuel makes the proposal even more
suspect.)
Allowing Iran to operate a pilot-scale enrichment plant
would give Iranian engineers all the opportunity they need
to master this technology. Once this is done, Iran has
jumped the major hurdle on the route to acquiring nuclear
weapons.
Proponents of pilot-scale enrichment as the least-bad
option assume that Iran does not or will not have secret
facilities to conduct enrichment beyond the declared pilot
facility that would be heavily monitored. Iran's failure
after three years to give the IAEA an adequate explanation
of what happened with the advanced centrifuge designs that
Iran purchased on the black market indicates that, at least
in the past, undeclared actors and facilities operated in
the nuclear program. Still, proponents of the pilot-scale
option argue plausibly that there is no proof that Iran now
has secret facilities. Because Iran seems willing to create
a major crisis and limit the International Atomic Energy
Agency's inspectors if pilot-scale enrichment is not
allowed, the hope is that giving Iran what it wants will
motivate Tehran to allow intrusive inspections that will in
turn deter any effort to use secret facilities to apply the
knowledge gained in the pilot-scale plant.
Unfortunately, an internationally endorsed pilot-scale
plant reduces the odds of detecting secret activities in
several ways. If inspectors or spies detect suspicious
procurement of parts or communications or other evidence
related to enrichment, Iran can argue that the legitimate
plant explains it. When no enrichment is allowed, any
evidence is decisive; when some enrichment is allowed, all
evidence may be ambiguous.
Iran's potential to break out of the nonproliferation
treaty and move full speed to building nuclear weapons would
grow greatly once it has mastered enrichment technology.
Again, proponents of the pilot-scale fallback recognize
this; they just think there is no better alternative.
But the pilot-scale alternative only postpones for a
little while the hard dilemmas and dangers posed by Iran's
nuclear ambitions. Iran has behaved according to a very
clear logic since its major nonproliferation violations were
detected in 2002. Indeed, Iran's chief nuclear negotiator
from 2003 through 2005, Hasan Rowhani, has explained that
Iran's strategy has been to suspend only those activities
that it was not ready to undertake. Once the technologists
have been prepared to take a new step in acquiring the
capability to produce fissile materials, they have taken it
and essentially dared the international community to stop
them. This happened in 2004, in August 2005 with the
re-starting of the uranium conversion facility at Isfahan,
and in January 2006 with the end of suspension of uranium
enrichment. In the Isfahan case, Iran crossed a redline
established by the EU-3 and seems to have managed to erase
it from the consciousness of many observers.
Iran's behavior and articulated strategy warn clearly
that once it has mastered pilot-scale enrichment it will
seek to do more, and will break any agreement to the
contrary. A crisis, no less dire than the current one will
emerge, only then Iran will be much closer to having the
capability to make bomb fuel than it is today. There is no
evidence that Iranian leaders are prepared to make a
strategic decision not to acquire the capability to make
nuclear weapons. The pilot-scale option enables Tehran to
avoid this decision and proceed as it wishes.
Perhaps there is nothing the U.S. or others in the
international community can do to persuade Iranian leaders
to eschew their quest for dual-use facilities. But how would
we know? The U.S. has not joined directly into the
negotiating process with France, Germany and the United
Kingdom, so Iran has not been able to factor its interests
viz a vis the U.S. None of Iran's interlocutors, including
the IAEA and its director general, has posed costs or
benefits of sufficient magnitude and certainty to move
Iranian decision-makers away from the path they are on.
Given the inadequacy of threats and inducements mustered
thus far, many observers leap to the assumption that
military attacks must be the alternative to acquiescence.
Memories of the Bush Administration's run up to the Iraq war
still loom large. When President Bush says banally (and
unnecessarily) are not taking any option off the table,
listeners leap to the conclusion that war is on. But
discussions with a wide range of U.S. officials betray keen
awareness that military attacks on Iran would probably
result in a worse situation than we face today, and would
not solve the strategic problem posed by Iran's nuclear
ambitions and support of terrorist organizations.
Fixating on the shadow of military strikes is an excuse
for avoiding the hard problem of mustering international
unity to confront and persuade Iran to build a nuclear
energy program that inherently reassures the international
community that Iran will be a constructive, not a
threatening, power on the world stage. This means unity in
offering more positive incentives than Washington has
contemplated, and more determined political and economic
pressure than Russia, China, India and others have been
willing to endorse. The volume of public warnings over the
obvious dangers of military attack is so high compared to
discussions of political-economic strategies that one
detects an avoidance of responsibility for international
stewardship.
To sharpen the point, imagine if President Bush
unequivocally said that there is no military solution to the
strategic challenge posed by Iran, and the U.S. will conduct
no military operations against Iran unless Iran or its
agents attack U.S. or friendly forces. Many would not
believe such a declaration, which means there is nothing the
U.S. can do in this regard, but if war is set aside does it
make any sense now to open the door to uranium enrichment in
Iran? Again, why is war being posed as the alternative to be
avoided now? Why should Iranian decision-makers and public
be spared from facing a higher set of costs in maintaining
the current nuclear-weapon-option strategy? Why not hold the
line at the critical point of uranium enrichment and offer
Iran a higher set of benefits for switching to a nuclear
energy policy that the world can live with?
Even leading organizations and individuals that incline
toward the pilot-scale-enrichment 'compromise' recognize
that it is undesirable. What is the imperative to fall back
now? Doesn't it make more sense to seriously try the
diplomacy of inducements and pressure by bringing the U.S.
off the sidelines and directly into the multilateral
negotiations with Iran? |