Stopping the Bomb
By The Editors
National Review Online
At midnight tonight, the U.N. Security Council’s deadline for Iran to stop enriching uranium will pass, but the centrifuges at Natanz will keep spinning. That Iran has defied the deadline should surprise no one. What does surprise us is that the president who swore he would not “permit the world’s most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world’s most destructive weapons” does not show more urgency in fulfilling that pledge.
According to a senior administration official, the U.S. will hold off on seeking sanctions through the U.N. for at least a month while trying to hammer out the details of a Security Council resolution with Europe. The charitable (and highly implausible) interpretation is that Condoleezza Rice and her top aide, R. Nicholas Burns, have good reason to believe that Europe is finally ready to break with its four-year history of appeasement and back some meaningful penalties. But as a display of resolve, the delay is rather less than impressive. If the West were really united against the mullahs — and if the U.S. and its allies really agreed on how to thwart them — the Iranian regime would see a draft resolution Friday morning. Instead, it will see a Security Council so irresolute that its members take weeks, even months, to agree with each other, and a United States that gives no clear signal of its willingness to move beyond fruitless and feckless diplomacy.
We’re glad to learn that the U.S. will press European financial institutions to end their lending to Iran. And we hope it will go further: expanding such efforts to include non-European countries (for example, Japan), and pushing for tighter enforcement of the Security Proliferation Initiative (an international pact to prevent the transit of banned weapon components). But these would be mere speed bumps on Iran’s road to the nuclear club. Likewise the ban on exporting nuclear materials and equipment to Iran that American and European officials reportedly plan to seek. The A. Q. Khan network showed how easily rogue states can buy nuclear technology on the sly. The one sanction that might work — because it would threaten the regime’s survival — is a blockade of Iranian oil. But this is a diplomatic impossibility.
Moreover, China and Russia are unlikely to support even modest sanctions. Russia in particular has hundreds of millions of dollars at stake in the construction of an Iranian nuclear reactor. Both nations promised the U.S. that they would back sanctions if Iran failed to halt enrichment, but neither shows any intention of keeping its word. Iran understood from the beginning that the Security Council’s supposed unity was a façade, and its 21-page response to the incentive package it was offered in June — a response that stonewalled on the question of enrichment but spoke vaguely of resolving the dispute through dialogue — seemed calculated to give Russia and China a pretext for splitting with the U.S. and Europe.
We would be fools to take comfort in the International Atomic Energy Agency’s report, released today, that suggests Iran’s enrichment activities are proceeding slowly and producing uranium of a quality too low for weaponization. Given enough time, the regime will build its nukes. The paramount mission of the Bush administration in its remaining two years should therefore be twofold: to keep the mullahs from going nuclear, and to speed their fall from power. Unfortunately, these objectives do not admit of a single solution. We should redouble our aid the Iranian democracy movement, but we quite obviously cannot assume that the revolution will come before the bomb.
Stopping the bomb will require us instead to hasten the diplomacy to its inglorious denouement and think very seriously about our military options. A preemptive air strike is a nasty thing to contemplate. The mullahs could retaliate against us in Iraq (either by attacking our forces or by increasing their support for the Shiite militias). They could sabotage tanker shipments in the Persian Gulf, causing a spike in crude-oil prices. They could back terrorist attacks on U.S. soil. But the alternative — a nuclear Iran — is vastly worse. Even if the mullahs never used their arsenal, its simple existence would deal a catastrophic blow to U.S. interests. It would effectively give Tehran a veto over U.S. military action in the region. Since the nuclear facilities are protected by the Revolutionary Guard — rabid ideologues who operate with a high degree of autonomy — a weapon could conceivably be transferred to terrorists without the central government’s okay. And an Iranian bomb would likely produce a regional arms race and multiply the number of Middle Eastern nuclear powers. This too would raise the likelihood that a weapon of mass destruction will fall into terrorist hands; and by making it harder to determine where a detonated bomb had originated and retaliate against the guilty party, it would give the jihad that much more incentive to push the button.
Bush has made forfending that possibility his presidency’s raison d’être. We believe he means it. But we wonder how much longer he will wait before abandoning “solutions” that are anything but.
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