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Sanction Iran

June 13, 2004
The Jerusalem Post
Opinion

In October, the foreign ministers of the United Kingdom, France, and Germany (known as the EU-3) went to Teheran and came back with a deal: Iran gives up its nuclear ambitions in exchange for better trade relations with the West. The mullahs were given six months to comply.

Eight months later, the jury is in. On June 1, International Atomic Energy Agency Director-General Mohamed El-Baradei issued a report that was full of smoking guns. In diplomatic language, it caught Iran in lie after lie.

Iran was supposed to declare all its enrichment facilities, yet it neglected to mention it had P-2 centrifuges – a particularly sophisticated type used only for weapons-grade enrichment. Inspectors discovered laser enrichment equipment; which again, reasonably points only to a weapons program. Finally, the IAEA found plutonium-separation experiments, and enriched uranium that the Iranians incredibly brush off as contamination from imported material.

The report, issued in advance for the IAEA Board of Governors meeting this week, notes that Iran was given time to clear up all these "omissions" and "outstanding questions." None of them was. Iran, if anything, is becoming more brazen.

On Saturday, Iranian Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi openly declared Iran's right to become "a member of the nuclear club." He also rejected US and European demands that it give up its assorted uranium enrichment programs. Finally, he confirmed that Iran had tried to buy 4,000 magnets for uranium enrichment purposes, but said this issue had been "unnecessarily" hyped.

We have gotten to the point at which, in the words of reporter James Traub in yesterday's New York Times Magazine, "What is nonnegotiable to the Iranians is unacceptable to the Bush administration, the EU-3, and Baradei himself."
This should not be a surprise. The last eight months have been spent pretending either that Iran's nuclear ambitions were in question, or would be given up in response on the vague waving of carrots and sticks.

Whether it says so in so many words, the IAEA has succeeded in proving that Iran is bent on enriching nuclear fuel in a way that points in only one direction: nuclear weapons. This has put the international watchdog agency in a bind – if it is not forthright and aggressive, it will be duped as it was before the first war in Iraq, in which it gave a clean bill of health to facilities that were later proven to be the heart of Saddam's nuclear weapons program. But if it declares Iran to be in outright violation, the IAEA fears that Iran will follow North Korea's lead and simply withdraw from the treaty, which would end inspections and remove the IAEA from the ball game.

Such institutional dilemmas should not be allowed to drive the international agenda. Iran's intentions are crystal clear. The time has come for a simple question: Does Europe want Iran to go nuclear?

The long, sad story of sanctions against Iraq shows that economic pressure alone does not always produce cooperation. Yet if sanctions are not enough, than surely cajoling short of sanctions is a waste of precious time. Further, the more relevant precedent may not be the failure of sanctions in Iraq, but their success in Libya.

Faced with a united Security Council that imposed draconian sanctions in response to the downing of an American and a French airliner, having been caught red-handed smuggling nuclear equipment, and seeing Saddam Hussein having his teeth examined by a US Army medic, Muammar Gaddafi said that he had enough. He revealed a nuclear program the West did not even know he had and, pending verification, has gotten out of the terrorism business.

Iran is arguably more susceptible to such sanctions than was Libya. The Iranian economy is considerably larger, more advanced, and more dependent on the West than is Libya's. In Europe, Iranian diplomats are not used to being treated as pariahs. The Iranian people, while it may support the quest for the bomb, is likely to blame a government that it hates for any further hardships imposed by the international community.

To some, standing up to Iran's brazen nuclear bid will be seen as starting another war. It is the opposite. It is not too late to attempt, by economic means alone, forcing Iran to go the way of Libya and getting out of the nuclear and terrorism business. The longer Europe and the US wait to act, the more the options will become limited to living with Iran as a terrorist base with a nuclear umbrella, or taking military action.

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