November 21, 2004
IN THE confrontation over Iran's nuclear ambitions, Tehran has managed to outmaneuver the United States in its push for international sanctions against the Islamic republic.
That's not surprising.
The hard-liners in the Bush administration consider Iran a threat to be dealt with on their terms and theirs alone. That myopic view has kept the United States on the sidelines while Britain, France and Germany negotiated a freeze on a crucial aspect of Iran's nuclear program. With Tehran agreeing to temporarily suspend uranium enrichment last week, an attempt to bring Iran before the U.N. Security Council would have few supporters.
That hasn't kept the Bush administration from raising the alarm about Iran's true intentions: building an atomic bomb and finding a way to launch it. Iran has indeed been duplicitous about its nuclear ambitions. The same Europeans who negotiated this recent deal learned that the hard way last year, when a similar agreement fell apart with the disclosure that Tehran had misled negotiators about its enrichment of uranium, a process both necessary to generate electric power and critical to the development of nuclear weapons.
But the Bush administration has no realistic deterrent to offer here. Its position allows for resolution of the Iranian problem by only two means: bombing Iranian nuclear facilities or regime change. Both are unacceptable. Given the White House's mess in Iraq and the unreliability of U.S. intelligence, dealing militarily with Iran is out of the question. That leaves the European deal which offers Iran economic incentives to suspend its enrichment of uranium, although it doesn't preclude Tehran from resuming it later.
United Nations nuclear inspectors also said last week that they found no new evidence of a clandestine nuclear program in Iran. That finding leaves Iran in a strong position to defend itself against any threat of international sanctions. Tehran's recent oil and natural gas deals with Russia and China also insulate it from any action.
The deal struck with the Europeans is the international community's best hedge against Iran parlaying its nuclear interest into a bomb if -- and it's a big if -- Tehran holds up its end of the bargain. An agreement in hand doesn't mean the work of policing Iran is over. Far from it. Inspectors for the International Atomic Energy Agency have said publicly that they can't definitively prove that Iran's covert activities are over. And recent reports from a Paris-based Iranian opposition group suggest otherwise.
The Europeans must move forward with their deal, but cautiously. Iran's behavior in the past demands a rigorous, consistent verification system. At the first sign that the Iranians haven't lived up to their end of the deal, inspectors should blow the whistle on them. Then, the United States would have ample evidence to demand a tough response from the international community.
