The U.S. must not let Iran’s contradictory actions dissuade us.
The debate over military options on Iran has finally started to focus on the critical issue of deterrence — that is, can the threat of air strikes deter Iran from proceeding in its nuclear-weapons program, and if so, how? Answering that question will not be easy, for it raises a number of difficult questions that nobody is asking.
Here are two: First, what would Iran do if it thought that military strikes against its program were imminent? Second, on the heels of two failed visits by inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency, why are the Iranians still pretending to cooperate with the IAEA?
The first question is the simpler one. Under several outstanding U.N. Security Council resolutions, Iran is required to halt uranium enrichment. That’s what the massive diplomatic front now arrayed against Iran — including even Russia and China — agrees on. But on virtually every other issue — the proper sorts of sanctions, the possibility of military strikes — the members of that front disagree.
So if Iran thought it was about to get hit, it would have a simple solution: It could simply declare a suspension of uranium enrichment, and see what happens next. Many of the governments that have thus far been with us would declare victory and proclaim that military strikes are no longer needed. Many people in the U.S., and even in Israel, would say that. Once the media had had its way, what public support there was for military strikes against Iran would be severely diminished.
Long story short, if Iran declares a suspension of enrichment activity, it would certainly prevent U.S. strikes, and would almost certainly prevent even Israeli strikes. The problem is this: Iran is only partially cooperating with the IAEA. It allows inspections only at “declared” facilities — and not at facilities where nuclear activities are suspected but not declared to the IAEA. Therefore, the danger posed by Iran’s nuclear activities would hardly be diminished by a suspension of enrichment at its declared facilities, even if that suspension could be verified.
Recent high-profile trips by the IAEA raised hopes for increased transparency, but inspectors were denied access to the military base at Parchin, outside of Tehran, where the Iranians are suspected of conducting high-explosives tests necessary for a nuclear warhead. Moreover, if Iran has secret enrichment facilities — and we have already discovered one — they can freely continue to enrich their stockpile of uranium to weapons grade. Their stockpile of lightly enriched uranium is highly mobile and not constantly monitored by the IAEA; meanwhile, their development of warheads and delivery vehicles continues unimpeded.
Under these circumstances, if Iran thought an attack could be imminent, it would almost certainly declare a suspension in uranium enrichment, and present us with a huge diplomatic and strategic problem that would pose only a mild tactical problem for them.
That leads to the second and vastly more important question: Why are they continuing to cooperate with the IAEA at all?
Recall that because of its continued uranium enrichment, Iran has been continuously in breach of Chapter VII Security Council resolutions since 2007. Chapter VII resolutions, which concern “Threats to the Peace,” are clearly legally binding on Iran under Article 25 of the U.N. Charter. Iran has therefore been in flagrant breach of this solemn treaty obligation since 2007. In fact, their breach of Article 25 is so flagrant that they have essentially abrogated the Charter, and could theoretically be expelled from the United Nations. And by the way, they are also in material breach of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty: They refuse to declare new nuclear facilities or the production of centrifuges, as the non-proliferation treaty requires non-weapons states to do.
Yet, curiously enough, they continue to comply with most of their IAEA-related obligations, despite their continued breach of all the relevant treaties. Their level of cooperation has diminished over the years, but they are still disclosing copious amounts of information and periodically admitting inspectors.
The closer Iran gets to nuclear-weapons capability, the harder it will be for the IAEA to verify the peaceful nature of its nuclear program. Since 2003, the IAEA has consistently reported that it can verify only the “non-diversion” of nuclear materials for weapons use at Iran’s declared facilities, and that the information it does have raises a number of serious questions that the Iranians refuse to answer. Those questions have increased over time, in both number and importance, but the answers haven’t been forthcoming. Given the failure of its most recent mission to Iran, the IAEA’s next reports are likely to be the most damning yet.
Another factor to consider is that the closer Iran gets to nuclear-weapons capability, the more it will have to reduce its level of cooperation with the IAEA. But the question remains, why haven’t they pulled out of the non-proliferation treaty altogether?
The most plausible explanation seems to be that withdrawing from the treaty would be tantamount to admitting that they are in fact developing nuclear weapons. But, as long as long as everyone participates in the charade of Iranian cooperation with the IAEA, any military strike on its program will have to be essentially unilateral, easily cast as an act of “unprovoked” aggression.
They have thus far consistently denied that they are developing nuclear weapons, but nobody serious doubts that they are developing a nuclear-weapons capability. General Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, may be correct in his claim that the regime hasn’t decided to build a bomb. But that’s hardly a winning point if they have decided to build all the components of a bomb, which they clearly have decided to do. Letting the timing of U.S. or Israeli strikes turn on whether Iran has finally decided to build a bomb makes as much sense as waiting until you know for sure that the person holding a gun to your head has fully decided to pull the trigger before defending yourself.
Those who say that we don’t have any evidence that Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons don’t know what they’re talking about. As the French mission to the IAEA pointed out years ago, Iran’s supposedly civilian nuclear program doesn’t make any sense from the economic or energy-security point of view. As justification for the program, Iran says it wants to be self-sufficient in energy, but there isn’t enough naturally occurring uranium in Iran to power the new reactors for more than a few years. Moreover, the program is far more expensive than the expected returns in terms of electricity could justify. If Iran wants to increase its domestic supply of cheap, reliable energy, all it has to do is build oil refineries instead of nuclear reactors, and it won’t have to import 40 percent of its gasoline from the United Arab Emirates anymore.
And if you want to understand the tenor of relations between Iran and the UAE, here’s one recent indicator: In December, the UAE agreed to buy $3.48 billion’s worth of the Pentagon’s THAAD “area missile defense” system — more than the Pentagon currently plans to acquire for all of its global needs in the years ahead, and nearly half the entire U.S. missile-defense budget.
In short, everyone who is serious and well-informed on this issue knows that Iran is developing a nuclear-weapons capability. If you laid out a timeline of what Iran would have to do at different points in order to arrive as quickly as possible at all the elements of a serial-production capability, based on levels of highly enriched uranium, Iran has done everything you would expect exactly when it had to. And, as you’d expect, the key nuclear facilities are built deep underground or inside mountains, and ringed by the country’s most advanced and expensive air defenses.
The fact that Iran is doing so many things that constitute a tacit admission that they are pursuing nuclear weapons seems to cast some doubt on the theory that their aversion to a tacit admission explains their hesitation to withdraw from the non-proliferation treaty altogether. On the one hand, they learned from the North Korea nuclear crisis of 1994 that a declared withdrawal from the non-proliferation treaty could raise the possibility of immediate military strikes in discussions at the White House and in Israel. On the other hand, a relationship with the IAEA is difficult to manage if you’re a terroristic, messianic regime bent on acquiring nuclear weapons, and as we’ve seen in the last year, the IAEA can help solidify an international consensus that Iran is in fact developing nuclear weapons.
But at this point, nobody serious believes that Iran ultimately intends to fulfill its obligations under the non-proliferation treaty or the U.N. Charter — it has been openly in breach of both for years. Our policy has to assume that Iranian behavior — both the possibility that Iran could declare a temporary suspension of enrichment, and its continued quasi-cooperation with the IAEA — will be determined by purely tactical considerations as the country makes its way toward a nuclear-weapons capability.
That is why it’s important to focus on the nature of the current regime in Iran. It is by its nature dangerous. It parrots the language of international law, exploiting it for today’s political purposes. But the current regime has little interest in the country’s long-term credibility as a member in good standing of the international community. That is what makes a charade of its quasi-cooperation with the IAEA — and that’s what almost guarantees that any suspension of uranium enrichment would be a mere subterfuge.
Iran needs to establish a modern, democratic, functioning government. If the Iranian people had self-government, they would never engage in flagrant treaty violations, aggressive threats to other nations, or clandestine nuclear-weapons activities.
Until Iran establishes a modern, democratic government, it is prudent to prepare for the worst. It makes no sense to minimize short-term risks only to maximize long-term ones, when the long-term ones could be upon us in just a matter of years. Prudence and precaution argue for a clear deterrent threat of military action in the near term if Iran does not transparently abandon its pursuit of nuclear weapons — regardless of whether it suspends uranium enrichment or continues its quasi-cooperation with the IAEA.
— Mario Loyola is former counsel for foreign and defense affairs to the U.S. Senate Republican Policy Committee.