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MaximsNews
Contributor Jeffrey
Laurenti
Jeffrey
Laurenti is a senior fellow in
international affairs at The
Century Foundation. He is an
expert in international security,
international law and multilateral
institutions and a Contributor to MaximsNews
Network.
DON'T
BOMB IRAN by JEFFREY LAURENTI (MaximsNews.com,
U.N.)
UNITED
NATIONS - / www.MaximsNews.com,
UN/ - 07 February 2007 -- Jacques
Chirac recently blurted out what
realists on both sides of the Atlantic
have long realized: that if Iran’s
political leaders are solidly determined
to build nuclear weapons, the rest of
the world will need to isolate and deter
Iran—not attack it.
The good news
is that Iranians seem not to be united
in pursuit of nuclear weapons. The first
wave of targeted sanctions imposed by
the United Nations Security Council on
December 23 has already prompted several
of Iran’s contending political
factions to make common cause against
the reckless leadership of president
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
The bad news
is that the Bush administration in
Washington doesn’t get it.
Even as the
capital’s Republican foreign policy
realists rally behind James Baker’s
call for direct talks with Tehran, an
administration still frozen in
neoconservative rigor mortis is busy
manufacturing pretexts to do the only
thing that would rally Iran’s
disaffected political class behind
Ahmadinejad—attack Iran.
America’s
ruling conservatives, of course, have
long been infatuated with military
force—and been both contemptuous and
fearful of U.N. collective
security.
They continue
feverishly to propagate the yarn that
U.N. sanctions don’t work and that
Washington’s adversaries—Communists
in the past, Muslims today—only
understand force.
The
administration, of course, famously
insisted that only military force would
eliminate Iraq’s weapons of mass
destruction. Yet, as everyone but the
Vice President now acknowledges, the
U.N.’s comprehensive sanctions and
disarmament teams had already succeeded
in doing so and left Saddam Hussein a
snarling but caged, decrepit, and
toothless tiger.
Even the
selective Security Council sanctions
against Libya, as Duke University
professor Bruce Jentleson has recently shown,
were the trigger both for resolution of
the Lockerbie terrorist bombing and the
process to normalize U.S.-Libyan
relations, culminating in Libyan
abandonment of a nuclear program—which
Washington conservatives fancifully
claim was clinched by the conquest of
Iraq.
If the
administration were not so profoundly
allergic to the notion of collective
security, it would be trumpeting the
extraordinary precedents against nuclear
proliferation that Western countries won
from the Security Council in 2006.
The sanctions
the Security Council imposed—with
support from Russia and China—against
North Korea’s and Iran’s nuclear
programs constitute the first
enforcement measures the Council has
ever taken against weapons acquisition
by a country that is not attacking or
occupying any of its neighbors.
Acceptance of
the notion that sovereign countries are
not free to acquire whatever weapons
they deem necessary for their own
defense is actually quite
remarkable.
After
predictable initial bluster from both
Pyongyang and Tehran, both governments
have begun signaling a more sober
attitude. While the administration would
have Americans believe its own financial
measures and military saber-rattling are
responsible for the changing mood, the
fact is that neither country had
believed that the Security Council’s
members would unite to impose any
sanctions at all.
Both must now
worry about another miscalculation
leading to further tightening of a
sanctions noose.
America’s
allies are united with Washington on the
goal of preventing Iran’s acquisition
of nuclear weapons, and are prepared to
step up the pressure to achieve that
goal. But the Europeans have also
quietly strategized what comes next if
prevention fails.
As France’s
president inadvertently made clear, they
have calculated that if Iran were to get
the bomb, the certainty of retaliation
if it ever tried to use it—i.e.,
classic deterrence—would keep that
nuclear sword in its sheath.
The real
threat of a nuclear-armed Iran, Chirac
blurted out, would be not to the
security of its neighbors but to the
survival of the nuclear nonproliferation
regime—precisely the analysis that
MIT’s Barry Posen has advanced in a
recent U.S. paper, A
Nuclear-Armed Iran: A Difficult But Not
Impossible Policy Problem.
The Bush
administration has shown, however, scant
interest in upholding the nuclear
nonproliferation regime—least of all
with respect to America’s own
commitments.
Instead,
administration cheerleaders point
admiringly to the bombing of Iraq’s
Osirak nuclear reactor by Israel’s
Likud government in 1981—an attack
even the Reagan administration
denounced—as a model for decisive
action on Iran.
Discouragingly,
the Osirak attack did not halt Saddam
Hussein’s nuclear program. Baghdad
quickly reconstituted it and accelerated
the drive for arms capability, as U.N.
weapons teams found in the mid-1990s as
they dismantled it.
All
infatuations foster illusions, but
conservatives’ self-deceptions about
the curative power of military force on
Middle East arms issues will prove
especially perilous with Iran.
President
Bush’s denial last week that he plan
to “invade” Iran was not
particularly reassuring, since the
attack plans have always focused on an
air war.
Even with his
calls to “maintain the cohesion of the
international community” against
Tehran’s nuclear quest, Chirac
acknowledged that “the Americans…are
not exactly on the same line.”
He all but
quoted James Baker in reminding
Washington that “it is important to
have a dialogue with this country (Iran)
to try to have stability in the Middle
East.”
If Europe’s
and his own ex-consigliere’s warnings
cannot budge Bush, perhaps only the
Congress can deter the President from a
tragic miscalculation.
JeffreyLaurenti@MaximsNews.com
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