Losing the Nuclear Race with Iran
As the Obama administration obsesses over the protracted sanctions process, it has forgotten that Iran also has a timeline for testing a nuclear device and is moving faster.
Impatient with White House inaction, Democrats in Congress are pressing ahead with their own plan for gasoline sanctions on Iran. National Security Advisor James Jones has been talking to key lawmakers to plead for exemptions and waivers.
This looks like Round LXXII in a story of a go-slow administration failing to act decisively on the Iran threat. (See Charles Krauthammer's column this weekend):
America's proposed Security Council resolution is already laughably weak -- no blacklisting of Iran's central bank, no sanctions against Iran's oil and gas industry, no nonconsensual inspections on the high seas. Yet Turkey and Brazil -- both current members of the Security Council -- are so opposed to sanctions that they will not even discuss the resolution. And China will now have a new excuse to weaken it further.
But the deeper meaning of the uranium-export stunt is the brazenness with which Brazil and Turkey gave cover to the mullahs' nuclear ambitions and deliberately undermined U.S. efforts to curb Iran's program.
Yet the administration's own story is one of slow and steady progress, incremental achievement, moving ahead with a tough job, etc. etc.
What we have here is a bureaucratic procedure that has taken on a life of its own. The administration has lost sight of its actual goal (stop the Iranian bomb!) and been captured instead by a purely instrumental and interim goal (gain a Security Council consensus on some package of sanctions against Iran). To arrive at that secondary goal, the administration makes compromises that nullify its formerly principal goal. But then, maybe all this distraction from the formerly principal goal is a feature not a bug. As the administration obsesses over the sanctions process, it can forget for a time that Iran also has a timeline, that Iran is moving faster and is likely to succeed first.
That way, when Iran does arrive and does test a nuclear device and does up-end politics in the region, everything will come as a shock and surprise. "An Iranian nuclear test? Oh no - and we were just putting the final finishing touches on our latest Iran Security Council resolution! All that diplomacy gone to waste ...."
Confronting this protracted slog and bog, people concerned with Iran need to focus on three more purposeful goals:
1) Sanctions by the willing. It would obviously be better to include China and Russia in the sanctions group. But sanctions imposed NOW by NATO, the EU, and Japan are better than sanctions imposed sometime in the wild blue yonder by the so-called international community.
2) Open political space for the Israelis to act if they feel they can and must. It seems unlikely in the extreme that the US will act militarily to stop the Iranian bomb project. Israel may - and if it does, will feel the wrath of an Obama administration that has repeatedly ordered it to stand down. If Israel does strike, Americans concerned with national security will need to prepare to prevent the Obama administration from imposing punitive measures. (It would be a fine irony if the Obama administration dealt more harshly with Israel for preventing the Iranian bomb than it has ever dealt with Iran for building the bomb in the first place.)
3) Start planning now for a world that features a nuclearized Iran. Such a world may revive the value of tactical American nuclear weapons. It will require a much more explicit US nuclear guarantee to friends in the Persian Gulf. It suggests that there ought to be American military personnel permanently stationed in Israel, so as to ensure that the US too takes casualties in the event of an Iranian nuclear strike: removing any doubts about global retaliation for Iranian nuclear action. And more.