Iranian impasse

Hope now rests with the US and the EU to act swiftly, decisively and independently.

By JERUSALEM POST STAFF
ahmadinejad UN press conference 224.88 (photo credit: AP)
ahmadinejad UN press conference 224.88
(photo credit: AP)
What to do about Iran, and who should do it? According to the International Atomic Energy Agency's report released earlier this month, Teheran continues to expand its capabilities to enrich uranium, and to refit long-range missiles to carry nuclear warheads. But the same report also acknowledges the IAEA's powerlessness: "The agency, regrettably, has not been able to make any substantive progress" on key issues of "serious concern." Nor can we count on the United Nations, a body whose only action this week on the subject was to host President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's appalling speech to the General Assembly. Three rounds of UN sanctions on Iran have so far only granted that country more time to acquire centrifuges and perfect their use. And high-level talks on Iran that were scheduled for yesterday were canceled after Russia's announcement earlier this week that it is no longer willing to support the Security Council's proposal for a fourth, and stiffer set of sanctions. This effectively spells the end of the UN sanctions process. "We don't see it working or leading anywhere," UN Ambassador Gabriela Shalev told The Jerusalem Post. As for diplomacy, two years ago, the Iraq Study Group led by James Baker and Lee Hamilton proposed a "robust diplomatic effort" with Iran and Syria - the very countries that move terrorists and explosives into Iraq. Two weeks ago, five former US secretaries of state (Madeleine Albright, Colin Powell, Warren Christopher, Henry Kissinger and Baker), gathering to give their advice to the next president, agreed that the United States should talk to Iran. And on Wednesday, after an 18-month study of the deteriorating relations between the United States and the Muslim world during the Bush administration, a diverse group of 34 American leaders - including Albright and Thomas Dine, a former executive director of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee - released a report recommending, among other things, increased diplomatic engagement with Iran. The timing of their expression of faith in diplomacy to confront nuclear-obsessed enemies could not have been more damaging to their credibility: The very same day, the IAEA announced in Vienna that North Korea had barred international inspectors from a reprocessing plant at its nuclear reactor complex in Yongbyon. North Korea, which tested its first nuclear device in 2006, intends to resume production of nuclear weapons-grade fuel there within a week. So much for the disarmament accord reached after many rounds of intense six-nation diplomatic negotiation. ALL OF this, taken together, shows clearly that two notions must be dropped if the Iranian regime is to be dissuaded from acquiring nuclear weapons. The first is the persistent belief in the power of transformative diplomacy. The time for polite diplomatic exertions in response to the looming Iranian threat is long past. Such exertions have achieved about as much today as they did in 1935, when Hitler defied the disarmament provisions of the Versailles Treaty, and British foreign secretary John Simon went to Germany for talks with the Fuehrer. Direct contact with Iran is not intrinsically problematic; indeed, it can be central in conveying the urgency of Iranian compliance with its obligations in halting its nuclear drive, and emphasizing the costs of failing to do so; the problem, rather, is that the diplomatic community has proved itself woefully incapable of addressing the threat with the necessary seriousness. Nothing has been done so far to give the Iranian regime a compelling reason or interest to stop its relentless push for the bomb. Yet it must be stopped. So if military intervention is to be avoided, a second - and increasingly flimsy - notion must be altogether abandoned: the idea that the UN is the sine qua non of legitimate action in the international arena. Hope now rests with the US and the EU to act swiftly, decisively and independently to ratchet up their own sanctions efforts, and to apply their own severe pressures. With French President Nicolas Sarkozy as EU president, now is the time. The stakes couldn't be higher - for Israel in particular (though by no means for Israel alone). For at the very moment Ahmadinejad denies Iranian ambitions to build nuclear weapons, he simultaneously reiterates their intended objective - to see Israel wiped off the map.