By Charles Krauthammer
Thursday, April 09, 2015
“Negotiations . . . to prevent an Iranian capability to
develop a nuclear arsenal are ending with an agreement that concedes this very
capability . . .”
— Henry Kissinger and George Shultz, the Wall Street
Journal, April 8
It was but a year and a half ago that Barack Obama
endorsed the objective of abolition when he said that Iran’s heavily fortified
Fordow nuclear facility, its plutonium-producing heavy-water reactor, and its
advanced centrifuges were all unnecessary for a civilian nuclear program. The
logic was clear: Since Iran was claiming to be pursuing an exclusively civilian
program, these would have to go.
Yet under the deal Obama is now trying to sell, not one
of these is to be dismantled. Indeed, Iran’s entire nuclear infrastructure is
kept intact, just frozen or repurposed for the length of the deal (about a
decade). Thus Fordow’s centrifuges will keep spinning. They will now be fed
xenon, zinc, and germanium instead of uranium. But that means they remain ready
at any time to revert from the world’s most heavily (indeed comically)
fortified medical isotope facility to a bomb-making factory.
And upon the expiration of the deal, conceded Obama
Monday on NPR, Iran’s breakout time to a nuclear bomb will be “almost down to
zero,” i.e., it will be able to produce nuclear weapons at will and without
delay.
And then there’s cheating. Not to worry, says Obama. We have
guarantees of compliance: “unprecedented inspections” and “snapback” sanctions.
The inspection promises are a farce. We haven’t even held
the Iranians to their current obligation to come clean with the International
Atomic Energy Agency on their previous nuclear activities. The IAEA charges
Iran with stonewalling on eleven of twelve issues.
As veteran nuclear expert David Albright points out, that
makes future verification impossible — how can you determine what’s been
illegally changed or added if you have no baseline? Worse, there’s been no
mention of the only verification regime with real teeth — at-will, unannounced
visits to any facility, declared or undeclared. The joint European-Iranian
statement spoke only of “enhanced access through agreed procedures,” which
doesn’t remotely suggest spot inspections. And on Thursday, Iran’s supreme
leader ruled out any “extraordinary supervision measures.”
The IAEA hasn’t been allowed to see the Parchin
weaponization facility in ten years. And the massive Fordow complex was
disclosed not by the IAEA but by Iranian dissidents.
Yet even if violations are found, what then? First, they have
to be certified by the IAEA. Which then reports to the United Nations, where
Iran has the right to challenge the charge. Which then has to be considered,
argued and adjudicated. Which then presumably goes to the Security Council
where China, Russia and sundry anti-Western countries will act as Iran’s
lawyers. Which all would take months — after which there is no guarantee that
China and Russia will ratify the finding anyway.
As for the “snapback” sanctions — our last remaining bit
of pressure — they are equally fantastic. There’s no way sanctions will be
re-imposed once they have been lifted. It took a decade to weave China, Russia,
and the Europeans into the current sanctions infrastructure. Once gone, it
doesn’t snap back. None will pull their companies out of a thriving,
post-sanctions Iran. As Kissinger and Shultz point out, we will be fought every
step of the way, leaving the U.S., not Iran, isolated.
Obama imagines that this deal will bring Iran in from the
cold, tempering its territorial ambitions and ideological radicalism. But this
defies logic: With sanctions lifted, its economy booming, and tens of billions
injected into its treasury, why would Iran curb rather than expand its
relentless drive for regional dominance?
An overriding objective of these negotiations, as Obama
has said, is to prevent the inevitable proliferation — Egypt, Turkey, the Gulf
states — that would occur if Iran went nuclear. Yet the prospective agreement
is so clearly a pathway to an Iranian bomb that the Saudis are signaling that
the deal itself would impel them to go nuclear.
You set out to prevent proliferation and you trigger it.
You set out to prevent an Iranian nuclear capability and you legitimize it. You
set out to constrain the world’s greatest exporter of terror threatening every
one of our allies in the Middle East and you’re on the verge of making it the
region’s economic and military hegemon.
What is the alternative, asks the president? He’s
repeatedly answered the question himself: No deal is better than a bad deal.
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