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How to Stop Iran's Bomb

(New York Times) John R. Bolton - In theory, comprehensive international sanctions, rigorously enforced and universally adhered to, might have broken the back of Iran's nuclear program. But the sanctions imposed have not met those criteria. The president's own director of National Intelligence testified in 2014 that they had not stopped Iran's progressing its nuclear program. Successive administrations, Democratic and Republican, worked hard, with varying success, to forestall or terminate efforts to acquire nuclear weapons by states as diverse as South Korea, Taiwan, Argentina, Brazil and South Africa. This gold standard is now everywhere in jeopardy because the president's policy is empowering Iran. Whether diplomacy and sanctions would ever have worked against the hard-liners running Iran is unlikely. But abandoning the red line on weapons-grade fuel drawn originally by the Europeans in 2003, and by the UN Security Council in several resolutions, has alarmed the Middle East and effectively handed a permit to Iran's nuclear weapons establishment. The inescapable conclusion is that Iran will not negotiate away its nuclear program. Nor will sanctions block its building a broad and deep weapons infrastructure. The inconvenient truth is that only military action like Israel's 1981 attack on Saddam Hussein's Osirak reactor in Iraq or its 2007 destruction of a Syrian reactor, designed and built by North Korea, can accomplish what is required. An attack need not destroy all of Iran's nuclear infrastructure, but it could set back its program by three to five years. The U.S. could do a thorough job of destruction, but Israel alone can do what's necessary. Such action should be combined with vigorous American support for Iran's opposition, aimed at regime change in Tehran. The writer, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, was a former U.S. ambassador to the UN.
2015-03-27 00:00:00
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