The main thing to remember about Friday’s revelation that Iran has a secret uranium-enrichment facility is that it is not a revelation.
Sure, the facts are new. They are these: In addition to a uranium-enrichment site at Natanz that international inspectors have monitored for years, Iran has been constructing a facility inside a mountain near the city of Qom. This facility is under the control of the Revolutionary Guards, the elite corps under the “Supreme Leader’s” orders and imbued with that pious zeal for which Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is celebrated. It appears to be too small to be useful in enriching uranium for large-scale energy production, but would be suited to enriching it for atomic warheads. It also appears to have been designed with an eye toward avoiding detection. The IAEA has now requested access to the facility. If granted, this would be of some marginal value, but would probably achieve little more than endless procedural wrangling between inspectors and Iranian officials who specialize in hiding evidence from inspectors.
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Rather than revelatory, these facts are confirmatory. They confirm, for instance, that the Iranian regime lies through its teeth about its nuclear activities. We knew this already from, among other things, the revelation a couple of years ago that Iran had run a secret program to develop a nuclear warhead (now supposedly abandoned) despite its assurances that its intentions were peaceful, and the revelation in 2002 that it had been operating a nuclear program in contravention of international law for the better part of two decades.
They confirm, additionally, that the European approach to the crisis has failed. That approach was to assure the Iranian regime that no, we really didn’t want to do anything that would be very hard on them, but yes, we would certainly like to give them a lot of money in exchange for their word that they are well-meaning persons.
Most important, they confirm what has been apparent all along: that the Iranian regime is a very serious security threat and is doing precisely what states do when they wish clandestinely to build nuclear weapons. Even President Obama seems not to have a very hopeful outlook, and has declared that the “configuration” of the Qom facility is “not consistent with a peaceful nuclear program.”
That is in truth a forceful statement, amounting almost to an explicit rejection of Iran’s claim, throughout the standoff, that its sole aim is civilian energy production. Unfortunately it is coupled with a diplomacy of wishful thinking and faith in international bureaucracy. Obama learned of the facility’s existence during his transition briefings following the election. Why, then, did we go through this week’s U.N. charade? Why did the administration not instead present the facility — and the regime’s failure to report it at the planning stage, which it was required by treaty obligation to do despite its protestations to the contrary — to Russia and China as justification for placing a new sanctions resolution on the Security Council’s agenda?
The administration will have a chance to redeem itself on October 1, when it and other great (and formerly great) powers engage in talks with the regime. It should use that occasion to demand major concessions, including a guarantee that inspectors may conduct snap inspections at any suspected site, with enumerated consequences for noncompliance. It should arrive having presented to Europe, China, and most especially Russia a very forceful demand that Iranian intransigence on these points be met with highly punitive sanctions. (While the facts are not revelatory, they provide Russia enough diplomatic cover to do a 180 on Iran and back a tough policy.) And if the Security Council remains deadlocked, there is still much the U.S. could do with a “coalition of the willing” to lock Iran out of the global financial order (the Bush administration pursued a similar strategy with North Korea and then abandoned it).
The president also should, but almost surely will not, signal that any failure to attain such results would put the military option back on the table.
For the better part of a decade, the diplomatic establishment has wanted — for reasons self-interested in some cases and in others naïve — the world to think that Iran’s intentions are peaceful. Iran seems determined to prove it wrong. How much more confirmation do we wish to see?
