Reuel Marc Gerecht, a former Iranian-targets officer in the CIA’s
Clandestine Service is a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of
Democracies. Mark Dubowitz is the foundation’s executive director and heads its
project on Iran sanctions.
Iranian President
Hassan Rouhani is lying when he says the Islamic Republic has never had any
intention of building an atomic weapon. Defecting Iranian nuclear engineers
told U.S. officials in the late 1980s that the mullahs’ program, then hidden,
was designed exclusively for such arms. Everything Western intelligence
services have tracked since then matches those early revelations.
U.S. participation in
the upcoming negotiations doesn’t appear to be premised on an expectation of
Iranian veracity. If it were, President Obama wouldn’t send his secretary of
state until Tehran had come clean about its past deceits. The exemplary
behavior of South Africa’s often-mendacious apartheid government when it
decided to go non-nuclear — total transparency about the militarization of its
atomic program — isn’t expected from Iran. The clerical regime has already
dropped the bar through its “facts on the ground” intransigence: more than
19,000 centrifuges built and a heavy-water plant nearing completion. Washington
doesn’t want to go to war again in the Middle East, and the Iranians know it.
The administration
and Congress are gambling that sanctions will be enough to overcome the
regime’s chronic dishonesty. Economic pain will be so intense, the theory
holds, that eventually Tehran will play by Western rules.
In other words, supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the
Revolutionary Guards and Rouhani — who had a not-insignificant role in developing Iran’s nuclear program in the 1990s —
would be willing to admit that “evil incarnate” (Khamenei’s update to the “Great Satan”), against
which the Islamic Republic’s very identity has been built, has defeated their
nuclear aspirations.
Every country has an
economic breaking point. But achieving that moment in the Islamic Republic will
be extraordinarily difficult because such compromise is tantamount to spiritual
suicide.
U.S. foreign policy
elites play down or ignore God’s role in foreign affairs since the divine has
no part in the U.S. worldview. In Western media, Rouhani is a “pragmatist,” as was his mentor Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the former
major-domo of the political clergy; and as was Khamenei before he backed the
election of populist firebrand Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as president in 2005. All of
these men have been critical to Iran’s nuclear-weapons program. All, even
Ahmadinejad, have been politically pragmatic. This doesn’t make them less religious,
less anti-American or averse to viewing terrorism as both statecraft and
soulcraft.
Iranian leaders
probably are entering these negotiations for one reason: to test Barack Obama’s mettle. They want to
see whether Tehran can have the bomb and sanctions relief. The
strategy for doing so isn’t complicated. The regime could suspend work at the Arak heavy-water facility, the regime’s
plutonium path to a bomb, and stop enriching uranium to 20 percent, the big
step in processing it to weapons-grade. But without a verifiable end to
centrifuge production, the regime could continue to manufacture centrifuges,
shrinking the time required to convert unprocessed uranium to bomb-grade stock.
With enough advanced centrifuges, a 20 percent stockpile becomes operationally much less relevant given
the increased speed of processing.
The only real
compromise Khamenei would be making here is with the nuclear calendar. More
time would be needed to develop a rapid, undetectable “breakout” capacity,
which nuclear expert David Albright has estimated will happen by mid-2014. If the regime could trade heavy-water
processing and uranium enriched
to 20 percent in return for weakening of the interbank transfer
sanctions, regaining the right to trade in gold or loosened restrictions on
using euros, then it could easily gain $20 billion — a big sum for a regime that has only $20 billion
in fully accessible hard currency. Tehran still has about $50 billion of locked-up cash that can be
used for barter trade in a handful of countries. Given Iran’s currency reserves,
even without a lessening of economic pressure, nuclear physics is still
outpacing sanctions and diplomacy.
Obama has been clear
that he isn’t going to war to stop low-grade enrichment, so Tehran needs to
figure out whether the president has any “red line” on 3.5 percent enrichment.
If Khamenei had to export most of Iran’s stockpile enriched to that amount, a nuclear weapon
would be significantly delayed — provided centrifuge production
was curtailed and the number of machines spinning reduced.
Khamenei can’t allow
the West to stop centrifuge
manufacturing. He cannot allow Washington to know where all of the
centrifuges are being built or how the regime has avoided
sanctions on “dual-use” imports. Such knowledge could massively delay or even
end the weapons program, either through a preemptive strike or better sanctions
enforcement.
Nor can Iran’s
supreme leader implement any additional protocol of the Non-Proliferation
Treaty that would allow U.N. inspectors to track centrifuge
plants, search military bases (where the regime probably hides its most
sensitive nuclear-weapons research) or debrief all of Iran’s nuclear
scientists.
The administration
and Congress would be wise to hit Tehran with more sanctions immediately. The
United States shouldn’t be fooled by false divisions within the regime.
Abandoning the long quest for atomic weapons would be an extraordinary
humiliation for Iran’s ruling class. That isn’t going to happen unless Iran’s
supreme leader and his guards know with certainty that the Islamic order is
finished if they don’t abandon the bomb.
“All, even Ahmadinejad, have been politically
pragmatic. This doesn’t make them less religious, less anti-American or averse
to viewing terrorism as both statecraft and soulcraft.”
Pragmatic so far, in order to get the bomb. And then
what? Will the Twelver ideology kick in
at that point? We better never let them get to that point!
