By JOHN R. BOLTON
MARCH 26, 2015
FOR years, experts worried that
the Middle East would face an uncontrollable nuclear-arms race if Iran ever
acquired weapons capability. Given the region’s political, religious and ethnic
conflicts, the logic is straightforward.
As in
other nuclear proliferation cases like India, Pakistan and North Korea, America
and the West were guilty of inattention when they should have been vigilant.
But failing to act in the past is no excuse for making the same mistakes now.
All presidents enter office facing the cumulative effects of their
predecessors’ decisions. But each is responsible for what happens on his watch.
President Obama’s approach on Iran has brought a bad situation to the brink of
catastrophe.
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. Naturally, Tehran wants to be
free of them, but the president’s own
director of National Intelligence testified in 2014 that they had not stopped
Iran’s progressing its nuclear program. There is now widespread acknowledgment
that the rosy 2007 National
Intelligence Estimate, which judged that Iran’s weapons program was
halted in 2003, was an embarrassment, little more than wishful thinking.
Even
absent palpable proof, like a nuclear test, Iran’s steady progress toward
nuclear weapons has long been evident. Now the arms race has begun: Neighboring
countries are moving forward, driven by fears that Mr. Obama’s diplomacy is
fostering a nuclear Iran. Saudi Arabia, keystone of the oil-producing
monarchies, has long been expected to move first. No way would the Sunni Saudis
allow the Shiite Persians to outpace them in the quest for dominance within
Islam and Middle Eastern geopolitical hegemony. Because of reports of early
Saudi funding, analysts have
long believed that
Saudi Arabia has an option to obtain nuclear weapons from Pakistan, allowing it
to become a nuclear-weapons state overnight. Egypt and Turkey, both with imperial
legacies and modern aspirations, and similarly distrustful of Tehran, would be
right behind.
Ironically
perhaps, Israel’s nuclear weapons have not triggered an arms race. Other states
in the region understood — even if they couldn’t admit it publicly — that
Israel’s nukes were intended as a deterrent, not as an offensive measure.
Iran is a
different story. Extensive progress in uranium enrichment and plutonium
reprocessing reveal its ambitions. Saudi, Egyptian and Turkish interests are
complex and conflicting, but faced with Iran’s threat, all have concluded that
nuclear weapons are essential.
The former Saudi intelligence chief, Prince
Turki al-Faisal, said recently, “whatever comes out of these talks, we will
want the same.” He added, “if Iran has the ability to enrich uranium to
whatever level, it’s not just Saudi Arabia that’s going to ask for that.”
Obviously, the Saudis, Turkey and Egypt will not be issuing news releases
trumpeting their intentions. But the evidence is accumulating that they have
quickened their pace toward developing weapons.
Saudi
Arabia has signed nuclear cooperation agreements with South Korea, China,
France and Argentina, aiming to build a total of 16 reactors by 2030. The Saudis also just
hosted meetings with
the leaders of Pakistan, Egypt and Turkey; nuclear matters were almost
certainly on the agenda. Pakistan could quickly supply nuclear weapons or
technology to Egypt, Turkey and others. Or, for the right price, North Korea
might sell behind the backs of its Iranian friends.
The Obama
administration’s increasingly frantic efforts to reach agreement with Iran have
spurred demands for ever-greater concessions from Washington. 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. Even where
civilian nuclear reactors were tolerated, access to the rest of the nuclear
fuel cycle was typically avoided. Everyone involved understood why.
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 United Nations 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. Time
is terribly short, but a strike can still succeed.
Rendering
inoperable the Natanz and Fordow uranium-enrichment installations and the Arak
heavy-water production facility and reactor would be priorities. So, too, would
be the little-noticed but critical uranium-conversion facility at Isfahan. An
attack need not destroy all of Iran’s nuclear infrastructure, but by breaking
key links in the nuclear-fuel cycle, it could set back its program by three to
five years. The United States 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.
Mr.
Obama’s fascination with an Iranian nuclear deal always had an air of
unreality. But by ignoring the strategic implications of such diplomacy, these
talks have triggered a potential wave of nuclear programs. The president’s
biggest legacy could be a thoroughly nuclear-weaponized Middle East.
John R. Bolton, a scholar at the
American Enterprise Institute, was the United States ambassador to the United Nations from August 2005 to December
2006.
