So Iran has come forward to admit it has been working away on a
second, heretofore undisclosed, nuclear enrichment plant. The effect
of that announcement, according to the Washington Post, was an immediate refocus of Obama administration foreign policy as regards Iran.
The disclosure of a second uranium enrichment site in Iran has led the
Obama administration to shift the emphasis in its dealings with the
Islamic republic — away from engagement and toward building an
international consensus for sterner action against Tehran.
The effort to directly engage Iran was a hallmark of the early months
of the administration, with President Obama offering a televised
greeting in honor of the Persian New Year and sending private letters
to the country's supreme leader. But the gestures went largely
unreciprocated.
It's time to be stern, even though stern wasn't such a good thing in
the not too distant past. It's a past Barack Obama can't stop himself
from bringing up nearly every time he opens his mouth, and I wonder if
that will ever get to be even mildly embarrassing for him. Hardly a day
goes by that we are not reminded that our Messiah inherited a mess.
Obama's election came at the conclusion of a campaign in which he
promised a reversal of nearly every George W. Bush policy. With regard
to Iran, Obama's prescription could very well have been lifted
straight from a 2008 Foreign Affairs article by Vali Nasr and Ray Takeyh entitled, The Costs of Containing Iran: Washington's Misguided New Middle East Policy.
Iran does present serious problems for the United
States. Its quest for a nuclear capability, its mischievous
interventions in Iraq, and its strident opposition to the
Israeli-Palestinian peace process constitute a formidable list of
grievances. But the bigger issue is the Bush administration's
fundamental belief that Iran cannot be a constructive actor in a stable
Middle East and that its unsavory behavior cannot be changed through
creative diplomacy.
Therein lay the conventional wisdom. The bigger issue was the Bush administration. With creative diplomacy and engagement Barack Obama would surely succeed where George Bush had utterly failed. According to conventional wisdom, anyway.
Shortly before taking
the oath of office, then president-elect Obama explained to George Stephanopoulos his plan to ditch Bush administration policy and apply his diplomatic intensity directly upon Iran.
Speaking on the ABC News program “This Week,” Mr. Obama
reiterated that he wanted to work directly with Iran — a country whose
president has called for Israel’s destruction — to improve relations
and halt a nuclear program that Tehran describes as peaceful, but that
the West believes is not.
“We are going to have to take a new approach,” he told the program’s
host, George Stephanopoulos. “My belief is that engagement is the place
to start.”
Mr. Obama said he wanted to adopt “a new emphasis on respect and a
new willingness on being willing to talk” to the Iranians, while making
it clear “that we also have certain expectations.”
The remarks suggested a clear departure from the often pointed and
deprecatory speech that has prevailed between Iran’s president, Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad, and President Bush.
His plan of action had the added benefit of restoring America's
reputation. A twofer. As Politico's Anderson reported in November,
2008, progressives were with Obama one hundred percent. He brought hope and change they could believe in.
Still, in the Middle East particularly, "we have a lot to do to repair
the U.S.'s reputation, credibility and effectiveness," said Dennis
Ross, who was the top Middle East peace negotiator under President
Clinton and is sometimes mentioned as a possible Obama Cabinet member.
"The fact is, being someone not named Bush will help," Ross said, "but
the next president has to realize what he's going to face and fashion a
policy that focuses on things that can be done," such as "being a
leader on climate change. Being on the right side of issues with a
broader imperative will affect American's image."
Although much goodwill has evaporated, these analysts said, Obama will
find that when he goes to the well, there's still some left.
Progressives everywhere exhaled. With George W. Bush was out of the White House, America could expect more allied support in its efforts to prevent Iran from getting nuclear weapons. Obama's skillful diplomacy would tap that well of good will, and a blessed gusher of peace would shower down.
Or not. News of Iran's second uranium enrichment plant has taken the air right out of Obama's diplomatic initiative. Simon Tisdale of the Guardian could hardly be more incensed at the Iranians.
Like riverboat gamblers casting loaded dice, Iran's
leaders have played a double game of deceit, duplicity and Persian
blind man's bluff in on-off talks with western countries since the
existence of suspect nuclear facilities was first exposed. Now it seems
the Iranian regime has been caught red-handed, and clean out of trumps,
by the forced disclosure that it is building, if not already operating,
a second, secret uranium processing plant.
The revelation will bring a triumphal roar of "told you so!" from Bush
era neoconservatives in the US to hawkish rightwingers in Israel. The
likes of former vice-president Dick Cheney and UN envoy John Bolton,
and the current Israeli leader, Binyamin Netanyahu, have long insisted
that Tehran's word could not be trusted.
Yet the argument about who was right and who was wrong about Iran is hardly important at this juncture.
He was aghast. Iranian theocrats turned out to be untrustworthy. Who could possibly have
foreseen it? Other than Bush and the neoconservatives, I mean. A lucky guess that turned out right.
Or maybe it wasn't so lucky. Yesterday Thomas Joscelyn posed some questions about that 2007 National Intelligence Estimate. You know. The one that said Iran had shut down its nuclear weapons program in 2003? That one?
In November of 2007, the U.S. Intelligence Community (IC) drafted a
National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran’s nuclear program. In its
publicly released “Key Judgments,”
the IC concluded: “We judge with high confidence that in fall 2003,
Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program.” A footnote at the end of
that sentence made it clear just what the IC thought had been “halted”
(emphasis added):
For the purposes of this Estimate, by “nuclear weapons program” we
mean Iran’s nuclear weapon design and weaponization work and covert uranium conversion-related and uranium enrichment-related work; we do not mean Iran’s declared civil work related to uranium conversion and enrichment.
As many noted at the time, the language and logic of the NIE were
nonsensical. There were transparent flaws in its analysis, including
the arbitrary decision to set aside concerns over Iran’s overt uranium
enrichment and ballistic missile development efforts –- both of which
continued apace.
Now, with the Obama administration’s revelation
this morning that Iran has secretly built a covert uranium enrichment
facility near the city of Qom, we know just how flat wrong –- and
potentially willfully misleading –- that 2007 NIE was.
Though the Iranians were supposed to have shut down their weapons program back in 2003, the New York Times reported yesterday that the new uranium enrichment plant, which had been under construction and under surveillance for years, was better suited for making bombs than for commercial use.
The plant’s size, secrecy and location on a Revolutionary Guards base
all point to a covert plant for making weapon fuel, analysts said
Friday. They called it too small for any commercial use, but a good
size for the much easier task of making bomb fuel.
Up to now progressives have
been giddy over the perceived repudiation of our Texas cowboy's
go-it-alone policies. Cooperation and diplomacy have become the new watch
words. But we go back to the Washington Post to ponder, how is that creative diplomacy going to work out now?
Now the question is whether Russia — which has long had close ties
with Iran — will be prepared to take even tougher action if Tehran
resists full disclosure, such as canceling fuel shipments to the
Bushehr reactor, which Moscow constructed.
"So much depends on the Russians," said George Perkovich, vice
president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International
Peace. He noted that sanctions to date have been used in an attempt to
change Iran's behavior, without much success. Now, tougher sanctions
may need to be used as punishment.
China probably remains the most difficult obstacle to broad new
international sanctions. The Chinese reaction on Friday was much weaker
than Kremlin's.
"We hope that the IAEA will deal with the matter according to its
terms of reference and its mandate," Ma Zhaoxu, a spokesman for the
Chinese Foreign Ministry, said in a brief statement. "It is also our
hope that Iran will cooperate with the IAEA on this matter."
Another official, He Yafei, the vice foreign minister, stressed the
need for negotiations. "You talk about punishment, and personally I
don't like the word 'punishment,' and I think all issues can only be
solved through dialogue and negotiation," he told reporters.
So we're
hoping the Russians will favor tough sanctions, and the Chinese are hoping the Iranians will cooperate, and by stressing that issues can only be solved through dialogue and negotiation, the Chinese vice foreign minister sounds a lot like Obama did last month, before his apparent epiphany.
But the big question remains. Will American national security interests ever become as important to Barack Obama as they were to George W. Bush? Or will the preferences of
the Russians, or the Chinese, or any other leftist regime always weigh into his decisions?
Meanwhile the Iranians have given no sign that they intend to slow the uranium production, nor do they seem care to if they never sit face to face with Obama. So, how is that creative diplomacy supposed to work now?
Libertarian Leanings 