U.S. May Accept Nuclear Iran

The Financial Times reported April 4 that U.S. officials are considering accepting Iran's pursuit of uranium enrichment. The paper says that a policy review ordered by President Obama includes discussion about the possibility that the United States will be forced to concede to Iran's insistence on its right to a nuclear program. We always suspected it would come to this, didn't we?

For years the international community has tried to persuade Iran to abandon its nuclear program with no success. As Mark Fitzpatrick of the International Institute for Strategic Studies put it, "There's a fundamental impasse between the western demand for no enrichment and the Iranian demand to continue enrichment. There's no obvious compromise between those two positions."

In 2009 we are in the same position we were in when international pressure on Iran first started in earnest in 2003. Six years of talking has led to nothing but six years of continued nuclear progress by Iran. But really, what choice do we really have? The United Nations Security Council will never authorize truly meaningful economic sanctions against Iran as long as Russia and China insist on putting national financial interests before the effort to stop Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. Unilateral sanctions efforts by the United States and the European Union haven't had any appreciable effect, and thus far there doesn't appear to be any substantive support for cutting off Iran's gasoline imports, a move that would have a crippling effect on Iran's economy.

A military strike by the United States isn't a viable option. The potential consequences in the region far outweigh any potential benefits, given the difficulties involved in attacking dispersed nuclear facilities protected by advanced surface to air defense systems and the likely retaliatory strikes conducted through proxies like Hezbollah and various Iraqi militias. Even the Israelis are unlikely to undertake such an effort, despite increasingly bellicose rhetoric from Israeli officials and warnings of a potential Israeli strike by U.S. Central Command head General David Petraeus.

There appears to be very little that the United States and its allies are willing or able to do stop Iran's nuclear program. According to the Times, asked last month if the Obama administration was considering a compromise position allowing Iran to have a limited uranium enrichment capability but not nuclear weapons, State Department spokesman Robert Wood said, "I don't know...Let's let the review be completed and then we can spell out our policies."

And there we have the outlines of the way ahead with respect to Iran. Unable or unwilling to act, the international community and the United States are preparing to resign themselves to the reality of an Iran armed with a uranium enrichment capability. But having the capability to produce nuclear weapons and actually producing nuclear weapons that can be delivered to a target are two entirely different matters. If attainment of a uranium enrichment capability cannot be prevented, the task will then become one of preventing Iran from using that capability for the purpose of attaining nuclear weapons.

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/3028ceae-20b1-11de-b930-00144feabdc0.html