Iranian Mullahs: Can We Talk? (Part 1)

The Iranian Mullahs want to talk. So does the United States. Tehran wants to negotiate because the economic sanctions are hurting. The US wants to negotiate because it wants to be sure Iran is not building nuclear weapons. But can such talks work? The historical record is not promising.

The US administration has apparently decided we will deal with the current regime in Tehran, however despicable we find it. So we have to ask ourselves: if Iran agrees to abide by the rules of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, the NPT, and pursue nuclear energy production without any side-show to produce nuclear weapons grade fuel, do we have sufficient confidence that any agreement they sign will do the job?

Here the evidence is murky at best. David Kay, one of America’s top specialists in assessing whether a country does or does not have an illicit nuclear weapons program masquerading as a nuclear energy effort, say the rules laid down by the United Nation’s International Atomic Energy Administration, the IAEA in Vienna, Austria, will not be sufficient to curtail Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

David Kay writes on July 17^th in the Wall Street Journal:

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) would need access to all of the infrastructure that could possibly aid in fashioning a nuclear weapon and potential delivery systems. They also would need a full and complete declaration of all Tehran’s nuclear components, all of its uranium enrichment, all of its plutonium-related activities, and all missile testing, production and deployment sites.

“This is just not plausible when inspectors confront a hostile regime. Tehran has kept hidden its nuclear activities and support networks, domestic and foreign. It has refused repeated IAEA requests for interviews with the scientists and engineers responsible for large areas of its secret atomic work, and it has refused to disclose the details of its involvement with North Korea and with Pakistan’s A.Q. Khan nuclear smuggling network.”

And then David Kay reminds us of the history of the IAEA with regard to Iraq. And no, it was not the brief Iraqi inspections in late 2002 and early 2003 but nearly two decades earlier. Here again, Kay’s warning is deadly:

Individual IAEA inspectors in the 1980s raised serious questions about the extent and direction of Iraq’s nuclear program. These suspicions were buried, and the inspectors moved to other jobs…Even after the 1991 Gulf War, the IAEA leadership at first rejected inspection findings that showed massive violations by Iraq.

But the problem with the IAEA leadership, particular the “blind” Hans Blix, was not limited to Iraq. As Kay again reminds us: “beginning in the early 1990s, the IAEA leadership gave Iran a public ‘clean bill of health’ on living up to its safeguard obligations as a signatory of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.”

In the absence of military pressure on the regime in Iran, will sanctions do the trick? In short, will the Mullahs and the IRGC, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, and the Supreme Leader, choose what I term “the Saddam option” or “the Gaddafi option”? Faced with the prospects of US military action, Saddam chose to fight. Muammar Abu Minyar al-Gaddafi chose to give it up, especially on seeing Saddam emerge from his spider hole in the custody of American’s  finest fighting men and women. Iran may decide the US will not use any military force and thus its diplomatic bob and weave can remain intact. On the other hand, will the US and its allies really enforce the sanctions we have at hand to actually change the regime in Tehran?

That then is our dilemma. Though we rhetorically see Iran as a state sponsor of terror, and even officially say so in our annual State Department reports on the same subject, our actions to date, and from every administration since 1979, have revealed a general  unwillingness to face an ugly reality. Iran is supporting terrorist attacks on our soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. They are the prime sponsors of Hamas and Hezbollah, serving as both the exchequer and armory for both. They blew up the Pam Am flight over Lockerbie and our Marine barracks in Beirut. They are an outlaw regime. They are at war with Lebanon, Israel, and the United States and its allies. But we have generally chosen to deal with them anyway, despite their record.