Revelations of new Iranian nuclear site mean Obama must now put military option back on the table
Today’s revelations that Iran has secretly built a second uranium enrichment plant have raised the stakes considerably in the West’s efforts to prevent the Islamist regime from going nuclear. President Obama said of the news that it was a “direct challenge” to Iran’s non-proliferation obligations.
But let us put all this in clearer perspective. We now have definitive proof that Iran has been engaged in a policy of outright deception both with Western powers and with the United Nations. Their dishonesty can only mean one thing: Iran, as its sharpest critics have always said, is running a nuclear weapons programme. There would be no need for deception if its ambitions were purely civilian.
Calls are now coming in from Europe and the United States for tougher measures. Obama and other western leaders are now giving Iran until December to comply or face a new round of sanctions. This is all very well. But it does not go far enough. Either Obama is serious about stopping Iran from going nuclear or he is not.
If he is serious, the time has surely now come to put the military option back on the table. Tehran has proved adept at exploiting empty rhetoric from Western powers because it is not convinced that, ultimately, it would ever be faced with the prospect of a military attack.
The hope that Moscow will join in attempts at tougher sanctions in return for the US administration’s decision to scrap missile defence plans for central and eastern Europe is just that: a hope. But there is no evidence from the previous decade of Vladimir Putin’s dominance of Russian politics that Moscow can be relied upon to deliver.
The petulant, anti-Western political elites who surround Putin view the consequences of a nuclear armed Iran as negative for the United States but neutral for Russia. In the zero sum game that they believe they are engaged in with the West, that effectively means that a nuclear Iran is seen as being in their interests.
Sanctions in any case, may not be enough. The only way to show Tehran that it must stop its nuclear programme and stop it now, is to back up the threat of sanctions with the threat of a military strike.
No one wants to go there. But no one wants a nuclear armed Iran either. We will soon know whether the Obama administration is prepared to will the means to its stated ends, or whether the stated ends are indeed empty rhetoric as Tehran currently calculates.
Robin Shepherd is Director, International Affairs at the Henry Jackson Society in London.
September 25th, 2009 at 10:05 pm
“Today’s revelations that Iran has secretly built a second uranium enrichment plant have raised the stakes considerably in the West’s efforts”
From what I understand (Radio 4’s PM news - hardly the best source), Western intelligence agencies had had strong suspicions about this plant for some time. The only reason the affair now has come to light is because Ahmadinejad discovered that Iran had been rumbled and decided to get in his shots first. If that is so then Obama has betrayed Israel in the worst possible way. Perhaps he really is The Manchurian Candidate, or maybe he is just unspeakably vile.
Given that he was already in the know, I suppose these revelations, or at least the knowledge that the suspicions had been supplanted by actual facts, explain the enormous confidence displayed by Netanyahu at the UN as well as his bravura and Churchillian rhetoric. “You see, we the despised Jews have been right all along,” he told the world,”an anti-Semitic madman is about to obtain nuclear weapons which he will use to kill us and then you.” I suppose he must have been feeling the same kind of satisfaction Churchill and his small band of friends, those Tory MPs who had supported him through thick and through thin, must have felt when his long days in the wilderness had come to an end and he entered the House of Commons as Prime Minister in May 1940 to give his “blood, toil, tears and sweat” speech. Is it not ironic that Benjamin Netanyahu too also heads a small nation that has been largely abandoned by a pusillanimous world and must face the threat of destruction by an evil regime alone? Is it Israel’s destiny, like Britain’s, to save not only herself but that very same cowardly world?
Incidentally, Churchill when he entered the chamber on that day in May 1940 was greeted by almost total silence from the Tory benches for they still saw him as a traitor to their cause. However, when Churchill left the chamber after the speech it was to great cheers from all sides of the House. On hearing this, Churchill turned to a colleague (either Richard Law or Leo Amery, I forget) and told him “That got the b******s, didn’t it?” Even if he didn’t actually articulate the sentiments, I hope that Netanyahu had similar feelings yesterday despite the absence of actual cheers on this occasion.
September 26th, 2009 at 11:39 pm
Wait for it, Im sure Barry will have a lovely speech to give Iran on this matter!
Mailman
September 27th, 2009 at 5:28 am
There are clear parallels with the Ribbentrop-Molotov agreement and Russia’s shortsightedness believing then, that it could contain the devil and have parts of Poland, with today’s dilly-dallying and inaction over Iran. Sadly few today have learned that bitter history lesson.