Confronting Iran on the nuclear issue

What happened

The U.S. and five other major powers this week threatened to impose tough new sanctions against Iran unless it granted “immediate and unfettered” access to its nuclear facilities. In talks with Iranian officials in Geneva, convening as The Week went to press, the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council and Germany insisted that nuclear inspectors be admitted to a newly revealed uranium-enrichment plant, hidden inside a mountain near the Iranian holy city of Qum. The secret facility, said President Obama, “raised grave doubts” about Iranian claims to be pursuing only peaceful nuclear power. “They are going to have to come clean and they are going to have to make a choice,” he said. Israeli officials said they were willing to wait for the result of negotiations, but reserved the right to take military action to prevent Iran from building a nuclear bomb, which they view as a direct threat to Israel’s existence.

Iran remained defiant, test-firing a new short-range missile that could strike Israel and downplaying the revelation of the Qum facility. The plant, said President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, was “a very ordinary facility in the beginning stages,” and had been declared to the International Atomic Energy Agency a few days before Obama publicly revealed its existence. Ahmadinejad described the Geneva talks as an “exceptional opportunity” for the U.S. and its allies to “reform their way of interacting with other governments and return to law, justice, and respect.”

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What the editorials said

This long, frustrating game of nuclear chess has entered its “dangerous endgame,” said USA Today. The Iranians are likely planning to use this week’s talks as yet another opportunity for “ducking, weaving, and stalling for time.” But the startling revelations about the Qum facility have hardened the resolve of the international community, with even the Russians now acknowledging that a new and tougher round of sanctions may be “inevitable.”

“Even among wacko, dictatorial regimes,” Iran’s tyrants are difficult to read, said the Detroit Free Press. It still isn’t even clear that they are genuinely bent on acquiring nuclear weapons, rather than simply “modernizing a decrepit power grid.” Neither new sanctions nor airstrikes would answer that question—though they would have the effect of unifying the Iranian people behind their leaders. Ultimately, the only real way of neutralizing Iran’s nuclear threat is “by a change in its governance.”

What the columnists said

“Talk is not enough,” said Michael Rubin in the New York Daily News. With only sanctions to fear, the Iranians will lie and stall their way through these discussions, as they have so many times in the past, buying time as they continue to develop their weapons of mass destruction. The talks, in short, will fail, making military conflict that much more likely and hammering a final “nail in the coffin of the Obama doctrine.” Some doctrine, said Stephen Hayes in The Weekly Standard. Obama’s foreign policy might be summed up as “speak timidly and don’t carry a stick.” It hasn’t worked so far, and it won’t work now.

All this apocalyptic talk is grimly familiar, said Glenn Greenwald in Salon.com. As astounding as it sounds, we actually may be about to launch another war based on sketchy intelligence reports and speculation about weapons a nation might acquire at some point. The Iranians claim they built the newly revealed enrichment plant only out of fear that Israeli airstrikes might set back their pursuit of peaceful nuclear power. Maybe they’re lying, maybe they’re not. But, this time, why don’t we wait to find out what the truth is before setting off on another military misadventure?

There’s a better option than either war or sanctions, said Anne Applebaum in Slate.com. The Iranian people remain restive and divided in the wake of Ahmadinejad’s dubious “victory” in the June elections. Obama could make it clear that unless Iran abandons its pursuit of nuclear weapons, he will launch a “sustained and well-funded human-rights campaign” and start actively supporting dissidents. Iran’s mullahs are fanatics, and they really don’t fear airstrikes, sanctions, or even a full economic blockade. What keeps these tyrants up at night is the fear of their own people. “We certainly have nothing to lose by trying.”