Previous posts this week have drawn attention to the big issue hanging over the Nuclear Nonproliferation review conference this week in New York–whether China will support stronger sanctions against Iran—and to China’s indebtedness to all those who have nonproliferation at heart. But why is it important to slow Iran’s nuclear program? Can sanctions actually work?
The truth is, when a consensus forms in a country that the nation is a great power, deserves to be treated as such, and that nuclear weapons are the ticket to the table, history shows it ultimately will get its way. This was the story in both England and France, where, as Margaret Gowing and Lawrence Scheinman have shown, socialists and labor pushed nuclear programs forward just as aggressively as their conservative rivals.
One might dream that if somehow the current regime in Iran were to be overthrown and the opposition were to take power, then the country’s nuclear program will be considered. But there’s little basis for that. Let’s not forget that it was Mir Hossein Moussavi, the opposition candidate in last year’s election, who made the 1987 deal with Pakistan’s A.Q. Khan resulting in Iran’s purchase of Khan’s purloined uranium enrichment technology (and probably China’s atom bomb technology as well).
To be sure, what appeared to be very well-informed news analyses suggested last year that Moussavi was just a cypher, that the person really pulling the strings in the Iranian opposition was Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani. But that doesn’t give much grounds for hope.
In a Friday sermon delivered on Dec. 18, 2002, Rafsanjani said: “If one day . . . the world is Islam is mutually equipped with the kind of weapons which Israel presently possesses, the world’s arrogant [colonialist] strategy will then come to a dead end, because the use of an atomic bomb on Israel won’t leave anything; however, in the world of Islam [use of a bomb] will just cause harm, and this scenario is not far-fetched.”
Regrettably, it’s not far-fetched, or at least not entirely. This is why Israelis are suffering paroxysms of anxiety (as a quick Internet search on the words “Israel” and “existential” will immediately confirm).
This week, the idea of making the Middle East a nuclear-free zone resurfaced, and this indeed was the only really newsworthy development at the nonproliferation review conference. Especially noteworthy was the support given the idea by the five Ur-members of the “nuclear club”–that is to say, the World War II victor powers–the United States, Russia, Britain, France, and China. Ellen Tauscher, the U.S. under secretary of state for arms control, cautioned that the proposal almost certainly could gain traction only in the context of a comprehensive Middle East peace settlement.
Israel lost no time rejecting the idea. But it was Israel itself that first put forth the idea, during the year preceding its raid on Iraq’s Osirak reactor. At that time, presumably, it was an insincere offer, made to provide diplomatic cover for the raid. But isn’t it time now for Israel to get sincere at last?
Israelis know in their guts that they face an existential threat, and they are slowly facing up to the blunt fact that they have no reasonable military means of heading it off. If Israel wishes to avoid a future in which it will confront two or more Islamic nations that are equipped with nuclear weapons, it is going to have to start getting used to the idea of relinquishing its own.
Even that–a denuclearized Israel in the context of a comprehensive Middle East peace settlement–might not be enough to make Iran change its stubborn course. It’s admittedly a long shot, but it may be the only shot. Tauscher is to be applauded for putting the United States four-square behind the idea, and if Egypt can find a constructive way of convening a general conference next year to promote Middle East nuclear-free zone, all power to it.
It will take Israelis a good deal of time to start getting used to the idea, and that’s why it’s crucial to slow down Iran–to give Israelis the time they need.
