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Iran’s nukes in exchange for peace – Haaretz – Israel News

Iran’s nukes in exchange for peace
By Akiva Eldar
Tags: Iran nuclear program, Iran

One of the best-known sayings bandied about in this region is that “Israel will not be the first country to introduce nuclear weapons in the Middle East.” This has been the official position of successive Israeli governments. What is less known is that after a comprehensive, regional peace agreement is reached, Israel will support a regional decommissioning of nuclear weapons. Recently, President Shimon Peres personally confirmed to me that this was the policy he had presented to the world when he served as prime minister. He added that as far as he knows, this policy remains in effect to this day.

Let us assume that tomorrow Iran informs its American interlocutors that it will cooperate with the International Atomic Energy Agency, abide by all United Nations resolutions relating to nuclear weapons, and recognize Israel – but on two conditions: first, that Iran will receive assurances from the international community that it will immediately act to implement UN resolutions calling for the establishment of a Palestinian state in territories conquered in 1967, and a commitment to expedite the end of Israel’s occupation of the Golan Heights; secondly, that Israel be forced to open its reactor in Dimona to IAEA inspectors, to ensure that the country has developed nuclear energy solely for peaceful purposes rather than for producing dozens of atomic bombs, which foreign press reports say do, in fact, exist.

Is this a scenario for the distant future? Not necessarily. During a meeting among the foreign ministers of Muslim states that took place in Tehran in May 2003, Iran – then led by president Mohammad Khatami – voted in favor of the Arab League peace initiative introduced in March 2002. According to the initiative, which has since become part of the road map as well as UN Security Council Resolution 1515, the Arab League would offer Israel full, normalized relations in exchange for a total withdrawal from the territories.

Flynt Leverett, the senior director for Middle East affairs on the National Security Council during president George W. Bush’s first term in office, claims that on at least two occasions, Washington ignored conciliatory gestures from Tehran. In a lecture he gave in June 2006 before the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, Leverett recalled that in the spring of 2003 – a short time after the U.S. invasion of Iraq – the Swiss ambassador to Tehran relayed to the White House an Iranian offer which included three elements: an agreement to launch negotiations with the U.S. administration over the nuclear issue, to adopt the Arab League initiative, and to cease support of Palestinian terrorist organizations based outside of the territories. The Bush administration ignored the message.

According to an article written by Leverett at the time, this was not the first time that an Iranian offer was met with a cold shoulder. Following the attacks of September 11, 2001, he noted, Iran offered the Bush administration assistance in stopping the terrorism sowed by Al-Qaida and the Taliban. Bush preferred to adopt the “Axis of Evil” strategy. In a New York Times op-ed piece which he co-authored with his wife, Hillary Mann Leverett, Leverett warned U.S. President Barack Obama not to repeat the same mistakes as his predecessor vis-a-vis Iran.

Today Leverett, a research fellow who specializes in Iran at The New America Foundation, shares the view of many experts, who are doubtful of the chances that Russia and China will support more stringent sanctions against Iran. Given the fact that the “traditional” sanctions policy has not produced any tangible results, they warn that Obama will be faced with two unsavory options: coming to terms with an uninspected Iranian nuclear program that will demonstrate the powerlessness of the international community; or another war in the Middle East.

Leverett proposes a different approach: replacing the language of sanctions against Iran with an attempt to build new relations with it, based on shared interests. In the op-ed piece, he noted that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad declared recently in New York that cooperation with the United States on the nuclear issue is possible only within the context of a wider strategic understanding in the diplomatic, security-related and economic realms.

Is this a case of naivete? Perhaps. It is certainly possible that the ayatollah regime seeks to mislead the Americans in order to buy more time to complete its nuclear program. But what will we do if the Iranians surprise Obama with an offer to rid the Middle East of nuclear weapons and to help establish peace throughout the entire region? It is so convenient for us to remain tied to the policy of ambiguity on both issues. Netanyahu needs to prepare himself for the possibility that Iran will redeem its concessions vis-a-vis its nuclear program with Israeli concessions over the territories.

No relief in Geneva | Iran news | Jerusalem Post

DAVID HOROVITZ DAVID HOROVITZ
Oct 5, 2009 0:15 | Updated Oct 5, 2009 9:08
Analysis: No relief in Geneva
By DAVID HOROVITZ

In remarks to American Jewish leaders on Friday, Israel’s man in Washington, Michael Oren, gave a certain cautious welcome to the results of the previous day’s first direct Iranian-American diplomatic engagement on Iran’s nuclear program.

IAEA’s ElBaradei: Inspectors to visit Qom plant on October 25

Teheran’s readiness to open its Qom enrichment site to IAEA inspectors and its apparent willingness to have other countries process its enriched uranium for ostensible peaceful use, said the ambassador, could be considered “important and rather positive developments.”

It would be a mistake, however, to read any genuine sense of Israeli relief, much less pleasure, into that kind of polished diplomatic response. Oren’s comments merely reflect Israel’s decision to publicly endorse President Barack Obama’s attempt at diplomacy, even though there is utter certainty in Jerusalem that Iran is playing for time and will not be talked out of the bomb.

Oren spelled out, tellingly, that Israel was backing the effort at engagement on condition that the talks with Teheran “not be open-ended, that there would be an eye on the enrichment clock, which continues to tick.”

Indeed it does. And there can only be heightened concern in Jerusalem that the headlines from Geneva, hailing the apparent positive headway made at the engagement talks there, are obscuring this immensely troubling fact.

What happened in Geneva was that Iran grudgingly accepted inspection of a facility it had constructed in secret, and is now presumably rendering inoffensive ahead of those checks, and it agreed in theory to have its uranium enriched overseas – a concession it is now disputing and no great hardship anyway.

What didn’t happen in Geneva was anything that moved Iran any nearer to freezing enrichment – that is, to halting its serene path to nuclear weapons.

Indeed, Iran has been unprepared to so much as discuss halting those parts of its program that are slowly but surely bringing it to the status of a nuclear threshold nation.

The flawed nature of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty is that states can claim to be working within its framework and complying with its requirements while hauling themselves to the very brink of nuclear weapons capability – ready to “break out” to the bomb in a matter of months, if not weeks.

It has long been Israel’s conviction that this is the Iranians’ game plan: stay more or less within the parameters of the NPT until they have reached that threshold, and then, at the moment of their choosing, aided with progress made at various non-disclosed facilities, breach the treaty and go nuclear when it’s too late for anyone to stop them.

Israel never accepted the dramatic assertion in the 2007 US National Intelligence Estimate that Iran had halted its nuclear weapons program. Indeed, Jerusalem is convinced that by now, neither delivery systems nor weaponization constitute serious obstacles to an Iranian bomb.

That’s why, from Israel’s point of view, Iran must be denied sufficient quantities of sufficiently enriched uranium to make that final push for the bomb. The “break out” capacity must be prevented.

Curiously, Oren’s was a lone official Israeli voice responding to Geneva. The silence from Jerusalem was deafening.

And whatever the ostensible “important and positive” developments at the talks, the fact is that so long as Iran keeps those centrifuges spinning, the window on diplomacy, from Israel’s point of view, is closing by the day.

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Editorial / Commentary / Opinion

Kenneth R. Timmerman : Big, ominous win for Iran

Thursday’s meeting in Geneva between the great powers and Iran delivered a big win for Iran, whose President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad could go to bed that night once again truly believing “America can do nothing” – a phase his mentor, Islamic revolutionary leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, loved to repeat.

The buildup on our side of these talks was tremendous. Expectations ran high that Iran’s representative would simply grandstand and use the talks to sermonize the United States, that we would walk out, and “crippling sanctions” would begin.

But the Iranians played us masterfully. Instead of repeating Mr. Ahmadinejad’s mantra that the nuclear issue was “off the table” and Iran would be happy to discuss the terms of our surrender, his representative, Saeed Jalali, bought precious time for Iran to continue its clandestine nuclear activities.

Sen. Joe Lieberman, Connecticut independent, set the standard for what the talks should have produced in remarks to a conference on Capitol Hill at the very moment our negotiating team was getting snookered by the Iranians.

“If our engagement with Iran is to have credibility, the parties need to emerge from the meeting in Geneva today with a set of clear and credible benchmarks for mutual steps forward and a timetable for meeting them,” Mr. Lieberman said. “These benchmarks must include verifiable suspension of all enrichment activities, as repeatedly demanded by the U.N. Security Council, and full cooperation with the [International Atomic Energy Agency] to resolve all outstanding questions about Iran’s nuclear-related activities.”

None of that came out of Thursday’s meeting with the five permanent Security Council members plus Germany (P5+1). Instead, the Iranians changed the subject.

Iran remains in utter defiance of multiple Security Council resolutions that demand total suspension of uranium-enrichment activities.

Rather than discuss that issue – the core issue – the P5+1 allowed Mr. Jalali to sidetrack the discussions to make complex arrangements so Iran could gain access to enriched uranium. That’s right. Rather than talk about stopping Iran’s enrichment activities, the meeting enhanced Iran’s access to enriched uranium. No amount of White House spin can call that a “win” for the United States.

The last-minute “deal” with Iran about sending its declared supplies of low-enriched uranium (LEU) to Russia for further enrichment is a cute negotiating ploy that Mr. Ahmadinejad floated a few days ahead of the meeting. It is a side issue of no relevance to the core problem of Iran’s continued defiance of the Security Council and its refusal to come clean on its nuclear weapons research, which very well could include additional, undeclared supplies of LEU.

Mr. Ahmadinejad only needed one thing from the Geneva talks: to keep us talking. The longer he can delay hard deadlines and hard demands from the world powers, the more time he has to complete his nuclear designs and put in place new sources of refined petroleum should the U.S. Congress move forward legislation – stalled at White House request – to impose a ban on gasoline sales to Iran.

Mr. Obama was right to respond cautiously to the news from Geneva, saying that “talk is no substitute for action.” Yet, on the action side of the talks, Iran won hands-down.

Iran has been demanding that its case be handed back to the IAEA, not the Security Council. Why? Because it knows it can slow-roll the Vienna-based inspectors, as it has been doing for the past 17 years. (That’s right: since 1992, when the IAEA under blind Hans Blix first attempted to conduct something akin to a surprise inspection and failed miserably even to find the sites it wanted to inspect). The great powers granted Iran’s request and announced that IAEA inspectors would leave in two weeks for Iran to ask permission to visit the formerly secret uranium enrichment facility in Qom.

That inspection could stretch out a long time. Meanwhile, we have no confidence that Iran has not built additional underground enrichment plants or a warhead-design facility. We don’t even know for certain that Iran has not actually tested a low-yield nuclear device, as Assistant Secretary of State for Verification Paula A. DeSutter revealed in 2007 in written responses to questions from Sen. Jon Kyl, Arizona Republican. By digging a test cavity into the massive salt domes of its eastern desert and using venting and decoupling techniques, Iran could reduce the seismic signature of a nuclear test by 70 percent to 100 percent and thus escape detection, Ms. DeSutter said.

Brookings Institution scholar Kenneth M. Pollack, a self-styled “cheerleader” of Mr. Obama’s engagement policy, now says engagement is a “pipedream” and that the administration must consider new policies for the long-term “containment” of Iran.

In clear terms, that means learning to live with a nuclear-armed Iran. Not only is this a dangerous admission of U.S. failure and U.S. weakness, but it also essentially shifts the entire burden of preventing a nuclear Iran onto Israel.

As Winston Churchill said after Neville Chamberlain returned from negotiating with Adolf Hitler in Munich, “You were given the choice between war and dishonor. You chose dishonor, and you will have war.”