WarSclerotic

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Iran might grow less willing to negotiate over its disputed atomic activities following air attacks by Western powers on the military of Libyan dictator Muammar Qadhafi, Reuters last week quoted experts as saying (see GSN, March 23).

Under a program to relinquish its WMD activities, Qadhafi’s government in early 2004 reportedly turned over nuclear-weapon equipment that included a largely complete bomb design and 4,000 uranium enrichment centrifuges capable of generating fissile material (see GSN, March 1).

Iran, though, has steadfastly pressed ahead in its nuclear program, despite Western concerns that some of its atomic activities could support weapons development. Tehran has maintained its atomic intentions are strictly peaceful.

Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei last week said the airstrikes proved Iran was correct in continuing its nuclear efforts. While Tripoli surrendered its atomic assets in exchange for paltry rewards, Tehran “not only did not retreat but … officials tried to increase nuclear facilities year after year,” Khamenei said.

“I suspect that this is playing into the hands of those who say that Iran has to have a nuclear deterrent because look at what happened to Qadhafi,” said Shannon Kile, a specialist with the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.

Former U.S. State Department nonproliferation analyst Mark Fitzpatrick said “the attack on Qadhafi’s forces will reinforce the Iranian distrust of the United States.”

“Ayatollah Khamenei already has long believed that if you give an inch to the United States, they will take a mile, that any concession on the nuclear front will only lead to demands on human rights and Israel and other issues,” Fitzpatrick said (Fredrik Dahl, Reuters, March 24).

Tehran would require “a little over two years to have a bomb,” Agence France-Presse quoted Fitzpatrick as saying. He said, though, that the Iranian government had yet to make a concrete determination to pursue that goal: “As long as they haven’t made that decision I think there is still time for diplomacy” (Agence France-Presse/Google News, March 25).

“Even without the operations in Libya the attitude in Iran has hardened over the last two to three years,” Reuters quoted Jane’s Information Group analyst David Hartwell as saying. Iranian conservatives would probably point to the strikes in Libya as an example of why “we simply can’t trust the West,” he said.

Tehran might assess that the West would have avoided taking military action in Libya if Qadhafi had retained key armaments, said Oliver Thraenert, an expert with the German Institute for International and Security Affairs. “You might argue that possessing a nuclear option means that you will not be confronted with an international intervention, whatever you might do in the future with any opposition within Iran,” Thraenert said.

Still, some Iranian leaders might suggest similar U.S. and European attacks could take place inside their country before it “gets its hand on a nuclear option. It is also possible,” the expert said.

“If it is an easy victory [for Western powers in Libya] it would enhance the position of those who want to negotiate with the West,” said Baqer Moin, a London-based Iran specialist (Dahl, Reuters).

Meanwhile, Israel’s prime minister on Thursday stressed the international threat posed by Iran as part of an effort to curb Russian dealings with Jerusalem’s antagonists, AFP reported.

Russia has constructed an nuclear power plant in Iran that is slated to enter operation in the near future (see GSN, March 2).

“There is a danger to Israel, Russia and the modern world that radical regimes, possibly radical Islamic regimes, will emerge that threaten us,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told Russian President Dmitry Medvedev in Moscow.

“One regime is already doing so. That is Iran, which threatens to torpedo all attempts at peace and to return us all to the 9th century,” he said.

“We have an interest in stopping this evil and promoting good,” Netanyahu added.

“If the Tehran regime manages to create nuclear weapons, it will never fall,” the Israeli leader said at a news conference. “If this happens, no one — neither you (Russia) nor anyone else — will be safe from threats, blackmail and attacks” (Gavin Rabinowitz, Agence France-Presse II/Google News, March 24).

Elsewhere, the Bush administration’s ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency in January 2009 said then-IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei was “likely to remain part of the problem” in addressing nuclear activities in Iran and Syria, the Associated Press reported.

ElBaradei said his agency would “go through the motions” of investigating potential illicit nuclear activities in the two countries, then-U.S. Ambassador Gregory Schulte noted in a leaked diplomatic cable obtained by the transparency group WikiLeaks.

The U.N. nuclear watchdog chief “seems poised to continue to place the onus on the U.S. and others to ‘solve’ the Iran and Syria issues,” Schulte said. ElBaradei left the U.N. nuclear watchdog in November 2009 and and later became prominent in the opposition movement that unseated Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak earlier this year (George Jahn, Associated Press/Washington Post, March 25).