Iran nuclear threat now clear
Iran nuclear threat now clear – The West Australian.
Iran’s cover is blown. It is irrefutably on the path to developing a nuclear weapon.
The International Atomic Energy Agency’s report last week on Tehran’s progress blew away any pretence that its nuclear developments were purely peaceful.
So what happens next?
The prospects of a nuclear-armed Iran terrify its neighbours, several of whom say they too would consider embarking on a nuclear weapons program if Iran were to get the Bomb.
Particularly worried is – albeit nuclear-armed – Israel, which Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad says should be wiped off the map.
Europe and the US, too, would be in reach of nuclear-capable missiles the Iranians are developing.
The US is trying to gather support for tougher sanctions but fears that Russia and China would block them in the United Nations Security Council.
The more dramatic option is that Israel will send in its bombers. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has reportedly been urging his Cabinet to consider military action, and his country has a track record in this kind of operation.
In 1981 its jets destroyed Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor, which Israel said was part of a weapons program. And in 2007 Israeli planes took out a secret nuclear reactor under construction in the remote Deir ez-Zor region of Syria.
But the Iranians have learnt well from others’ experience and are believed to have buried key nuclear installations deep underground in bomb-proof shelters.
Distance too is against a military strike. Iran is a big country and its nuclear facilities are spread out.
Israeli jets would need to fly 900km across Jordan and Iraq just to get to the Iranian border, and Iraq would not permit the overflights. Indeed, Israel is ringed by so many hostile powers that sending bombers the long way round to attack Iran from the north or the south would be hard to organise.
David Horovitz, an Israeli author, commentator and former editor-in-chief of the Jerusalem Post, does not believe that Israel is planning military action.
But he says something must be happening to make the previously reclusive former Mossad chief Meir Dagan denounce the idea.
Horovitz, in Perth last week, believes Israel’s response is likely to be more creative and cites Defence Minister Ehud Barak’s background as a commando.
Among Mr Barak’s exploits was a covert mission in 1973 in which he dressed as a woman to assassinate members of the Palestine Liberation Organisation in Beirut.
He helped to plan the 1976 Israeli commando raid which freed the hostages on an Air France flight in Entebbe, Uganda. Horovitz points also to the Stuxnet virus which reportedly infected Iranian computers.
The virus is said to have caused delicate centrifuges enriching uranium to weapons grade to spin wildly out of control and smash to pieces.
Israel did not claim responsibility for this but, pointedly, did not deny it.
This year and last there were a series of shootings of Iranian scientists said to have been involved in the nuclear-weapons program.
Iran blamed Israel.
Operations such as these depend on intelligence penetration of Iran to an extent that must make the ruling mullahs nervous.
They avoid the serious risks of a military strike with its many unknowns, along with the dangers of retaliation and the fear that bombings would unite an unhappy Iranian population around the currently unpopular leadership.
Iran has long harboured ambitions to harness nuclear energy for the days when the oil runs out.
Its nuclear-power program was tootling along nicely when the pro-western shah was in power. Even then, the CIA foresaw a day when the shah might want a nuclear weapon.
Strange as it may seem, the Islamic revolutionaries who overthrew the shah in 1979 were hostile to nuclear energy and scrapped elements of the program.
Then came the seizure of the US Embassy and the taking hostage of its staff. That was enough for the Americans to cut off weapons and parts supplies for the tanks and jets they had sold to the Shah.
When the Iraq-Iran war erupted in 1980 the Iranians found their defences severely compromised by the official US policy of not selling munitions or spare parts.
Half a million lives were lost in total in the eight-year war. It was then, Western analysts believe, that a decision was made that Iran would never again have to depend on foreign weapons for its survival.
The nuclear weapons program was on.
This is not to argue that a nuclear weapon in Iran’s hands would be strictly defensive. But it helps explain why joining the nuclear-weapons club is popular among Iranians.
A poll last year found 71 per cent in favour. If tougher sanctions don’t happen and a military attack is too risky, the success of the West’s response may come down to creativity.
Alan Kirk is The West Australian’s Foreign Editor
Explore posts in the same categories: Uncategorized
WarSclerotic 
Leave a comment