WarSclerotic

A Bomb that scares us all.

The outcome of Friday’s vote on the resolution aimed at censuring Iran for persisting with its nuclear weaponisation programme at the meeting of the 35-nation International Atomic Energy Agency Governing Board was as much a foregone conclusion as the final text of the resolution itself. Iran has got away, yet again, despite the November 8 report of IAEA Director-General Yukiya Amano which has served to confirm what has been known all along: That Tehran is well on its way to acquiring a nuclear bomb.

With Russia and China firmly refusing to back any initiative by the US to impose harsher punitive sanctions on Iran by referring the issue to the UN Security Council, it couldn’t have been any other way at Vienna. While Russian and Chinese intransigence was only to be expected, the insistence of France and Germany to toe a soft line did come as a surprise. Others chose to sit on the fence.

On its part, Iran continues to deny that it is pursuing a military nuclear programme and has described Mr Amano’s report as “fabricated”. It has also questioned the credibility of intelligence inputs that have been cited or mentioned in the report. Mr Amano has been denounced as a ‘stooge’ of the West — that is understandable; after all, unlike his predecessor Mohammed El Baradei who was loath to expose Iran’s intentions, he has been straight and upfront with his assessment. But there’s nothing new about Iran’s denial and denunciation of the West, either.

Denials and denunciations, however, do not compensate for Iran’s refusal to allow onsite inspections of its uranium re-processing facilities. Nor can Iran really thumb its nose at the world and say it cares tuppence for international opinion. For Iran is a signatory to the NPT and is obliged to honour the commitments contained in that treaty. If Iran ultimately manages to get away with violating those commitments then the very sanctity of international treaties and legitimacy of multilateral agreements would lie in tatters. Anarchy and worse would come to replace whatever remains of global order with rogue regimes ruling the roast.

Yet, it is a reflection of our times that, if truth be told, nothing can be done to stop Iran from acquiring a nuclear arsenal whose consequences could prove to be cataclysmic if we are to take President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s threats seriously, especially his repeated call to “wipe Israel off the map of the world”. No less worrisome is the chain reaction that will be triggered by Iran conducting a nuclear test by way of announcing that it now has a weapon of mass destruction. It is anybody’s guess as to when that could happen.

Iran’s mocking defiance is also a telling comment on the efficacy, if not relevance, of the UN and its toothless watchdog agencies like the IAEA. Focussed as its efforts are to be seen to be fashionably politically correct (recall this year’s General Assembly hoopla over Abu Mazen seeking full Palestinian membership of the august body now reduced to a talking shop) it has long lost sight of its Charter.

Every country which matters, the US included, would be lying if it were to say that Mr Amano’s report has come as a startling revelation. As Brigadier-General Shalom Harari, who has served in the intelligence branch of the Israeli Defence Force and is currently associated with the International Institute for Counter-Terrorism at Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya, recently told me, “The Iranians were cheating all this while and the world knew of it.” The world, of course, did nothing about it. Instead, Israel was — and continues to be — accused of being ‘needlessly’ alarmist. “They have the missiles. Soon they will have the bomb,” Brig Gen Harari added ruefully.

Israel has the most to fear if Iran does come to possess a nuclear arsenal. Before the Arab Spring unsettled the Arab world and upset its hierarchical power structure, entrenched Sunni Arab regimes served as obstacles in Shia Iran’s journey in search for supremacy in West Asia or the extended Middle East. That situation no longer obtains. With radical Islamism filling the vacuum created by the collapse of many of the entrenched regimes, support for Iranian adventurism and strident anti-Americanism is no longer defined by sectarian allegiances. The Shia-Sunni divide may not have been erased entirely, but it is no longer as sharp as it was till recently.

Tehran’s proxies now wield considerable influence in the region. There’s Hizbullah which is virtually in charge of Lebanon. There’s Hamas which has declared that its hudna with Israel is over. And there’s President Bashar Al-Assad who, despite battling a rebellion at home, remains firmly in power. The Islamists aligned with the Muslim Brotherhood who now command sizeable support in Egypt, the centre of Arab politics and powerplay so long as President Hosni Mubarak was in office, and their fellow Ikhwan radicals in Jordan would be happy to collaborate with Iran. Iraq after Saddam Hussein is already under pro-Iran Shia domination. Elsewhere, for instance in Bahrain, Shia insurgency, fuelled by Iran, is giving Sunni regimes sleepless nights. In such a situation, Israel cannot but worry about the future and its very existence.

In 1981 Israel ignored world opinion and bombed Iraq’s nuclear facility, called Osirak and built with the assistance of France, out of existence. On that occasion France had insisted that its Osiris class nuclear reactor was not being used for producing weapon-grade plutonium. That was codswallop. Operation Opera was an unqualified success and Iraq’s dreams of building a nuclear bomb were shattered. In 2007, there was sufficient evidence that Syria was setting up a plutonium-producing facility with a North Korea-designed reactor at Deir al-Zor. Israeli planes bombed that facility to rubble although Jerusalem never admitted to its role in that raid.

Today, Israel has to think twice, if not more, before it undertakes another Operation Opera. The dynamics of the region have changed radically and any raid on Iran would fetch immediate retaliatory attacks by Tehran’s proxies. “Bombing Iran’s nuclear facility is the last option,” says Brig Gen Harari, “The world has to stop it (Iran getting the Bomb) through economic, diplomatic and international pressure… Iran has to be isolated.” And what if it cannot be stopped? “We must at least try to delay it. One assessment is that Iran will have a nuclear bomb by 2014. Can back channel diplomacy be used to make it go slow?”

That, in a sense, shows how pathetically helpless we all are — an Iranian Bomb is not good news for India either — in the changed circumstances ushered by the much-hailed but little understood Arab Spring. We can’t stop the Ayatollahs from getting hold of nukes. So we try to delay Iran going nuclear. That way lies the path to unmitigated disaster.

This entry was posted on November 18, 2011 at 9:18 PM and is filed under Uncategorized. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site.