Monday, May 14, 2007

Heads They Win, Tails We Lose

The Times is reporting that Iran has smoothed out the wrinkles in their centrifuge operation and is stepping up their uranium enrichment program. They're still a long way, and several major technical obstacles, away from nuclear weapons capacity. Specifically, they'll need to keep the centrifuges running long enough to enrich enough uranium for a bomb. Even then, they'd need to enrich it again before it would be weapons grade. And finally they'd need the capacity to assemble a small enough warhead for their missiles to carry.

Be that as it may, the logic of the American negotiating position, namely a freeze on enrichment in order to keep the Iranians from gaining the necessary technical capacity, is for all intents and purposes outdated. Mohammed ElBaradei, head of the IAEA, had this to say:

“Quite clearly, suspension is a requirement by the Security Council and I would hope the Iranians would listen to the world community,” he said. “But from a proliferation perspective, the fact of the matter is that one of the purposes of suspension — keeping them from getting the knowledge — has been overtaken by events. The focus now should be to stop them from going to industrial scale production, to allow us to do a full-court-press inspection and to be sure they remain inside the treaty.”

Unfortunately, the Bush administration has backed itself into a corner with its hardline posture of "not a single centrifuge spinning" as a pre-condition to further talks. Which means that, barring an "about face" of the N. Korean variety, any compromise now will be rejected as losing face.

On the other hand, the negotiating stalemate of the past few years is largely responsible for Iran's technical advances, and will continue to play into Tehran's hands as they amass more expertise, more capacity, and more enriched uranium.

Like Iraq, this will probably be a bullet the next President will have to bite in January 2009. By then, of course, the Iranian position will be even stronger.

Posted by Judah in:  Iran   

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