NYT Time to stop Iran

Politicus
Next Stage on Iran Could Hold Real Peril


By JOHN VINOCUR
Published: December 21, 2009

LONDON — A little less than a month ago, one of the officials developing the allies’ strategy to halt Iran’s drive to make a nuclear weapon described their governments’ discomfort about soon having to move beyond attempts to engage the mullahs.

The diplomat’s remarks, quoted in a European newspaper, hardly created a stir, perhaps because they reflect an obvious truth: months of outstretched Western hands have brought nothing in return from Tehran.

“Sometimes one might perhaps have to accept the answer’s no when the answer’s no,” the official said, according to the press account.

“But we don’t want to acknowledge that the answer’s no, because we are afraid of the consequences.”

That’s a hard-edged but reasonable judgment, because the consequences for the United States and its allies demand new levels of resolve that are not without danger.

The consequences also require a tone of confrontation involving tougher sanctions and, considering the sanctions’ high potential for failure, follow-up efforts to contain and deter Iran as it moves closer to a nuclear weapon.

That new approach might be widened over weeks and months to come to include more direct support for the opposition to the mullahs on Tehran’s streets, and open consideration (or private threats) of a military option.

Until now, compared with Afghanistan, these issues have been far from center-stage among the allies’ international security concerns.

But their discussion can’t be avoided when the West’s end-of-year deadline passes for Iran to have said yes to the International Atomic Energy Agency’s best offer: a proposal to have its low enriched uranium exported for enrichment in quantities that would limit, for a time, the Iranian capacity to make a bomb.

As an issue, Afghanistan is now politically circumscribed by new troop reinforcements and a fairly specific time frame for their success that leaves an evaluation until at least the end of 2010.

Concern over Iran, however, is in an accelerating mode without any positive endgame in sight.

Allied intelligence agencies are now weighing the authenticity of suspected Iranian documents, apparently dating from 2007, that describe a four-year plan to test a neutron initiator, a device that creates a nuclear bomb’s explosion.

The plan’s validation could represent conclusive proof that Iranian denials it is building nukes are false.