No one can say the warning signs weren’t everywhere.
That is, no one can say the entire international community wasn’t warned repeatedly that Iran was playing games and having its way with the P5+1, led by the United States, in the now twice-extended nuclear talks now scheduled to end this summer.
According to highly informed experts, despite all the international community’s efforts to prevent it, Iran will almost certainly, before long, be a breakout nuclear weapons state.
While the barbarity of ISIS in Syria and Iraq has grabbed recent headlines, Iran – a more dangerous threat to international peace and security, given its aggressive designs from Lebanon to Iraq to Yemen, its terrorist plots in Europe and Asia, and even in the Western Hemisphere (see Argentina) – continues to push ahead with its nuclear program.
A quick review: more than a decade ago, after Iran was repeatedly caught cheating on its obligations as a member of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), including developing secret centrifuge sites, the UN Security Council passed a series of six resolutions demanding that Iran stop enriching nuclear fuel or face sanctions. Insisting it had a “right” of enrichment under the treaty, which it doesn’t, Iran was subjected to Security Council-imposed sanctions.
Iran continued to defy the UN, its nuclear weapons inspectors, and both the United States and the European Union, which imposed even tougher economic sanctions against Tehran.
Only in November 2013, when these sanctions began to bite, did Iran agree to hold talks with the five permanent Security Council members plus Germany (hence the P5+1) to reach what was called the Geneva Interim Agreement. According to this plan, Iran would roll back its enrichment program in return for limited sanctions relief.
But instead of insisting, as the Security Council resolutions demanded, that Iran cease all enrichment activities, the P5+1 only required Iran to convert 20 per cent-enriched nuclear fuel to five per cent, but allowed it to continue to enrich fuel to this level – thus, in effect, accepting Iran’s “right to enrich” while trying (ineffectually, as it turned out) to persuade Iran to diminish its centrifuges from nearly 10,000 to 2,000. Iran insists it will limit only the efficiency, not the number, of its centrifuges – which can quickly be reversed.
The interim plan, begun in January 2014, was intended to lead to a comprehensive agreement by last July, but the deadline was extended first to November and then to June 30, 2015, with a framework agreement to be in place by March.
Almost no one expects this to happen. The options are a further extension or the American’s acceptance of a bad deal.
Iran is seen, foremost by Israel, as simply playing for time. Leveraging a loophole in the interim agreement that allows for research and development “practices,” Iran is reportedly hard at work on advanced centrifuges that can dramatically accelerate the enrichment of nuclear fuel to weapons-grade at a time of Iran’s choosing, thus giving it a quick “breakout” capacity to produce a nuclear bomb.
Since the interim agreement didn’t address Iran’s nuclear warhead research (made off-limits by Iran to IAEA inspectors) or its ballistic missile development, Tehran has managed to counter interference in its overall nuclear program. Limited sanctions relief is worth several hundred million dollars a month to Iran while it pushes ahead with a nuclear weapons program in which it repeatedly – and disingenuously – denies any interest.
Summing up where things stand, Emily Landau, Israel’s leading expert on arms control, recently wrote: “Negotiations so far show that Iran’s steadfast defiance in resisting any significant concessions with regard to its nuclear program has been met time and again with concessions by the P5+l.”
The “P5+1” might better be seen as a short-hand for the U.S. administration that is dedicated to nuclear talks with Iran while it also, in effect, counts on Tehran to fight ISIS in Iraq – yet a further dangerous development, especially for Israel.
