Europe's Iran Moment

The Wall Street Journal:

The Bush administration has justified its softly-softly approach to the Iranian nuclear program on grounds it has firm commitments from the Europeans to get tough should diplomacy fail. Those promises are about to be put to the test now that Iran has informed the International Atomic Energy Agency of its intention to resume uranium enrichment. READ MORE

The suspension agreement was inked last November after what turns out to have been nearly 20 years of Iranian deception vis-a-vis the IAEA. And it can be argued that diplomacy has at least bought time, assuming -- and it's a big assumption given how many times Iran has already been caught lying to inspectors -- that there has been no clandestine program going on in the interim. But the desire of the EU-3 (Britain, France and Germany) to find a negotiated solution seems only to have encouraged Iranian intransigence on the central issue, which is its repeatedly claimed "right" under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty to enrich uranium for what it says is a civilian power program.

The existence of any such right is debatable, given that the NPT forbids using a civilian nuclear program as cover for a military one. But to the extent Iran is able to plausibly make this claim, it only highlights the problematic moral equivalence at the heart of the U.N. system, of which the IAEA and NPT are a part. Put simply, Iran is not a democratic country. And it is patently wrong to treat the ruling mullahs as if they were likely to observe international law.

This should be all the more clear after June's sham presidential elections, which were rigged to the extent that Hashemi Rafsanjani -- who has said that Iran should have the bomb so it can destroy Israel -- came off as the more moderate of the final two candidates. Most Iranians themselves (as suppressed poll results indicated) see the nuclear program for exactly what is -- a means of keeping their oppressors in power.

We were encouraged to see the Europeans talking tough yesterday, saying any Iranian move to restart enrichment would result in an emergency IAEA meeting and possible referral to the U.N. Security Council for sanctions. But it's a fairly open secret that many European diplomats think that the best we can expect even after such action is further delay, and that the world will ultimately just have to "get used to" the idea of the mullahs having the bomb.

This would be a historic mistake, starting with the fact that it would mean the permanent discrediting of the multilateral arms control system these very same diplomats claim to hold dear. North Korea has already gone nuclear under the IAEA's watch. If Iran follows, the world can be assured the U.S. will never again look for answers to the IAEA's shiny new Vienna headquarters.

The strategic consequences are also hard to overstate. Iranian leaders such as Mr. Rafsanjani have spoken openly about wanting the bomb to thwart U.S. "colonialism" in the Middle East. At a minimum, a nuclear umbrella would remove any inhibition they might still have about using conventional terrorism in an all-out assault on U.S. democracy-promotion in the region. World oil supplies could be threatened. And it is not inconceivable they might hand such a weapon to terrorists, since the further proliferation that would undoubtedly follow might make such an act plausibly deniable.

We're hardly reassured by yesterday's Washington Post report that Iran might be 10 years from the bomb, or five years longer than previously thought. It was reportedly based on information from a still-classified U.S. National Intelligence Estimate. But as we've argued in the past, leaning too heavily on NIEs is dangerous because they tend to be lowest-common denominator assessments that create the illusion of actual knowledge where there is often much uncertainty. The government would be better off without them.

Exhibit A are the NIEs that said we'd find WMD in Iraq. But the intelligence consensus also missed by a long shot how close Saddam was to the A-bomb before the first Gulf War, and it missed again on North Korea. The best policy practice with countries obviously intent on acquiring a bomb, as Iran is, is to act as if the prospect is any day now, not to look for reassurance that the problem can be put off until later.

It's no exaggeration to say that everything we've been trying to achieve in the Middle East and beyond is at stake here. The mullahs know it, which is why they risked international censure through sham elections to consolidate their power and are now risking a confrontation with the Security Council. The potential consequences of an Iranian nuke for the Western democracies are an order of magnitude graver than backpack bombs on subways.