Maybe China And Russia Will Go Along With It If We Give Them A Pony

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Apropos of the picture, let’s start with the bomb.

Times:

Iran has perfected the technology to create and detonate a nuclear warhead and is merely awaiting the word from its Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, to produce its first bomb, Western intelligence sources have told The Times.

The sources said that Iran completed a research programme to create weaponised uranium in the summer of 2003 and that it could feasibly make a bomb within a year of an order from its Supreme Leader.

A US National Intelligence Estimate two years ago concluded that Iran had ended its nuclear arms research programme in 2003 because of the threat from the American invasion of Iraq. But intelligence sources have told The Times that Tehran had halted the research because it had achieved its aim — to find a way of detonating a warhead that could be launched on its long-range Shehab-3 missiles.

They said that, should Ayatollah Khamenei approve the building of a nuclear device, it would take six months to enrich enough uranium and another six months to assemble the warhead. The Iranian Defence Ministry has been running a covert nuclear research department for years, employing hundreds of scientists, researchers and metallurgists in a multibillion-dollar programme to develop nuclear technology alongside the civilian nuclear programme.

Allah Pundit:

Any reason to believe Iran might have those “smaller, secret facilities” needed to build a bomb covertly? Why, yes: According to an NYT story published in January, a classified portion of that 2007 NIE described at great length analysts’ “suspicion that Iran had 10 or 15 other nuclear-related facilities, never opened to international inspectors, where enrichment activity, weapons work or the manufacturing of centrifuges might be taking place.” Combine the fact that that rather significant detail was omitted from the public debate at the time with the report’s increasingly discredited conclusion that Iran gave up its program in 2003 and you’ve got one of the most astounding intelligence failures in U.S. history, with potentially graver consequences than either 9/11 or the WMD intel on Iraq.

Rowan Scarborough at Human Events

Dave Schuler:

I have little doubt that Iran at the very least wants to be able to build a nuclear weapon and I’d be flabbergasted if the Iranians didn’t have a covert program to exactly that effect. However, it also appears that they’ve run into a lot more difficulties in their enrichment program than they expected. I have no idea when they could produce enough HEU to produce a weapon and I doubt that anybody else does, either.

I’m not going to bother to dredge up the fatwas against nuclear weapons that have been issued by Iranian clerics (Khamenei wrote such a fatwa in 2005). I’m sure Steve Hynd over at Newshoggers will be all over this story and will do it for me. I also don’t put a lot of truck in them. Where there’s a will, there’s a way.

Next, possible sanctions on Iran. Michael Goldfarb in TWS:

That’s the lead story from Ha’aretz today, whose plugged-in diplomatic correspondent Barak Ravid writes that, in meetings this week in Israel, National Security Adviser Jim Jones told the Israelis that the Obama administration has begun thinking about imposing tough new sanctions on Tehran, if the Iranians don’t respond to the administration’s outreach by the end of September.

According to Ravid, “new sanctions would mainly aim to significantly curb Tehran’s ability to import refined petroleum products. Despite its huge crude oil reserves, Iran has only limited refining capacity, so it imports large quantities of refined products such as gasoline. Jones and his team reported that a bill by Senator Joe Lieberman to curb sales of refined oil products to Iran is almost complete, and 67 senators have already signed it.”

More Goldfarb

Daniel Drezner in Foreign Policy:

In fact, here’s a good time-saver:  if you read any story about a gasoline embargo o Iran, just scan quickly and get to the part where the reporter explains how and why Russia and China would go along.  If it’s not mentioned, the story is inconsequential.

If you want China and Russia to agree to sanctions, should you wish for the free pony as well?  Here the growth of dissent in Iran complicates an already complicated picture.  I’m betting that Moscow and Beijing have observed the “Death to Russia!” and “Death to China!” chants among the protestors.  This is likely going to make them even more reluctant to do anything that undermines the current regime (even if this hurts their long-term interests).  Which a gasoline embargo would most certainly do.

Do I think a gasoline embargo is a good idea?  Absolutely.  Do I think it will happen?  No, I don’t.

Spencer Ackerman:

Why would Russia and China agree to such a package? And why would, say, the United Nations agree to a move that would push the Iranians to dare the international community to confront it militarily over a global economic chokepoint? The smart people quoted in Sanger’s piece make the case for the sanctions by saying that the Iranian regime is more vulnerable to sanctions now, after the theft of the June 12 elections exposed popular anger and antipathy toward it, but not how to make those sanctions feasible.

Prairie Pundit

Matthew Yglesias:

I suppose one question for the folks pushing this line is how badly do you want it? What are you willing to give the Russians to get them on board? The US-Russian bilateral relationship, after all, has many aspects to it. But the very same people who are most vehement about the idea that the Iranian nuclear program is a threat to civilization tend to also be the most vehement about the idea that we should admit Ukraine and Georgia to an anti-Russian military alliance, that we should spend billions of dollars on attempting to undermine Russia’s nuclear deterrent, etc. I would think that if people really believed some of the things they claim to believe about Iran, that they’d be more eager to trade some horses.

Russia and China aside, what I think we need to hear more about here is the Iranian opposition. In general, I’m pretty skeptical about sanctions. If it’s the case that the opposition actually wants sanctions, the way the ANC did during apartheid, then that’s something we should take very seriously. But I would imagine that if Iran finds itself short of gasoline that the security services and the governing elite won’t be the ones without enough fuel to get around.

Roger Cohen’s piece on Iran and the Obama administration in NYT

Jonathan Tobin in Commentary:

The main point of the piece is that Obama and his foreign policy team are committed to a realpolitik view of the world. In this case, that means engagement with Iran must proceed no matter how beastly the ayatollahs and their minions behave. Appeasing dictators is not for the faint of heart. But as Cohen aptly notes, the most obvious historical analogies to Obama’s plans for Iran — Franklin Roosevelt’s rapprochement with the Soviet Union in 1933 during Stalin’s terror famine and Richard Nixon’s outreach to China in 1972 during the equally bloody Cultural Revolution — have one significant difference from the current situation in Iran: “bloodshed then … was not being YouTubed around the globe.” Obama’s slow, bumbling, stumbling, and halfhearted reactions to the heartbreaking scenes in Tehran, which Cohen himself witnessed, were not only an embarrassing indication of the president’s lack of judgment. They were also a measure of how badly a cynical policy, such as his determination to “engage” Iran, plays in an informed democracy.

Indeed, despite Obama’s claim that the opposition in Iran didn’t want his support, Cohen confesses that “protesters I met on the streets of Tehran pointedly asked me, “Where’s Obama?” The conclusion that this policy has been a disaster both in terms of the administration’s credibility and the forlorn hope of convincing the Iranian government that America means business about stopping their nuclear program is inescapable.

According to Cohen, Obama’s team, in which veteran foreign policy hack and Middle East peace processor Dennis Ross now plays a pivotal role from a perch at the National Security Council, is nonetheless determined to move ahead with engagement even though their plans are in ruins. Even if it were inclined to deal with Obama, the Iranian regime “is in no position to talk right now.” Obama has forced everyone in his administration to read from the same playbook on Iran — even Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who supposedly entered into office with a sensible skepticism about appeasing the regime. But they must now contend with the fact that “Iran has morphed in the global consciousness, to the point that U2 and Madonna have adopted the cause of Iranian democracy.”

Spencer Ackerman on the Cohen piece

Matthew Yglesias on the Cohen piece

UPDATE: Michael Goldfarb in TWS, answering Ackerman

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Tags: Allah Pundit, Commentary, Daniel Drezner, Dave Schuler, Foreign Policy, Human Events, Iran, Jonathan Tobin, Matthew Yglesias, Michael Goldfarb, Middle East, New York Times, Political Figures, PrairiePundit, Roger Cohen, Rowan Scarborough, Spencer Ackerman, The Times, The Weekly Standard