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We need a new international regime to supervise our nuclear capacities and everyone should submit to it .
So who are the cheese-eating surrender monkeys now? President Jacques Chirac of France says rogue states fit the French doctrine for a response using its nuclear arsenal. Meanwhile, the Bush administration goes softly-softly on an Iranian revolutionary regime that is setting out to go nuclear. So now it seems that it's the French who are from Mars and the Americans who are from Venus. What a difference four years make. Four years and a bloody nose in Iraq.
Yes, President Bush had some stern words for Iran in his state of the union address this week. But the tone was very different from his state of the union in 2002, soon after the September 11 terrorist attacks, when he arbitrarily hitched together Iraq, Iran and North Korea in an "axis of evil". Now he says "the world must not permit the Iranian regime to gain nuclear weapons". The world, note, not the United States. But how will the world prevent it? At the moment the only serious answer coming from Washington is multilateral diplomacy, preferably through the UN. Welcome to the Euroweenies club, Mr President!
To be sure, the White House insists that the president can never take the military option off the table. But senior administration officials make it entirely clear that Iran is not another Iraq, and military analysts agree that there are no good options for strikes on Iran's nuclear facilities, only bad or worse ones. I had the chance last weekend, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, to talk through those options with one of the leading American experts on the military side of the relationship with Iran, Kenneth Pollack. Many people suggest that the US might leave it to Israel to do the dirty work of setting back Iran's nuclear programme with bombing raids. Pollack argues convincingly that this would be extraordinarily difficult for Israel to do, even if it was ready to.
Israel has few planes capable of operating effectively at that distance. There are so many possible sites where the mullahs might be hiding their nuclear kit. After the first few strikes you would have lost any element of surprise. Thereafter you would have to take out Iranian air defences before continuing the bombing - a major undertaking. And Iran could retaliate, not least by encouraging Hizbullah to carry out terrorist reprisals against Israel. Since Israeli commanders say what they really fear most from Iran is not the Tehran government possessing a nuclear bomb (they have their own to deter it with) but the unleashing of Hizbullah, these strikes could produce precisely the effect they were intended to avoid.
None of this is to say that Israel wouldn't, in the end, do the deed if it felt its own vital security was threatened. But militarily, only the US could do it with any probability of a technical success (by which I mean setting back the programme to produce nuclear weapons for a number of years). However, that technical success would come at a huge price. Given the wide distribution of potential nuclear sites, far beyond the well-known ones at Isfahan and Natanz, it's almost certain there would be collateral damage: in plain English, the killing of innocent civilians. This would produce a wave of patriotic solidarity with the theocratic regime in Iran, even among those young Iranians who are fiercely critical of the mullahs, and another tidal wave of reaction around the world, especially among Muslims. Small wonder that Washington is not keen on it.
So who are the cheese-eating surrender monkeys now? President Jacques Chirac of France says rogue states fit the French doctrine for a response using its nuclear arsenal. Meanwhile, the Bush administration goes softly-softly on an Iranian revolutionary regime that is setting out to go nuclear. So now it seems that it's the French who are from Mars and the Americans who are from Venus. What a difference four years make. Four years and a bloody nose in Iraq.
Yes, President Bush had some stern words for Iran in his state of the union address this week. But the tone was very different from his state of the union in 2002, soon after the September 11 terrorist attacks, when he arbitrarily hitched together Iraq, Iran and North Korea in an "axis of evil". Now he says "the world must not permit the Iranian regime to gain nuclear weapons". The world, note, not the United States. But how will the world prevent it? At the moment the only serious answer coming from Washington is multilateral diplomacy, preferably through the UN. Welcome to the Euroweenies club, Mr President!
To be sure, the White House insists that the president can never take the military option off the table. But senior administration officials make it entirely clear that Iran is not another Iraq, and military analysts agree that there are no good options for strikes on Iran's nuclear facilities, only bad or worse ones. I had the chance last weekend, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, to talk through those options with one of the leading American experts on the military side of the relationship with Iran, Kenneth Pollack. Many people suggest that the US might leave it to Israel to do the dirty work of setting back Iran's nuclear programme with bombing raids. Pollack argues convincingly that this would be extraordinarily difficult for Israel to do, even if it was ready to.
Israel has few planes capable of operating effectively at that distance. There are so many possible sites where the mullahs might be hiding their nuclear kit. After the first few strikes you would have lost any element of surprise. Thereafter you would have to take out Iranian air defences before continuing the bombing - a major undertaking. And Iran could retaliate, not least by encouraging Hizbullah to carry out terrorist reprisals against Israel. Since Israeli commanders say what they really fear most from Iran is not the Tehran government possessing a nuclear bomb (they have their own to deter it with) but the unleashing of Hizbullah, these strikes could produce precisely the effect they were intended to avoid.
None of this is to say that Israel wouldn't, in the end, do the deed if it felt its own vital security was threatened. But militarily, only the US could do it with any probability of a technical success (by which I mean setting back the programme to produce nuclear weapons for a number of years). However, that technical success would come at a huge price. Given the wide distribution of potential nuclear sites, far beyond the well-known ones at Isfahan and Natanz, it's almost certain there would be collateral damage: in plain English, the killing of innocent civilians. This would produce a wave of patriotic solidarity with the theocratic regime in Iran, even among those young Iranians who are fiercely critical of the mullahs, and another tidal wave of reaction around the world, especially among Muslims. Small wonder that Washington is not keen on it.
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