September 2, 2004 - IAEA inspectors will report that Pakistan’s pardoned nuclear black-marketer furnished Iran with the expertise, parts and materials to build 70 sophisticated centrifuges used to produce weapons grade highly enriched uranium. The machines have been assembled and reports are circulating in Washington that Iran has already produced sufficient HEU to build 4 or 5 bombs. Now this is not a shipment of aluminum tubes or forged documents indicating failed attempts to buy Nigerien Yellow Cake. This is solid information assembled by the IAEA inspections team, they aren’t just suspicious that the centrifuges exist; they have seen them. Iran does not deny that they are pressing forward with the production of HEU. The Iranians claim that the weapons grade material is only intended for peaceful purposes.

The President says that we will press Iran diplomatically. He says that Iran’s situation is different than that which caused him to invade Iraq. “Diplomacy failed for 11 years in Iraq, and this new diplomatic effort is barely a year ago.'', he told the New York Times last week. I was puzzled by that reported remark. You would have thought that eleven years of diplomatic failure would have resulted in an active and productive Iraqi nuclear weapons program. If diplomacy – and eleven years of sanctions – had failed to restrain the Ba`athist regime’s nuclear ambitions their program would be farther along than that of Iran – or that of North Korea for that matter. That being the case you would think that 160,000 or so allied troops occupying Iraq would have discovered a gram or two of HEU in more than a year, even after our spectacular catastrophic success. You would have thought that the fact that they have not shows that the diplomatic isolation and severe sanctions imposed for 11 years had effectively dismantled the Iraqi nuclear program. We have it on the President’s authority that diplomacy failed and that was reason enough for war.

Secretary Powell is headed for the IAEA governing board meeting where he will try again to garner enough votes to refer the Iranian situation to the UN Security Council for sanctions. He has failed to round up allies in that effort before. He will probably do so again. Even should he get the matter referred to the Security Council it is doubtful that the international community will be anxious to pass a sanctions resolution in the light of the United States having used SCR 1441 as an excuse to launch a unilateral war.

The situation in Iran is different from that posed by Iraq. There is no credible threat of US military action behind the diplomacy. Military action of the scale necessary to halt the Iranian program is just not on the table. The President knows that and they know that in Teheran and in Pyongyang. The President took the military option off the table when he sent virtually the whole of our combat ready force into Iraq and left it bogged down in a quagmire of unending guerilla war. Only a general mobilization bringing our force up to cold war levels can put it back on the table. The Iranians and the North Koreans know that too.

Diplomacy supported by a credible threat of military force worked to contain Saddam Hussein’s WMD programs for 11 years. It was leadership and not diplomacy that failed and that same shortsighted leadership has insured that diplomacy can’t work in Iran or North Korea.