THE DISARMAMENT ILLUSION / THE WALL STREET JOURNAL REVIEW & OUTLOOK ( HIGHLY RECOMMENDED READING )

REVIEW & OUTLOOK

SEPTEMBER 26, 2009

The Disarmament Illusion

Obama pursues arms control treaties; Iran builds the bomb

President Obama appreciates "teachable moments," so let's all discuss this week's lesson in arms control theory and practice.

The President brought his soaring sermon about "a world without [nuclear] weapons" before the U.N. General Assembly. He called for a new arms control treaty and won Security Council support for a vague resolution on proliferation. On cue yesterday, Iran showed the world what determined rogues think about such treaties. On the evidence of his Presidency so far, Mr. Obama will not let that reality interfere with his disarmament dreams.

The disclosure that Iran has a second facility to make bomb-grade fuel, the latest of many Tehran deceptions, isn't exactly surprising. Administration officials say U.S. intelligence has known about the secret underground plant near the city of Qom for years. Iran sought other hidden sites after the Natanz facility was discovered in 2002, and now officials say they suspect there are other facilities too.

The U.S., France and the U.K. yesterday presented detailed evidence about the plant to the International Atomic Energy Agency. They acted after Iran got wind of the U.S. intelligence and sought to pre-empt possible consequences by informing the supposed nuclear watchdog in Vienna about what Tehran called a "pilot plant" for civilian use.

It's not clear why the mullahs even bothered to make that effort. The past decade of international efforts to monitor, control and sanction the Iranian nuclear program is a story of fecklessness. Iran's nuclear weapon efforts started many years ago, but it was exposed by an Iranian opposition group in exile, not by IAEA inspectors who've been allowed in the country since 1992. Despite this violation of Iran's treaty commitments, the world community has since done nothing to punish, much less stop, Iran's nuclear program.

What's changed now? Standing together before the G-20 summit in Pittsburgh yesterday, Mr. Obama and the French and British leaders put on their game faces, calling for Iran to immediately admit IAEA inspectors. New deadlines were mentioned—talks with Tehran starting October 1, tougher sanctions by December, and so on. "Everything," said France's Nicolas Sarkozy, "must be put on the table now."

At least the French President tried to sound tough, which isn't hard when you stand next to Mr. Obama. The American said Iran will "be held accountable" but watered this down with extended remarks on Iran's "right to peaceful nuclear power," as if the mullahs, sitting on the world's second-largest natural gas and third-largest oil reserves, have any need for peaceful atomic energy.

The Iranians have heard it all before, waltzing along in talks with the "E-3" and now the "P-5-plus-1" (the Security Council permanent members and Germany), all the while ignoring Security Council resolutions and its commitments as a signatory to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.

Let's also not forget the boost Iran got in late 2007, when a U.S. national intelligence estimate concluded that Iran had stopped its nuclear weapons program in 2003 and kept it frozen. The U.S. spy agencies reached this dubious conclusion while apparently knowing about the site near Qom. The intelligence finding stole whatever urgency existed for the Bush Administration to act against Iran, militarily or otherwise, which perhaps was the intended goal. The Iranians got more time and cover.

In an interview with Time magazine this week, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad didn't sound overly concerned, saying that if the U.S. mentioned the previously secret facility, it "simply adds to the list of issues to which the United States owes the Iranian nation an apology over." Following the violent protests this summer in response to Iran's fraudulent presidential elections, Mr. Ahmadinejad has kept power but looks both weaker and more ruthless. He makes explicit threats against Israel and he engaged in more Holocaust denial at the U.N. this week.

Meantime, the U.S. and its allies dream. Mr. Obama used his global forum this week not to rally the world to stop today's nuclear rogues but to offer lovely visions of disarmament in some distant future. In the bitter decades of the Cold War, we learned the hard way that the only countries that abide by disarmament treaties are those that want to be disarmed. It's becoming increasingly, and dangerously, obvious that Mr. Obama wasn't paying attention.

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