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What Iran Is Really Up To

(Mosaic) Michael Doran - Iran's Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei intends to raise the specter of war and simultaneously offer a cooperative way to exorcise it, namely, by returning America to the Iran deal (JCPOA). Thanks to the nuclear archive that an Israeli operation spirited out of Iran last year, the U.S. has enough information to argue persuasively that Iran has, in fact, grossly violated the JCPOA. The archive reveals, among other things, that Iran never abandoned its nuclear-weapons program but simply restructured it, emphasizing dual-use activities that have allowed Tehran to claim with a modicum of plausibility that its nuclear activities are "peaceful" and "civilian." The JCPOA helped advance this deception by bestowing international legitimacy on facilities like the Fordow bunker. Built under a mountain, Fordow never had any purpose other than to produce weapons-grade uranium. The great conceit of the previous U.S. approach to Iran was to believe that there existed a clever diplomatic way to stop it from getting a nuclear bomb. There is not. Iran's nuclear-weapons program will come to an end only if the U.S. wrests it from the talons of the regime. This need not mean war, but it will require a prolonged coercive strategy. The great paradox is that the more successfully the U.S. transmits a readiness for war, the less likely war will become. The writer, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, is a former deputy assistant secretary of defense and a former senior director of the National Security Council.
2019-06-26 00:00:00
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