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 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, U.S. President George Bush had some stern words for Iran in his State of the Union address Tuesday night. But the tone was very different from his State of the Union in 2002, soon after the Sept. 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 United Nations. 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 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 the United States might leave it to Israel to do the dirty work of setting back Iran’s nuclear program by bombing raids. Mr. 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 Hezbollah to make terrorist reprisals on 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 Hezbollah, these strikes could therefore 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 United States could do it with any probability of a technical success (by which I mean setting back the program to produce nuclear weapons for a number of years). But that technical success would come at a huge price. Given the wide distribution of potential nuclear sites, far beyond the well-known ones at Esfahan 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 Washington is not keen on it.

 

Four years ago, the runup to Iraq was like a game of football — swift and explosive. Over Iran, we shall see a long, drawn-out game of chess.

 

The board meeting of the International Atomic Energy Authority (the hard-to-pronounce IAEA) that begins today will be followed by another in early March, which will almost certainly agree to report Iran to the UN Security Council. That is what was agreed in a useful meeting between Britain, France, Germany, the United States, Russia and China in London earlier this week. Russian and Chinese officials have gone to Tehran to bring home the message to the Iranian government. Jack Straw did the same in a meeting with the Iranian Foreign Minister yesterday.

 

Even if it goes to the UN, there will probably be more elaborate moves before sanctions are imposed. It’s very unclear what sanctions China and Russia would agree to. This Persian chess game is multidimensional and exemplifies the reality of a multipolar world. The Iranian President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, denounces the assaults of “false superpowers,” but the real point is that they are multiple great powers, with diverse interests. Even if they agree to sanctions, those may not stop the Iranian regime going ahead, overtly or covertly, with its nuclear program. Fortunately, nuclear experts reckon it will take from three to eight years for Iran to reach the point at which it can decide whether to go hell-for-leather for the weaponization of its nuclear capacity.

 

That timetable has a particular significance for U.S. politics. If you wonder why the Bush administration is being so mild and moderate, so more-European-than-the-French, on this issue, a cynic would observe that they know the crunch won’t come on their watch. If you ask why both John McCain and Hillary Clinton, two front-runners to be the next president of the United States, are being so hawkish on this issue, a cynic would observe that they know that the crunch probably will come on their watch, after 2009.

 

Whatever Washington does or does not do, the world faces a serious problem of nuclear proliferation, and Iran has become a leading test case. The head of the IAEA, the Nobel Peace Prize winner Mohamed ElBaradei, said in Davos: “The present system for preventing the proliferation of nuclear weapons is at an end, is bankrupt.”

 

The nuclear non-proliferation treaty is not adequate to the task and is often honoured only in the breach. The most telling charge against established nuclear powers such as the U.S. and Britain is that of double standards: Why is there one rule for you and another for the rest? More acutely still: Why is there one rule for Iran, but quite another for Israel and India? To say, “Oh, that’s because they are responsible democracies” begs the question “who decides which states are responsible democracies?” And anyway, Pakistan isn’t.

 

So whatever we do about Iran, what we need is a new international system for the supervision and inspection of nuclear capacities in every country in the world. It should be explicit, consistent, and administered by the nearest thing we have to a world arbiter, the United Nations. In order for it to be credible, established nuclear powers such as Britain and the U.S. will have to submit themselves to the same regime of supervision and inspections as everyone else.

 

“The US will never agree to that!” you exclaim. Well, not under present leadership and in its current mood. But the American approach to Iran and this week’s State of the Union address show how much even the Bush administration has changed. In 2009, Washington could change some more. If you want a message of hope in this dark scene, remember Churchill’s remark that you can usually rely on the United States to do the right thing — once it has exhausted all the alternatives.

 

 

British political writer Timothy Garton Ash is a professor of European studies at the University of Oxford. This article appeared in the Globe and Mail, February 2, 2006, p. A21.

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