Is It Too Late To Stop Iran's Race For The Bomb?
With diplomatic efforts stalled, a bipartisan “Plan B” is emerging in Washington. But Israel may well believe it’s too little, too late for dialogue.
Momentous risk: An Israel strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities could lead to a full-scale Mideast war. But some say the prospect of a nuclear Iran is untenable.
With diplomatic efforts stalled, a bipartisan “Plan B” is emerging in Washington. But Israel may well believe it’s too little, too late for dialogue.
Washington and Jerusalem are of one mind about the danger Iran presents to the region, and the world, as the Islamic revolutionary state moves ever closer to the threshold of producing nuclear weapons.
But as former Israeli Ambassador to the United States Michael Oren and others have noted, the U.S. and Israel differ on the key issue of where the dividing line stands: America considers the point of no return to be Iran developing a nuclear bomb; for Israel, the intended target for annihilation, the point of no return is Iran reaching the nuclear threshold.
And all indications are that Iran is almost there.
With that in mind, a new diplomatic proposal that was discussed at a Nov. 4 conference devoted to exposing and countering Iran’s threat to the world could be viewed as either bold and promising or hopelessly naive.
The proposal of a Plan B -- an alternative to the controversial 2015 nuclear agreement between Iran and the West -- was the focus of a session moderated by Ambassador Dennis Ross featuring the new plan’s proponents, Sen. Robert Menendez (D-NJ) and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) , at the “virtual summit” of United Against Nuclear Iran (UANI), a non-profit policy group chaired by former Sen. Joseph Lieberman.
It included panels and presentations from a number of senior government officials, policy experts, former U.S. ambassadors, including John Bolton and Nikki Haley, Bahrain’s Ambassador to the U.S. and Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett.
Readers will recall that the 2015 agreement sought to slow Iran’s nuclear program for a number of years and have its facilities closely monitored.
From the outset, though, critics distrusted Iran’s insistence that the nuclear program was for peaceful means, noting the regime’s secrecy about its facilities and its ongoing threat to destroy Israel.
President Trump, who opposed the deal, withdrew the U.S. from it in 2018, and brought back heavy financial sanctions in an attempt to have Iran change its policies. That seems to have only emboldened the regime, despite the economic hardships it has caused Iranian society. The country’s leaders have accelerated the program, denied access to international monitors and taken steps -- like uranium enrichment approaching weapon-grade level -- that only make sense if the goal is to build bombs.
Calling For ‘Plan B’
Is there a diplomatic solution at hand?
The Biden administration is seeking to bring back the 2015 agreement now, and then broker “a longer and stronger” deal that would lengthen the timeline and take up the issue of Iran’s ballistic missiles and other military actions.
Iran has indicated that it would come back to the table at the end of this month -- but only if the U.S. lifts sanctions.
At a stalemate, and with Iran advancing its program, Menendez and Graham’s Plan B calls for a multilateral plan that would have the U.S. and the other key countries offer to ensure nuclear power for peaceful purposes to countries in the Mideast region, including Iran, in return for an agreement of no enrichment for military use.
This would prevent a nuclear arms race throughout the region, Menendez pointed out. And if Iran rejects the proposal, it underscores its aggressive intentions, he said, further isolating the regime. “It would show them up for why they really want nuclear power -- for a bomb,” Menendez noted.
In this bipartisan proposal, Graham said he would be willing to “work with the [Biden] administration to give up some sanctions to get Iran to the table,” adding that Iran has never been offered such a proposal, to be part of a nuclear umbrella for the region. He called the plan “pretty bold.”
But Yossi Klein Halevi, an Israeli journalist and author with expertise on the topic, is not impressed. Far from it. He insists that it is too late for such diplomacy.
“There’s no time for these elaborate plans,” he told me, calling them “embarrassing and worrying.”
For many Israelis, he said, including a significant number of security, military and political leaders, the fear of Iran having access to a nuclear bomb is even greater than the possible outcomes of an Israeli strike, including regional warfare.
[Prime Minister Bennett, in his brief recorded remarks, asserted that Iran “poses a strategic threat to the world” and “we will do whatever we need to do” to prevent such a threat. He did not elaborate.]
“We’re past the point of threats,” Klein Halevi said. “The idea that Iran has to be exposed into revealing its true interest, after allowing its economy to collapse in the service of pursuing a nuclear missile program, is ludicrous. This isn’t 2005. Iran is moving toward a bomb, and we need a sense of urgency and immediacy.
“In the end,” he said, “Israel will strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities -- which probably should have happened ten years ago.”
Dennis Ross sounds a similar, if less dramatic, warning.
“Iran does not believe we [the U.S.] will use force,” he told me the day after the UANI summit, and that’s the problem. In a Foreign Affairs essay posted last week, entitled “The Threat Of War Is The Only Way To Achieve Peace With Iran,” the veteran Mideast envoy argued that “if the U.S. wants to reduce the risk of a conflict and give diplomacy a chance to succeed, the Biden administration is going to have to restore Iran’s fear of a U.S. reaction and apply pressure more effectively.”
That calls for isolating Iran in every way possible -- politically, economically, diplomatically, etc. -- and convincing Iran that Washington will act militarily if necessary, and won’t stop Israel from striking Iran’s nuclear sites.
“Not for the first time,” Ross’s essay concluded, “the credible threat of force is necessary to obviate its use.”
He believes the U.S. should lease to Israel B-2 bombers that carry the Massive Ordnance Penetrator, a 15-ton bomb that can destroy underground nuclear sites.
Yossi Klein Halevi would welcome such a move, but adds: “The Americans must understand we will use them.”
When I asked Ross whether he believes the U.S. will use force or support Israeli strikes, he responded, “I’m not sure.”
Invoking The Begin Doctrine
There are precedents for a dramatic Israeli attack, though never as momentous as this would be.
Forty years ago, fearing that Saddam Hussein’s nuclear reactor in Osirak, near Baghdad, was weeks away from becoming operational, Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin ordered a surprise air strike. The unprecedented move, conducted by Israeli fighter planes, was a diplomatic failure, condemned unanimously by the UN Security Council and sharply criticized by President Reagan.
But it was a military success in that the Osirak reactor was destroyed, never to be used, and setting back Iraq’s nuclear timetable. Some argue, though, that it resulted in Hussein increasing his military to confront Israel in the 1980s.
The Israeli move marked the birth of what came to be known as The Begin Doctrine, a “Never Again” declaration, in the words of its author, that “if an enemy of our people says he seeks to destroy us, believe him. Don’t doubt him for a moment … Never pause to wonder what the world will think or say.”
The doctrine was invoked by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert in 2007 when Israel attacked a nuclear facility in Syria. (There was little international criticism at that time.) And in truth, Israel’s covert actions against Iran in recent years, from alleged assassinations of key nuclear scientists to a daring 2018 raid that captured tens of thousands of secret military documents from a Tehran warehouse, are an ongoing expression of the doctrine.
Today, the growing sense among high-level Israel observers is that the question is not whether Israel will strike Iran, but when.
"Washington and Jerusalem are of one mind about the danger Iran presents to the region, and the world, as the Islamic revolutionary state moves ever closer to the threshold of producing nuclear weapons."
Is this true? Originally the JCPOA was intended to delay the development of the bomb. This was the source of Israel's rejection. If this has changed, would Iran ever agree? The JCPOA is diplomacy in search of a future for those policy experts who believe in it. This does not include the Iranians. Hence diplomacy is negotiating with ourselves, also called "failing upwards" for our diplomatists. Better to assume that Iran will not stop until it has a bomb, like Pakistan and North Korea. Then strategy might develop clarity of thought and there might be a real "plan B".