11-19-2007

REGIME CHANGE OR MILITARY FORCE ARE ONLY OPTIONS TO STOP IRAN BOMB; MUSHARRAF IS KEY TO PAKISTAN'S NUCLEAR SECURITY

John Bolton, one of the American foreign policy establishment's most prominent neo-conservatives, was U.S. ambassador to the United Nations from August 2005 to December 2006. Before that he served as the undersecretary of state for arms control and international security in which his key area of responsibility was the prevention of the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. His new book is entitled "Surrender Is Not an Option." He spoke with Global Viewpoint editor Nathan Gardels from New York on Saturday, Nov. 16.

By John Bolton

Nathan Gardels: The long-awaited report by the International Atomic Energy Agency’s director general, Mohammad ElBaradei, on Iran’s nuclear program has just been released. What is your reading of this report?

John Bolton: It was extraordinary, especially coming from the ever-optimistic ElBaradei, that the report said Iran’s cooperation was “reactive rather than proactive.” What that means is that Iran responds when it has to respond, and gives up the minimal amount of information it can.

Most alarming, though, the report admits the IAEA is losing visibility over the direction of Iran’s nuclear program. This is an incredible admission, since what happens in the future is vastly more important than what happened in the past.

Despite ElBaradei’s effort to spin the report as “progress” in resolving longstanding questions about Iran’s nuclear program, in fact most of the questions that were the subject of the recent IAEA-Iranian cooperation that led to this report were about accounting for past activities, not the most significant questions relating to future intentions. Therefore, the answers to those issues don’t move the issue one way or the other.

When you combine the results of this report with (Iranian President Mahmoud) Ahmadinejad’s continuing bombast and the paralysis at the U.N. Security Council over new sanctions, it means that Iran is still on track in pursuit of its strategic goal of acquiring nuclear weapons capability. The IAEA report does not offer any indication of a change in that strategic decision.

Gardels: On what basis do you assert that Iran has made a “strategic decision” to have nuclear weapons?

Bolton: The strategic decision, I believe, was made over 20 years ago. The evidence for this is Iran’s activity over the years since then across the full span of the nuclear fuel cycle. For energy purposes, there is simply no reason for Iran to develop such a cradle-to-grave approach, pursuing everything from uranium in the ground, of which they have ample deposits in Iran, up to weaponization design work, including the “hollow hemispheres” of plutonium and uranium metals as well as the mating of a nuclear device with a ballistic missile, in effect creating a warhead.

As the IAEA itself has reported, at the Parchen plant in Iran, which is basically an artillery weapons explosive facility, there was work done using high explosives to detonate these “hollow hemispheres,” which implodes the metal and creates the critical mass which gives you the uncontrolled chain reaction of a nuclear explosion. The Iranians, for obvious reasons, have refused to let anyone into Parchen.

You also have Iranian research with polonium 210, which they say is for powering batteries. Polonium 210 is indeed used for powering batteries — in deep-space probes. But Iran doesn’t have any deep-space probes. Aside, as we now know, from assassinating ex-KGB agents in London, the only real use for polonium 210 is as an initiator in a nuclear weapons explosion.

When ElBaradei says he doesn’t see any nuclear program, this is denial by category. In other words, he can’t find the specific information that absolutely, positively confirms that Iran is pursing a nuclear weapons program. So he fails to connect the dots and chooses to let each dot stand on its own. But when you put this all together, the conclusion is inescapable.

Gardels: Where do we go from here? With Russia and China refusing to cooperate, it looks like no new sanctions with be coming from the Security Council?

Bolton: Bernard Kouchner, the French foreign minister, has been trying to push the Europeans into “national sanctions” or European-wide sanctions that skirt the Security Council. But he is not getting very far. The Germans and Italians still want sanctions without pain — that is, without harming their business interests. That isn’t going to work.

Moving this issue to the IAEA, the Security Council and the Europeans, in their attempts to negotiate with Iran, only let the Iranians buy time to pursue the weapons program. As this most recent ElBaradei report notes, they now have 3,000 functioning centrifuges to enrich uranium — developed and built during these many years of fruitless negotiations.

Based on this most recent IAEA report, Richard Garwin, the American nuclear scientist, believes the Iranians are now only a year away from having weapons-grade uranium.

It is clear that we cannot rely on “just-in-time” non-proliferation, which aims to stop proliferators at the very moment they are poised to step over the line. What if we get the time estimate wrong because of our lack of information?

This whole episode ought to be a warning that engaging in diplomacy is not cost-free. If you listen to most of the Democratic presidential candidates, they act as if diplomacy is a policy, not an instrument. Like any instrument, it is subject to cost-benefit analysis. What diplomacy has cost us in the Iranian case is time.

Time is always on the side of the would-be proliferators. We have given Iran more than four years by deferring to the European negotiation efforts, in which time they have perfected the science and technology they need to have a complete, indigenous mastery over the nuclear fuel cycle.

This leads me to the conclusion that further diplomatic efforts, including sanctions, are simply not going to be sufficient, given the point where Iran currently is in its nuclear development. Whatever you think the timeline is to weaponization, sanctions are not going to stop them from achieving it on their own schedule. All they need are resources, and with oil at more than $90 a barrel, they’re flush.

Gardels: Your logic leads, then, to military action?

Bolton: There are only two options — regime change or military force.

Gardels: If negotiations cost time in the Iranian case, haven’t they succeeded in the case of North Korea, which is shutting down its nuclear program by the end of the year?

Bolton: I don’t think so. This is another episode in Kim Jong-il’s very successful ploy in which he promises to give up his weapons for economic aid and political benefits, and then doesn’t.

All he has said he is going to do is “freeze” the Yongbyon reactor. The original American objective was dismantlement — which means no two bricks, one on top of the other. What they’ve agreed to now is “disablement,” the equivalent of taking your keys out of the car and putting them on the nightstand.

Of course, we already know everything about the Yongbyon reactor. There was IAEA oversight of that facility  from 1994 to 2002. There’s nothing new there.

The real issue is when the North Koreans will make a declaration about the rest of their program — a declaration overdue already, according to the timetable negotiated by Chris Hill (the U.S. negotiator in the six-party talks). How much plutonium have they extracted from Yongbyon? How many weapons do they actually have? What is the state of their uranium-enrichment program? And what were they doing with Syrians in the middle of the desert at that facility the Israelis attacked?

Gardels: Gen. Pervez Musharraf assured me after one of the assassination attempts against him that Pakistan’s nuclear weapons were more secure than those in the ex-Soviet Union, with him or without him. In your view, are Pakistan’s nuclear weapons secure if turmoil deepens in that country and Musharraf is pushed out?

Bolton: No. Musharraf is key. We have to make a distinction between the technical security of the weapons and their political security. The U.S. has worked with Pakistan to make sure weapons can’t be stolen or diverted easily, or loaded on F16s or missiles or carried away or detonated easily by unauthorized personnel. So, from a technical view, they are pretty safe.

But what happens if discipline in the military breaks down? There are a lot of Islamicist radicals in the military and the ISI (Pakistan’s intelligence services). If you have a period of chaos, an attempted coup or an assassination, and military command and control breaks down, then those weapons could come loose.

You would have radical Islamicists or their allies who know how to break through the technical protections and firewalls. That is the real risk. The worse case, of course, would be if a radical regime came to power. They would have control of the entire arsenal of weapons, not just a few here or there leaking out.

In this context, it is critical for Musharraf to stay in power. Although he has tried to fill the military with his supporters, the accumulated weight of the years and years of Saudi-Wahhabi funding of the madrassas and inserting recruits into the Pakistani military has made it very hard to be sure the military would remain secular.

Obviously, Musharraf is not a Jeffersonian democrat. But this is a circumstance where not all our values and interests are convergent. We just have to face up to that.

This kind of American interference — “take your uniform off,” “hold elections,” “form a coalition with Benazir Bhutto” — reminds me of the days when we overthrew Ngo Dinh Diem in South Vietnam because we wanted “a better ruler.” Instead, we ushered in years of revolving-door government that made it harder for them and for us to fight the North Vietnamese.

We don’t have to argue that Musharraf is perfect.I do think we should look at the central U.S.strategic interest in Pakistan— the security of those nuclear weapons. If Musharraf in uniform is the guy whocan do that, I put my money on him.

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DISTRIBUTEDBY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, NOV. 19, 2007