Talks with Iran: window for peaceful resolution closing

On Tuesday, the director general of the IAEA, Yukiya Amano, said that he had reached something of a breakthrough with Iranian officials on the agency’s demand for access to some of Iran’s military facilities and officials to check Iran’s assertion that it is not working on a nuclear weapon.

The powers’ proposal does contain two of the three elements Israel said would persuade it not to use military force to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities – stopping enriching uranium to 20 percent, and the removal from Iran of the uranium already enriched to 20 percent. Israel – and, for that matter, Saudi Arabia – also demand, however, that the centrifuges at the underground enrichment facility at Fodro be dismantled under IAEA supervision, and that the facility itself be closed down.

Israel also wants to be sure that the nuclear inspection regime imposed on Iran is air-tight. Informally, Israel let it be known that it would prefer that American inspectors accompany IAEA inspectors on visits to suspicious Iranian facilities.

Analysis
The time frame for the talks between the six powers and Iran is tacitly accepted by all sides. In their meetings in the White House two months ago, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu assured President Barack Obama that Israel would not take unilateral military action against Iran before the U.S. presidential elections in November. Since the harsher economic sanctions on Iran go into effect on 1 July, this delay in an Israeli attack would allow the sanctions to make life even more difficult for Iran, testing the notion that economic and political pressure can persuade Iran to abandon their nuclear weapons ambitions.

If the current round of talks fails, and the harsher July sanctions do not persuade Iran, by the end of the year, to cease and desist its nuclear weapons activities, then the path will be clear for a military attack on Iran – by Israel, the United States, or both – sometime during the first three or four months of 2013.

Israel, and possibly the United States, could then argue that they have given economic and diplomatic sanctions time to work, but that these measures have failed. President Obama would be less worried about the domestic political implications of a temporary rise in the price of crude oil which will surely accompany an attack on Iran. If Mitt Romney is elected president, Israel will likely have even more support from the new administration in coordinating military moves against Iran.

Samuel Johnson said that “The prospect of being hanged focuses the mind wonderfully.” It remains to be seen whether the prospect of a military attack would focus Iran’s mind on the need to abandon its nuclear weapons ambitions. The clock is ticking.