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October 1, 2004/Tishri 6 5765, Vol. 57, No. 5
If sanctions fail, would Israel strike Iran?
LESLIE SUSSER
Jewish Telegraphic Agency
JERUSALEM - After months of high-profile lobbying against Iran's nuclear program, Israeli officials are confident that the international community will impose sanctions on Tehran if it fails to meet a Nov. 25 deadline to halt its nuclear weapons program.
They base their optimism on a series of meetings with American and European officials, mainly during the recent U.N. General As-sembly session in New York. They say they detect a major shift in the European position, which could lead to the Europeans joining a U.S.-led move on sanctions at the U.N. Security Council.
If the sanctions fail, Israeli analysts believe the United States has the capacity to stop Iran from going nuclear by military means. They are also not ruling out a strike by Israel, if the Iranians go past the point of no return in nuclear bomb manufacturing and the international com-munity fails to take effective action.
Israeli officials, however, make it clear that Israel sees Iran's nuclear program as a global rather than an Israeli problem, and would much prefer to see the inter-national community dealing with it.
The hardening of the European line came after the Iranians rejected a mid-September demand from the International Atomic Energy Agency not to produce the enriched uranium from which nuclear bombs are made.
The defiant Iranian response was to announce that it had begun converting large amounts of raw uran-ium and that it had test-fired a new version of the Shihab-3 missile, capable of reaching Israel and most European capitals.
A few days later, at the U.N. General Assembly session in New York, Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom said he was encouraged by the new European stance.
The time, he said, was now ripe "to move the Iranian case to the Security Council in order to put an end to this nightmare."
At the same time, Israel's national security council chief, Giora Eiland, came away from talks with American officials convinced that they realized the gravity of the situation and would be ready to act.
November, Eiland stressed in his talks, would be the very last chance to do something effective to halt the Iranian nuclear drive without having to resort to force.
Gerald Steinberg, an expert on nuclear proliferation at Bar Ilan University's BESA Institute, asserts that the Europeans, tired of Iran's double game, will now be ready to follow an American lead.
"The British, the Germans and to some degree the French now realize that their approach, holding various kinds of dialogue with Iran, has failed," he said.
Nor does he expect Russia or China to oppose a move for U.N. sanctions against Iran. "Russia, given its troubles in Chechnya, will find it difficult to condone a nuclear buildup in terror-supporting Iran," he said.
"And China won't want to be the only permanent member of the Security Council to allow Iran to develop nuclear weapons."
Steinberg estimates that the Iranians are at least six months and perhaps some years away from producing a bomb, so that there is time to test whether a sanctions strategy works.
If it doesn't, the next step could be an American-led military strike. Spelling out U.S. policy in late September, President Bush said he would prefer to use diplomacy, including sanctions, to stop the Iranian nuclear drive, but if necessary he would not shy away from the use of force.
A leak in Newsweek maga-zine that American contin-gency plans to hit Iran were being updated seemed to underline the president's message.
Both the president's tough talk and the Newsweek leak seemed calculated at the very least to put more pressure on Iran ahead of the November deadline, by presenting a credible U.S. military threat.
Leslie Susser is the diplomatic correspondent for the Jerusalem Report.
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