Technology | 2010.08.27
This phoney finger-wagging won't talk Iran out of nukes | Lionel Shriver
Drop the moral posturing, Hillary – US hypocrisy will be all too clear in Tehran. Only realpolitik can halt their nuclear ambitions
This weekend Russian specialists will begin loading low-enriched uranium fuel rods into Iran\'s Bushehr reactor , the initial step in getting its first nuclear power plant up and running. Though Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state, has criticised the irreversible startup as "premature", Bushehr is in fact a long-delayed fiasco predating the Iranian revolution. By contract, the spent fuel rods, containing weapons-grade plutonium, are to be returned to Russia. Uneasy faith that Iran will keep its promise, if only because it still lacks the technology to process the rods at home, is the sole reason that America and its allies are not hysterical. Whether nominally safe or not, Bushehr foreshadows Iran\'s more ominous nuclear plans, which the Obama administration\'s hectoring and cajoling have signally failed to discourage.
"Iran is entitled to civil nuclear power," Hillary Clinton sermonised in Moscow in March. "It is a nuclear weapons programme that it is not entitled to." While arguably no country is "entitled" to possess weaponry capable of ending life on this planet as we know it, for the nation with the largest nuclear arsenal in the world to rebuke others for developing the same technology is bewilderingly hypocritical.
Yet this is hypocrisy to which we\'ve grown so accustomed that nobody seems to notice it any more. The nuclear club is meant to be exclusive. The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty recognises the five permanent members of the UN security council as "nuclear weapons states", committing them to act as bouncers at the club door. The treaty theoretically obliges these members to ditch their own nukes in the fullness of time – an aptly pompous expression, for an otherwise nuke-free world would make a rogue state with even one bomb so powerful that the chances of universal disarmament are zero. Ever since Hiroshima, we\'ve been faced with the depressing fact that you cannot un-invent something.
You also cannot retain a device for yourself and then lecture others that they are not "entitled" to it. Iran is, alas, just as entitled to nuclear weapons as the US and Britain. Ditto North Korea. All the Obama administration has the moral and political right to assert is: "We don\'t want Iran to have nuclear weapons." To which Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would quite sensibly respond: "So what?"
Virtually no government aside from Tehran itself wants Iran to have nuclear weapons, including its Middle Eastern neighbours, just as it\'s sickening worldwide that North Korea\'s Dear Leader will likely bequeath a couple of nukes to a son who promises to carry on the family tradition of being even crazier than dad. Yet since promotion of nonproliferation by nuclear states has been chronically two-faced for years, the Obama administration needs to be cannier, and more sensitive to how preaching that "You\'ve no right to what we\'ve got in buckets" sounds to hostile ears.
Such arrogance can only backfire. By conceit, the US is one of a handful of states righteous enough to safeguard the world from the very Armageddon they could themselves unleash. By implication, Iran is an untrustworthy custodian of the means to apocalypse. But this self-serving pose surely elicits "Who do you think you are?" from non-nuclear sovereign nations. Inside Iran "entitlement" rhetoric can only inflame nationalistic indignation, inverting neatly into propaganda for Ahmadinejad. It throws down a gauntlet – and invites defiance.
Granted, international leverage with Iran is limited. Yet what\'s required is competent manipulation, which means appealing to self-interest. In addition to brandishing sanctions, America needs to drop the posturing and talk turkey: "OK, you want nukes. Given the way we treat the folks who went out and got them even when they were told not to, that\'s understandable. We handle Pakistan with kid gloves, and when they went nuclear we did little more than say: \'Well. That\'s a drag.\' Likewise when Pyongyang sank that South Korean warship, we huffed and puffed and grumbled something like \'That wasn\'t very nice\', but nothing happened. Because we\'re afraid of these guys. So sure, you want us to be afraid of you, too.
"But have you read the cover story of this August\'s Atlantic Monthly? It assembles an unnervingly convincing case that if you gatecrash our gentlemen\'s club, Israel will hit you with massive air strikes , just as they took out Saddam\'s Osirak reactor in 1981 , and a North Korean-built reactor in Syria in 2007 . We realise you don\'t believe us, but we don\'t totally control these people. Think about it: do you want a war in the Middle East? When you reflect back on the Iran-Iraq war, don\'t you feel tired? You\'ve sky-high inflation and unemployment. Can you afford a war? Wouldn\'t you rather spend the money torturing protesters and executing adulterers with something a little more sophisticated than rocks?"
All right, maybe Clinton could contrive a more persuasive line than that. But any pragmatic appeal would beat the kind of phoney finger-wagging that notoriously flops with one\'s children: scolding a teenager for smoking, and jabbing a lit cigarette for emphasis.
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/[...]r-wagging-iran-hillary-nuclear
