Editorial: Iran’s moment of nuclear truth

In the coming days Bashar Assad’s troops should be paying a terrible price for launching a chemical attack on their fellow Syrians. Assad himself and the regime elite are probably already sitting at the bottom of underground bunkers, waiting for the cruise missile strikes. They will perhaps be wondering if, given the destruction wrought on subterranean weapon silos in Qaddafi’s Libya by ground-penetrating bombs, whether their engineers in fact dug them deep enough.
Others will be wondering much the same. The most sensitive parts of Iran’s nuclear program with its uranium enrichment, have been located in caverns excavated far into the base mountains. At the very least, the entrances to these facilities will be extremely vulnerable to bomb or missile attack, even if the equipment and personnel within the facility cannot easily be damaged.
Iran is due to resume talks with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) at the end of next month. It will be the first chance for the international community to gauge the sincerity of the country’s new President Hassan Rowhani in his expressed desire to make a fresh start on the issue. It will also of course, be an opportunity to assess the degree to which the views of the real power in the country, supreme leader Ayatollah Khamenei, have changed in the face of ever-more damaging sanctions.
Early indications are that the new president may already be encountering resistance to his plan for a more accommodating approach to the IAEA. He has reportedly been unable to nominate a new chief nuclear negotiator to attend the talks that begin on Sept. 27. This could represent a real difference of opinion, or it could be yet another Iranian smokescreen, behind which it can achieve further delays, while it presses on as fast as possible with its uranium enrichment program.
If no chief negotiator has been appointed by the resumption of the talks, then the meeting will either be canceled, or a temporary chief negotiator will be sent. This person will almost certainly be unable to do anything more than present the official view, from which it will not be possible to deviate to any degree, if at all. Therefore the new talks will be doomed from the start. They will be rescheduled for when Khamenei finally allows his new president to choose a genuine negotiator for the job. And that might not be any time soon.
But then Tehran may not need to use this ploy. It is about to see its loyal ally Bashar Assad pay a terrible price for his brutal and bloody attempt to crush his own people. In the expected US-led attacks, it may also see Hezbollah, the terrorist organization has so willingly and generously sponsored and financed, itself suffer considerable damage.
Within days, if not hours, the Iranian regime is going to be protesting loudly about the long-overdue retribution meted out to its friends in Syria and southern Lebanon. The obvious response that it will make to Washington’s action will be to cancel the nuclear program talks. That this will mean a continuation, if not a further tightening of the economic sanctions that are crippling the Iranian economy will probably matter less than that, at the moment when its Syrian and Hezbollah clients are humiliated, it expresses its anger and vows darkly to exact a terrible revenge.
Bluster aside, the only lever that Tehran has is to try to ramp up the proxy war that it has been encouraging Iraq’s Prime Minister Nuri Al-Maliki to conduct against the country’s Sunni and Kurdish minorities. However with the Assad regime approaching its demise, Al-Maliki must know that he is going to have to be dealing with a very different neighbor on his western border. He may be unprepared to worsen already poor relations with Syria’s Sunni majority.
It would be fortunate, therefore, if he resists further Iranian interference. The real issue here is that the Middle East region should be free of nuclear arms. If Iran is indeed trying for its own atomic weaponry it should stop, just as Israel should be made to come clean over its nuclear arsenal and be obliged to dismantle it. The destruction of the wicked Assad regime is imminent. The real prize now is to remove nuclear arms from the region. Tehran should abandon its Syrian cause, as lost, and look to the future, a nuclear free future.