01/15/2012
Humanitarian gestures and covert actions won’t stop Iran’s bomb.
As a supervisor at the uranium enrichment plant in Natanz, Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan was engaged in building a nuclear bomb in violation of four binding U.N. Security Council resolutions. On Wednesday he was assassinated after a bomb was attached to his car, making him the fifth senior Iranian nuclear scientist known to have been killed in recent years.
His death will serve a useful purpose if it convinces a critical mass of his colleagues to cease pursuing an atomic critical mass. That wouldn’t be a bad way to bring the confrontation over Iran’s nuclear program to a peaceful conclusion. But don’t count on it.
Opponents of Tehran’s nuclear ambitions have been attempting for years to use a combination of diplomacy, sanctions and covert action to persuade the mullahs that they have more to lose than gain from building a bomb. So far, none of it has worked: Diplomacy has mostly allowed the Iranians to play for time. Sanctions so far have been too narrowly targeted to have much effect, though that may change now that the U.S. and Europe are finally targeting Iran’s oil trade.
As for covert activity, we may someday learn the full story of who did what, how they did it, and what effect it all had. But to judge by last November’s report on Iran’s nuclear programs by the International Atomic Energy Agency, Tehran is closer than ever to a bomb. That’s despite the Stuxnet computer worm, the assassinations, and last year’s mysterious explosion at a missile factory.
What goes in the cloak-and-dagger world also goes for public diplomacy. Americans can take pride in last week’s dramatic rescue by the destroyer USS Kidd of 13 Iranian sailors who had spent 40 days as hostages of Somali pirates. But if the Administration thought that would break the tension following Iran’s threats over the Strait of Hormuz, Tehran had other ideas.
Days after the Kidd rescue, Iran imposed a death sentence on 28-year-old Amir Hekmati, an Arizona-born Iranian-American and former U.S. Marine. Mr. Hekmati was charged with spying for the CIA and convicted of being moharebe, or an enemy of God, the worst offense in the Iranian penal code. The U.S. government categorically denies that Mr. Hekmati worked as a spy. His family says he was in Iran on his first visit to see his grandmothers when he was arrested last August.
The Islamic Republic has a long history of detaining foreigners on dubious espionage charges and then trying to use them as diplomatic bargaining chips. But if Mr. Hekmati is simply their latest victim, the death sentence is unprecedented for an American citizen. It is also a reminder of how little U.S. gestures like Thursday’s rescue count in Tehran’s calculus. An evil regime will not be swayed by the conspicuous performance of good deeds.
Much of the world wants to believe that force won’t be necessary to stop Iran’s nuclear ambitions, but the explosions and killings show that a covert war involving deadly force is already underway. The Obama Administration says Iran plotted to kill a Saudi ambassador in a Washington, D.C. restaurant, and Iran is trying to kill U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan as it previously did in Iraq. Many more people will die if the world doesn’t get serious about stopping this rogue regime.
