Israel Matzav

Surprise: Russia and China resisting Iran sanctions

It should come as no surprise to any of you that one of the results of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's sudden agreement to 'negotiate' is that Russia and China are seizing on the 'negotiations' as an excuse to resist harsher sanctions against Iran.

The meeting of the five United Nations permanent Security Council members and Germany was complicated by a last-minute offer of talks from Saeed Jalili, the top nuclear negotiator in Iran.

Because no details of the offer were available, the delegates assumed that Mr Jalili planned to use his proposal to slow the progress of moves to impose sanctions. Russia and China used the prospect of a peace offering from Tehran, however vague, as an argument against punitive measures.

One of the diplomats said: “The point is to duck, dive, tease and confuse until they are more or less resistant to the kind of sanctions that we have been considering.”

Meanwhile, the French and the Germans - fearful that if they don't act Israel will - have suddenly gotten much tougher on Iran.

France and Germany called this week for harder-edged sanctions. Their concern is that if the West is not seen to be pushing Iran harder, Israel may consider a military strike. Critics of President Obama, such as John Bolton, the former US envoy to the United Nations, argue that sanctions are doomed to fail even if they could be linked directly to stopping Iranian nuclear plans.

“Adopting tougher economic sanctions is simply another detour away from hard decisions on whether to accept a nuclear Iran or support using force to prevent it,” he wrote in The Wall Street Journal this week.

Israel has to recognize that Bolton is right and that imposing sanctions at this point - even if they are effective, which appears unlikely - does nothing but buy time for Iran to complete their program. Israel's former ambassador to the United Nations Dore Gold warns against giving Iran extra time through 'engagement' or sanctions:

Former Israeli diplomat Dore Gold railed against the West's "rising complacency" at the specter of a nuclear Iran Tuesday and warned that any engagement with Teheran should last only a few weeks lest it allow the Islamic Republic to achieve a nuclear breakout.

Gold, who served as Israel's ambassador to the UN during the first term of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, whom he continued to serve as a foreign policy adviser through his recent campaign, contended that Iran's rulers would take full advantage of any period of engagement to advance its nuclear program, as had occurred in past negotiations conducted by the European Union.

On similar grounds, he urged the West to stick to the September deadline it had given Iran to respond to its offer of direct engagement. US President Barack Obama, who has made diplomatic outreach a cornerstone of his Iran policy, had indicated he would reconsider that approach if Iran had not accepted by then.

Gold noted that in the wake of the domestic challenges to the Iranian government's authority following the June presidential elections, Obama seemed to be reviewing the US posture. He warned that if the upshot were to extend the September deadline by half a year, "Those six months will be fully exploited to move Iran closer to the nuclear finishing line."

Gold also does not believe that it is possible to deter Iran as was done with the Soviet Union during the Cold War:

"I don't remember communist suicide bombers," he said, noting that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad not only encourages terrorism throughout the Middle East, but has backed an end-of-days ideology that begins with "chaos."

The strategic situation of the Middle East is also different, according to Gold, as Arab countries would likely pursue nuclear capabilities as a result of the hegemonic threat from Iran, making for a multi-polar deterrence program.

Yet he listed the growing traction of deterrence as one of the key reasons for the lack of urgency on the part of the Western world at the prospect of an Iranian bomb. He also blamed the talk of engagement, with many players taking the position that "it will work out" through effective US diplomacy.

The moment of decision is arriving. Israel is going to have to act.

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 6:59 PM