The world is getting perilously close to reaching a nuclear deal with Iran. The world is in peril because the deal is dangerous and irresponsible. Iran is a nation that has historically supported the use of terrorism, targeted civilians, and pursued the Islamic bomb. Iran has consistently defied the United Nations and the international community on these very issues, resulting in decades of sanctions. Iranian leaders assisted insurgencies in Iraq and directly targeted American troops. Every Iranian leader since 1979 has advocated the total removal of Israel from the middle east, by force if necessary.
In the next two weeks, the United States will provide Iran with a roadmap to becoming a nuclear power. The terms of the deal are basically public at this point. Iran will halt uranium enrichment beyond a certain level, limit its total number of nuclear centrifuges, and agree to otherwise use its nuclear program for peaceful purposes. But only for ten years. At the end of that hiatus, Iran will be legally allowed to develop nuclear weapons, or at the very least, the development of those weapons will no longer be a violation of the multinational treaty.
The stated goal of this treaty is to prevent a so called "nuclear break-out" from occurring without our knowledge. It is assumed that at this very moment the Iranians could have at least one nuclear weapon in three months. It is hoped, although not at all certain, that by limiting enrichment and the number of centrifuges, it would take Iran at least a year to achieve a nuclear weapon. With intrusive inspections, elaborate verification and good intelligence, the Obama Administration hopes to be able to predict an Iranian break-out in time to do something about it. What, exactly, he would do about it remains a mystery. It is likely, however, that he or his successor would be relegated to lobbying the United Nations for a reinstatement of sanctions. That could take months or even years to achieve.
The efficacy of this deal, as limited as it may be, hinges almost entirely on verification. If the Iranians secretly violate the treaty and continue to enrich uranium in hidden centrifuges, they could become a nuclear power in violation of the treaty. It would then be too late and too risky to use military force to destroy their nuclear program. This openly hostile, terrorist regime would then possess the means by which to destroy Israel - something it has vowed to do since 1979. So, if the United States and its allies cannot effectively verify compliance, the pursuit of this treaty will have been an enormous mistake.
As the deal gets closer, the CIA has been actively working to quiet critics by assuring the public that, if the Iranians violate the terms of the treaty, they will know about it. However, effective verification is a difficult prospect and our intelligence services have a pitiful record when it comes to predicting outcomes. To be fair, the CIA is filled with hard working, dedicated patriots who spend their waking moments working to keep our nation safe. The agency's greatest achievements are likely never known because the CIA operates in secret. It is likely that for every intelligence failure, there are many successes. That said, history has proven that the CIA consistently fails to accurately predict these types of outcomes.
For example, the CIA failed to predict the fall of Saigon, the Iranian revolution in 1979, the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the invasion of Kuwait, the use of chemical weapons on the Kurds and, more recently, the so called Arab Spring.
When it comes to nuclear proliferation, they have an equally poor record. In 1991, the two Koreas agreed to a "nuclear free" Korean peninsula. As part of that treaty, the United States withdrew the eight nuclear weapons it had stationed in South Korea. Unfortunately, verification failed and the intelligence estimates were that by 1994, North Korea would have two nuclear weapons. That summer, former president, Jimmy Carter, at President Clinton's request, famously traveled to North Korea to negotiate a "nuclear freeze." His negotiations were deemed a success and a tremendous victory for the Clinton Administration. However, that success was based on an unenforceable "agreed statement," similar to the one being negotiated in Iran and, of course, "verification." Nevertheless, by the end of 1995, the IAEA, who was charged with the verification process, reported that North Korea's nuclear program had "halted."
In 2002, however, the Bush Administration revealed that North Korea had maintained a clandestine nuclear program in violation of the Carter agreement. A year later, the consensus in the intelligence community was that North Korea had nuclear weapons and a few months after that, North Korea announced that it had the weapons. Verification had failed, and the North Koreans now possess a nuclear deterrent that even our allies in South Korea do not have.
There is a kind of hubris in the intelligence community about effectiveness. Once a nation like North Korea becomes a nuclear power, the focus then changes to preventing proliferation. It is assumed that the United States can effectively "contain" a nuclear power and prevent a nuclear attack. But our intelligence agencies have not been effective in either containing a nuclear power or stopping all terrorist attacks. And, in a world with nuclear-armed terrorists, that will be the measure. A single nuclear attack would be catastrophic. While it is very likely that the CIA has thwarted many attacks against our nation, they failed to stop the World Trade Center bombing, the attacks on our embassies in Africa, the attack on the USS Cole and, of course, 9/11. The 9/11 Commission said the attacks were possible because of a "failure of imagination" on the part of our leadership and our intelligence agencies. The failure was epic to be sure, but it was not a failure of imagination. The idea of hijacking an airplane was nothing new. The idea of killing passengers was nothing new. The idea of jihad against western targets was nothing new. The idea of a group of jihadis hijacking an airplane and killing people by crashing it into something was nothing new.
Quite frankly, if our intelligence agencies can miss something as unimaginative as 9/11, we should be very careful about trusting them to thwart a more imaginative nuclear attack from a hostile Iran. Not only should we doubt the CIA's ability to tell us whether Iran is about to break out to a bomb, we should doubt that they can predict where, exactly, those weapons will end up.
This is why there can be no deal with Iran on nuclear weapons until they have conclusively demonstrated to the world that they have abandoned their hatred of the west and Israel. Until their clerics stop holding weekly "Death to America" rallies, we cannot be so reckless as to believe that their leadership will not use a nuclear weapon on us, and only a fool signs his own death warrant.
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