Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
August 15, 2008 10:00 AM
The deal would involve providing Russia with American advanced nuclear
know-how, the joint global promotion of nuclear power for peaceful civilian
uses, and expanded energy commerce (including nuclear commerce) between
our nations. It would also help pave the way for Russia’s entry into the World
Trade Organization, which is kind of like welcoming the Gambino Family into
the Chamber of Commerce.
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For here is the problem: Putin, for whom “strategic partner” is just a side-line
from his full-time gig as Capo di Tutti Commie, has all the while been arming
and protecting our most determined enemies.
In small compass, Russia tells the sorry story of Secretary Condoleezza Rice’s
Carteresque turn at the State Department. The President Bush of the first term
— you remember, the guy who announced the Bush Doctrine, smashed al-
Qaeda, isolated Arafat’s nascent terror state, ousted Saddam, inspired Qaddafi
to forfeit his nukes, squeezed Kim Jong Il — strongly condemned Russia’s
facilitation of the Bushehr nuclear facility in Iran. With good reason.
Purportedly dedicated to peaceful civilian energy development, Bushehr gives
the oil-rich Khomeinists all the cover they need to build atomic weapons.
Let’s consider for a moment only the low enriched uranium Russia delivers to
Bushehr every 12 to 18 months. In June, Henry Sokolski, executive director of
the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center, told a House committee that, at
the start of the fueling cycle, Iran could divert the fresh uranium to feed its
centrifuge enrichment plant. If they did, they’d have “a bomb’s worth of
weapon uranium” within about eight weeks. Alternatively, if Iran waited until
refueling is next due in 2010, it could seize the spent fuel and “gain access to
30 crude bombs worth of near-weapons grade plutonium to make plutonium
weapons.”
Would the Russians really tolerate such a thing right across the Caspian Sea?
At the right price, Putin would tolerate anything.
Like any sensible person living in the real world (so we are not talking now
about American and European diplomats), the Russians know it is a virtual
flip of the atomic switch to go from civilian to military capabilities. Yet they’ve
pressed zealously ahead. As Sokolski details, there are about 1300 Russian
nuclear technicians in Iran, a number that will soon surge to over 2500 (if it
hasn’t already). And we know the Russo/Iranian nuclear cooperation
encompasses more than the Bushehr camouflage. No one but the Russians
and the Iranians know exactly what the technicians are up to, and Russian
“entities” already have a history of assisting the mullahs’ plutonium
production and uranium-enrichment efforts.
former high ranking members of the Russian military have facilitated a multi-million
2003 missile technology transfer agreement between Iran and North Korea,” and that
Russia has exported to Iran “production facilities, diagrams and operating instructions
so the missile can be built in Iran, as well as liquid propellant (to fuel the rockets).”
The British paper goes on to detail how “Russian specialists have also been sent to
Iran to help development of its Shahab 5 missile project.” The Shahab 5 is a system
that is designed to be capable of delivering a crude nuclear warhead to nearly any
target in Europe.
None of this is a surprise. Indeed, in March 2007 (i.e., before the U.S. troop
surge kicked in), when it appeared that Iranian terror would likely cause a
humiliating U.S. defeat in Iraq, the Director of National
Intelligence warned the State Department: “We assess that individual Russian
entities continue to provide assistance to Iran’s ballistic missile programs. We
judge that Russian-entity assistance, along with assistance from entities in
China and North Korea, has helped Iran move toward self-sufficiency in the
production of ballistic missiles.”
LET’S PRETEND
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At the time of course, President Bush was in no position to provide one. Yet,
despite Bushehr and the other intelligence, the administration cajoled
Congress into granting a three-year waiver of the certification requirement,
enabling us to pay the Russians for the space-station while they helped the
Iranians build missiles and enrich uranium.
Dream on. Even as State was braying about sticks, the Russian foreign
minister calmly explainedthat there were only carrots: his government had
given no assurances on sanctions. By late summer, with the Russians
snickering as the Iranians worked on their nukes, administration officials
ruefully conceded that they’d been reduced to seeking inconsequential U.N.
penalties (such as travel restrictions on Iranian officials) because Russia and
China would veto any real sanctions.
Through all this humiliation, as Iran continues its mischief in Iraq, backs the
Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, and moves ever closer to becoming a
nuclear power, the administration has eschewed a policy of regime-change or
a military attack on Iranian nuclear sites. Again and again, the president and
his Secretary of State have reaffirmed their commitment to a diplomatic
process that is critically dependent on Russian cooperation.
Notwithstanding that we’ve gotten the opposite of cooperation, the president
leapt headlong into his “strategic partnership” with Putin in April. If you’re
keeping score, that would be after the years of abetting Iran, after the murders
of Russian journalists, after the Kremlin’s brutal expropriation of private
industries, and after Putin scalded the United States in February for
purportedly provoking a new arms race and undermining global stability. (A
White House spokesman sniffed that the president was “surprised and
disappointed” by the remarks.)
To add insult to injury, President Bush also asked Congress for another
INKSNA waiver. After all, why shouldn’t we keep paying the Russians and
encouraging all this outstanding cooperation we’re getting even though we
can’t certify that they’ve stopped giving nuclear and military aid to a regime
whose motto is “Death to America,” led by a jihadist who says a world without
America and Israel is attainable.
Moreover, just a few weeks after the administration submitted the pact
anyway, 14 House Republicans, including Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, the ranking
member of the Foreign Affairs Committee, wrote the president to request that
he withdraw the pact. The lawmakers pointed out the obvious: The
administration’s claim that Russia’s Iran record is now satisfactory flies in the
face of its own request to be relieved of the duty to certify that Russia is not
assisting Iran’s weapons programs.
The administration has ignored the House Republicans, but it won’t be able to
ignore them anymore. Not after Georgia. Not after Russia has invaded a
sovereign, American-allied democracy: one that stood with the U.S. in Iraq;
one that President Bush was recently grooming for NATO-membership and all
the security guarantees that implies — or at least used to imply, for whether
Russia’s belligerence has conclusively exposed the alliance’s obsolescence is an
urgent question.
It is the height of folly to regard the Putin Family as though it were a normal
regime, protecting the vital interests of a normal country. This is the fiction
that says one of these years the Russians will surely come around because, in
the long-term, they shouldn’t want a nuclear Iran either.
If Putin makes a lot of money while Iran gets nukes, Putin is not going to
worry about Iran one day threatening the Russian people. Putin doesn’t give a
damn about the Russian people now — he and his cronies in the workers’ neo-
paradise care only about lining their pockets.
COMMENTS
— National Review’s Andrew C. McCarthy chairs FDD’s Center for Law &
Counterterrorism and is the author of Willful Blindness: A Memoir of the Jihad.