How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb

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News Analysis: Chirac says what many have been thinking

By Elaine Sciolino

Friday, February 2007

PARIS

When President Jacques Chirac said this week that he was not overly worried if Iran had a nuclear weapon or two, he stated clearly what some arms control experts have been saying for some time: that the world may have to learn live with a nuclear Iran.

Chirac quickly retracted his remarks, and the Élysée Palace reaffirmed France's commitment to preventing Iran from becoming a nuclear power. But in veering from the prepared script and letting the veil of caution fall, he was sparking discussion of whether containment of a nuclear Iran is less bad than other options — and certainly preferable to war.

"Jacques Chirac said things that many experts are saying around the world, even in the United States; that is to say, that a country that possesses the bomb does not use it and automatically enters the system of deterrence and doesn't take absurd risks," Hubert Vedrine, the French foreign minister from 1997 to 2002, said Friday on LCI television.

The logic of the argument goes this way: Iran is manufacturing enriched uranium, which can be used for making electricity or nuclear weapons. If Iran masters that process for military purposes, it may be able to build a bomb or two. The only realistic goal is to delay the process as long as possible. But even if Iran has the bomb, the classic doctrine of nuclear deterrence that restrained nuclear powers during the Cold War will prevent it from ever using it, according to this argument.

"There is a growing realization that the international community is failing to stop Iran from acquiring a uranium enrichment capability," said Mark Fitzpatrick, a senior fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies. "The U.S. government wouldn't accept it, but it's becoming a fait accompli. Can the next step — a nuclear weapon — be prevented? Chirac skipped over that question and cut to the chase in saying that, 'We can live with a nuclear- armed Iran.'"

The Bush administration rejects the idea of an Iranian bomb and has made stopping it the object of an increasingly aggressive policy. Among the Europeans, however, there is an overwhelming consensus that the American-led war in Iraq has been an unmitigated failure and that Washington's Iran strategy could end in an even more destabilizing military confrontation.

It was Chirac who led Europe's opposition to the invasion of Iraq, and in a told-you-so speech last month he said that his predictions that the war would spread more chaos, regional instability and terrorism had come true.

In his remarks this week, he could have been speaking for most of Europe when he said that what he called "the Iraq affair" has "shifted red lines."

Even inside the Bush administration, some officials have acknowledged over the past year that Iran eventually may have a nuclear weapon or at least the technology and components to assemble one quickly. Outside of government, the view that the world might have to coexist with a nuclear Iran was laid out in a study by two U.S.-government-financed scholars at the National Defense University in 2005.

"Can the United States live with a nuclear-armed Iran?" the report asked. "Despite its rhetoric, it may have no choice." The report added that the costs of rolling back Tehran's nuclear program "may be higher than the costs of deterring and containing a nuclear Iran."

In a sense, Chirac was trying to make just that point when he said in interviews to three publications, including the International Herald Tribune, that a bomb would do Iran little good because it would never be able to use it without facing swift retaliation.

He also made clear that Tehran must not be completely humiliated and isolated, but encouraged to become a positive regional player. "How can we impose sufficiently strong constraints on Iran?" he asked in the Monday interview. Calling the Islamic Republic "a bit fragile," he said, "One has to know what Iran can withstand or not."

The following day, he stressed the importance of having a "dialogue" with Tehran, which he said had an important role to play to stabilize the region.

What was lost in the furor over Chirac's remarks was his clear statement that Iran was secretly trying to become a nuclear power. "Iran wants, through the enrichment of uranium, to make a bomb," he said. In the past several years, Chirac has tried to navigate between the United States on one side and Iran on the other. It was France, in the months after the invasion of Iraq in 2003, that conceived a diplomatic initiative joined by Britain and Germany in which Iran would freeze its uranium enrichment activities in exchange for political, economic and technological incentives.

The Europeans felt that the United States was moving closer to an open confrontation with Iran that looked too much like the prelude to the Iraq invasion. But the initiative failed, even after the United States, Russia and China joined in. Sanctions, even in the unlikely eventuality that they can be toughened substantially, are not likely to be tough enough to change Iran's behavior.

As for the Islamic Republic, it says its nuclear program is for peaceful energy purposes and that charges it is developing a nuclear weapon are lies. It views UN sanctions to punish it for enriching uranium as unjust and a violation of its rights as a signatory to the nuclear Non- Proliferation Treaty. It justifies its presence in Shiite-controlled Iraq as necessary to preserve its own national security interests and protect itself should that nations dissolve into chaos.

On Thursday, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said that Iran was becoming a "superpower" and that the UN sanctions would not deter it from pursuing its nuclear program. Indeed, the Iranians are well aware that possession of the bomb would transform them immediately into the dominant power in the Middle East.

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