Who's Tough on Tehran?

Iranian voters are, but not the U.N. Security Council.

Opinion Journal from the Wall Street Journal editorial page

Iranians made their feelings plain about Mahmoud Ahmadinejad last week by voting to reject his allies in municipal elections and in the Assembly of Experts, a clerical body that theoretically has authority over Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. That doesn't mean reformers now run Iran, but it does suggest that international pressure and a policy of democracy promotion may produce the kinds of changes in Iran that three years of Western diplomacy have failed to achieve.

So it's all the more puzzling that, even as Iranians try to apply some pressure on Mr. Ahmadinejad, the international community is about to prove his point that Iran will pay little price for its quest to develop an atomic bomb. Consider what's happening at the U.N., where the Security Council is expected to approve a sanctions resolution this week, nearly four months after its August 31 "deadline" for Tehran to stop enriching uranium.

We've seen the latest draft of the resolution, hashed out among the U.S., the Europeans and Russia. Iran will be forbidden from importing any items or technical assistance "which could contribute to [its] enrichment-related, reprocessing or heavy water related activities, or to the delivery of nuclear weapon delivery systems." The resolution also imposes travel restrictions, and it freezes the financial assets of certain individuals involved in Iran's nuclear and ballistic missile programs.

This almost sounds tough. But then the resolution carves out exceptions that are broader than the actual rules. Consider the financial freeze: It shall apply in all cases, except where the money is necessary for "basic expenses," "extraordinary expenses," or is "the subject of a judicial, administrative or arbitral lien." Or take the travel ban, which has exceptions for "humanitarian need," "religious obligation," or when the sanctioned individuals need to travel in connection to some nuclear activities as opposed to others.

More dangerous is the exception for Bushehr, the civilian reactor that Russia has built for Iran at a cost of $1 billion and that is expected to be ready by October 2007. Conventional wisdom says "light-water" reactors such as Bushehr can't easily be used to make nukes, one reason the Clinton Administration arranged to build two of them for North Korea.

In fact, says proliferation expert Henry Sokolski, such reactors produce 330 kilograms of reactor-grade plutonium, which can be reprocessed into nuclear fuel for as many as 60 Nagasaki-type bombs in a matter of weeks. The Russians promise to safeguard the nuclear fuel. But the reactor's uranium pellets can be secretly removed by substituting dummy fuel rods and then quickly enriched to weapons-grade material in Iran's centrifuge cascades, without foreign inspectors ever being the wiser. Iranian scientists will also gain invaluable nuclear know-how simply by operating a civilian reactor.

In other words, the Security Council's resolution may well be worse than nothing at all. It reaffirms Iran's "right" to peaceful nuclear energy--a right it has long since forfeited by violating the terms of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT). And by carving a legally binding exception around Bushehr, the Security Council gives Iran the foothold it needs to develop its nuclear program to within a screw's twist of an actual bomb, without ever trespassing against the sanctions.

The resolution's defenders, particularly at the State Department, tell us this is a price worth paying to accommodate the Russians and achieve an international consensus. They also say the resolution is just the latest incremental step. But at some point one has to ask whether consensus is helping to achieve U.S. policy goals, particularly when Iran keeps using international divisions to buy time for its nuclear programs. Perhaps the best the Administration can hope for is that Iran responds to even these minimal sanctions by making good on its threats to withdraw from the NPT, embarrassing even the U.N. Security Council into tougher action.

Which brings us back to the Iranian elections. It is wrong to imagine that the big winner--former president and Ayatollah Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani--is a moderate or a reformer, though he is more certainly presentable than his successor; he too has threatened Israel with nuclear annihilation. But given the limited political choices the regime offers voters, the election indicates that most Iranians dislike the regime and that they take no pleasure in their president's status as a moral pariah.

There's an opening here to promote change, provided the U.S. doesn't reward Mr. Ahmadinejad's bad behavior by failing to punish it, and provided President Bush reminds Iranians that while the U.S. opposes their government, it stands with Iranians who want more freedom.

(Editor's note: This editorial overstated the amount of plutonium the Bushehr reactor could produce. The error has been corrected.)