Between now and September 2005, Iran will move to resume operating the uranium conversion plant at Esfahan, and it perhaps will resume testing centrifuges. Iranian officials will insist that such activities are entirely within Iran's rights under the NPT, and that they will be conducted in accord with IAEA safeguards. They will argue that the demands being made by Europe exceed any legal requirement, and that Iran is ending its voluntary suspension of enrichment activity because certain countries—read the United States and Israel—will never relent in their attempt to make Iran a backward, weak country. At the behest of these hostile states, the European Union will reject Iran's offer of the most intrusive possible monitoring and inspections of its nuclear activities. Iran will publish what it has offered and let the world judge who is being reasonable or not. Iran will not be able to do anything more to demonstrate that it will play by the rules in exercising its right to nuclear technology. Rather than be bullied by the United States, Iran will decide that it must rightfully resume its nuclear program.Of course, betting against this crowd dragging us into another ill-advised and bloody foreign policy conflict is a mug's game if there ever was one.
The United States will seize on Iran's ending of its suspension and insist that the E.U.-3 should "do what they have promised" and take Iran to the U.N. Security Council. Popular opinion and many political figures in these countries will balk. Officials will leak that the United States was unprepared to take steps that "everyone" knew would be necessary to persuade Iran to accede to demands that it permanently cease uranium enrichment and plutonium separation activities. "How can Iran be expected to give up its nuclear capability if the United States is threatening regime change?" Many in Europe and elsewhere will argue that America intended all along to repeat the Iraq scenario and manufacture a case for war against Iran. As the E.U.-3 countries waver about when to refer Iran's case to the Security Council and what action to take there, members of the U.S. Congress will denounce French perfidy and German equivocation. Transatlantic recriminations will mount. In the IAEA and the United Nations, developing countries will decry U.S.-led efforts to ignore their rights and to impose a new form of nuclear apartheid.
In Iran, the U.S. Congress's reauthorization of secondary sanctions and the George W. Bush administration's eagerness to refer the Iran case to the U.N. Security Council straightaway will strengthen the feeling that Iran must hunker down to defend its rights to technological development. Known political reformers will not dissent. Student demonstrations will occur, demanding that Iran not give up its nuclear program. The new Iranian president will take a defiant stance, and all factions of the Parliament will unite to insist on exercising the "right" to enrich uranium. Iranian leaders will travel to China to sign new deals for investment in Iran's energy resources...