Iranian Gamesmanship Sets New Test for West

(Feb. 8) – Iran's diplomatic contests with the West over its nuclear program have often been compared to poker and chess, while the back-and-forth of its most recent rhetorical shots more aptly evokes ping-pong. Whatever the metaphor, the Iranian leadership is once again making clear it won't concede the game.

Tehran's latest move came Monday, when the country's envoy to the International Atomic Energy Agency informed the U.N. watchdog that Iran would go ahead with the enrichment of uranium to the level of 20 percent – just above the IAEA threshold for "highly enriched uranium" and a key step toward the weapons-grade level of 90 percent.

There are scientific and geopolitical grounds for doubting the Iranian rhetoric, but the envoy, Ali Asghar Soltanieh, told The Associated Press the enrichment decision was a medical imperative. "We cannot leave hospitals and patients desperately waiting for radio isotopes," he said. Those medical isotopes are produced at the Tehran research reactor that needs the purer uranium fuel fashioned into special fuel rods, which can be produced in suitable form only by France and Argentina.

Soltanieh blamed the United States and its European allies for his government's decision to continue the enrichment process, arguing that Tehran had waited in vain for a response to its latest offer to ship some Iranian uranium in small batches to France and Russia for enrichment. That proposal had been rejected by the IAEA as a meaningless alternative to a more stringent export deal, presented by the West last year, that Iran initially accepted and then spurned.

Only last week, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad suggested Iran might comply with the Western enrichment deal. But his reversal on Sunday and official word to the IAEA on Monday sent the ball back to the West's court.

U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates, addressing Iran for the third time in three days from three different countries, told reporters in Paris that the Obama administration and its partners tried ardently and sincerely to engage with Iran, but that "all these initiatives have been rejected," leaving the West little option other than sanctions against Tehran.

The tougher U.S. stance – following a lapsed administration deadline for Iran last year – is backed by France, Britain, Germany and even Russia, a frequent opponent of sanctions in the past but one that has voiced growing impatience with Iran's gamesmanship.

But a new slate of biting U.N. sanctions against Iran seems unlikely for now, since China, a permanent member of the U.N. Security Council with veto power, remains set against such action. And with Beijing and Washington at odds over a host of other issues, from Taiwan and the Dalai Lama to currency policy and climate control, the Obama administration stands little chance of securing more aggressive punishment of one of China's biggest oil suppliers.

The U.S. could still try to orchestrate multilateral economic sanctions without the U.N. imprimatur, a prospect that may help explain the latest Iranian move as a bid for a better negotiating position. For any country looking for reasons to oppose Western sanctions, the medical argument for enrichment sounds a more sympathetic tone than Tehran's usual claims that it wants to build nuclear power plants.

The Iranian government may also be playing to its domestic audience. Opposition leaders, at odds with the regime since Ahmadinejad's disputed re-election last June, have called the latest round of mass protests for Thursday, the 31st anniversary of the Iranian revolution. Most opposition figures are fervent opponents of the West's uranium export proposal.

But even if Iran's latest nuclear promises are sincere, there are doubts about the country's ability to follow through.

The Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security, a proliferation-tracking group with a strong record of parsing Iranian data, notes that Iran is technically capable of enriching parts of its uranium stockpile to the 20 percent level at its Natanz facility and has the unused centrifuge capacity to do it.

But the uranium stockpile most suitable for the task – the almost 4,000 pounds Iran has already acknowledged enriching to 3.5 percent purity – comes with constraints. That stockpile is under the scrutiny of the IAEA, and Iran is required by international treaties to tell the agency if it further enriches it because such enrichment could produce weapons-grade material quickly – perhaps in as little as six months, according to ISIS estimates for a so-called "breakout scenario."

It takes much more enrichment effort to bring uranium to the 3.5 percent level than it does to enrich the uranium further to 20 percent or even weapons grade. Yet even starting with that stockpile would require preparations at Natanz that could take some time – if Iran hasn't already secretly undertaken them. And Iran could have trouble turning the enriched uranium into the kind of rods it claims to want for the Tehran research reactor, a process mastered by France and Argentina, as well as a handful of countries for lesser quantities, but never by Iran, the ISIS notes.

Moreover, though Soltanieh also announced Iranian intentions to build 10 enrichment facilities next year, ISIS points out that it can break ground for that many, "but outfitting them with centrifuge equipment is far-fetched" and raises doubts about the motivation for the whole announcement.

"Iran may seek to project defiance, strength and technical prowess, despite deficits in all but the first," it says. "A subtler point is that Iran may be signaling that it is building other centrifuge plants that it has no intention of declaring early, unless one is discovered by foreign intelligence."

And that leaves the next move to the U.S. and its partners, who must make good on their threat of sanctions or risk letting Iran keep setting the rules for the game.