COMMENTARY
By PER AHLMARK
February
7, 2006;¬ÝPage¬ÝA26
Let us focus on
the good guys. The fools of the Iranian nuclear tragedy we already
know. The International Atomic Energy Agency was duped for 18 years.
Since its start in 1985, Iran's atomic program has been an ambitious,
highly deceptive project. However, the IAEA gave the regime a clean
bill of nuclear health, over and over again. The first 12 of those
years, gullible Hans Blix, IAEA director general, believed in almost
everything Tehran told him. He arrogantly dismissed warnings. The
likely Blix legacy: atomic bombs in the hands of the mullahs. His
successor, Mohamed ElBaradei, inherited the illusions in 1997 and
proceeded on a similar path. But disclosures by experts in the West
-- confirmed by militant groups within Iran -- made the IAEA denial
absurd. Mr. ElBaradei revealed the truth on Nov. 10, 2003, in a
stunning report to the IAEA board of governors: Iran had been lying
to the IAEA for almost two decades.
Who, in all this, are the good guys? Did the Norwegian Nobel
Committee realize the gathering storm in Iran when it last year
decided to give its peace prize to the IAEA? Maybe they chose to
award a U.N. agency, which had been a fiasco for so long, hoping the
prize would speed up its recovery. If so, a beautiful idea. My
feeling is different. It's time to express admiration of
personalities who have not been cheated by the Iranians. That's why I
have nominated two Americans for the Nobel peace prize for 2006. One
is an independent researcher who never gave up his quest to uncover
the truth, the other a government official. Separately, but on
parallel tracks, they have been alerting us that a tremendous threat
to peace is in the offing.
Kenneth Timmerman has for 20 years exposed Iran's nuclear
intentions. In books, reports, speeches, articles and private
meetings he has told us of specific detail as well as the big picture
-- a full-fledged, official plan to game the system of international
safeguards. His latest book, "Countdown to Crisis: The Coming Nuclear
Showdown with Iran," lays this out in chilling detail; and it was his
report for the Wiesenthal Center in 1992 that first detailed Iran's
ties to Pakistani nuclear scientist A.Q. Khan. [Deleted by WSJ
editors: Presenting that
report the same year, the famed Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal said
about the author: “I have spent my life tracking down the
murderers of yesterday. Mr. Timmerman is tracking down the murderers
of tomorrow”. ]
John Bolton, former undersecretary of state, has with unusual
energy tried to find ways to counter this threat. Friends and foes
agree -- he never gives up. He has repeatedly underlined the threat
of Iran pursuing two paths to nuclear weapons: One is the use of
highly enriched uranium, achieved by thousands of centrifuges, which
Iran has developed and tested. A large buried facility at Natanz is
intended to house up to 50,000 centrifuges. Iran resumed activities
there just four weeks ago (in direct defiance of the IAEA). The
second is through plutonium. Mr. Bolton knows that a heavy-water
production plant and the Bushehr light-water reactor can be exploited
as cover for sensitive nuclear fuel cycle activities. He says another
"unmistakable indicator" of nuclear intentions is Iran's habit of
"repeatedly lying to and providing false reports to the IAEA."
The danger is even more serious as Iran is a leading sponsor of
terrorism. Mr. Bolton, now U.S. ambassador to the U.N., is also a
father of the Proliferation Security Initiative, an international
effort to interdict shipments of WMD components, materials and the
ballistic missiles needed to deliver them. Thanks to this PSI, the
U.S. and others managed to seize centrifuge components en route to
Libya in 2003. This led to the breakup of the network of A.Q. Khan,
mastermind of the proliferation business in recent years.
European leaders have become a bit more active than before when
supporting united efforts to prevent Iran from going nuclear. But
there is still a sense of wishful thinking around them. Don't they
understand that Iran's messianic President Ahmadinejad is serious
when he says "wipe Israel off the map"? Appeasing fanatics does not
work. We have learned that already in the last century. The work of
John Bolton and Kenneth Timmerman provide stark reminders of that
most important lesson of history.
Mr. Ahlmark is a former deputy prime minister of Sweden and a
former leader of the Swedish Liberal Party.