7 March 2012. PenzaNews. Iran’s nuclear problem is now the focus of attention for the international community. Tehran's refusal to halt uranium enrichment and its insistence on developing all aspects of the nuclear fuel cycle have led to intensified international pressure. The United States, Israel and several other Western countries have accused Iran of plans to build nuclear weapons under the guise of peaceful nuclear power. Tehran has in turn rejected the accusations claiming that its nuclear program is aimed exclusively at generating electricity to meet the country’s energy needs.

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The Iranian foreign minister, Ali Akbar Salehi, said in a statement to the Conference on Disarmament recently held at the UN Office at Geneva that there are two ways to engage with Iran on its nuclear program: engagement or confrontation. In his words, Iran, “confident of the peaceful nature of its nuclear program, has always insisted on the first alternative,” calls for negotiations on a treaty banning nuclear weapons and condemns their production or possession as “a great sin.”

However, a report released by the UN nuclear weapons inspectors in November 2011 casts serious doubts about the character of Iran’s nuclear program. In its report the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) cited evidence that “Iran has carried out activities that are relevant to the development of a nuclear explosive device,” and that the project may still be under way. The IAEA’s updated report released on 24 February 2012 states, among other findings, that “the Agency continues to have serious concerns regarding possible military dimensions to Iran's nuclear programme.”

A number of states and organizations have introduced sanctions against Iran demanding that it ensure full transparency of its nuclear program and demonstrate its exclusively peaceful nature. The UN Security Council has adopted four rounds of sanctions on Iran. To cut Iran off from the international financial system the United States and the European Union took serious steps aimed at its central bank and commercial banks. The United States also imposed sanctions on companies involved in Iran’s nuclear industry, as well as on its petrochemical and oil industries by depriving the Iranian government of its ability to invest in its petroleum industry.

In response to the sanctions Iran threatens to close the Strait of Hormuz, an important oil transit point. In addition, Iran’s government ordered a halt to oil exports to the UK and France and also threatened to cut oil shipments to the rest of EU countries as the EU is preparing to cut off Iranian oil imports and freeze central bank assets beginning in July 2012.

Aref Assaf, an Arab-American scholar on Middle Eastern affairs, thinks that Iran’s recent threats to close the Strait of Hormuz are just empty threats that could nonetheless have unintended consequences.

According to Karim Sadjadpour, an expert on Iran and an associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Iran has “this schizophrenia” because it simultaneously has delusions of grandeur and profound insecurity.

“What the Obama administration is trying to do is to subject the Iranian regime to enough pressure to bring it back to the table and get it to make meaningful compromises on the nuclear part. And there has been tremendous pressure in terms of the Central Bank sanctions, now the currency crisis. There's external pressures as well. Their chief ally, the Syrian regime, is on the verge of collapse. The question is whether Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, will seek deliverance in a nuclear compromise in order to bring about some relief to himself, or whether he will seek deliverance with a nuclear weapon … [to] bring him a shield from outside pressure. I think recent history doesn't bode very well, because … when Gadhafi abdicated his nuclear program, that made him vulnerable to outside intervention,” the expert noted.

Meanwhile, General Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that the United States would “take action and reopen the strait,” if Iran blocked the Strait of Hormuz, which could be accomplished only by military means. At the same time, White House press secretary Jay Carny in a briefing on March 2 confirmed that the United States keeps all options on the table, including the military option, but stated that a diplomatic solution is still preferable.

In turn, Israeli officials say they will not warn the United States if they decide to launch a pre-emptive strike against Iranian nuclear facilities to decrease the likelihood that America would be held responsible for failing to stop Israel's potential attack.

Iran’s nuclear program and the possibility of an Israeli strike to stall it dominated President Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s meeting in Washington on 5 March 2012. Netanyahu responded to Obama’s warning against “loose talk of war” by stating that Israel reserves the right to decide whether to attack Iran to counter a possible existential threat to the Jewish state. Obama tried to persuade Netanyahu that the U.S. and Israel share the same aims in preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, adding that there is still time for diplomacy though the U.S. does not rule out any options, including a military option.

Tehran was quick to react to Tel-Aviv’s statements with the Islamic Republic’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, confirming the country’s readiness to fight back and stating that any country or group opposing the “Zionist regime” could now count on Iran’s full support. In addition, a detailed plan of attack on Israel was published indicating the cities and facilities in the country to be targeted by Iran’s missiles. Thus Tel-Aviv and Haifa could be targeted by Shahab-3 missiles, and Israel’s nuclear facilities and research centers could be attacked by Sejjil missiles.

Observers believe that the Israeli leadership is concerned that the Iranian nuclear program will soon enter a “zone of immunity,” when the main facilities are transferred to locations secure from an Israeli air strike, thus making an already complex aerial operation nearly impossible to accomplish. In their view, if Israel must strike eventually it should do so as early as this spring or summer, when weather conditions are amenable to precision bombing operations of this kind. However, American commentators consider such an attack only as a temporary setback to Iran's nuclear program.

“When it comes to Iran, Israel and the United States appear to be on two different timelines. Both fear that an Iranian nuclear program might make an already unstable Middle East more dangerous, by spurring a nuclear arms race in the region, encouraging Iranian belligerence and threatening oil prices. The United States, along with others, has pursued a mixture of diplomacy and increasingly harsh sanctions to dissuade the Iranian regime from pursuing its nuclear program. The Obama administration prefers to stay the course and use non-military means to deal with Iran, at least for the time being,” Natan Sachs, a fellow of the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution, stated.

Director of Studies at the Institute of Democracy and Cooperation John Laughland said in an interview with news agency PenzaNews that he finds it difficult to assess the likelihood of an Israeli attack on Iran.

“Israelis have been talking about this for a long time, at least starting from 2004. It is also not clear whether Israel would be wise to do this even in terms of its self-interest. It is obvious that Iran can defend itself and presumably even fight back. And it can also disrupt the world oil supplies, which would cause damage to the whole world economy. Like many I am afraid as nobody will benefit from the war. The only beneficiary might be Israel because Israel fears greatly nuclear-armed Iran. The United States if it won the war against Iran might, of course, be a beneficiary in geopolitical terms by having a friendly state where there is now a hostile state. But we are not talking about a war of the kind which was waged against Iraq, i.e. a war of conquest and regime change. No doubt once the fighting started the mission might escalate to regime change, and, of course, that’s what the Americans would like. Frankly it would be difficult to know how a huge country like Iran could be militarily defeated. We haven’t even managed to defeat the Islamists, the Taliban in Afghanistan. It seems impossible that Israelis would be so foolish as to attack the Islamic country unprovoked. But one can never be certain. Certainly there are plenty of people, including in the United States, calling for this to happen. And it seems to me to be very irresponsible,” the expert said.

Meanwhile, American analysts have already started discussing possible strategies for an attack on Iranian nuclear facilities, especially Fordow, an underground uranium-enrichment plant near Qom. A report published in late February 2012 by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank, said that the facility was thought to include multiple blast-proof doors, extensive divider walls, hardened ceilings, and double concrete ceilings with earth filled between layers. U.S. experts acknowledged some uncertainty over whether the Pentagon’s newest bunker-buster weapon —the Massive Ordnance Penetrator — could pierce in a single blow the subterranean chambers. But, in their view, a sustained U.S. attack over multiple days would probably render the plant unusable by collapsing tunnels and irreparably damaging the technical infrastructure required to operate it.

In a 130-page report analyzing the Iranian nuclear problem Anthony Cordesman and Alexander Wilner, experts of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, indicate that the United States and its allies have all the resources and capabilities necessary to take military action against Iran.

“The U.S. and its allies have established a major conventional presence in the Gulf in response to Iran’s expanding capacity to wage asymmetric warfare. The US maintains installations in Kuwait (several jointly operated air and military facilities), Qatar (key air and command and control facilities), Bahrain (where the US 5th fleet is currently based), and Oman. The U.S. cooperates closely with Saudi Arabia and the UAEs, and has large military divisor and contractor support groups in both countries. Britain and France also play a major role. The U.S. is also reshaping its entire force posture in the Gulf to take account of its withdrawal from Iraq and the growth of the Iranian threat in other ways. It is deploying advanced missile defense cruisers to the Mediterranean, and can rapidly deploy added defenses to the Gulf,” they noted.

Meanwhile, the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs warned in February that the American military base located at Manas Airport in Kyrgyzstan could be used by the U.S. in a potential conflict with Iran. The air base has been used to support NATO’s Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan with the U.S. lease of the base due to expire in 2014. In late February 2012 President of Kyrgyzstan Almazbek Atambayev expressed his opposition to the use of the U.S. military base in a potential attack on Iran.

“The base in Kyrgyzstan must not be used against Iran. This is why we say that after 2014 there should be no foreign military personnel, i.e. no military base, at Manas Airport, a civilian airport,” the head of state said.

However, some people in Kyrgyzstan demand that the base be closed immediately. Thus in a recent statement to the Kyrgyz media the Muslim Resistance Committee of Kyrgyzstan calls for the removal of the American military from the country and the closure of the base. A previously unheard-of group urges Kyrgyz workers to commit acts of sabotage and kill Americans military personnel calling them invaders and occupiers and stating that the U.S. army “is waging war against our brother-Muslims in Afghanistan and Iraq, is also preparing a strike on Iran and Syria.” In its statement the group also threatens to retaliate against President Almazbek Atambaev if he fails to close the base immediately.

Despite Obama’s assurances that military action against Iran remains a measure of last resort, commentators see reasons to believe that the American political elite is ready for a war on Iran in any case, even without sufficient evidence of the military nature of its nuclear program. Thus on 16 February 2012 U.S. Senator Joe Lieberman published a statement, announcing that 32 senators — both Republicans and Democrats — urge action to prevent Iran from advancing in its pursuit of a nuclear weapons capability.

Commenting on the shift in the U.S. policy toward Iran, Robert Parry, an American investigative journalist and author, said that there is a subtle but important distinction between Iran’s alleged pursuit of a nuclear weapon and its alleged pursuit of a nuclear weapons capability.

“The distinction is important because a “capability” can mean almost anything, since peaceful nuclear research also can be applicable to bomb building. To deny Iran the “capability” would almost surely require a war between the United States and Iran, a course that some neocons have been quietly desiring for at least the past decade,” he noted.

Halil Karaveli, a senior fellow at the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute and Silk Road Studies Program at Johns Hopkins University, believes that the rising tensions over Iran demonstrate that the international community will not allow the Iranian regime to acquire nuclear weapons.

“Israel, the United States and the European Union will not let Iran to become a nuclear power even at the cost of starting a war with the country. But will this make the Islamic Republic abandon its nuclear program? Quite to the contrary, the war is likely to accelerate its development. The sanctions imposed on Iran are crippling its economy, the international pressure is isolating it from external contracts but its resolve to develop nuclear technologies remains strong. There are differences within Iran’s ruling elite as to how sensible it is to provoke Israel and the United States but uranium enrichment continues. I think that Israel and the United States will eventually take military action against Iranian nuclear sites. But the ultimate goal the Americans have in mind is not so much to destroy uranium enrichment plants as to undermine political stability in the country and to topple the regime. Iran’s threats to close the Strait of Hormuz are a sign of growing despair. To block the strait is a blow against its own security. The situation can get out of hand at any moment,” Halil Karaveli said.

However, the positions of other actors on the international arena, especially China and Russia, are different from those of the United States and Israel. Thus, China’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei said that China hopes relevant parties will resume the dialogue process on the Iranian nuclear issue at an early date while Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin in his article “Russia and the Changing World” published in the Moskovskie Novosti newspaper warned about the growing threat of a military strike against Iran.

“If this happens, the consequences will be disastrous. It is impossible to imagine the true scope of this turn of events. I am convinced that this issue must be settled exclusively by peaceful means. We propose recognizing Iran's right to develop a civilian nuclear program, including the right to enrich uranium. But this must be done in exchange for putting all Iranian nuclear activity under reliable and comprehensive IAEA safeguards. If this is done, the sanctions against Iran, including the unilateral ones, must be rescinded. The West has shown too much willingness to “punish” certain countries. At any minor development it reaches for sanctions if not armed force,” Russian Prime Minister wrote.

Moreover, at a meeting with experts to discuss global threats to national security and the improvement of defenses and combat readiness of the Russian armed forced held on 24 February in Sarov Vladimir Putin suggested that “the fight to prevent the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction by allowing another member into the nuclear club, Iran, is used to pursue other goals, such as regime change.” However, he added that the positions of Russia and the West coincide at least in one aspect: Russia has no interest in Iran’s becoming a nuclear power.

Iran has been a non-nuclear weapon state party to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons since 1970, and has possessed a nuclear program for more than fifty years, ostensibly for peaceful purposes. Iran is not a member of the Missile Technology Control Regime and is actively working to acquire, develop, and deploy a broad range of ballistic missiles and space launch capabilities.

Negotiations to resolve the nuclear issue between the United States, Russia, France, the UK, China, Germany (P5+1) and Iran have failed to produce tangible results and remain stalled due to Tehran's unwillingness to discuss a suspension of its uranium enrichment program. According to the Nuclear Threat Initiative, critical parts of Iran's nuclear infrastructure include a light water reactor at Bushehr, a uranium conversion facility at Esfahan, enrichment facilities at Natanz, an enrichment facility under construction at Qom, and two facilities at Arak (a heavy water production plant and a heavy water research reactor under construction).