home > by publication type > op-eds > Day of Reckoning for Iran: The Decision-Point on the Nuclear Weapons Program is Upon Us
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| Author: | Micah Zenko, Fellow for Conflict Prevention |
|---|
November 25, 2009
New York Daily News
In 1981, while debating the victor of a hypothetical matchup of two prizefighters, A and B, the boxing promoter Bob Arum insisted that Fighter B would win. When a reporter pointed out that the previous night Arum insisted Fighter A would win, the promoter offered his oft-quoted defense: "Well, yesterday I was lying. Today, I'm telling the truth."
Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei must be fans of Arum.
On Monday, the International Atomic Energy Agency released its latest report on Iran's noncompliance of its required obligations under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and UN Security Council resolutions. The report examined the improbable claim that, other than the uranium enrichment facility recently uncovered by Western intelligence agencies near the city of Qom, there were no "other nuclear facilities that were currently under construction or in operation that had not yet been declared to the agency."
Reading the report in full leads to this disturbing conclusion: Iran is asking the international community to forget a quarter-century of clandestine nuclear activity outside of the agency's verification procedures in favor of newfound trust. It is asking us to accept this assertion on faith alone. But based on the healthy skepticism developed over the decades, the world has no choice but to accept our understanding of reality, not Iran's.
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