Iran's Nuclear Dreams Threaten the World

Defying both history and logic, the idea that the West should diplomatically engage with Tehran still commands an important following.

Despite the massive waves of demonstrators across Iran who charged their government with rigging the June 12 presidential elections, there still are officials in the Obama ad- ministration who seem to believe that engagement with the Islamic Republic should "remain on the table," as columnist Roger Cohen put it in the New York Times Magazine this week. Javier Solana, the European Union foreign policy chief, agrees: "We would like very much that soon we will have the possibility to restart multilateral talks with Iran on the important nuclear issues," he said on June 24.

But they're wrong, just as they have been from the start. Indeed, there are plenty of reasons to be skeptical about sticking to engagement. The main one is that it has already been tried -- and utterly failed. Iran has consistently used the West's willingness to engage as a delaying tactic, a smoke screen behind which Iran's nuclear program has continued undeterred and, in many cases, undetected.

Back in 2005, Hassan Rowhani, the former chief nuclear negotiator of Iran during the reformist presidency of Mohammad Khatami, made a stunning confession in an internal briefing in Tehran, just as he was leaving his post. He explained that in the period during which he sat across from European negotiators discussing Iran's uranium enrichment ambitions, Tehran quietly managed to complete the critical second stage of uranium fuel production: its uranium conversion plant in Isfahan. He boasted that the day Iran started its negotiations in 2003 "there was no such thing as the Isfahan project." Now, he said, it was complete.