The Persian Shell Game

Iran shuns EU 'reactor incentive'

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has dismissed a possible European offer of incentives to induce Iran to suspend its nuclear enrichment programme. He likened the incentives, which European negotiators are said to be considering, to the offer of "walnuts and chocolates" in exchange for gold.

Of course he did. What the hell does President Armoredinnerjacket want with a light water reactor and no weapons grade material? Get with the program, guys.

Of course, the usual suspects are hyping up the prospect of the region’s newest nuclear power. But let’s take a super quick look at this business of pre-emption (and when it’s deemed acceptable), which started with the Caroline incident:

Much of the traditional doctrine on self-defence comes from an incident in 1837 near the Niagara Falls, in which a boat called the Caroline was attacked and tipped over the Falls by British forces that moved into American waters from Canada. The boat was being used by Canadian rebels preparing an attack.

Some very elegant diplomatic exchanges between US Secretary of State Daniel Webster and British Foreign Secretary Lord Ashburton led to the acceptance of Webster's principles of pre-emptive self-defence. These held that it was justified only in cases in which the "necessity of that self-defence is instant, overwhelming, and leaving no choice of means, and no moment for deliberation".

The UN Charter basically adopted that rule, and a highlevel group which looked at UN reform in 2004 said that "Article 51 needs neither extension nor restriction in its long understood scope".

The General Assembly confirmed that view. However there remains some debate about how "imminent" a threat has to be, and how large.

The doctrine of pre-emption has therefore not received widespread international backing. Last year, Chatham House sent a questionnaire about self-defence to 13 international lawyers in Britain. As a result, a number of principles were drawn up to give precision to Webster's phrasing.

These stressed the importance of imminence. Post-9/11 style pre-emption was not endorsed.

Stun me. I have only one question here. How long have we lived with the reality that is the appalling destructive power of a nuclear weapon? A power that renders conventional forces irrelevant; a power that can unleash in a single device pretty much the entire bomb payload dropped during World War II? We’re dealing with weapons that can wipe out tens of millions in a single firing, not musket shots across the Potomac. Just how long is it going to take these characters to work out that the game has changed?