In the past, the U.S. signed agreements with North Korea (1994) and Libya (2003) stipulating that those countries would give up their nuclear-weapons programs. While the Libyan deal succeeded, that with North Korea has been a spectacular failure. Which one, asks Max Boot, does the recent agreement with Tehran most resemble?
Though Iran has agreed to reduce the number of operational centrifuges from 9,500 to 6,000, to shrink the amount of low-enriched uranium in its possession from 10,000 kilograms to 300, and to make changes at several facilities to prevent them from being used to create nuclear weapons, all of these steps are reversible. Iran is not destroying its nuclear-weapons infrastructure as [Libya] did. Nor is it giving up ballistic missiles, renouncing terrorism, or making restitution for past attacks. It is only freezing its nuclear program, as North Korea did.
Monitoring Iran’s compliance will require onsite IEAE inspections. . . . There will be continuous monitoring of a few declared nuclear sites, but Iran will be able to delay inspections of disputed facilities for at least 24 days, which would give it time to sanitize a site. The larger problem, [however], is that, like North Korea, Iran is a big country: if the government wants to hide something, it will likely succeed. . . . Perhaps Iran will cooperate, but so far, it has not come clean with the IAEA about twelve existing “areas of concern” regarding the “possible military dimensions” of its nuclear program.
That is not a good sign. It suggests that Iran, like North Korea (or, for that matter, Iraq during the 1990s), is likely to play a game of cat-and-mouse with inspectors—and that if it does cheat, as North Korea did, the world will again discover it is too late to do anything about it.
Read more on Los Angeles Times: http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-boot-is-iran-more-like-north-korea-or-libya-20150721-story.html