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Miscues set up nuclear
crisis
By Kaveh L Afrasiabi
SAN
FRANCISCO - Iran's resumption of
uranium-processing activities and the EU-US
warning of sanctions in response to Iran's
rejection of the latest European proposal have set
the stage 
for a full-scale international crisis
engulfing the United Nations at a time the world
organization can ill-afford the entanglement of
this crisis.
Already, UN Secretary General
Kofi Annan warned in a recent interview of a
Security Council deadlock, given the potential
Russia and China veto of any proposed Western
sanctions against Iran. This would paralyze the UN
at a sensitive time when the burning issues of UN
reform could easily be made more complicated as a
result of confluence with the Iran crisis.
Annan's latest statement, calling on Iran
to show "nuclear restraint", should be heeded by
the Iranian policymakers as they need to seriously
explore the idea of self-restraint, even in the
absence of external or internal limits to their
nuclear program, whereby, for example, Iran would
refrain from fuel fabrication, at least for a
while, even after rescinding the suspension of its
enrichment programs.
And even if the
Security Council does adopt sanctions, "the
implementation of economic sanctions against Iran
is not such an easy thing", to quote Annan, given
the rather poor history of UN-imposed sanctions.
But the main worry is less the long-term effect of
sanctions and more the immediate prospect of a
showdown at the Security Council, where the
complaining party, namely, the UN's International
Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)and its backers in
Western capitals, have the burden of establishing
that Iran is in material breach of its obligations
toward the non-proliferation regime.
Certainly, the US and its European allies
can cite the past history of the Islamic Republic
of Iran in concealing some of its nuclear
activities and in it resuming nuclear fuel-related
activities not in line with the Iran-EU Paris
Agreement of November, 2004. But, by the same
token, Iran's hand is stoked with the optimism
that the more recent past - that is, the past two
years of steady cooperation with the IAEA,
culminating in the satisfactory resolution of most
if not all the outstanding issues of material
concern by the atomic agency, such as the foreign
sources of contamination by HEU (highly enriched
uranium) - can somehow trump the more distant past
rife with lack of transparency and full
cooperation with the IAEA.
Indeed, as the
US and the EU-3 (France, Britain and Germany) meet
IAEA officials to chart a map of action in
response to Iran's enrichment activities, deemed
as perfectly legal from the Iranian prism, the
question arises as to the grounds on which the UN
could penalize Iran for engaging in a legal
activity? This, in fact, forms the nub of the
Iranian defense, in light of the IAEA chief's
admission, in an interview with Der Spiegel, dated
February 21, that "we at the IAEA lack conclusive
evidence. We have yet to see a smoking gun that
would convict Tehran. I can make assumptions about
intentions, but I cannot verify intentions, just
facts."
And what exactly are the disputed
facts on the table? Mohammad ElBaradei in the same
interview stated, "I am certainly proud of what we
have accomplished in Iran. Eighteen months ago the
country was more of a black hole for us." Rightly
so, as the IAEA has conducted numerous
comprehensive inspections, some on short notice,
since October 2003, the time when Iran pledged to
increase its cooperation with the IAEA.
Hence, in light of Iran's fulfillment of
its nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT)
obligations and the legality of its uranium
conversion program currently pursued under full
IAEA monitoring, one wonders why the EU-3 are so
adamant about referring Iran to the Security
Council and risking their rather lucrative trade
relations with Iran? Have they really thought
through the various, multiple side effects of
their threats? Probably not.
The IAEA's
governing board, meeting in emergency session to
discuss the Iran issue, has a recent record of (a)
acknowledging "good progress" in terms of Iran's
"voluntary confidence-building measures" and (b)
deferring to the director general reporting "if
and when he deems it necessary" to raise concerns
about Iran. Yet, currently the EU-3 and the White
House have seemingly decided to supplant the
IAEA's director general and impose a harsh IAEA
agenda vis-a-vis Iran. But for the most part this
would not wash, as seen from the vantage point of
international treaty obligations of IAEA member
states, including Iran.
The new Iranian
policy has not emerged in a vacuum; rather it can
best be accounted for by a constructivist approach
that would interpret the policy changes as an
outgrowth of evolution in the country's identity
and the need for creative policy adjustments
thereto.
Iran is concerned by the
unreasonable demand of the EU-3 that it should
make a "binding commitment" to forego its
"inalienable right" to peaceful nuclear
technology, including the centrifuge enrichment
program allowed by article IV of the NPT, in
exchange for guarantee of a foreign supply of
nuclear fuel and certain other economic and
security incentives.
Concerning the
latter, the latest European proposal is a giant
step backward compared to the Paris Agreement,
which stipulated that Europe would provide "firm
commitments" on economic, nuclear and security
issues pending Iran's "objective guarantees"
regarding its nuclear program. The new proposal,
named "Framework for a Long-Term Agreement",
bypasses both issues deemed central in the Paris
Agreement, by giving broadly vague and
insufficiently firm "incentives" tantamount to
pseudo-incentives. A close scrutiny of this
proposal is called for, deconstructing its legal
basis:
The proposal, items 2(e) and 14,
repeatedly pays lip-service to Article IV of the
NPT as well as to "rules of international law"
and, yet, explicitly requests Iran to exclude
fuel-cycle related activity from the purview of
its nuclear program. Aside from the fact that all
the three European states are themselves fully
engaged in nuclear fuel production, and two of
them, namely France and Britain, are also
procuring nuclear fuel for the international
market, the other interesting fact is that the
EU-3's demand does not even conform with the
IAEA's own demand that Iran suspends its
enrichment activities as a temporary
"confidence-building" measure.
The same
sentiment was reflected in the Paris Agreement,
and yet the new proposal openly seeks to make
permanent a transitional arrangement, irrespective
of Iran's offer of objective guarantees and the
IAEA experts' own admission that Iran's low-grade
enrichment can be verified.
Also, the EU-3
proposal, item 36(c), calls on Iran to allow,
pursuant to the Additional Protocol, the IAEA
"inspectors to visit any site or interview any
person they deem relevant to their monitoring of
nuclear activity in Iran". This goes beyond the
scope of the Additional Protocol, which expands
the right of access to IAEA inspectors without,
however, making this a limitless right as demanded
by the EU-3.
Thus the million-dollar
question: why shouldn't Iran pursue its fuel
fabrication when it has the technology, when it
costs less, when it is environmentally more safe,
and when it can be tightly monitored by the IAEA,
through its inspectors, surveillance cameras, etc?
The EU-3 proposal (item 25) deals with nuclear
fuel for Iran by outsiders. It reads:
Any fuel provided would be under
normal market conditions and commercial
contracts and subject to proliferation-proof
arrangements being agreed for safety, transport
and security of the fuel, including the return
of all spent fuel. Unfortunately,
until now the US and the EU-3 have failed to
seriously consider the viability of similar
proliferation-proof arrangements for Iran's home
production of nuclear fuel, whereas what is needed
is a rational framework for verification and
safeguard that would put to rest the existing
worries of a potential diversion to military
purposes. Such a framework can be set up and the
IAEA officials this author has talked to have
invariably been on the side of an objectively
verifiable system to monitor the Iranian nuclear
program.
A major problem with the Iran-EU
nuclear talks since 2003 has been the conflation
of nuclear and economic and security issues,
whereas what is needed, as aptly put by an Iranian
official in a recent interview, is to disentangle
the nuclear issue from these other issues, eg
terrorism, Iran's accession to the World Trade
Organization, drug trafficking, and so on, which
are complicating the picture. What is needed is a
straightforward discussion of purely nuclear
issues, centered on objective guarantees, without
any suggestion that somehow Iran can be persuaded
to trade it nuclear fuel rights for some (vague)
incentives. One such incentive is Europe's pledge
of support for Iran's role in regional security,
which is totally meaningless without an explicit
American endorsement. But Iran-US relations at the
moment are too hostile and too distrusting to
allow for such a crucial development in the near
future. Consequently, it is hardly surprising that
the Bush administration's support of the European
initiative has remained at the abstract level,
without touching the specifics.
In
conclusion, tackling this crisis requires much
more prudent European diplomacy than reflected in
their latest proposal evincing the latent
inclination toward the use of coercive, hard power
with sanctions and other related punishment under
the guise of a framework for cooperation. More
appropriately, this is a framework for diplomatic
nihilism, sinking the ship of an independent
European diplomacy in the sea of American
unilateralism.
Kaveh L
Afrasiabi, PhD, is the author of After
Khomeini: New Directions in Iran's Foreign Policy
(Westview Press) and co-authored "Negotiating
Iran's Nuclear Populism", The Brown Journal of
World Affairs, Volume X11, issue 1, Summer 2005,
with Mustafa Kibaroglu.
(Copyright
2005 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved.
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