The US-Europe express train to the United
Nations Security Council against Iran has been
partially derailed on the eve of an emergency
meeting of the UN's atomic agency, the
International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), by the
combined counter-punches of India and China, not
to mention the news of an imminent Iran-Russia
deal for fuel fabrication on Russian soil.
By all indications, the latter news should
bring a sigh of relief, albeit temporary, to the
administration of US President George W
Bush,
which has overnight mismanaged its drive to send
Iran's nuclear dossier to the UN by (a) coercive
linkage diplomacy toward India, threatening to
kill a nuclear deal with New Delhi if it dared to
stray from the United States' script for action at
next month's IAEA meeting, raising serious ire
among Indian politicians, and (b) prematurely
declaring China to be on board the US plan, only
to be rather rudely repudiated by the Chinese, who
have openly opposed the idea of a UN sanction on
Iran, thus showing the falsity of a US top
diplomat's claim that the US and China were in one
mind over "core issues" regarding Iran.
Given the timing of the setback to US
diplomacy, with the Palestinian election results
showing an impressive victory by Hamas, the lone
superpower must now contemplate its next move in
the light of its inability to cause a change of
behavior on the part of the defiant Iranians.
Another sigh of relief for the US, in
terms of confrontation being delayed, is the
decision of IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei to
postpone his much-anticipated report on Iran until
early March, making it highly unlikely that the
IAEA governing board convening next Thursday in
Vienna will dispatch the Iran case to the Security
Council.
Of course, there is still a
summit of the foreign ministers of the Security
Council permanent five (Britain, China, France,
Russia and the US) plus Germany ahead of the IAEA
meeting to consider, which may turn out little
more than a face-saving maneuver by the US and its
key European partners.
Nervously watching
all these fast developments are the UN leaders
headed by Kofi Annan, who warned last year of a UN
paralysis over the Iran nuclear crisis. This
brings us to the issue of UN sanctions and/or
other punitive measures against Iran, vocally
endorsed by a growing number of US lawmakers.
Can the Security Council meet Iran's
nuclear challenge? The answer seems a definite yes
if one turns to the congressional hawks or to the
small army of experts and analysts crowding the
beltway.
Chief among the latter is Pierre
Goldschmidt, the former deputy director general of
the IAEA and now resident scholar at the Carnegie
Endowment for International Peace. Widely quoted
by the US media, Goldschmidt draws attention both
because of his expertise and because of his novel
proposal for Security Council action vis-a-vis
Iran.
Goldschmidt's toolkit of
alternatives to "sanctions or violent mechanisms"
consists of "three steps". First, he calls for a
"generic" and "binding" resolution that would call
on any state found in non-compliance with the IAEA
to grant "immediate and unfettered access at all
times to all places and data and to any person".
Second, Goldschmidt seeks to prevent the
non-compliant state from leaving the nuclear
Non-Proliferation Treaty by forcing it to continue
to abide with NPT-type safeguards "for all nuclear
facilities".
And third, Goldschmidt calls
on the Security Council to suspend the right of
the NPT violator to undertake the nuclear fuel
cycle "for a period of 10 years".
Sensing
a unique historical opportunity, Goldschmidt's
contention is that "the Iran case both
necessitates and provides an opportunity to
improve the overall non-proliferation regime".
Bearing in mind the rather dismal failure
of the 2005 NPT review conference in New York,
where the opposing "disarmament" and
"non-proliferation" camps neutralized each other,
Goldschmidt's proposal is, in fact, a rather
ambitious one, that is, he hopes to shortcut a
long and arduous process of rewriting the rules
and standards of an international regime, via the
Security Council. He optimistically predicts that
among his proposals "none would trigger sanctions
or violence".
Of course, Goldschmidt is
not alone and can count on, among other notables,
his colleague at Carnegie, George Perkovich, who
has similarly penned in the International Herald
Tribune: "There is no way around the fact that in
cases of non-compliance such as Iran the IAEA must
be given authority to conduct wider and deeper
inspections. Only the UN Security Council can
grant this authority."
A critique The Goldschmidt-Perkovich duet may sound music
to the bipartisan anti-Iran coalition in the US
Congress, yet is hardly a successful note for the
UN "symphony", or rather cacophony, of voices. The
following objections can be raised.
First,
historically, as in the case of disarmament, the
Security Council is very hesitant to adopt broad
and "generic" resolutions, opting instead for
case-specific actions or guidelines, for the
simple reason that the UN Charter stipulates
Security Council measures in response to threats
to peace or acts of aggression "without prejudice
to the rights ... of the parties concerned".
Second, the moment the Security Council
begins its deliberation on the type of resolution
Goldschmidt and company have put forth, then the
usual objections raised at the divisive NPT
conference will manifest themselves, ie, why not a
similar resolution with respect to non-compliance
with Article VI (disarmament) and or the
Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty?
The
permanent five at the Security Council will
inevitably feel the flip side of their initiative,
exerted by the Non-Aligned Movement and all
non-nuclear states, and would be forced to adjust
themselves.
Third, assuming a "virtual"
Security Council debate, one wonders how
Goldschmidt and others would respond to the charge
that instead of strengthening the NPT, their
initiative may actually undermine it by augmenting
the image of a feudalistic nuclear hierarchy
manipulated by the nuclear haves to the detriment
of nuclear have-nots.
The fourth objection
is that this is a recipe for disaster as far as
the importance of the Additional Protocol is
concerned, by undermining its hitherto universal
relevance and importance, and which Iran has
adopted since December 2003.
After all,
ElBaradei, Bush and various European leaders have
consistently gone on record emphasizing the
importance of the Additional Protocol, which
substantially expands the IAEA's ability to check
for clandestine nuclear facilities.
Nor
can we take comfort from Goldschmidt's assurance
that a UN adoption of his three steps would not
trigger sanctions or worse, war, given the recent
history of the United States' manipulation of the
Security Council over Iraq.
A valuable
protocol Lauded as a key measure of the
non-proliferation regime, the Additional Protocol
imposes additional declaration requirements on a
party and permits the IAEA expanded inspection
rights, including inspection of undeclared
activities.
Among the several categories
of locations covered by the Additional Protocol
are the facilities that manufacture components for
uranium-enrichment plants or for
plutonium-separation facilities, such as the
facilities at Natanz or, before that, at the
Kalaye Electrical Company Workshop, which in
February 2003 Iran acknowledged was being used for
the production of centrifuge components.
Both these facilities, as well as several
other nuclear-related facilities in Iran, are
under the watchful eyes of the IAEA and its
digital, state-of-the-art surveillance cameras,
not to mention the 1,400 inspection hours since
Iran's voluntary implementation of the Additional
Protocol. This raises the question of what
"corrective steps" will the UN Security Council
ask of Iran when, in fact, most if not all of
those steps have already been followed.
The irony is, indeed, that the recent IAEA
resolution finding Iran in breach of its
obligations should have been adopted in 2003,
since in the intervening time Iran has managed to
satisfy the "outstanding questions" raised by the
IAEA. These include the foreign sources of highly
enriched uranium, which turns out to come from
equipment sold by the Pakistani network headed by
Abdul Qadeer Khan.
Similarly, the
questions regarding a raised site at Lavizan, or
suspicious activities at another base in Parchin,
have been largely settled as a result of
environmental sampling and inspection of relevant
documents. The bottom line is that despite the
United States' skeptical reaction and insinuation
of a covert military program using the
dual-purpose technology, so far no smoking gun has
been found.
This, together with Iran's NPT
right to the nuclear fuel cycle, poses a serious
legal problem for a Security Council entertaining
the kind of proposal suggested by Goldschmidt and
championed by US policymakers. That is, with the
pre-2003 Iranian non-compliances having been for
the most part, if not entirely, rectified since
then, the Security Council cannot anchor its
decision on international law to support its new
intrusive guidelines - which surpass the
Additional Protocol by in fact nullifying the
significance attached to it so far.
Hence,
with so many states yet to sign or legislate the
Additional Protocol, the question bearing heavy on
Goldschmidt and other like-minded experts is to
solve the conundrum of how to advance the
non-proliferation cause without introducing
significant new cracks in that regime.
As
Florence Nightingale once said, "Whatever else
hospitals do they should not spread disease." And
yet Goldschmidt's proposal leads but to a rule
nihilism, supplanting the IAEA with the Security
Council, and the NPT standards with exigent ad hoc
standards melting the very core of the NPT.
To elaborate further on a point mentioned
above, a Security Council debate on Iran may yield
a positive result in another direction, ie, by
generating a new momentum for a universal
declaration against the use of nuclear weapons.
Time to alter nuclear doctrines Following the footsteps of the US government,
French President Jacques Chirac has unleased a new
global debate on the role of nuclear weapons in
the national-security doctrine of nuclear haves.
Chirac's warning of nuclear retaliation against
terrorists and their state sponsors has once again
reminded us of the perils of a nuclear
"barbarianism" multiplying under the skin of
Western civilization. The Russian military
provides for the use of nuclear weapons, and China
is the sole exception - it has publicly declared
that its nuclear weapons are only for self-defense
against a nuclear attack.
Hence, in the
light of the bellicose nuclear postures of France
and the US, an equally urgent priority of the
Security Council is to put to rest global
anxieties, particularly by the "latent" nuclear
powers, both now and in the foreseeable future.
They now feel the pinch of credible nuclear
deterrence as long as there is no pledge of no
nuclear use by the nuclear haves.
In other
words, as long as nuclear war, above all the use
of tactical nuclear weapons in a conventional
theater, has not become unacceptable, the nuclear
haves will be hesitant to disarm, as will at least
some of the nuclear have-nots intent on joining
their exclusive club.
In conclusion, the
only bright side of last year's NPT review
conference was to highlight the discrepancy of
interests and positions between the nuclear elites
and the rest of the world and the dire necessity
of closing this gap - by tackling the issues of
disarmament and non-proliferation simultaneously,
as envisaged by the UN secretary general's
proposals for comprehensive UN reform.
Yet
as last September's General Assembly summit dealt
a severe blow to Annan's reform agenda, completely
bypassing the twin nuclear issues, subsequently
deemed a "disgrace" by Annan, the real question is
whether the current debate on Iran can reignite a
renewed interest in reversing a historic failure
at the NPT conference last year. The answer, given
the plethora of disparate interests playing
themselves out on the UN playing field, is most
likely negative.
Kaveh L
Afrasiabi, PhD, is the author of After
Khomeini: New Directions in Iran's Foreign Policy
(Westview Press) and co-author of "Negotiating
Iran's Nuclear Populism", The Brown Journal of
World Affairs, Volume XII, issue 2, Summer 2005,
with Mustafa Kibaroglu.
(Copyright
2006 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved.
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