The IAEA and the new world
order By Kaveh L Afrasiabi
French philosopher Michel Foucault once
wrote about the Iranian revolution of 1979, "It is
not a revolution in the literal sense of the term,
which is, people getting on their feet and
redirecting themselves. It is the insurrection of
people ... who want to lift the formidable weight
we all bear, but more particularly weigh on them,
'the weight of the entire world order'."
Foucault's premonitions about the
"world-disclosing" impulse of the Iranian
revolution appear to have been verified, at least insofar
as
Iran's nuclear policy aimed at challenging the
global status quo and, indeed, the entire edifice
of Iran's foreign policy, is concerned.
With the Islamic constitution mandating
Iran's solidarity with the liberation movements
and struggles against the world's hegemons, the
pitfall of media pundits who naively suggest that
Iran could actually become a participant in a
US-designed regional security apparatus is
unmistakable.
On Thursday, as Iran
feverishly tried to mobilize the 17 votes in the
International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) that
belong to the Third World countries in the current
roster of the IAEA's governing body, the nuclear
lineups increasingly reflect the larger power
struggle on the world scene, between the dominant
West, ie, the US and Europe, versus the developing
nations of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM). (The
IAEA was due to vote on whether or not to send
Iran's nuclear dossier to the United Nations
Security Council, where it could face possible
sanctions.)
This is not an imaginary
bifurcation, in light of last year's nuclear
Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) review conference
where the NAM countries, including Iran and Egypt,
successfully defeated a one-dimensional US-led
campaign to rewrite the NPT's non-proliferation
rules selectively while leaving the relevant
articles on disarmament untouched. The result was
a stalemate, contributing to the conference's
overall stalemate.
Iran's outspoken
President Mahmud Ahmadinejad has bluntly
questioned the post-Cold War status quo dominated
by the US superpower, calling it a "fake
superpower" and urging other NAM countries to
support Iran's bid to challenge "global
feudalism".
But Iran has managed several
self-inflicted wounds during the past few months,
as a result of which its bid against the
"unipolar" world order has been overshadowed by
its seemingly ideological zeal against Zionism,
even casting a large shadow on Iran's national
interests, according to some of president's
home-grown critics.
Not
all hope is lost, though,
and even in Russia, which has chosen to align
itself with the US in backing moves to send Tehran
to the UN, there are powerful voices echoing
Iran's sentiment. A case in point is former
president Boris Yeltsin, who has lashed out at
the United States' "monopolistic policy" using a "big
stick" and threatening nations such as Iran.
Without doubt, Yeltsin is not alone and expresses
the sentiment of a powerful section of Russia's
political elite.
Hence it remains to be seen
how far President Vladimir Putin will go in joining
the White House's bandwagon on the way to the
Security Council. Is Putin willing to set aside
all his misgivings about the United States' power
projection in Russia's vicinity and go along with
sanctions on Iran, thus potentially denying Russia
an important buffer between itself and the US?
Asked another way, what are the limits, if any, of
Russia's current honeymooning with the US
vis-a-vis Iran, given the distinct possibility of
a US-planned diplomatic maneuver simply as a
prelude to war against the second element of its
perceived "axis of evil"? (North Korea is
temporarily out of the crosshairs.)
The
same questions apply with respect to China, which
must now weigh the potential hazards to its long-term
quest for energy security by pursuing a common
path with the US that may, in fact, culminate
in severe setbacks to its carefully
constructed energy trade with Iran.
Put simply, both Russia and China have much to
lose, and little to gain, by going along with the
United States' script for action against Iran. Even a
halfway accommodation of the US may turn out
sufficient in light of the Iraq experience and how
the US obviated its earlier professed need for
explicit authorization for war from the Security
Council.
Unfortunately, as Georg Wilhelm
Friedrich Hegel wrote in his
Rechtsphilosophie, knowledge comes too
late, and we are still too close to the events of
Iraq's invasion in 2003 to be able to draw the
right historical lessons about the operation of US
power and its vast conglomerate of
knowledge-makers in the media, academia and
beyond.
Recently, President George W Bush
declared Iran a major threat to global security,
and yet one is reminded of former South African
leader Nelson Mandela, who called the US the
gravest threat to world peace.
The
European
Union, keenly intent on trans-Atlantic patch-ups
after feebly standing up to Washington's warmongering,
is now playing a subservient role, without
adequately factoring in the United States' military
objectives. Yet, since world domination hinges on
who controls the oil, as admitted by Henry
Kissinger in one of his recent, and
uncharacteristically candid, writings, a
substantially weakened or US-dependent Iran after
the present crisis simply translates into a more
subordinate role for Europe in global affairs, as
it would be much more beholden to US power and
geoeconomic control.
Speaking of control,
a pertinent question at this point is whether the
IAEA is turning into a puppet of the US.
The IAEA's quandary Given
a European resolution calling on the IAEA to
refer Iran to the Security Council for
possible sanctions, it merits our attention to examine
the latest reports in the US media about the
IAEA's new revelations suggesting an Iranian
nuclear-weapons program.
According to a news
article in the New York Times on Wednesday, the
IAEA has "for the first time provided evidence
directly suggesting that at least some of Iran's
activities point to a military project". The
timing of this finding couldn't have been more
ideal as far as the anti-Iran forces within the
IAEA are concerned. The article goes on to say
that the IAEA, with "partial help" by US
intelligence, has uncovered a "secretive Iranian
entity called the Green Salt Project which worked
on uranium processing, high explosives and a
missile warhead design".
According to the
IAEA report, the project "could have a military
nuclear dimension and appears to have
administrative interconnections". Furthermore, it
cites a 15-page report given to Iran in the
mid-1980s related to "fabrication of nuclear
weapon components". That report has been put under
the agency's seal.
What is curious about
the newspaper report is that it is deliberately
sketchy about the sources and nature of US
intelligence given to the IAEA, confining itself
to a passing statement that it stems from a
"laptop seized in Iran".
Well, the laptop
story again. Not long ago, it was the subject of a
lengthy Sunday New York Times investigative piece
written principally by David Sanger, who is also
named as one of the several authors of Wednesday's
article on the IAEA's discovery of a smoking gun
of sorts. In that story, a perfect fit for a James
Bond movie, the laptop is said to have belonged to
"someone in Iran who is now dead and had given it
to someone else" who had somehow smuggled it out
of the country.
Several months ago, IAEA
officials in Vienna were given a state-of-the-art
presentation by US intelligence officers on the
vast information on Iran's nuclear program
contained in the laptop, including the purported
design for nuclear warheads.
Not long
after, the New York Times website featured a
serious rebuttal by the respected David Albright,
president of the Institute for Science and
International Security, citing "serious and deep
flaws" in the New York Times piece on the laptop.
According to Albright, "William J Broad and David
E Sanger repeatedly characterize the contents of
computer files as containing information about a
nuclear warhead design when the information
actually describes a reentry vehicle for a
missile. This distinction is not minor, and Broad
should understand the difference."
Yet
Sanger, a colleague of Judith Miller, who
propagated false and misleading information about
Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, failed to open
even a small parenthesis in his piece about the
healthy skepticism of Albright and others about
the laptop.
Nor did Sanger or
his respected co-authors mention that the
four-page IAEA report, released on Tuesday, gives a
rather glowing impression of Iran's cooperation
with the IAEA. For example, on page 1 we read:
"Iran has continued to facilitate access under its
safeguard agreement as requested by the agency,
and to act as if the Additional Protocol is in
force, including by providing in a timely manner
the requisite declarations and access to
locations." It cites environmental sampling at
Parchin and elsewhere, with the results "still
pending".
Interestingly, the
report, written by Olli Heinonen, the deputy chief of
the IAEA who has just returned from Iran, begins
by setting the benchmark that it contains
"factual information" only and that it "does not
include any assessments thereof". Unless we are
all assumed non-English-speaking or with English as
our second language at best, this raises serious
question about the report's inconclusive
assessments of the Green Salt Project, ie, it
"could have a military nuclear dimension", or "it
appears to have administrative interconnections".
This is not factual information, but rather
assessments or conclusions arrived at through
deductive reasoning.
The trouble with such
inferences is that, whether they are legitimate or
deliberately overdrawn, they can be misconstrued,
coming as they do at a critical time coinciding
with Bush's State of the Union address and the
big US-EU push at the IAEA. This is because of the murky
nature of nearly all dual purpose technology -
after all, the so-called "green salt" is the name
for a catalytic ingredient in the conversion of
uranium ore into uranium hexafluoride, which in
turn is enriched into nuclear fuel - or a bomb.
What is called for at this stage is a
candid statement by IAEA experts on the
reliability and relevance of the intelligence fed
by the US, instead of pursuing a blind-faith
approach to such politically motivated
information. That means the need for a second
report by IAEA secretary general Mohammad
ElBaradei by March 6, the due date for his report
to the IAEA on Iran's dossier. This second report
should address the quality of the extra-IAEA data
on which Heinonen has seemingly relied
uncritically.
On Iran's part, on the other
hand, the problem, in addition to the need to
provide greater transparency and thus to put to
rest the lingering marginal questions about its
program, is one of regaining the sympathy of the
world community after making incendiary
anti-Israel statements. Unfortunately, the Iranian
problem is more severe than that and, by all
indications, a fresh rethinking of Iran's nuclear
moves and counter-moves is seriously under way in
Iran right now.
Iran's nuclear policy
revisited Not everyone is happy with the
course of action pursued on the nuclear front
since Mohammad Khatami ended his term as president
some five months ago. In fact, visible signs of a
foreign-policy house cleaning can be seen aplenty
in Tehran, in the light of the highly visible trip
of Iran's strongman, former president Ayatollah
Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, to the holy city of
Qom, where he expressed public anxiety about the
state of the republic and admitted that "we
ourselves have not been without influence" in
creating the present "crisis".
In fact,
Rafsanjani's careful use of the word "crisis"
stands in sharp contrast to the statements of
Ahmadinejad, who a few weeks ago denied there was
a "crisis" over the nuclear issue. Yet today not
even his most ardent supporters can escape the
fact that a serious international crisis has
dawned on Iran and that their prescribed hardline
foreign policy reorientations led by Ahmadinejad
have backfired.
Consequently, it is hardly
surprising that Ali Larijani, Iran's chief nuclear
negotiator, who criticized the Paris Agreement
between Iran and the EU as an unequal exchange of
"lollipops for pearls", is now making a drastic
adjustment, if one is to believe certain newspaper
reports in Tehran, and slowly but surely
re-adopting the nuclear positions and postures of
his predecessor, Hassan Rowhani, who works closely
with Rafsanjani.
Throughout the eight
years of the Khatami era, Iran's nuclear diplomacy
was linked with rapprochement with the West,
Europe in particular, reflected in Khatami's warm
welcome in Berlin, Madrid, Paris, Brussels and
Rome. As a political observer accompanying Khatami
on his European tours, this author can confirm
first-hand the conscious decision of Khatami and
his inner circle to solicit Western respect for
Iran's nuclear rights via their deft diplomacy of
dialogue among civilizations, and East-West
detente. The premise was that only by reassuring
the outside world of Iran's benign intentions and
constructive role in world affairs could the
desired objective with respect to Iran's
"inalienable right" to nuclear technology be
fulfilled.
That prudent wisdom, cast aside
by political rhetoric supplanting foreign policy
during the past few months, is now making a
comeback, perhaps requiring a reshuffling of
personnel as well as policies. Even the
hardline-controlled parliament (majlis) is
beginning to respond, stepping back from the raw
politics of one legislation after another, the net
effects of which have been to further alienate
Europeans and others. One legislator has gone on
record warning that sanctions have in fact begun
in discrete fashion, manifested in diplomatic
isolation, financial squeeze, and other punitive
measures against Iran.
Indeed, the "loss"
of European support for Iran has been a heavy
blow, given the initial goal of Tehran to engage
in separate nuclear talks with the EU-3 (Germany,
France and Britain), seen as a "counterweight" to
the US. Yet that assumption has proved baseless
now, given the EU's solid alliance with the US
against the perceived "nuclear threat" of Iran,
cemented by the anti-Israel statements of
Ahmadinejad.
Ordinarily, given
the EU's position as Iran's No 1 trade partner and
its present and future energy dependency on Iran,
one would expect a little more success from Iran's
EU policy. The fact that the exact opposite has
now happened alone should send shivers through
Iran's political strategists and decision-makers.
How did things get so bad?
Untimely
transition: The brewing nuclear crisis
coinciding with Iran's presidential elections and
the rise of a new group in charge of Iran's
national security and nuclear affairs. This ranks
high in the list of causes disadvantaging Iran.
Missteps: One of
Ahmadinejad's first measures was a wholesale
change of personnel in the Foreign Ministry,
including the ambassadors to Paris, Berlin and
London, who happened to be (a) quite competent and
well-liked by their host governments, and (b) were
not replaced immediately, thus leaving an
important vacuum at a crucial time.
But of
course, even without their replacement, those top
envoys of Iran would have had a hard time at
damage-control. For example, Ahmadinejad's
statement that Israeli Jews should be relocated to
Germany and Austria caused a backlash in both
these countries. This was especially so in
Germany, whose new chancellor, Angela Merkel, had
until then refrained from diverging too much from
her predecessor, Gerhard Schroeder, on Iran.
Coming as "manna from heaven" for the
anti-Iran lobbyists in Europe, such statements
from Tehran alienated the new German government,
which has set aside its previous moderate stance
relative to France and Britain - yet another
self-inflicted wound according to some Tehran
editorials.
A big part of the problem with
the presidency of Ahmadinejad is that his inner
circle is crowded by people with little or no
experience in international affairs, and yet
carrying a heavy load of ideological baggage
smacking of revolutionary "anti-diplomacy". These
individuals, who openly bragged to Tehran's media
about Ahmadinejad's "highly successful" trip to
New York last September, are now hard-pressed to
show any, absolutely any, diplomatic gain after
nearly half a year.
Iran has now lost
China and Russia to the US, and many NAM countries
have serious misgivings about the direction of
Iran's foreign policy under Ahmadinejad, as do the
moderate governments in the Muslim world who are
members of the Organization of Islamic Conferences
(OIC).
A growing consensus among Iranian
foreign-policy experts both inside and outside
Iran is that there has been avoidable damage to
Iran's foreign policy aims and interests, caused
by a lack of experience, dogmatism,
overambitiousness, self-fed sloganism and
miscalculation.
A critical anatomy of
Iran's diplomatic hiatus must, of course, weed out
the individual causes from structural or
institutional ones, the deliberate ones from the
ones imposed from without, ie, Iran's
miscalculations about how Russia and China would
react might have been committed by the previous
nuclear negotiation team as well, if they, too,
had opted for resuming nuclear research.
But that is a hypothetical question and,
in reality, Iran's leaders must now reckon with
the fact that their novel experimentation with a
"unified" government devoid of multi-layered
currents representative of the Khatami era has not
been particularly successful. The latter might
explain why Rafsanjani's complaint in Qom about
the "attrition of Iran's republicanism" has
resonated with leading figures in Iran's
post-revolutionary polity.
After all, this is a
country well seasoned in weathering crisis after
crisis. It has survived a quarter century of US
sanctions, attempted coups and assassinations of
its leaders (a president, a prime minister and
more than 75 legislators), not to mention the
bloody eight-year war with Iraq in the 1980s.
Yet the present nuclear crisis
is increasingly perceived as one of the most
serious and life-threatening crises ever faced by
the Islamic Republic. To open a caveat here,
this author recalls that this was precisely
the adjective used by the former foreign
minister, Kamal Kharrazi, at a private dinner reception
at the Foreign Ministry's think-tank, the Institute
for Political and International Studies, in
December 2004.
But to his credit,
Kharrazi and his team were able to advance Iran's
diplomatic aims admirably, as seen in Iran's
performance at the 2005 NPT review conference in
New York, where it almost singlehandedly led the
NAM campaign to defeat the US-led attempt to
distract from disarmament and to "close the
loopholes of the NPT".
A close scrutiny of
speeches delivered by Iran at that conference
clearly shows that Iran behaved on principle as a
weighty developing nation enjoying a great deal of
deference by the international community.
But where is that respect and deference
now? And what happened to the hard-earned fruits
of Iran's European diplomacy, on which Iran
expended so much focus and energy during the 1990s
and the first half of the 2000s? And, more
important, why did the foreign-policy elite of
Iran suddenly prove so thin-boned and so incapable
of stepping in for several months to put a stop to
the ruinous policies and positions adopted by
amateurs?
Maybe Foucault was right after
all, that the essence of the problem with Iran
today is the excess weight of historical
responsibility that it has been carrying, under
the increasingly unbearable heat of a Western
superpower and its allies. It is thinking all the
time that a prudent exit strategy from the
"unipolar" world order is possible, that in China
or Russia or India it can find a coalition of the
willing to challenge Pax Americana. So how rude an
awakening it was this week to the fact that the
Cold War's winner is also aware of this historical
contingency.
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 X11, Issue 2, Summer 2005, with Mustafa
Kibaroglu.
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