An Iran option the US prefers to
ignore By Kaveh L Afrasiabi
After a week of internal wrangling
culminating in a mini-split, with China and Russia
unwilling to forge a united front with the other
three permanent members of the UN Security Council
on a strongly worded statement on Iran, the latter
are proceeding anyway.
The US, France and
the United Kingdom have submitted a draft text
that, while it calls on Iran to comply with
International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)
resolutions, reeks of legal nihilism.
The
draft statement, now being debated among the 15
members of the Security Council, calls on Iran to
suspend all enrichment-related activities and to
maintain a "full and sustained
suspension", giving IAEA
chief Mohamed ElBaradei two weeks to report on
Iran's response.
It also calls on Iran to cooperate
with the IAEA to resolve "outstanding issues" and
to take the steps needed to "begin building
confidence".
The last statement is rather
strange, since the IAEA has always insisted that
"verification is confidence-building". And in
light of three years of robust inspection it is
rather disingenuous of the sponsors of this text
to imply that there has been no
confidence-building on Iran's part. These involved
about 1,700 inspection-hours and 20 other visits
to military and civilian facilities at short
notice beyond the Additional Protocol of the
nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).
Equally questionable is the selectiveness
with which the draft statement refers to IAEA
resolutions and reports without once mentioning
their acknowledgements of Iran's "steady
progress", "access" and greater and greater
transparency.
This was reflected in
ElBaradei's candid statement in December at
London's International Institute for Strategic
Studies that "over the past three years we have
compiled a detailed picture of most aspects of
Iran's past and current nuclear program ... we
have asked that Iran provide additional
transparency measures".
Hence, given that
the IAEA has given a clean bill of health to very
few countries and that requesting greater
transparency is not exactly calling a member state
in "breach of its obligations", one wonders how
far the US and its European allies can run with
this ball. Can the Security Council operate in a
legal vacuum indefinitely?
To elaborate,
the February 4 decision by the IAEA to complain
about Iran to the UN did not cite two important
articles, XII.C and III.B.4, in the IAEA statute
that would trigger a "report [on] the
non-compliance to all [IAEA] members, the Security
Council and the General Assembly of the United
Nations".
Instead, in a compromise
reached in London to get Russia and China on board, it
was decided that the IAEA director general
should "report to the Security Council" only on the
need for Iran to build confidence in the
peaceful nature of its program by (i) re-establishing
"full and sustained suspension" of all its
enrichment and reprocessing activities; (ii)
reconsidering the construction of the Arak heavy-water research
reactor; (iii) ratifying and implementing the
Additional Protocol, and pending ratification to
act in accordance with its provisions; and (iv)
implementing transparency measures "requested by
the director general which extend beyond the
formal requirements of the Safeguards Agreement
and the Additional Protocol".
As Jean
Dupreez at Monterey, California's Center on
Non-Proliferation Studies has aptly noted, in the absence of
any smoking-gun confirming an Iranian weapons program,
the legal foundation for any punitive measures
against Iran are lacking.
Mindful of these
delicacies, the Non-Aligned Movement requested, at
the conclusion of the most recent IAEA meeting
this month, that Iran's case remain within the
IAEA, a sentiment shared by both Russia and China.
To return to the legal nihilism of the
Security Council, the draft statement cleverly
seeks to sidestep the legal framework by pushing
for a measure - full suspension of the fuel cycle
- which the IAEA itself has demanded not as a
right but as a "legally non-binding
confidence-building measure". In other words, Iran
has been asked to either "volunteer" to suspend
its enrichment activities or be found in violation
of the will of the Security Council. Also, the
draft text expresses the "conviction that
continued Iranian enrichment-related activity
would intensify international concern". There is,
first of all, international concern about not just
Iranian but any nuclear fuel cycle, which is why
the IAEA has called for a universal moratorium on
new enrichment facilities and the establishment of
an international fuel bank.
But until that idea pans out, countries such as Iran,
which has a track record with the IAEA since
1973, can meet this "expressed concern" only
within the legal framework of the IAEA, that
is, by implementing the terms of its bilateral
safeguard agreements with the agency to put those concerns and
anxieties to rest.
Yet, echoing the IAEA's
latest resolution on Iran, the draft text
currently circulating within the Security Council
asks Iran to "implement transparency measures ...
which would extend beyond the formal requirements
of the Safeguards Agreement and Additional
Protocol".
At the same time, the drafters
of this "presidential statement" have called on
Iran to "promptly ratify and implement in full the
Additional Protocol". Yet, as per the above, the
drafters are seeking measures beyond the
Additional Protocol, thereby undermining its
value.
This attitude, if it persists,
given that the majority of IAEA member states have
not adopted the Additional Protocol, will only
undermine the IAEA's singular emphasis on the
Additional Protocol and its hoped-for universal
adoption.
All this belies the rosy
prediction of former IAEA deputy chief Pierre
Goldschmidt that "the Iran case provides an
opportunity to improve the overall
non-proliferation regime".
Goldschmidt
overlooks the nightmarish scenario that the
non-proliferation regime could suffer a lethal
blow as a result of the Iran crisis, given UN
head Kofi Annan's admission at the 2005 NPT review
conference that the NPT regime faced a double
crisis of "verification and confidence".
Clearly, the US double standard of
differentiating "good proliferators", such as
Israel and India, from "bad proliferators", such
as Iran, must count as serious causes of this
crisis.
Indeed, the entire
non-proliferation regime may suffer as a result of
this rule-avoiding approach crystallized in the
draft text on Iran. If it is adopted and
eventually proven as the first link in a chain of
a "graduated response" by the Security Council,
culminating in sanctions which prompt Iran to exit
the NPT and the IAEA framework, it may have a
domino effect. That is, it could lead other
states, including several in the Middle East, to
follow suit or, at a minimum, question the wisdom
of their transparency with the IAEA.
Ironically, the so-called "outstanding questions"
mentioned in the draft text have, in fact,
been deemed as not outstanding and "normalized"
by the admissions of ElBaradei. These include
the foreign source of equipment contamination
(via Pakistan) and the results of
environmental samplings at some military sites.
Anomalies in the case against Iran The US and Europe would be well advised to
consider the anomalies in their article of faith,
their self-constructed paradigm sheepishly
followed by their "free and pluralistic press"
regarding Iran's purported march toward nuclear
weapons. Briefly:
In 1995, Iran voted in favor of the indefinite
extension of the NPT.
Iran has been an enthusiastic supporter of the
CTBT (Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty) and, in light
of the required nuclear testing for any would-be
proliferators, this raises the question of why
would Iran take such steps if it is not in its
nuclear interests.
Iran just reversed a two-year "voluntary and
legally non-binding" suspension of its
uranium-enrichment activities.
In Brussels in January, Iran put forward a
six-point proposal that includes another two-year
moratorium on uranium enrichment - a novel
proposal dismissed out of hand as old news by
British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw. The other
points included Iran re-embracing the Additional
Protocol by formally legislating for its adoption,
and pursuit of an international fuel bank.
Another proposal, still on the table and
submitted last March to the IAEA and the EU-3 -
Germany, France and Britain - was for a contained,
monitored enrichment.
Iran's leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has
issued a religious decree, fatwa ,
against the acquisition, development and use of
nuclear weapons, a position he and other leaders of
the Islamic Republic have regularly reiterated.
These points count as "anomalies" in the
sense that they do not support the behavior of a
would-be proliferator. Indeed, if that were the
case, why would the Iranian leaders insist so
much, and so frequently, on the un-Islamic and
amoral nature of nuclear weapons?
On the other
hand, it is impossible to isolate the Iranian
nuclear issue from other developments, above
all the United States' desire to defang the Islamic
Republic via the nuclear standoff by isolating it
and, at a minimum, weakening it considerably. This
would remove a major barrier to its planned
visions for the "greater Middle East". These
extra-nuclear considerations are often neglected
in the West.
Good news on the
horizon? What is remarkable about the
Iranian nuclear crisis is how close it could be to
being resolved. Iran is willing to forgo
large-scale enrichment and limit itself to a small
cascade of centrifuges for research and
development, in conjunction with assurances of a
fuel supply, mainly from the Russians.
The
Russians dropped the ball on the way to
Washington, yet there are strong indications that
this proposal could resurface soon - if only the
US would stop ignoring this option, which is
viable for two main reasons.
First,
the military risk posed by such a small cascade
is minimal as the fissile-uranium output of 168
centrifuges would be nowhere near enough to
facilitate a weapons program.
Second,
the reason the IAEA favors this option is that agency
safeguards would be in place and it would notice
any change in Iran's agreed program.
With
the
potential risks of militarization thus minimized,
this option is distinctly preferable to others,
including the military one, which without doubt
would spur a clandestine weapons program on Iran's
part. And this is not to mention the collateral
damage on the world economy and other grim
consequences.
The cause of regional and
world peace, therefore, dictates urgent attention
to this viable option benefiting the cause of the
overall non-proliferation regime.
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. He
is also author of Iran's Nuclear Program: Debating
Facts Versus Fiction.
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