Iran: Options for a face-saving
solution By Kaveh L
Afrasiabi
The UN Security Council's
statement calling on Iran to comply with the
requests of the International Atomic Energy Agency
(IAEA) - above all, a full suspension of all
uranium-enrichment related activities - has raised
Iran's nuclear crisis to a new level of gravity
that requires an objective assessment of the
various face-saving options for the Iranian
government.
The Security Council's
"Presidential Statement", the outcome of three
weeks of grueling, secretive negotiations between
the five
permanent members plus
Germany, says that the IAEA chief, Mohamed
ElBaradei, must report back to the IAEA's
governing board and the Security Council within 30
days regarding Iran's (non-)compliance with the
IAEA's demands.
Henceforth, all sides need
to resort to the arsenal of flexible diplomacy in
order to prevent any further escalation of this
crisis that now portends punitive measures by the
Security Council against Iran.
Regarding
punitive measures, China and Russia continue to
insist that they are opposed to any sanctions
against Iran, but their willingness to maintain a
united front at the Security Council has generated
momentum against their ability to maintain this
position for too long.
On the contrary,
assuming for a moment that Iran refuses to modify
its present stance - of flatly rejecting the call
to suspend enrichment activities (the resumption
of which has been called "irreversible" by Foreign
Minister Manuchehr Mottaki) - then China and
Russia will be hard-pressed to avoid taking a
harder line at the next round of the Security
Council's debate on issue.
Dubbed by
China "one of the most difficult and complicated
issues in today's world", this crisis is unlikely
to be resolved without serious incentives that
would make it politically feasible for the Iranian
government to respond positively.
Iran's
options: Differentiated response A
close scrutiny of the IAEA's resolutions on Iran,
reiterated in the Security Council statement,
shows that there are in fact three principal sets
of demands that Iran has been told to meet: (1)
suspension of enrichment-related activities,
including research and develpment; (2) adoption of
the Additional Protocol; and (3) the resolution of
"a number of outstanding issues which could have a
military nuclear dimension".
In light of
Iran's declared willingess to continue its
cooperation with the IAEA and its implementation
of the Additional Protocol, which grants the IAEA
expanded rights of access to information and
sites, from December 2003 until February 2006,
there is no reason to exclude the possibility of
Iran's re-adoption of the Additional Protocol, as
part of a "differentiated response" that would be
distinctly different from the present zero-sum
approach.
Indeed, in retrospect, one may
argue that Iran's decision to scrap the Additional
Protocol after the IAEA's decision to report Iran
to the Security Council was uncalled for, given
the fact that the IAEA inspectors have been
visiting Iran without interruption during the past
few of months.
Already, Iran has somewhat
reversed itself by stating that it is willing to
re-adopt and even legislate the Additional
Protocol as part of a comprehensive formula to
resolve the crisis. Now, Iran may need to take
this one step further and unilaterally initiate
this measure irrespective of other negative
developments in the crisis.
Similarly,
during the 30-day allotted time, Iran and the IAEA
could deepen their cooperation with respect to the
"outstanding issues", such as the sources of
contamination of equipment (which has been largely
resolved anyway), the chronology of P-2
centrifuges, etc, leading to a more positive
report by ElBaradei.
As for the centrifuge
pilot plant (designed to produce enriched uranium
from uranium hexafluoride gas), its operation is
partly symbolic of Iran's sovereignty and
unwillingness to capitulate to outside pressure,
and yet, in light of the disproportionate weight
attached to it by the IAEA, which has called for
its suspension as a "confidence-building measure",
Iran should consider the pros of suspending
operation for a specific period. In the last round
of negotiations between Iran and the EU-3 (Germany,
France, and England), Iran agreed to a two-year
halt, compared to the EU-3's call for a seven-to-10-year
halt. This quantitative divide could be
conceivably bridged through balanced mediation by
the IAEA chief. In such a scenario, Iran's
enrichment facilities could be put on "cold
standby", a technical middle position between
being active and inactive.
The nub of
the problem here is that the US-European
Union approach within the Security Council appears to
be set on a permanent cessation of
all enrichment-related activities by Iran,
as reflected in a leaked letter written by the
top British negotiator, John Sawers, dated March
16. In this letter, Sawers writes: "We may also
need to remove one of the Iranian arguments that
the suspension called for is 'voluntary'. We could
[make] the voluntary suspension a mandatory
requirement to the Security Council, in a
Resolution, we would aim to adopt ... say, early
May."
Sawers' letter,
counseling initiatives by keeping the Chinese and Russians
in the dark, reportedly caused a mini-uproar,
upsetting particularly the Chinese delegates to
the UN, and reveals the extent to which the
charted map of US-EU action over Iran remains
incomplete. Sawers calls for a "shared concept of
what would happen in the Security Council after
the period specified by the proposed Presidential
Statement", ie, "further measures".
Sawers' boss, British Foreign Secretary
Jack Straw, has criticized Iran's "miscalculation"
and yet he and his European counterparts gathering
in Berlin to discuss Iran may have their own share
of miscalculations, such as ignoring the
implications of a shrewd Iranian differentiated
response.
Clearly, as Russian Foreign
Minister Sergei Lavrov has stated, the UN Security
Council should not supplant the IAEA's inspection
regime. Nor can the Security Council contradict
itself by backing the IAEA's resolutions calling
for Iran's "voluntary and non-legally binding"
confidence-building measures and, simultaneously,
going beyond those resolutions, as called for in
Sawers' letter, and insist on them as a "mandatory
requirement". After all, the Security Council does
not operate in a legal vacuum and, short of
shredding the articles and norms of the
Non-Proliferation Treaty, cannot possibly fulfil
Sawers' wish list.
Guaranteed nuclear
fuel supply If the Western powers and
others are serious about de-escalating the Iran
nuclear crisis, then an important prerequisite is
occasionaly to put themselves in Iran's shoes and
analyze the crisis and its potential ramifications
from Iran's vantage point. John Bolton, the US
envoy to the UN, has recently claimed to be
"incredibly flexible", and now the onus is on him
and other US decision-makers to prove themselves
accommodating to a realistic formula, whereby
Iran's chief concern of reliable and sustained
nuclear fuel supply would be addressed. In the
absence of a greater US willingness to go beyond
vacuous rhetoric and commit itself forcefully to
satisfying Iran's need, it is virtually guaranteed
that the nuclear impasse will continue.
Should ElBaradei succeed in making
tangible progress on this particular front and
announce in the near future a firm commitment by
the Western powers to a guaranteed nuclear fuel
supply and, perhaps, even the stockpiling of
nuclear fuel within Iran, the package of such
incentives may prove too enticing to ignore by
Tehran. Let us recall that Iranian President
Mahmud Ahmadinejad proposed at the UN General
Assembly meeting last year the formation of an
international consortium to supply nuclear fuel to
Iran - an apt suggestion sadly rejected rather
instantly by the US and EU.
Henceforth,
new packages from the IAEA are called for,
otherwise the risks of escalation and even
collision remain intolerably high. Contrary to the
US media's stereotype of Iran's political
leadership, it is sufficiently pragmatic to weigh
the risks to its national interests and
contemplate various options, some of which may
have certain political price tags attached, albeit
within tolerable limits.
The question of
'outstanding issues' According
to Iran's Communication to the IAEA, dated March
7, there are significant problems with the
latest IAEA reports on Iran. This technical
communication confirms that after more than three
years of the agency's robust inspection, there has
been susbtantial progress on the so-called
"outstanding matters". Thus, for instance, with
respect to the the issue of HEU (highly enriched
uranium) contamination found at an Iranian
facility, the Communication states that the agency
has been provided with "extensive sampling,
interviews and voluntarily presented all related
documents", warranting the agency's conclusion of
last September that "the results of the
environmental sample analysis tend, on balance, to
support Iran's statement about the foreign origin
of most ot he observered HEU contamination".
Regarding the IAEA's questions about work
on the P-2 centrigues between 1995 and 2002,
Iran's Communication sheds considerable light on
this issue and is worth quoting:
"P-1 was
the National Project and not the P-2.
"Iran
did not have any experience on centrifuge
enrichment; Iran had not not still obtained
skills on P-1, thus it was technically a big
mistake to jump to move to more advanced model
such as P-2, before being mastered on P-1. This
was also confirmed by the IAEA eminent enrichment
expert.
"Had Iran conducted P-2 project
during the said period, then it should have
procured items such as magnets from abroad, for
the assembly and operation of even a single P-2
machine. The information that the agency [IAEA]
has obtained from sources including States Parties
... proves that such measures have not taken place
...
"Had Iran worked on P-2 and obtained
achievement, there was no logic to continue the
national project and invest on P-1 in Natanz."
The Communication then goes to say that
"unfortunately this logic was not recognized by
the agency", and criticizes the IAEA for being
"politicized". Iran's foreign minister has gone
one step further and claimed that Iran is being
victimized by "unjustified propaganda" - not an
altogether unreasonable criticism, and one that
was echoed even by certain diplomats affiliated
with the IAEA after a recent US claim that it had
IAEA backing for its outlandish allegations
against Iran.
In conclusion, the ball is
now back in the IAEA's court, and history may
judge the agency harshly should it fail to play an
effective catalytic role in crisis prevention - a
failure that it can ill-afford at a time when the
viability of the entire non-proliferation regime
is being questioned.
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", 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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