COMMENT US trashes
Iran agreement at own peril By
Kaveh L Afrasiabi
This week, the
International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) was
thoroughly trashed by the Western media over its
recent agreement with Iran, an agreement that,
ironically, was warmly embraced by the majority of
nations that are members of the Non-Aligned
Movement (NAM). The North-South gap has turned
ballistic, and there is no bridge over this
troubled water.
"NAM respects the recent
report by the IAEA's director general, Mohamed
ElBaradei, on Iran," the Cuban foreign minister and
current head of NAM, Felipe
Perez Roque, told the press after the conclusion
of a two-day NAM summit in Tehran.
The
ministerial meeting was a timely shot in the arm
for Tehran, which hopes to avoid a new round of
United Nations sanctions come this autumn, even
though British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has
warned that new sanctions are inevitable if Iran
continues to defy UN Security Council resolutions
on its nuclear program.
Not surprisingly,
little if any of the praise for the IAEA heard at
the NAM summit has been echoed in the United
States, which is keen on maintaining the delicate
coalition at the UN that brought the first two
anti-Tehran resolutions and yet is concerned that
the IAEA's agreement with Iran could, in the words
of a Washington Post editorial, give China and
Russia "a pretext to resist another UN sanctions
resolution".
Iran and the IAEA agreed last
month on a plan of action that is supposed to
remove all technical ambiguities surrounding
Iran's nuclear projects and serve as the basis for
a political settlement between Iran's chief
nuclear negotiator Ali Larijani and European Union
foreign-policy chief Javier Solana.
The
Post editorial places the blame squarely on the
IAEA's "rogue regulator", ElBaradei, currently
vilified as "self-serving" and feeling free to
"use his agency to thwart their [ie, Security
Council and IAEA] leading members, above all the
United States."
Another editorial, in the
Chicago Tribune, has parroted the criticisms of a
nuclear expert, David Albright, calling the
Iran-IAEA agreement a "bad deal". According to
Albright, the "most glaring flaws" of the
agreement are as follows: there doesn't seem to be
any way to verify Iran's claims because under the
agreement, the IAEA isn't given access to "key
people, facilities and documents", unless Iran
volunteers them. And the agency potentially loses
its right to reopen issues or ask follow-up
questions, even if significant new information
emerges.
We can safely assume that the
IAEA officials, particularly those who brokered
the agreement, such as deputy director Olli
Heinonen, would take strong exception to
Albright's criticisms. There is absolutely nothing
in the agreement that would make the IAEA lose its
right to ask "follow-up questions".
Nor is
it true that the IAEA has not had access to the
key Iranian nuclear facilities and the people
running them. Albright has gone to the extreme of
claiming that the IAEA has no method of verifying
Iran's claims, again an unsubstantiated claim that
is bound to be objected to by the IAEA inspectors
who have chalked up more than 2,200 days
inspecting Iran's facilities.
But as the
Washington Post editorial makes abundantly clear,
Washington has developed a serious grudge against
the IAEA's chief and is by now fully determined to
undermine his authority and, perhaps, to defang
him, since it cannot simply remove him from
office. Similar attacks on ElBaradei and the IAEA
have transpired in other major US newspapers,
raising the question of what exactly is behind
them.
The answer is, in fact,
straightforward: the IAEA-Iran agreement,
providing a timetable for Iran to answer all of
the IAEA's lingering questions, leaves Iran's
uranium-enrichment program intact, and that is one
concession too many from the perspective of
Washington hawks and warmongers, who would much
prefer to ignore any signs of an Iran-IAEA thaw
that might culminate in Iran's file slipping back
into the IAEA and away from the Security Council.
Concerning the latter, Iran's Foreign
Ministry spokesperson has stated that Iran may be
inclined to readopt the intrusive Additional
Protocol if the US consents to returning the Iran
file to the IAEA.
Despite serious
objections by the US, the IAEA has mapped out a
plan of action that appears to be working in
Iran's favor (for now) but which can be terminated
at the United States' whim. The US is, after all,
the lone superpower that can dictate and persuade
(by using coercion). Or, it can think beyond
hegemony and stay on the right path, by knocking
on Iran's door for further dialogue.
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 also wrote "Keeping Iran's nuclear potential
latent", Harvard International Review, and is
author of Iran's Nuclear
Program: Debating Facts Versus Fiction.
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