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2 US dismisses nuclear report on
Iran Kaveh L Afrasiabi
and rights-based enrichment deprive
the current UN sanctions of a lion's share of
their legitimacy.
At this point a policy
conclusion: if the IAEA and the UN are serious
about gaining Iran's acceptance of their demand
for suspension of enrichment and reprocessing
activities, then a prior agreement on the duration
and the precise purposes and objective of this
suspicion must be worked out beforehand, given
Iran's concern that it has already complied with
that confidence-building
measure when it suspended its
uranium-enrichment activities for two years.
A legally non-binding, ie, voluntary,
suspension aimed as "confidence-building" is one
thing, an indefinite, time non-specific,
suspension approximating termination, which is by
all indications what the US and its European
allies are seeking without the benefit of an iota
of international law behind them, quite another.
Reacting to the IAEA report, the British
government has emulated the US by calling on Iran
to "come clean", as if it is not. Iran has
repeatedly reminded the world that the IAEA has
given a "clean bill of health" to only a small
fraction of member states and that minor
transgressions, particularly those successfully
corrected, do not muster to a breach of the NPT,
yet Iran is punished by sanctions and threats of
war and destruction as if it has.
The
International Herald Tribune has dubbed
ElBaradei's report as a "mixed report", but that
too is a mischaracterization, since there is
nothing ambiguous about its admission of Iran's
cooperation. What Western governments and their
media adamantly refuse to accept is that a
sea-change in Iran's cooperation with the IAEA has
occurred that, in effect, changes the calculus of
coercive diplomacy with regard to Iran.
Hypothetically, Iran can suspend its
enrichment activities for as little as a few weeks
and then restart and legitimately claim that it
has fulfilled its obligations under the Security
Council resolutions, thus totally undermining the
sanctions regime. It is not Iran but the sanctions
regime that needs a "regime change" toward nuclear
democracy, one representing equal nuclear rights
for all, away from the present caste hierarchy
that, in turn, perpetuates the unequal
distribution of global power.
The longer
the Iran crisis lasts, the more flagrant the
contradictions of the nuclear world order and the
greater the pressure by a bulk of the
international community to force the nuclear
weapon states to meet their own obligations to the
NPT. For instance, by pursuing real, practical
disarmament, endorsing nuclear weapons free zones,
pledging no first use, instead of threatening the
rest of the world with their dangerous nuclear
doctrines.
Similarly, Iran can re-adopt
the Additional Protocol without any fear, since it
has already complied with several IAEA requests
paralleling the terms of this protocol, eg, for
complementary visits, well beyond its treaty
obligations.
Lest we forget, whereas in
this report ElBaradei places much faith in the
agency's ability to get a full picture of Iran's
nuclear program only through "the full
implementation of the Additional Protocol", this
is at variance with his earlier statements that
put the bar considerably higher, by urging Iran to
take steps "beyond the Additional Protocol".
Clearly, the time to stop making excess
demands on Iran smacking of double standards has
arrived. [1])In his "balancing act", ElBaradei has
also contradicted his agency's earlier doubt on US
intelligence (traced to a lap top) regarding
Iran's missile system and re-entry vehicle, by
citing the latter in his report as one of the
lingering issues. To open a parenthesis here, the
nuclear expert, David Albright, who had similarly
questioned that particular piece of intelligence,
refers to it in his new article on Iran published
in Arms Control Today without a hint of his
earlier skepticism.
Given the
politically-induced shortcomings of ElBaradei's
report, all eyes are now on the upcoming meeting
of the European Union's foreign policy chief,
Javier Solana, with Iranian officials, who would
rather see the nuclear file closed and
"normalized" back in the IAEA. That is unlikely to
happen as long as Europe lacks the political will
to part ways from the US, irrespective of
ElBaradei's important findings suggesting the
non-necessity of a crisis over Iran's nuclear
program.
Note 1. It is
noteworthy that the US has cut its own special
deal with the IAEA respecting the Additional
Protocol, in effect circumventing its
intrusiveness in the name of "national security",
as a result of which there are today two separate
Additional Protocols, one for the nuclear weapon
states and one for the nuclear non-weapon states,
as if the latter have no military secret to keep
that could be jeopardized by the expanded
surveillance method of Additional Protocol.
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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