UN deepens the Iran nuclear
crisis By Kaveh L Afrasiabi
On Monday, the United Nations Security
Council adopted a third round of sanctions on Iran
[1] that will likely escalate the nuclear crisis,
given Tehran's stated promise to resist "unlawful"
pressures and demands. This may well mean
resisting a key aspect of the UN resolution that
calls for the interdiction of ships and airplanes
carrying suspected nuclear cargo to and from Iran.
With US and French ships poised to carry
out this duty in and around the Persian Gulf, the
stage has now been set for the next chapter in the
nuclear standoff, that is, physical confrontation.
After several weeks of closed-door
negotiations, the 15-member Security Council
imposed the sanctions, adding that if Iran
"suspends all enrichment-related and reprocessing
activities, including research and development",
the council would suspend
the
implementation of the sanctions.
The vote
was 14 in favor, including the five permanent
members - the United States, Britain, France,
Russia and China - with one abstention from a
non-permanent member, Indonesia.
For the
first time, the council imposed a ban on trade
with Iran, specifically on goods relating to both
military and civilian uses. The last two
resolutions against Iran were imposed in December
2006 and in March 2007, mostly relating to trade
in nuclear-sensitive materials and technology.
The new resolution listed further
sanctions, including a travel ban on some
individuals listed in previous resolutions;
additional names of persons and entities subject
to assets; a call to "exercise vigilance" in
granting export credits to Iran and over the
activities of Iranian banks; an embargo on
nuclear-related dual-use items, with the exception
of items for exclusive use in light water
reactors; and technical cooperation with the
International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
This is in addition to the resolution that
calls on states to inspect cargo to and from Iran
"if there are reasonable grounds to believe that
they may contain prohibited items".
Interestingly, while the non-permanent
members of the Security Council have made their
input by insisting that the sea inspections must
take place according to international laws of the
sea, in addition to the fact that the US has yet
to be a formal signatory to these laws, another
irony is that this may actually lead to future
infringements on Iran's rights in its territorial
waters in the Persian Gulf, in light of the
traffic lane there that traverses those waters.
The UN's broad ban on trade with Iran with
"dual purpose" goods - that have both civilian and
military usefulness - alone belies the impression
of "weak sanctions" and, on the contrary,
reinforces the opposite image of "punitive
sanctions" openly urged by US officials during the
past few weeks.
Prior to the vote, Iran's
ambassador to the UN, Mohammad Khazaee,
articulated Tehran's grounds for rejecting
"legally defective" and "politically coercive"
sanctions, citing Iran's nuclear transparency,
absence of any evidence of military misuse of
Iran's civilian nuclear program, and the
baselessness of allegations of past "weaponization
studies". Khazaee warned that the UN's legitimacy
as well as that of the IAEA may suffer as a result
of the Security Council's "unjust behavior".
Meanwhile, some European countries have
apparently prepared a similar move at the IAEA, by
preparing an anti-Iran resolution to be voted on
by the agency's governing board that meets this
week. Russia has reportedly objected to this move
on the ground of being kept in the dark - a minor
snag that in light of Russia's vote at the
Security Council will likely be resolved shortly.
After all, Russia has just had its presidential
elections and is looking to smooth its relations
with the US and the European Union, instead of
playing the spoiler role.
What the US and
its European allies may have achieved by the
Monday vote at the Security Council is the
preemption of a deep split within the IAEA, whose
35-member Board of Governors is substantially more
democratic and thus prone to influence by
non-major powers than is the case with the
Security Council.
The IAEA will have to
continue playing second fiddle to the Security
Council with respect to Iran for the foreseeable
future, with the council aiming to escalate the
pressures on Iran to bring about the desired
result. But, what is the desired result?
Sanctions are tools of policy and are not
a substitute for strategy, which is sadly lacking
in Washington these days. Officially, the demand
is clear: Iran must suspend its nuclear fuel cycle
in 90 days or face sanctions.
Yet, none of
the Security Council resolutions make clear how
long the duration of suspensions should be, nor is
everyone in the US sold on the notion that the
"zero-centrifuge" option favored by the West is
either realistic or feasible. For instance, Thomas
Pickering, a former US ambassador to the UN, has
just penned an article with two other US experts
calling for a joint enrichment program on Iran's
soil.
Recalling President Mahmud
Ahmadinejad's idea of a regional or international
consortium inside Iran, which he spelled out at
the UN headquarters in New York two years ago,
Pickering's proposal is similar to the European
idea of a "limited enrichment capability" reserved
for Iran. This has been officially resisted by the
US until now, and also reflects a growing fissure
within US policy circles that will by all
indications afflict the next US president as well.
The small cracks in the US's rigid stance
toward Iran, reflected in the statement by
Pickering and his colleagues, are bound to get
bigger, principally because of the internal
illogic of the argument that Iran's nuclear
Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) right to the
enrichment capability should be limited to
laboratory scale. From Iran's vantage point, this
limits Iran's technological progress and prevents
the realization of its aim to join the elite group
of countries exporting nuclear fuel.
Although some Iranian officials have
stated Iran will continue to cooperate with the
IAEA regardless of what happens in the Security
Council, the sheer scope of the new sanctions may
soon alter that position in favor of a degraded
cooperation with the IAEA in reaction to the
perceived unjust sanctions. Certainly, Iran will
not adopt the intrusive Additional Protocol of the
NPT, as requested by IAEA chief Mohammad
ElBaradei, as long as Tehran does not feel the
IAEA has played a fair game.
Concerning
the latter, it is a matter of supreme irony that
whereas the latest IAEA report on Iran openly
admits that it lacks "credible information"
regarding the so-called "alleged studies" on
weaponization, at the same time its chief
inspector has been quoted in US papers showcasing
"a litany" of data to diplomats and complaining of
Iran's refusal to answer questions about those
studies.
Iran's ambassador to the IAEA,
Ali Asghar Soltanieh, has drawn a line in the sand
by categorically denying any truth to the
allegations of "weaponization" stemming from,
among other things, a stolen computer. (See
The 'laptop of mass
destruction' Asia
Times Online, March 4.)
Perhaps it would
be better for Iran to be proactive, by calling for
an independent commission of inquiry to look into
the authenticity question surrounding the data
given to the IAEA by third countries about Iran.
Only then the idea of "comprehensive examination"
of this particular issue, pushed by ElBaradei,
will likely have the desired effect of "truth
verification".
Unfortunately, that is
unlikely to happen and the IAEA, which earlier had
cast doubt on the authenticity of information on
Iran from various countries, is now adopting them
at face value. This is like putting on trial an
accused with the help of dubious, even
manufactured, evidence, with the difference that
with this week's anti-Iran drifts in both the UN
and the IAEA, we are more apt to see a case of
"double jeopardy".
In other words, the
IAEA's Governing Board will follow the UN's
footsteps by passing a tough anti-Iran resolution
and thus ensuring the viability of the Iran
nuclear crisis that should have ended this week
after the IAEA's certificate of Iran's compliance
with respect to all its questions of concern,
better known as the "outstanding questions".
With so much verbal and substantive
self-reversal of IAEA officials in such a short
time, it is now clear that the deeper the Iran
crisis becomes, the more entrenched the problems
of the IAEA itself, which must either stop playing
double standards or resign to the caricature of
itself by the manipulative soft power of the US
and its allies.
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.
(Copyright 2008 Asia Times Online Ltd. All
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(Additional reporting by
Erkan Kaptan of Inter Press
Service.)
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