In his latest report to the United Nations, Mohamad ElBaradei, the head of the
International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) , has cited "substantial progress" in
clarifying questions about Iran's nuclear program, stating unequivocally that
the agency "has been able to continue to verify the non-diversion of declared
nuclear material in Iran".
This admission by the UN's atomic agency naturally raises serious questions
about the legitimacy of coercive UN sanctions on Iran for refusing to halt
nuclear activities that are completely legal from the standpoint of the nuclear
Non-Proliferation Treaty. The legal and transparent nature of Iran's
uranium-enrichment program in effect renders moot the UN's demand, and the
sooner
the UN backtracks on its unjustified demands the less the harm to its image.
There is still the residual issue of "alleged studies" in the past and in the
same report cited above ElBaradei expressed confidence that an "arrangement can
be developed which would enable the agency to clarify the remaining issues".
Clearly, this does not sound like an alarm bell, heard ever so loudly in the US
and Israel, about Iran's imminent leap to the nuclear weapons club.
However, the biggest hurdle on the path of normalization of Iran's nuclear file
is the IAEA's demand that Iran should somehow prove "the absence of undeclared
nuclear material and activities". Historically, the only other country
subjected to such a demand by the IAEA was Iraq under Saddam Hussein, and one
would think that the agency would have drawn an appropriate lesson from that
major fiasco.
"I regret that we are still not in a position to achieve full clarity regarding
the absence of undeclared nuclear material and activities in Iran," ElBaradei
stated before the UN General Assembly last week, thus warranting the legitimate
question: isn't this beyond the purview of the IAEA's standards and, more
specifically, the IAEA's inspection and verification agreement with Iran, to
demand that Iran proves a negative?
What the IAEA needs to do is to stick to its own rules, instead of devising ad
hoc new regulations or, for that matter, lavishing expanded new
responsibilities on itself not embedded in the agency's technical mandate.
ElBaradei also calls for a new IAEA-supervised nuclear fuel bank, saying that
"ultimately all existing enrichment facilities should be converted from
national to multinational control". He then adds that "this is not going to
happen overnight".
The fact is that it is a 90% sure bet that it will never happen and the big
powers - the US, China and Russia in particular - will never consent to ceding
authority over their nuclear fuel cycles to "multinational" hands.
Nor is Iran going to reveal its conventional military secrets by allowing the
IAEA to pry into its missile technology, simply because someone in Washington
or Tel Aviv came up with the idea that by concocting some evidence about Iran's
missiles the Iranians would be checkmated at nuclear chess, since their refusal
to let IAEA inspectors inside their missile systems would be interpreted as a
sign they are hiding nuclear secrets.
ElBaradei insists that his intention is pure and is not meant to "pry" into
Iran's conventional military secrets and, again, assures the Iranians that
there is a way to examine Iran's missile system without risking the
confidentiality of its military secrets. That is patently absurd. There is no
such possibility, as if the US and Israeli intelligence would not be clamoring
to get their hands on the vital information gained by the IAEA inspectors once
they poked their noses into Iran's conventional missile program.
Again, history is relevant. The IAEA has a failed report card with respect to
Iraq, when in the aftermath of the 2003 invasion of Iraq the world learned that
the US used the IAEA's data to justify its illegal invasion. Is ElBaradei, who
is stepping down next year, in a position to fully guarantee that none of his
inspectors will cooperate with Iran's adversaries and pass on information
deemed vital for those currently planning military action against Iran?
He cannot, and he should stop embarrassing himself and his agency by imposing
on Iran an unreasonable demand that could well backfire against the IAEA, and
indeed the entire non-proliferation regime, in the event the Iraq fiasco is
repeated with respect to Iran.
Already, there are reports of internal fissures within the agency with respect
to Iran, reflected in the fact that some agency inspectors boycotted the last
presentation by ElBaradei's deputy, Olli Heinonen, regarding the evidence on
Iran's "alleged studies". Heinonen has displayed an uncanny propensity to adopt
at face value any tidbit of disinformation on Iran and, as a result, it would
be nothing short of a national security risk for Iran to comply with the IAEA's
unreasonable demand cited above.
Lest we forget, when the IAEA approached Iran in the spring of 2007 and
proposed a comprehensive work plan to tackle all outstanding issues, the agency
did not list the "alleged studies" as one of its "outstanding issues". (The
"alleged studies" relate to information allegedly obtained from a laptop
computer that was taken out of Iran and handed to US intelligence in 2004.)
Those six issues have now been effectively dealt with and the IAEA has closed
the book on them, that is, considers them "no longer outstanding" per the
IAEA's February 2008 report. In terms of that agreement, Iran's nuclear file
should have been placed out of the current exceptional or emergency status and
treated as "routine", but that has not happened because of the "alleged
studies".
Yet ElBaradei has admitted, in his August 2008 report, that the agency has not
detected any diversion of nuclear material toward those "alleged studies".
The longer ElBaradei insists on his extra-legal demands from Iran the more the
world community loses confidence in his fairness, objectivity and the ability
of the atomic agency to remain insulated from big-power manipulation.
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. For his
Wikipedia entry, click here.
His latest book,
Reading In Iran Foreign Policy After September 11 (BookSurge Publishing
, October 23, 2008) is now available.
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