Ex-watchdog calls for nuclear
cool By Jasmin Ramsey
WASHINGTON - Even as United Nations
inspectors expressed disappointment about the
results of their visit this week to Iran, a former
chief of the International Atomic Energy Agency
(IAEA) urged all parties to make greater efforts
to defuse rapidly rising tensions over Tehran's
nuclear program to avert war.
"We don't
expect too much now, but we need to defuse the
most acute things and prepare the road for further
talks," said Hans Blix, the former Swedish foreign
minister who headed the IAEA, the UN's atomic
watchdog, from 1981 to 1997, at a Capitol Hill
briefing for congressional staffers on Tuesday.
"We are now
hoping that there will be a
meeting between the Iranians and the P5+1 ["Iran
Six" - the US, Britain, France, Russia, China and
Germany] perhaps in Istanbul relatively soon, and
we are now fearing there could be a war."
"I think we can sit and dream about the
big solutions. But for the moment we should be
defusing a very acute and dangerous situation,"
noted Blix, who also led the special UN inspection
unit that investigated whether Iraq had weapons of
mass destruction (WMD) in the run-up to the 2003
US invasion.
The latest developments came
as a high-level IAEA delegation returned from a
two-day visit to Iran - its second in less than a
month - apparently frustrated that some requests
of the Iranian authorities were denied.
Although IAEA chief Yukiya Amano said that
the visit to Tehran took place in a "constructive
spirit", Iran had refused his delegation's request
to visit its Parchin military base, which the IAEA
suspects may be used for weapons-related testing.
For its part, an Iranian government
spokesman insisted that cooperation with the IAEA
"continues and is at its best level".
Mark
Fitzpatrick, a nuclear expert at the London-based
International Institute for Strategic Studies,
wrote Wednesday that Tehran's refusal to permit
the inspectors to go to Parchin did not mean the
end of diplomacy.
"In dealing with Iran,
nothing ever happens quickly," he wrote, adding
that more meetings to press Tehran into answering
a series of questions about the possible military
applications of its nuclear research will likely
take place.
Meanwhile, Blix warned that
all parties in the growing crisis over Iran's
nuclear program "have boxed themselves into a
corner".
Blix, who in a 2004 book accused
president George W Bush and British prime minister
Tony Blair of exaggerating the WMD threat in Iraq
in order to rally their publics behind the
invasion, stressed that the most urgent task for
the moment was to reduce tensions between Iran and
Israel, which have risen sharply over the past two
months, and prepare "the road for further talks"
to prevent any disastrous "unintended
consequences".
Among other things, the US
and the European Union (EU), which, besides
Israel, have taken the hardest line on Iran,
should make clear to Tehran that "all our offers
are on the table" and "not just the threats", he
told a briefing that was sponsored by the National
Iranian American Council.
Reports that
Israel may attack Iranian nuclear facilities some
time this year, as well as counter-threats by
Tehran, have raised anxieties - as well as the
price of oil - in key capitals around the world,
including in Washington and London, two of
Israel's closest allies.
Last weekend,
chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff General
Martin Dempsey, who had returned from talks the
week before with top officials in Israel, told CNN
that an Israeli strike wouldn't be "prudent" at
this time. He also described Iran as a "rational
actor".
Dempsey's remarks reportedly drew
scorn from top Israeli officials, including
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who,
according to Israel's Ha'aretz newspaper,
complained to President Barack Obama's national
security adviser, Tom Donilon, when he visited
Jerusalem last weekend.
"The Iranians see
there's controversy between the United States and
Israel, and that the Americans object to a
military act. That reduces the pressure on them,"
a senior Israeli official told the daily.
Appearing with Blix at Tuesday's briefing
was Colin Kahl, until recently the Pentagon's top
Middle East official. He told staffers that an
Israeli strike on Iran would prove
counter-productive. "If you're worried about an
Iranian nuclear weapon, the nearest pathway to
that is probably a relatively ineffective Israeli
strike," he said.
Kahl argued that the
Israeli calculation about Iran's nuclear program
is "slightly different" than Washington's.
The Israelis say they are worried that key
uranium-enrichment capabilities could soon be
buried so deep underground - notably at its Fordow
plant near Qom - that they may be impervious to
Israel's biggest conventional bombs, allowing
Tehran to enter a "zone of immunity" within
months.
The Obama administration, however,
has argued that the situation is not nearly so
urgent, not only because Washington has munitions
that could penetrate Fordow, but also because Iran
faces many more challenges that would take at
least two to three years to overcome in building a
missile-deliverable weapon if it chose to do so.
"It doesn't make a lot of sense to launch
a preventive war on the basis of the zone of
immunity if all you'll do is force your adversary
to reconstitute its program in the facilities you
can't get at," Kahl noted.
That point was
echoed at Tuesday's briefing by former chief IAEA
inspector Robert Kelley, who stressed that all of
Iran's facilities that could be used to develop a
nuclear-weapons capacity are under IAEA
inspection.
"We want that to stay that
way, and the worst thing that I can imagine right
now is doing something short of war that causes
the Iranians to kick the IAEA out. That would be a
disaster."
If, indeed, Iran threw out the
inspectors as a result of an Israeli attack, noted
Kahl, the international community would go "blind,
[and] we would be forced into this situation of
having to permanently encircle Iran and be ready
to restrike on a moment's notice with very bad
intelligence on what they were actually doing," he
said.
"Eventually it's a question of will
power, a question of decision," said Blix, who
argued that, while the Iranians are on a nuclear
"path", it's a "long fuse before they will have a
weapon". He added that the "end of the diplomatic
line" has not yet been reached and that the
benefits for all parties of a negotiated
settlement would likely outweigh the costs.
Nonetheless, the Israel lobby is working
hard on Capitol Hill to limit Obama's flexibility
in any upcoming P5+1 negotiation.
Last
week, at least 30 senators introduced a resolution
calling on the administration to rule out both a
strategy of "containment" against a nuclear Iran
and any negotiated settlement that would permit
any enrichment of uranium by Iran on its own soil,
even if Tehran agreed to the strictest possible
IAEA oversight to ensure that none of it could be
diverted to a weapons program.
A former
top Middle East analyst for the Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA), Paul Pillar, warned on
Monday that the resolution, if adopted, "walks the
United States farther down a path to launching its
own war against Iran".
While noting that
the resolution is not binding, Kahl agreed that
its "rhetoric" and "signaling" would prove
counter-productive to prospects for a successful
negotiation.
The effect of "boxing
negotiators in" is to make a diplomatic solution
"less likely and a kinetic outcome more likely",
he warned.
On Wednesday, Russia added its
voice to warnings against an Israeli strike on
Iran. "Of course any possible military scenario
against Iran will be catastrophic for the region
and for the whole system of international
relations," Deputy Foreign Minister Gennady
Gatilov said.
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