IAEA misses the mark on Iran

IAEA misses the mark on Iran
By Kaveh L Afrasiabi | AsiaTimesOnline.com

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.