The Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency today warned that he cannot confirm that all of Iran’s nuclear activities are for civilian purposes. IAEA chief Yukiya Amano told the IAEA Board of Governors, which is meeting in Geneva Switzerland, that “we cannot confirm that all nuclear material in Iran is in peaceful activities because Iran has not provided the agency with the necessary co-operation.” His statement is a slightly softer indictment of Iran’s nuclear defiance than a confidential IAEA report leaked last week that indicated that the U.N. agency had “concerns about the possible existence in Iran of past or current undisclosed activities related to the development of a nuclear payload for a missile.”
Amano’s statement will add momentum to calls for stronger sanctions against Iran at the U.N. Security Council, where the United States, Britain, France and Germany are pressing Russia and China to sign off on another sanctions resolution against Iran. Although Moscow has opposed calls for new sanctions in the past, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev today indicated that Russia may be willing to consider a new round of sanctions.
But persuading Moscow and Beijing to accede to effective sanctions will require strong American leadership. Unfortunately, the White House has fallen short on the sanctions issue, losing an entire year before pushing for another resolution. Moreover, the State Department has sought to indefinitely postpone gasoline sanctions passed by bipartisan landslide votes in both the House and Senate over the Obama Administration’s objections. This sends exactly the wrong signal about getting serious about penalizing Iran for its nuclear defiance.
The long-overdue push for a fourth round of U.N. Security Council sanctions has been aided by Iran’s rejection of a nuclear deal brokered by the IAEA to move most of Iran’s stockpile of low enriched uranium out of the country in return for fuel for a nuclear research reactor in Tehran.
The push for sanctions also has been aided by the replacement of the IAEA’s longtime Director General Mohamed Elbaradei by Amano in December. Amano has been much more forthright in detailing Iran’s continued failure to cooperate on nuclear issues, in contrast to ElBaradei who often seemed more interested in criticizing the West than carrying out his duties regarding Iran’s suspected nuclear weapons activities. After leaving the U.N. agency that he politicized to carry out his own agenda, Elbaradei now has returned to Egypt where he hopes to exploit his anti-western notoriety to launch a political career. This is a worrisome development for Egypt, but a net gain for the IAEA.
For more on Iran, see: Iran Briefing Room
Yesterday the International Atomic Energy Agency released a report that warned that it has evidence that Iran may be working on a nuclear warhead. This is the first time the IAEA has suggested that Tehran had either resumed such work or in fact had never stopped, as U.S. intelligence agencies had concluded in a controversial 2007 National Intelligence Estimate. The draft report (pdf) cited undisclosed evidence that “raises concerns about the possible existence in Iran of past or current undisclosed activities related to the development of a nuclear payload for a missile.”
The report also noted that Iran had stonewalled IAEA efforts to discuss issues related to nuclear weapons work since August 2008 and confirmed that Iran had enriched uranium to a level of 19.8 percent, which is a major step toward producing weapons-grade uranium, despite repeated U.N. Security Council resolutions demanding that they stop these and other nuclear activities.
The new report, which included the U.N. agency’s strongest language to date concerning Iran’s suspicious nuclear activities, was the first prepared under the leadership of new IAEA Director General Yukiya Amano. Amino last year replaced former IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei, who repeatedly undermined western efforts to pressure Iran to halt its nuclear program and earned a reputation as the “nuclear watchdog that didn’t bark.”
The Obama Administration urged Iran to publicly address issues highlighted in the report. State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley complained that “We cannot explain why it refuses to come to the table and engage constructively to answer questions that have been raised.”
One senior administration official who briefed reporters on the report underscored that the findings showed that Iran’s “pattern of behavior is one that is very disturbing.” Another anonymous senior official told The New York Times that Iran’s actions described in the report “almost suggest the Iranian military is inviting a confrontation.”
But Tehran may believe that such a confrontation is unlikely with the Obama Administration, which continues to cling to its failed engagement strategy. Earlier this week Vice President Joseph Biden went out of his way to downplay Iran’s nuclear threat. And on February 17, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told Al-Arabiya television that “Obviously, we don’t want Iran to become a nuclear weapons power, but we are not planning anything other than going for sanctions.”
The new IAEA report provided fresh evidence contradicting the controversial 2007 National Intelligence Estimate on Iran’s nuclear program that concluded that Iran had suspended weaponization activities in 2003. Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-MI), the ranking Republican member on the House Select Committee on Intelligence, called for a review of the flawed 2007 NIE by outside experts:
When the IAEA, a United Nations body, is issuing reports that are more definitive than the US intelligence community, something is clearly wrong. The solution is to set up a “Red Team” of non-government experts to review US intelligence on an Iranian nuclear weapons program and issue an independent report. There is precedent for such an outside review which I believe would help improve and restore confidence in U.S. intelligence analysis.
For more on Iran, see: Iran Briefing Room