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
The tentative nuclear deal that the P5+1 (the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council plus Germany) reportedly has reached with Iran has been widely hailed as a success for the Obama Administration’s engagement policy. For example, today a Washington Post article described the deal as “providing a major boost for the Obama administration as it seeks to engage the Islamic republic.” But a closer look at the negotiations gives strong reasons for concern.
First of all, the focus on helping Iran to refuel its research reactor in Tehran has distracted attention from the fact that Iran stubbornly insists that it will continue to enrich uranium in defiance of U.N. Security Council resolutions. This is the main issue of the P5+1 talks, but it has been obscured by Tehran’s tactical flexibility on the issue of moving about three quarters of its known supplies of low enriched uranium (LEU) out of the country to be further enriched in Russia and turned into fuel rods by France.
Second, the negotiations have boosted Iran’s case that it needs enriched uranium for “civilian” purposes but have not solved the problem of how to keep Tehran from diverting enriched uranium to build a nuclear weapon. If Iran does in fact follow through on its promises to send the LEU to Russia, then the problem is only postponed, not resolved. Iran can replace the LEU in a year or less with the centrifuges still whirling away at Natanz. Meanwhile, Iran also could have other secret facilities dedicated to producing the highly enriched uranium needed to arm a nuclear weapon.
Third, by giving the appearance of progress while the real problem remains, Tehran has bought more time in which to continue to enrich uranium without paying a penalty in the form of tougher sanctions. Iran now will stretch out the negotiations to defuse momentum for further sanctions that was generated by the latest revelation of Iranian duplicity about the secret uranium enrichment plant at Qom. Before the latest round of talks, a senior Iranian official gloated that “Time is on our side” and that Iran would send junior officials who did not have the authority to make concessions to the October 19 talks, so that the talks can be dragged out further. President Obama said on October 1 that Iran must allow inspectors access within 2 weeks but Iran already has missed that deadline. The IAEA inspectors will go in on October 25th, if the agreement in principle is still valid then.
Fourth, the Obama Administration has an “agreement in principle” with a regime that has no principles, except to hold on to power and export its revolution. As Ambassador John Bolton has written, “Diplomacy’s three slipperiest words are ‘agreement in principle.’” Iran could renege on its commitment, as it has done many times in the past.
Iran already has altered the original agreement by claiming that France can not play a prominent part in the arrangements because of its past unreliability, which is a bad joke coming from Tehran. Apparently, now the Russians will subcontract the manufacturing of the fuel rods for the Tehran reactor to France so that Tehran’s tender sensibilities will be protected.
The bottom line is that contrary to popular belief, the negotiations with Iran have not produced a breakthrough that has resolved the long-simmering crisis over Tehran’s nuclear program. All they have yielded so far is an agreement in principle on a secondary issue that Iran can easily back away from in the future. Meanwhile, the push for further sanctions has been postponed despite the fact that Iran continues to enrich uranium.