by Gareth Porter
In a critique of the handling of the Iran file by the International Atomic Energy Agency, former IAEA Director General Han Blix has called for greater skepticism about the intelligence documents and reports alleging Iranian nuclear weapons work and warned that they may be used to put diplomatic pressure on Tehran.
In an interview with this writer in his Stockholm apartment late last month, Blix, who headed the IAEA from 1981 to 1997, also criticized the language repeated by the IAEA under its current director general, Yukiya Amano, suggesting that Iran is still under suspicion of undeclared nuclear activity.
Blix, who clashed with US officials when he was head of the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC) on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq from 2000 to 2003, said he has long been skeptical of intelligence that has been used to accuse Iraq and Iran of having active nuclear-weapons programs. “I’ve often said you have as much disinformation as information” on alleged weaponization efforts in those countries, Blix said.
Former IAEA Director General Hans Blix. Credit: Mikael Sjöberg
Referring to the allegations of past Iranian nuclear weapons research that have been published in IAEA reports, Blix said, “Something that worries me is that these accusations that come from foreign intelligence agencies can be utilized by states to keep Iran under suspicion.”
Such allegations, according to Blix, “can be employed as a tactic to keep the state in a suspect light—to keep Iran on the run.” The IAEA, he said, “should be cautious and not allow itself to be drawn into such a tactic.”
Blix warned that compromising the independence of the IAEA by pushing it to embrace unverified intelligence was not in the true interests of those providing the intelligence.
The IAEA Member States providing the intelligence papers to the IAEA “have a long-term interest in an international service that seeks to be independent,” said Blix. “In the Security Council they can pursue their own interest, but the [IAEA] dossier has to be as objective as possible.”
In 2005, the George W. Bush administration gave the IAEA a large cache of documents purporting to derive from a covert Iranian nuclear weapons research and development program from 2001 to 2003. Israel provided a series of documents and intelligence reports on alleged Iranian nuclear weapons work in 2008 and 2009.
Blix’s successor as IAEA director general, Mohamed ElBaradei, recalled in his 2011 memoirs having doubts about the authenticity of both sets of intelligence documents. ElBaradei resisted pressure from the United States and its European allies in 2009 to publish an “annex” to a regular IAEA report based on those unverified documents.
But Amano agreed to do so, and the annex on “possible military dimensions” of the Iranian nuclear program was published in November 2011. During the current negotiations with Iran, the P5+1 (US, UK, Russia, China, France plus Germany) has taken the position that Iran must explain the intelligence documents and reports described in the annex.
The provenance of the largest part of the intelligence documents—the so-called “laptop documents”—was an unresolved question for years after they were first reported in 2004 and 2005. But former senior German foreign office official Karsten Voigt confirmed in 2013 that the Iranian exile opposition group, the Mujahedeen E-Khalq (MEK), gave the original set of documents to the German intelligence service (BND) in 2004. The MEK has been reported by Seymour Hersh, Connie Bruck, and a popular history of the Mossad’s covert operations to have been a client of Israel’s foreign intelligence agency, the Mossad, serving to “launder” intelligence that Mossad did not want to have attributed to Israel.
Blix has been joined by two other former senior IAEA officials in criticizing the agency for its uncritical presentation of the intelligence documents cited in the November 2011 annex. Robert Kelley, the head of the Iraq team under both Blix and ElBaradei, and Tariq Rauf, the former head of the Agency’s Verification and Security Policy Coordination Office, have written that the annex employed “exaggeration, innuendo and careful choice of words” in presenting intelligence information from an unidentified Member State of the IAEA on the alleged cylinder at the Parchin military facility.
Blix said he is “critical” of the IAEA for the boilerplate language used in its reports on Iran that the Agency is “not in a position to provide credible assurances about the absence of undeclared nuclear material and activities….”
Blix added that it is “erroneous” to suggest that the IAEA would be able to provide such assurances if Iran or any other state were more cooperative. As head of UNMOVIC, Blix recalled, “I was always clear that there could always be small things in a big geographical area that can be hidden, and you can never guarantee completely that there are no undeclared activities.”
“In Iraq we didn’t maintain there was nothing,” he said. “We said we had made 700 inspections at 500 sites and we had not seen anything.”
Blix emphasized that he was not questioning the importance of maximizing inspections, or of Iran’s ratification of the Additional Protocol. “I think the more inspections you can perform the smaller the residue of uncertainty,” he said.
]]>by Gareth Porter
When Iran offered last month to allow the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to visit the Marivan region near the border with Iraq, the IAEA might have been expected to respond with alacrity to the opportunity.
The IAEA had been complaining for months that Iran had not provided the information and access required to “clarify” allegations of nuclear weapons-related experiments. But the immediate IAEA response to the Iranian offer, as well as the previous history of the Marivan issue, suggest that the nuclear agency is less than eager to take advantage of it. That reason appears to be because the Agency’s source for the alleged experiments failed to identify the site where the alleged experiments were supposed to have been conducted.
The Agency’s November 2011 report asserted that “information” provided by a “Member State” indicated that Iran had carried out “large scale high explosive experiments” in “the region of Marivan” using a technique for initiating an explosive charge found in “some known nuclear explosive devices.”
In a significant development in the IAEA-Iran process for resolving the “possible military dimensions” (PMD) issue however, Iran’s Permanent Representative to the IAEA, Reza Najafi, told the Board of Governors during its quarterly conference November 21 that Iran was ready to give the IAEA “one managed access” to the western Marivan region to “prove” that the allegations of nuclear weapons experiments were “wrong and baseless.” He said such alleged experiments “could easily be traced if the exact site would be visited.”
The Iranian diplomat said the unnamed Member State that had made the charge—which he said was either the United States or Israel—“should specify the site’s exact location. Otherwise it should confess that it has misled the IAEA with false information.” Najafi added, “In fact, there is no such location at all.”
The response from Gill Tudor, the spokesperson for IAEA Director-General Yukiya Amano, was non-committal. “The situation regarding a visit to the Marivan region is not as simple as that conveyed by Iran. The Agency will discuss the offer with Iran,” she said.
Two weeks after the Iranian offer, the IAEA was still silent on whether it has contacted Iran to discuss the offer. “The topic is still under consideration,” said Serge Gas, the IAEA Director of Communications, in response to this writer’s query December 3 about any follow-up with the statement.
A source close to the Agency told me, however, that the issue of a visit to Marivan “has gone to sleep for the moment.”
The Iranian mission to the IAEA, meanwhile, said it had nothing to add to Ambassador Najafi’s initial offer.
The IAEA’s apparent hesitancy about an inspection visit to Marivan is remarkable in light of Amano’s criticism of Iran for allegedly failing to provide information on suspect sites. Amano declared in a speech at the Brookings Institution in Washington Oct. 31 that Iran still had not provided information on the issues that Iran had agreed to address last summer, one of which was the alleged high explosives experiments.
But instead of pursuing a possible inspection of the site of the alleged Marivan experiment, Amano has focused solely on gaining access to the site at Iran’s Parchin military base where, according to the 2011 IAEA report, Iran had constructed a large explosives containment vessel in 2000 for hydrodynamic testing of nuclear weapons designs.
That report did not claim that the alleged cylinder at Parchin had actually been used for any nuclear weapons-related experiment, however. It asserted only that it was “suitable” for carrying out the same kind of experiment on a multipoint initiation system for a bomb that it said had been already performed in Marivan.
Former IAEA nuclear weapons expert Robert Kelley, who had twice headed the Agency’s Iraq Action Team, has argued that an inspection of the alleged Marivan high explosives experiments should thus take the priority. In February 2012, Kelley, a former director of the US Department of Energy Remote Sensing Laboratory in Nevada, told Jonathan Tirone of Bloomberg News, “The Agency needs to put Marivan first, because it is the sleeping dog in the last report.”
The day after Kelley was quoted on Marivan, Iran’s permanent representative to the IAEA, Ambassador Ali Asgar Soltanieh, told a visiting IAEA delegation, which had requested the day before to visit Parchin during its two-day stay, that it could carry out an inspection visit to Marivan instead. But the IAEA delegation rejected the offer, claiming that it had not been given enough lead-time to prepare for such a trip, according to Soltanieh.
The IAEA had never brought up Marivan publicly again until Najafi’s offer at the Board of Governors meeting. The only plausible reason for its present apparent reluctance to pursue such a visit is that the Member State that provided the intelligence on the alleged experiments failed to identify a specific site in the Marivan region.
Marivan is one of the “counties” of Iran’s Kurdistan province. It includes three districts with three cities and 151 populated villages with a total population of about 170,000 people.
The IAEA certainly had access to satellite images for the entire Marivan region, and would have searched through those images for any site that looked like it could be the location of the purported high explosives experiment. Apparently, it did not find a specific location that seemed plausible.
The allegation about the Marivan experiment isn’t the only one that lacked a specific location. The intelligence on the alleged explosives cylinder “suitable” for conducting the same type of experiment was also not connected to a specific site at the sprawling Parchin facility at the time that its alleged existence was first reported to the IAEA.
The IAEA revealed in its August 2012 report that the location of the Parchin site “was only identified in March 2011.” IAEA reports are carefully worded, and any intelligence information is always attributed to one or more unidentified Member States. The use of passive voice—which allowed the Agency to avoid the question of who did finally identify the location—strongly implies that the identification of the site at Parchin was not the result of new intelligence information provided by the original or some other, but rather resulted from the IAEA’s own searching through satellite images for a site with physical characteristics considered consistent with the intelligence the Agency had obtained. So the Parchin site is likely merely the IAEA’s best guess as to the location of the alleged object, the very existence of which is very much in question, as Kelley has argued on this website.
The fact that the unnamed Member State or States that provided the intelligence claims apparently failed to specify locations for either of the two major alleged Iranian nuclear weapons-related activities adds yet another reason to question the reliability of the intelligence used by the IAEA to construct what Amano calls the “case” that Iran carried out covert nuclear weapons research. But there are other compelling reasons to question those and other such intelligence claims. Kelley has discussed some of those reasons in multiple articles. Others are discussed in my own book-length study on the misinformation and disinformation surrounding the Iran nuclear issue.
Despite the problematic nature of the intelligence currently at the center of the PMD issue, the treatment of the issue in American news media continues to focus overwhelmingly on Iran’s refusal to allow the IAEA to inspect the site that has now been identified at Parchin. The implication has been that Iran is hiding something. At the same time, one would be hard-pressed to find US coverage of Iran’s latest offer.
There are other explanations for Iran’s reluctance to permit the IAEA to inspect Parchin, however. On one hand, Iran would not want to set a precedent for allowing inspections of its military sites on the basis of intelligence that it argues is not supported by credible evidence when hostile powers could exploit that opening to gather military intelligence. On the other hand, it can’t be expected to give away its ultimate negotiating chip to the IAEA without a concession of comparable value in return.
Photo: Resident Representative of the Islamic Republic of Iran Reza Najaf photographed with IAEA Director General Yukiya Amano in Vienna, Austria, 26 September 2013. Credit: Dean Calma/IAEA
]]>by Peter Jenkins
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has issued its latest quarterly report on Iran. The IAEA Board will consider the Sept. 5 report during the week of Sept. 15.
Much initial comment has centred on signs that the process launched on Nov. 11, 2013, when the IAEA and Iran [...]]]>
by Peter Jenkins
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has issued its latest quarterly report on Iran. The IAEA Board will consider the Sept. 5 report during the week of Sept. 15.
Much initial comment has centred on signs that the process launched on Nov. 11, 2013, when the IAEA and Iran agreed on a framework for addressing all outstanding IAEA concerns about the nature of Iran’s nuclear program, is starting to stall. But first the good news:
- Iran no longer possesses any declared uranium enriched to 20% U235 in gaseous form. Fed into a sufficient number of centrifuges, 20% U235 can quickly be enriched to weapon grade. All this material has either been down-blended or converted into uranium oxide for fuel plates.
- Iran has started to convert its stock of uranium enriched up to 5% U235 from gaseous form into uranium oxide. Once the whole stock has been converted, drawing on it to produce weapon-grade U235 would be an unattractive option.
- Iran has not brought any additional centrifuge cascades into service since the last IAEA report. It is operating 54 cascades at the Natanz plant and four cascades at Fordow.
- IAEA inspectors have been granted access to Iran’s centrifuge workshops and storage facilities, and have had access to a centrifuge research and development centre. These visits have enabled the agency to confirm that the production rate of rotors, a crucial centrifuge component, is consistent with a program for replacing damaged centrifuges (and points away from any clandestine centrifuge acquisition program).
- Iran continues to meet all its commitments under the Joint Plan of Action (JPA) agreed between the US and the P5+1 (US, UK, France, Russia, China plus Germany) last November.
- All nuclear material known to be in Iran’s possession continues to be accounted for and to be in peaceful use.
Together these findings suggest that the purpose of Iran’s uranium enrichment program is the production of reactor fuel, as declared, and not the production of nuclear weapons, which would be a violation of Iran’s obligations as a party to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). It is open to Iran at any time to change course and start using facilities that are inherently capable of serving both civil and military purposes for a military end, but there is no indication in the latest report that Iran has the ‘political will’ to do any such thing.
There is cause for concern, however, in what the agency reports about the implementation of the Nov. 11, 2013 Cooperation Framework. Having addressed all the issues raised by the agency on that date and Feb. 9, 2014, Iran has been slow to address two of the five issues raised on May 20 (but has now done so) and has only just begun to discuss two more.
The two issues on which Iran appears most reticent relate to allegations that Iran has engaged in research and experimentation into certain uses of high explosives, and has studied the application of neutrons to compressed materials.
What concerns the IAEA is that this work could have been relevant to a clandestine nuclear weapon research program. (It is not clear whether the agency has evidence that the work is ongoing. The US intelligence community has stated on record that Iran abandoned systematic nuclear weapon research in 2003.)
Worryingly, the agency reports that on Aug. 28 Iran wrote that “most of the issues” that the agency views as outstanding are “mere allegations and do not merit consideration”. This echoes the Iranian position during a long period that preceded the agreement last November, which seemed to herald a more constructive approach.
Neither party is to be envied. The IAEA has said that its concerns are based on more than intelligence material (which, almost by definition, may or may not be worthy of trust), and cannot retreat without losing credibility. Iran has backed itself into a corner by often denying ever having had any interest in developing nuclear weapons, and may well be nervous about the consequences of self-incrimination, not least because US politics make those unpredictable.
It must be recalled, however, that this process is entirely independent of the process launched two weeks later by the JPA. The JPA does not stipulate that resolution of all IAEA issues is an indispensable pre-condition for the conclusion of a comprehensive agreement. The IAEA has made clear that it is working to a much longer time-scale than those trying to negotiate a peaceful outcome to their nuclear dispute within the framework of the JPA.
So Iran has time to reflect on its position. It also has time to consult the US and others about how they would react to any admission of past weapon-related research, and to exchange assurances. That could be one way out of this impasse.
Photo: IAEA Director General Yukiya Amano at a press conference with Dr Ali Akbar Salehi, Vice President and Chairman of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran during his official visit to the Islamic Republic of Iran Aug. 17, 2014. Credit: Conleth Brady/IAEA
]]>by Peter Jenkins
Addressing the Board of Governors of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) on 3 June, the director general devoted more than half of his statement on Iran to a continuing absence of clarity in relation to certain unresolved issues.
He complained that, despite ten rounds of talks since [...]]]>
by Peter Jenkins
Addressing the Board of Governors of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) on 3 June, the director general devoted more than half of his statement on Iran to a continuing absence of clarity in relation to certain unresolved issues.
He complained that, despite ten rounds of talks since January 2012, the IAEA and Iran were still well short of agreement on a document (a so-called “structured approach”) that lists the issues on which the IAEA believes greater clarity is needed. “To be frank, for some time now we have been going round in circles,” said Director General Yukiya Amano.
What he did not say, and what IAEA spokesmen have rarely, if ever, said over the last 18 months is that the “structured approach” document contains a mixture of apples and pears. The document describes issues that fall within the scope of Iran’s Comprehensive Safeguards Agreement (CSA) and issues that are without the scope of that agreement.
The IAEA Safeguards Glossary suggests that the objective of safeguards in states that have entered into CSA’s is two-fold:
- to verify that all nuclear material in a state’s possession is in peaceful use
- and to detect the existence of any undeclared nuclear material or activities
In other words, the focus of IAEA safeguards, when a CSA is in force, is nuclear material and nuclear activities — and not nuclear-related activities or activities that might in theory have implications for the use of nuclear material at some future date.
According to that criterion, the “structured approach” document lists the following pears (issues that are without the scope of Iran’s CSA): detonator development; high explosive initiation; neutron initiation; modelling and calculations; testing/missile integration; arming, fusing and firing; access to Iran’s heavy water production plant; and information about nuclear-related research and development activities not involving nuclear material.
Two points can be made about this confusion of apples and pears.
First, the IAEA derives from the CSA legal authority to inquire into issues that fall within the CSA’s scope. Authority to inquire into issues that are without that scope derives from resolutions passed by the UN Security Council under Chapter VII of the UN Charter.
The CSA is an agreement into which Iran entered freely to give effect to its legal obligations under Article III of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), into which it also entered freely.
The UN resolutions in question are quasi-political instruments that make demands of Iran, that Iran has, for the most part, chosen to ignore. In Iranian eyes these resolutions are flawed by the absence of a prior determination by the Security Council that Iran’s nuclear activities constitute a threat to international peace and security.
The continuing absence of agreement on the “structured approach” document is portrayed in the West as further Iranian non-compliance with its non-proliferation obligations. The inclusion in the “structured approach” document of several “pears” suggests that it would be more accurate to portray Iran’s withholding of agreement as a further instance of Iranian defiance of the wishes of the UN Security Council.
This obfuscation is not accidental. Western governments are using Iran’s alleged non-compliance to create an impression that Iran remains a grave non-proliferation threat, despite US national intelligence estimates that Iran has never engaged in the manufacture of nuclear weapons and has not decided to do so, and also to justify the pressure tactics that have so far signally failed to bring about capitulation to the Western demand that Iran renounce dual-use nuclear fuel cycle technologies.
Second, a more honest, less political approach would entail the IAEA drafting two documents. One document would list issues that the CSA obliges and authorises the IAEA to clarify. The second would detail the issues on which the UN Security Council wishes the IAEA to engage Iran on the Council’s behalf.
This would put Iranian negotiators in an unenviable position. They would be hard pressed to find acceptable reasons to deny agreement to the first document. They might even recognise that it is in Iran’s interest to convince the IAEA that Iran’s nuclear material declarations have been correct and complete. Either way, the chances of progress towards resolving some important outstanding issues would be much improved.
That, though, raises a question: does the IAEA really want to make progress –- or rather will the Western states that call the shots in Vienna allow the IAEA to do anything that might lead, after ten long years, to a final resolution of the IAEA safeguards concerns to which Iran’s safeguards failures prior to 2004 gave rise?
]]>On 20 August Al-Monitor published a perceptive article about the upcoming Iranian three-year presidency of the Non Aligned Movement (NAM). The authors were Abbas Maleki, who was a deputy foreign minister of Iran for many years, and Kaveh Afrasiabi. One of the authors’ points was that any nuclear “missteps” by [...]]]>
On 20 August Al-Monitor published a perceptive article about the upcoming Iranian three-year presidency of the Non Aligned Movement (NAM). The authors were Abbas Maleki, who was a deputy foreign minister of Iran for many years, and Kaveh Afrasiabi. One of the authors’ points was that any nuclear “missteps” by Iran would be seen by many of Iran’s NAM partners as a betrayal of trust. This is a shrewd observation.
I was serving in Vienna in 2003 when Iran’s nuclear safeguards violations over several years were reported to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) board of governors. NAM countries, with few exceptions, were not amused. They felt that Iran had let their side down.
This may surprise Western readers who are used to hearing it implied that the NAM is feckless and irresponsible (because it refuses to toe Washington’s line). But that image of the NAM can be misleading. In my experience, most NAM members take seriously their responsibilities as parties to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and value the moral high ground that compliance with the Treaty’s provisions confers.
Why? Not least because that moral high ground can be used to condemn some of the practices of the three western nuclear weapon states (NWS), which the NAM see as a bad lot: dragging their feet on nuclear disarmament; denying the non-nuclear weapon states the nuclear fuel cycle technology to which the NPT appears to entitle them, provided they place all their nuclear material under safeguards and refrain from acquiring nuclear weapons; and turning a blind eye to the nuclear threat posed by the greatest rogue state (to NAM eyes) in the Middle East: Israel.
So Iran’s three-year leadership of the movement is likely to be two-edged. Should any fresh Iranian non-compliance with its NPT safeguards obligations come to light during this period, the odds are that NAM members will once more put Iran under pressure to correct the failures and come back into compliance with its NPT obligations.
An interesting question is whether NAM members would also be ready, as in 2003, to press Iran to suspend all enrichment and reprocessing-related activities and to re-apply the IAEA’s additional protocol (providing enhanced assurances as to nuclear material remaining in non-weapons use).
On the one hand, NAM members are likely to take a second betrayal of trust by Iran even more badly than the first, given Iran’s representational role as leader of the movement, and given the frequency with which Iran has assured NAM partners that its nuclear activities are blameless and that it is the victim of a vendetta.
On the other hand, the NAM view of the three western NWS is even darker than it was in 2003. NAM members did not appreciate the 2004 Bush administration’s proposal to divide the nuclear world into “haves” and “have nots”, nor a consequent tightening of the guidelines observed by members of the nuclear suppliers group. All but India and its closest friends disliked the same US administration’s decision to make nuclear technology available to one of only three states that have refused to adhere to the NPT: India.
Many NAM members consider the sanctioning of Iran by the UN Security Council, at western NWS instigation, to have been disproportionate to Iran’s pre-2003 safeguards failures, and therefore unjust. They note only modest NWS movement towards nuclear disarmament (though the Obama administration’s record is a big improvement on the back-sliding of the Bush administration). They also deplore continuing Israeli refusal to countenance proposals for a Middle East nuclear weapon-free zone, which would complement such zones covering Latin America, Africa and much of the Asia/Pacific region.
Moreover, the battle between the West’s candidate to succeed Mohamed ElBaradei as director general of the IAEA and the NAM candidate was bitter and divisive, and won by the West’s candidate.
This is a long list. Nonetheless, my hunch is that NAM members would want to give Iran a hard time if credible evidence of current (not pre-dating 2003) non-compliance were to be laid before the IAEA board by a credible IAEA member state (not Israel, the political leadership of which is seen as unscrupulous, and possibly not the US, UK and France, none of whose reputations for integrity have prospered in recent years).
So fate may be handing the West the best opportunity in years to achieve renewed Iranian suspension and reapplication of the additional protocol. There’s a twist, though.
The trigger for NAM pressure on Iran would be credible evidence of a second Iranian betrayal of NAM trust. That same second betrayal of trust would deepen Iran’s confidence deficit with the rest of the world and would increase the number of Westerners – including me, I suspect – who would be convinced that Iran cannot be left in possession of enrichment technology, even with the best guarantees in place against diversion of nuclear material. A long-term settlement based on the NPT, at the end of a suspension during which the IAEA completes its additional protocol investigations, would probably turn out to be as elusive as ever. We still would not be out of the thickets into which the Islamic Republic’s insecurity has driven us.
]]>The article is a look into the possible reasons that Israel has pushed back the nuclear timeline for Iran. I quote Tony Karon at length (which appears at TB) and list my own thoughts (some via Jim):
That notion — [...]]]>
The article is a look into the possible reasons that Israel has pushed back the nuclear timeline for Iran. I quote Tony Karon at length (which appears at TB) and list my own thoughts (some via Jim):
That notion — that you can’t whip up your own population into a fearful frenzy, then not do anything — tracks with comments made in the past by top Israeli officials casting aside the “existential threat” meme. Along with Barak, former Mossad chief Efraim Halevy sounded a confident note in late 2009: “It is not within the power of Iran to destroy the state of Israel — at best it can cause Israel grievous damage. Israel is indestructible.”
But there are other possibilities to consider, most of them speculative. Perhaps Israel was merely gloating about its covert actions against Iran. Many mainstream commentators suggest Israel is behind the Stuxnet computer worm that damaged Iranian centrifuges as well as a campaign of assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists. Maybe, as Jim Lobe suggested to me in a conversation, there was some kind of quid pro quo between the U.S. and Israel over the public extension of Israel’s nuclear clock.
There are certainly many pawns on the board to trade between Israel and the U.S. at the moment: an Israeli settlement freeze (whether including East Jerusalem or not), the fate of imprisoned Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard, a U.S. offer of an Israeli wish list of military hardware (as discussed in earlier failed talks on a freeze), or maybe even some sort of agreement for Israel to drop mounting preconditions for yet another round of direct talks. All are possibilities, though some quite unlikely.
It’s worth noting, that as a source close to high-ranking Israelis put it to LobeLog, Israel has shifted its focus from the threat of Iran to the threat of “delegitimizers.” The latter is an amorphous and misleading catchall phrase that the Israeli right and their Stateside defenders use to indict the motives of anyone who even comes near the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel.
I also add that Paul Pillar, writing on the website of the National Interest, has an interesting post listing some possibilities:
One is that they are more or less straightforward reflections of careful, straightforward analysis by Israeli experts of the actual state of the Iranian program. Not every statement by a public official needs to be a disingenuous manipulation of the facts in pursuit of a policy objective. Sometimes we need to resist the tendency to overanalyze someone else’s motives.
Given Israel’s track record, I’m skeptical of this lack of skepticism. But some of Pillar’s other possibilities track with the ones I enumerated, and all are well worth reading.
Matt Duss at The Wonk Room, meanwhile, picks up on an interesting Der Spiegel interview with new IAEA chief Yukiya Amano. Duss notes that Amano told the German daily, “Despite all unanswered questions, we cannot say that Iran is pursuing a nuclear weapons program.”
You’ll recall, of course, that Amano told U.S. officials that “he was solidly in the U.S. court on every key strategic decision” — including Iran — according to U.S. diplomatic cables. As Duss points out, this aligns perfectly with the view Amano espoused in his Der Spiegel interview — because the “U.S. court” on this particular “key strategic issue” corresponds with a public acknowledgment by the CIA (PDF) that the U.S. does “not know whether Tehran will eventually decide to produce nuclear weapons.”
On the other hand, the Wall Street Journal‘s neoconservative editorial board recently declared (falsely) that Iran had already “announced its intention to build a nuclear bomb.”
As I wrote on Tehran Bureau, none of the recent developments seem to have had much impact on U.S.-based Iran hawks, who are perfectly content to keep beating the war drums. No matter what Iran does or how its nuclear program advances (if at all), the hawks want to attack it. No matter how effective sanctions are, they will never be enough.
]]>Amano acknowledges that many questions remain unanswered by the Iranians about their nuclear program, but emphasizes that it is premature to conclude that Iran is building a nuclear weapon.
SPIEGEL: According to the most recent estimates, Iran is only a year away from building a bomb.
Amano: I’m not so sure about that. Despite all unanswered questions, we cannot say that Iran is pursuing a nuclear weapons program.
Der Spiegel presses Amano on this answer but he holds fast to his position.
SPIEGEL: Because you lack the conclusive evidence, the “smoking gun?”
Amano: That’s not my choice of words. I’m talking about unanswered questions. What purpose do components for a highly explosive ignition system serve? What are neutron triggers needed for? Are there nuclear developments that suggest a military background? Iran must provide clarity on these issues. That’s the point.
The Wonk Room’s Matt Duss points to the parallels between Amano’s language and that of the CIA’s March 2010 report (PDF) on Iran’s nuclear program, which reads:
We continue to assess Iran is keeping open the option to produce nuclear weapons, though we do not know whether Tehran will eventually decide to produce nuclear weapons. Iran continues to develop a range of capabilities that could be applied to producing nuclear weapons, if a decision is made to do so.
Both Amano and the CIA’s language should be looked at closely by Iran hawks as well as those in the media who suggest that Iran’s intent to produce a nuclear weapon is a foregone conclusion. This language does not preclude such a development but, as emphasized by Amano’s list of unanswered questions, it is far too early to draw conclusions about the Iranian nuclear program.
But it doesn’t seem like the Iran hawks think much of the CIA and the IAEA’s cautious analyses.
On Friday, the Council on Foreign Relations’ (CFR) Elliott Abrams called on House Republicans to increase pressure on Iran to stop an Iranian “weapons program.”
They should be asking right now what more the United States and our allies can be doing to stop the Iranian nuclear weapons program, make our sanctions more effective, and support democratic dissidents in Iran.
Mark Dubowitz, the Executive Director of the neoconservative Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), wrote in The Wall Street Journal Asia edition last week:
…[F]urther measures, and time for them to work, will still be needed to convince Iran to abandon its nuclear weapons program.
And the Journal‘s editorial board fired off an op-ed last week with a factually baseless assertion.
Since Iran announced its intention to build a nuclear bomb, it has had a friend in India.
As discussed by Ali, Iran has made no such announcement.
Both Dubowitz and Abrams have access to huge audiences (Abrams’ blog is hosted by the CFR and Dubowitz appears regularly in the Journal’s editorial pages), so it’s worth asking why prestigious institutions and newspapers, such as the Journal and CFR, permit such questionable fact-checking in their blogs and opinion pages.
Perhaps more importantly, why do platforms like CFR and the Journal give an audience to individuals–or, in the case of the Journal, an editorial board–who are blatantly overstating the case against Iran’s nuclear program?
]]>According to two cables released by the British Guardian newspaper (though not yet released by the anti-secrecy Wikileaks organization), Yukiya Amano, who took over as IAEA chief a year ago, said that his role would be less political than his predecessor (Mohamad El Baradai) and that he saw the IAEA primarily as a party to the safeguards agreement with Iran. In other words, he thinks the IAEA role in any P5+1 negotiations ought to be limited.
However, several months later, Amano told a U.S. diplomat that while the full body of the IAEA required him (rightly) to be impartial, “he was solidly in the U.S. court on every key strategic decision.” This includes “the handling of Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons program,” according to the cable’s author.
In the lead-up to this week’s negotiations, Amano called on Iran to be more cooperative with the IAEA and cited “outstanding issues which give rise to concerns about possible military dimensions to its nuclear program,” according to Scott Peterson in the Christian Science Monitor.
Peterson goes on:
But Iran may now see such criticism as part of a broader anti-Iranian slant, given a leaked American diplomatic cable from October 2009 that portrays Amano to be in lockstep with key aspects of US policy.
“It will give the Iranians another lever to apply in pursuance of a weapons-grade program,” says John Large, an independent nuclear expert in London. “For Iran, it really does mean that they don’t have a representative, they clearly don’t have the ear of anyone at the IAEA.”
The Guardian also rounds up and contextualizes related cables, concluding that Amano and the U.S. have a “cozy” relationship.
However, Peterson notes that since the IAEA plays such a technical role, its possible that, should even Iranian allegations of a bias against them be true, there may not be any concrete adverse consequences for Iran:
]]>Despite the Iranian interpretation of an anti-Iran slant from Amano – and stronger IAEA language toward Iran in the past year – any such bias may have a limited impact because of the technical nature of inspections and safeguard compliance.