@@ Nuclear "barbarianism" multiplying under the skin of "Western civilization" @@

Asia Times
January 28, 2006

Iran's challenge to the UN

Dr. Kaveh L Afrasiabi

The US-Europe express train to the United Nations Security Council against Iran has
been partially derailed on the eve of an emergency meeting of the UN's atomic agency,
the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), by the combined counter-punches of
India and China, not to mention the news of an imminent Iran-Russia deal for fuel
fabrication on Russian soil.

By all indications, the latter news should bring a sigh of relief, albeit temporary,
to the administration of U.S. President George W. Bush, which has overnight
mismanaged its drive to send Iran's nuclear dossier to the UN by (a) coercive linkage
diplomacy toward India, threatening to kill a nuclear deal with New Delhi if it dared
to stray from the United States' script for action at next month's IAEA meeting,
raising serious ire among Indian politicians, and (b) prematurely declaring China to
be on board the U.S. plan, only to be rather rudely repudiated by the Chinese, who
have openly opposed the idea of a UN sanction on Iran, thus showing the falsity of a
U.S. top diplomat's claim that the U.S. and China were in one mind over "core issues"
regarding Iran.

Given the timing of the setback to U.S. diplomacy, with the Palestinian election
results showing an impressive victory by Hamas, the lone superpower must now
contemplate its next move in the light of its inability to cause a change of behavior
on the part of the defiant Iranians.

Another sigh of relief for the U.S., in terms of confrontation being delayed, is the
decision of IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei to postpone his much-anticipated report on
Iran until early March, making it highly unlikely that the IAEA governing board
convening next Thursday in Vienna will dispatch the Iran case to the Security
Council.

Of course, there is still a summit of the foreign ministers of the Security Council
permanent five (Britain, China, France, Russia and the U.S.) plus Germany ahead of
the IAEA meeting to consider, which may turn out little more than a face-saving
maneuver by the U.S. and its key European partners.

Nervously watching all these fast developments are the UN leaders headed by Kofi
Annan, who warned last year of a UN paralysis over the Iran nuclear crisis. This
brings us to the issue of UN sanctions and/or other punitive measures against Iran,
vocally endorsed by a growing number of U.S. lawmakers.

Can the Security Council meet Iran's nuclear challenge? The answer seems a definite
yes if one turns to the congressional hawks or to the small army of experts and
analysts crowding the beltway.

Chief among the latter is Pierre Goldschmidt (http://tinyurl.com/csq3m), the former
deputy director general of the IAEA and now resident scholar at the Carnegie
Endowment for International Peace.

* Pierre Goldschmidt (Belgian) was a member of the Directoire of EURODIF, the large
French uranium enrichment company that has kept billions of Iran's EURODIF
investments for 30 years In 1975, Iran took a very costly 10% financial participation
in EURODIF uranium enrichment plant being built in France. Iran paid $1 billion
towards the purchase of a 10% share of ownership in EURODIF and agreed to buy a quota
from the new plant. But after the Iranian revolution in 1979, neither was Iran given
any enriched uranium nor did it get back its investment from EURODIF. The U.S. was
also paid to deliver new fuel and upgrade its power in accordance with a contract
signed before the revolution. U.S. gave neither the fuel nor the billions of dollars
it had received for it. Germany was paid for in full, billions of dollars for the two
nuclear facilities in Busher, but after three decades, Germany has refused to export
any equipments or refund the money.

Widely quoted by the U.S. media, Pierre Goldschmidt (http://tinyurl.com/bv4b2) draws
attention both because of his expertise and because of his novel proposal for
Security Council action vis-a-vis Iran.

Pierre Goldschmidt's toolkit of alternatives to "sanctions or violent mechanisms"
consists of "three steps".

First, he calls for a "generic" and "binding" resolution that would call on any state
found in non-compliance with the IAEA to grant "immediate and unfettered access at
all times to all places and data and to any person".

Second, Pierre Goldschmidt seeks to prevent the non-compliant state from leaving the
nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) by forcing it to continue to abide with
NPT-type safeguards "for all nuclear facilities".
And third, Pierre Goldschmidt calls on the Security Council to suspend the right of
the NPT violator to undertake the nuclear fuel cycle "for a period of 10 years".

Sensing a unique historical opportunity, Pierre Goldschmidt's contention is that "the
Iran case both necessitates and provides an opportunity to improve the overall
non-proliferation regime".

Bearing in mind the rather dismal failure of the 2005 NPT review conference
(http://www.un.org/events/npt2005) in New York, where the opposing "disarmament"
(Article 6, also known as the13-steps) and "non-proliferation" camps neutralized each
other, Goldschmidt's proposal is, in fact, a rather ambitious one, that is, he hopes
to shortcut a long and arduous process of rewriting the rules and standards of an
international regime, via the Security Council. He optimistically predicts that among
his proposals "none would trigger sanctions or violence".

Of course, Pierre Goldschmidt is not alone and can count on, among other notables,
his colleague at Carnegie, George Perkovich (http://tinyurl.com/brnge), who has
similarly penned in the International Herald Tribune: "There is no way around the
fact that in cases of non-compliance such as Iran the IAEA must be given authority to
conduct wider and deeper inspections. Only the UN Security Council can grant this
authority".

A critique

The Goldschmidt-Perkovich duet may sound music to the bipartisan anti-Iran coalition
in the U.S. Congress, yet is hardly a successful note for the UN "symphony", or
rather cacophony, of voices. The following objections can be raised.

First, historically, as in the case of disarmament, the Security Council is very
hesitant to adopt broad and "generic" resolutions, opting instead for case-specific
actions or guidelines, for the simple reason that the UN Charter stipulates Security
Council measures in response to threats to peace or acts of aggression "without
prejudice to the rights ... of the parties concerned".

Second, the moment the Security Council begins its deliberation on the type of
resolution Goldschmidt and company have put forth, then the usual objections raised
at the divisive NPT conference will manifest themselves, ie, why not a similar
resolution with respect to non-compliance with "Article VI" (disarmament
http://tinyurl.com/ch95w) and or the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT
http://tinyurl.com/7ssj9)?

The permanent five at the Security Council will inevitably feel the flip side of
their initiative, exerted by the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM http://tinyurl.com/cmh8x)
and all non-nuclear states, and would be forced to adjust themselves.

Third, assuming a "virtual" Security Council debate, one wonders how Pierre
Goldschmidt and others would respond to the charge that instead of strengthening the
NPT, their initiative may actually undermine it by augmenting the image of a
feudalistic nuclear hierarchy manipulated by the nuclear haves to the detriment of
nuclear have-nots.

The fourth objection is that this is a recipe for disaster as far as the importance
of the Additional Protocol is concerned, by undermining its hitherto universal
relevance and importance, and which Iran has adopted since December 2003.

After all, ElBaradei, Bush and various European leaders have consistently gone on
record emphasizing the importance of the Additional Protocol, which substantially
expands the IAEA's ability to check for clandestine nuclear facilities.

Nor can we take comfort from Goldschmidt's assurance that a UN adoption of his three
steps would not trigger sanctions or worse, war, given the recent history of the
United States' manipulation of the Security Council over Iraq.

A valuable protocol

Lauded as a key measure of the non-proliferation regime, the Additional Protocol
imposes additional declaration requirements on a party and permits the IAEA expanded
inspection rights, including inspection of undeclared activities.

Among the several categories of locations covered by the Additional Protocol are the
facilities that manufacture components for uranium-enrichment plants or for
plutonium-separation facilities, such as the facilities at Natanz or, before that, at
the Kalaye Electrical Company Workshop, which in February 2003 Iran acknowledged was
being used for the production of centrifuge components.

Both these facilities, as well as several other nuclear-related facilities in Iran,
are under the watchful eyes of the IAEA and its digital, state-of-the-art
surveillance cameras, not to mention the 1400 inspection hours since Iran's voluntary
implementation of the Additional Protocol.

This raises the question of what "corrective steps" will the UN Security Council ask
of Iran when, in fact, most if not all of those steps have already been followed.

The irony is, indeed, that the recent IAEA resolution finding Iran in breach of its
obligations should have been adopted in 2003, since in the intervening time Iran has
managed to satisfy the "outstanding questions" raised by the IAEA. These include the
foreign sources of highly enriched uranium, which turns out to come from equipment
sold by the Pakistani network headed by Abdul Qadeer Khan.

Similarly, the questions regarding a raised site at Lavizan, or suspicious activities
at another base in Parchin, have been largely settled as a result of environmental
sampling and inspection of relevant documents. The bottom line is that despite the
United States' skeptical reaction and insinuation of a covert military program using
the dual-purpose technology, so far no smoking gun has been found.

This, together with Iran's NPT right to the nuclear fuel cycle, poses a serious legal
problem for a Security Council entertaining the kind of proposal suggested by Pierre
Goldschmidt and championed by U.S. policymakers. That is, with the pre-2003 Iranian
non-compliances having been for the most part, if not entirely, rectified since then,
the Security Council cannot anchor its decision on international law to support its
new intrusive guidelines - which surpass the Additional Protocol by in fact
nullifying the significance attached to it so far.

Hence, with so many states yet to sign or legislate the Additional Protocol, the
question bearing heavy on Pierre Goldschmidt and other like-minded experts is to
solve the conundrum of how to advance the non-proliferation cause without introducing
significant new cracks in that regime.

As Florence Nightingale once said, "Whatever else hospitals do they should not spread
disease". And yet Goldschmidt's proposal leads but to a rule nihilism, supplanting
the IAEA with the Security Council, and the NPT standards with exigent ad hoc
standards melting the very core of the NPT.

To elaborate further on a point mentioned above, a Security Council debate on Iran
may yield a positive result in another direction, ie, by generating a new momentum
for a universal declaration against the use of nuclear weapons.

Time to alter nuclear doctrines

Following the footsteps of the U.S. government (http://tinyurl.com/a559e), French
President Jacques Chirac (http://tinyurl.com/avtyk) has unleased a new global debate
on the role of nuclear weapons in the national-security doctrine of nuclear haves.
Chirac's warning of nuclear retaliation against terrorists and their state sponsors
has once again reminded us of the perils of a nuclear "barbarianism" multiplying
under the skin of "Western civilization".

The Russian military provides for the use of nuclear weapons, and China is the sole
exception - it has publicly declared that its nuclear weapons are only for
self-defense against a nuclear attack.

Hence, in the light of the bellicose nuclear postures of France and the U.S., an
equally urgent priority of the Security Council is to put to rest global anxieties,
particularly by the "latent" nuclear powers, both now and in the foreseeable future.
They now feel the pinch of credible nuclear deterrence as long as there is no pledge
of no nuclear use by the nuclear haves.

In other words, as long as nuclear war, above all the use of tactical nuclear weapons
in a conventional theater, has not become unacceptable, the nuclear haves will be
hesitant to disarm, as will at least some of the nuclear have-nots intent on joining
their exclusive club.

In conclusion, the only bright side of last year's NPT review conference was to
highlight the discrepancy of interests and positions between the nuclear elites and
the rest of the world and the dire necessity of closing this gap - by tackling the
issues of disarmament and non-proliferation simultaneously, as envisaged by the UN
secretary general's proposals for comprehensive UN reform.

Yet as last September's General Assembly summit dealt a severe blow to Annan's reform
agenda, completely bypassing the twin nuclear issues, subsequently deemed a
"disgrace" by Annan, the real question is whether the current debate on Iran can
reignite a renewed interest in reversing a historic failure at the NPT conference
last year. The answer, given the plethora of disparate interests playing themselves
out on the UN playing field, is most likely negative.


* Kaveh L. Afrasiabi, holds a Ph.D. in political science from Boston University. He
has completed post-doctoral studies at Harvard University and UC Berkeley, and he has
collaborated with the UN Program on Dialogue Among Civilizations
(http://tinyurl.com/e4q4r). Dr. Afrasiabi is author of several books and numerous
articles, including "After Khomeini: New Directions in Iran's Foreign Policy"
(http://tinyurl.com/dyg67), "Iran's Foreign Policy Since 9/11", Brown's Journal of
World Affairs, co-authored with former deputy foreign minister Abbas Maleki, No 2,
2003 (http://tinyurl.com/74bun [PDF]). Dialogue of Theologies As Dialogue of
Civilizations (Global Scholarly Press, forthcoming), "Communicative theory and
theology", Harvard Theological Review, and many articles in the New York Times,
Telos, Brown's Journal of World Affairs, UN Chronicle (http://tinyurl.com/7faxb),
Middle East Journal, International Herald Tribune, and the San Francisco Chronicle.
He recently co-authored "Negotiating Iran's Nuclear Populism", The Brown Journal of
World Affairs, Volume XII, issue 1, Summer 2005, with [anti-Iran Turkish Prof.
Mustafa Kibaroglu] (http://tinyurl.com/aze2v). Dr. Afrasiabi teaches political
science at Tehran University.
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/HA28Ak01.html

Related:
-----------

JEW Carnegie -- January 18, 2006
Iran: Next Steps for UN Security Council
Pierre Goldschmidt
George Perkovich (Email: gperkovich[AT]ceip.org)
http://www.carnegieendowment.org/events/index.cfm?fa=eventDetail&id=845&&prog=zgp&proj=znpp

Containing Iran: Strengthening the IAEA -- January 2006
Pierre Goldschmidt
http://www.carnegieendowment.org/publications/index.cfm?fa=view&id=17867&prog=zgp&proj=znpp,zusr

IAEA Reports on Iran
http://www.carnegieendowment.org/npp/country/index.cfm?fa=view&id=1000089

National Public Radio (NPR) -- January 16, 2006
JEW ANALYSIS:
Options in dealing with Iran's nuclear ambitions
JEW "Pierre Goldschmidt" LIES
Audio
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5159450
Transcript
http://www.npr.org/programs/totn/transcripts/2006/jan/060116.beeston.html

The Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS), U.S. Strategic Command (STRATCOM)
Doctrine for Joint Nuclear Operations (Joint Pub 3-12), 2005
http://www.nukestrat.com/us/jcs/jp.htm

Why U.S. and France are not referred to UN Security Council for violating NPT and
UNSCR-984?
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.iranian/msg/11123fd0e6ea2e82

Iran has 'inalienable right' to nuclear energy; why hasn't the U.S. fulfilled its NPT
obligations? which NPT obligations is Iran violating? NONE
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.iranian/msg/e1d0c2ffc2437794

Will U.S. honor its NPT commitments?
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.iranian/msg/6ef0373af2f93171


.

Quantcast