@@ The IAEA and the New World Order @@
Arash
February 3, 2006
The IAEA and the new world order
Dr. Kaveh L Afrasiabi
French philosopher Michel Foucault (http://tinyurl.com/7jvzs) once wrote about the
Iranian revolution of 1979, "It is not a revolution in the literal sense of the term,
which is, people getting on their feet and redirecting themselves. It is the
insurrection of people ... who want to lift the formidable weight we all bear, but
more particularly weigh on them, 'the weight of the entire world order' ".
Michel Foucault's premonitions about the "world-disclosing" impulse of the Iranian
revolution appear to have been verified, at least insofar as Iran's nuclear policy
aimed at challenging the global status quo and, indeed, the entire edifice of Iran's
foreign policy, is concerned.
With the Islamic constitution mandating Iran's solidarity with the liberation
movements and struggles against the world's hegemons, the pitfall of media pundits
who naively suggest that Iran could actually become a participant in a US-designed
regional security apparatus is unmistakable.
On Thursday, as Iran feverishly tried to mobilize the 17 votes in the International
Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) that belong to the Third World countries in the current
roster of the IAEA's governing body, the nuclear lineups increasingly reflect the
larger power struggle on the world scene, between the dominant West, ie, the U.S. and
Europe, versus the developing nations of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM).
This is not an imaginary bifurcation, in light of last year's nuclear
Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) review conference where the NAM countries, including
Iran and Egypt, successfully defeated a one-dimensional US-led campaign to rewrite
the NPT's non-proliferation rules selectively while leaving the relevant articles on
disarmament untouched (http://tinyurl.com/ch95w). The result was a stalemate,
contributing to the conference's overall stalemate.
Iran's outspoken President Mahmud Ahmadinejad has bluntly questioned the post-Cold
War status quo dominated by the U.S. superpower, calling it a "fake superpower" and
urging other NAM countries to support Iran's bid to challenge "global feudalism".
But Iran has managed several self-inflicted wounds during the past few months, as a
result of which its bid against the "unipolar" world order has been overshadowed by
its seemingly ideological zeal against Zionism, even casting a large shadow on Iran's
national interests, according to some of president's home-grown critics.
Not all hope is lost, though, and even in Russia, which has chosen to align itself
with the U.S. in backing moves to send Tehran to the UN, there are powerful voices
echoing Iran's sentiment.
A case in point is former president Boris Yeltsin, who has lashed out at the United
States' "monopolistic policy" using a "big stick" and threatening nations such as
Iran. Without doubt, Yeltsin is not alone and expresses the sentiment of a powerful
section of Russia's political elite.
Hence it remains to be seen how far President Vladimir Putin will go in joining the
White House's bandwagon on the way to the Security Council. Is Putin willing to set
aside all his misgivings about the United States' power projection in Russia's
vicinity and go along with sanctions on Iran, thus potentially denying Russia an
important buffer between itself and the US?
Asked another way, what are the limits, if any, of Russia's current honeymooning with
the U.S. vis-a-vis Iran, given the distinct possibility of a US-planned diplomatic
maneuver simply as a prelude to war against the second element of its perceived "axis
of evil"?
The same questions apply with respect to China, which must now weigh the potential
hazards to its long-term quest for energy security by pursuing a common path with the
U.S. that may, in fact, culminate in severe setbacks to its carefully constructed
energy trade with Iran.
Put simply, both Russia and China have much to lose, and little to gain, by going
along with the United States' script for action against Iran. Even a halfway
accommodation of the U.S. may turn out sufficient in light of the Iraq experience and
how the U.S. obviated its earlier professed need for explicit authorization for war
from the Security Council.
Unfortunately, as Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (http://tinyurl.com/8yphk) wrote in
his Rechtsphilosophie (http://tinyurl.com/dd8bq), knowledge comes too late, and we
are still too close to the events of Iraq's invasion in 2003 to be able to draw the
right historical lessons about the operation of U.S. power and its vast conglomerate
of knowledge-makers in the media, academia and beyond.
Recently, President George W. Bush declared Iran a major threat to global security,
and yet one is reminded of former South African leader Nelson Mandela, who called the
U.S. the gravest threat to world peace.
The European Union, keenly intent on trans-Atlantic patch-ups after feebly standing
up to Washington's warmongering, is now playing a subservient role, without
adequately factoring in the United States' military objectives.
Yet, since world domination hinges on who controls the oil, as admitted by Henry
Kissinger (http://tinyurl.com/5rpgt) in one of his recent, and uncharacteristically
candid, writings, a substantially weakened or US-dependent Iran after the present
crisis simply translates into a more subordinate role for Europe in global affairs,
as it would be much more beholden to U.S. power and geoeconomic control.
Speaking of control, a pertinent question at this point is whether the IAEA is
turning into a puppet of the U.S.
The IAEA's quandary
Given a European resolution calling on the IAEA to refer Iran to the Security Council
for possible sanctions, it merits our attention to examine the latest reports in the
U.S. media about the IAEA's new revelations suggesting an Iranian nuclear-weapons
program.
According to a news article in the New York Times on Wednesday
(http://tinyurl.com/as4zb), the IAEA has "for the first time provided evidence
directly suggesting that at least some of Iran's activities point to a military
project". The timing of this finding couldn't have been more ideal as far as the
anti-Iran forces within the IAEA are concerned. The article goes on to say that the
IAEA, with "partial help" by U.S. intelligence, has uncovered a "secretive Iranian
entity called the "Green Salt Project" which worked on uranium processing, high
explosives and a missile warhead design".
According to the IAEA report, the project "could have a military nuclear dimension
and appears to have administrative interconnections". Furthermore, it cites a 15-page
report given to Iran in the mid-1980s related to "fabrication of nuclear weapon
components". That report has been put under the agency's seal.
What is curious about the newspaper report is that it is deliberately sketchy about
the sources and nature of U.S. intelligence given to the IAEA, confining itself to a
passing statement that it stems from a "laptop seized in Iran"
(http://tinyurl.com/blvnl).
Well, the laptop story again.
Not long ago, it was the subject of a lengthy Sunday New York Times
(http://tinyurl.com/ct2ma) investigative piece written principally by David E. Sanger
(http://tinyurl.com/8elww), who is also named as one of the several authors of
Wednesday's article on the IAEA's discovery of a smoking gun of sorts. In that story,
a perfect fit for a James Bond movie, the laptop is said to have belonged to "someone
in Iran who is now dead and had given it to someone else" who had somehow smuggled it
out of the country.
Several months ago, IAEA officials in Vienna were given a state-of-the-art
presentation by U.S. intelligence officers on the vast information on Iran's nuclear
program contained in the laptop, including the purported design for nuclear warheads.
Not long after, the New York Times website featured a serious rebuttal
(http://tinyurl.com/8u6gb) by the David Albright (http://tinyurl.com/8u8fm),
president of the Institute for Science and International Security or ISIS
(http://tinyurl.com/aq8jk), citing "serious and deep flaws" in the New York Times
piece on the laptop.
According to David Albright, "William J. Broad (http://tinyurl.com/c6phv) and David
E. Sanger repeatedly characterize the contents of computer files as containing
information about a nuclear warhead design when the information actually describes a
reentry vehicle for a missile. This distinction is not minor, and Broad should
understand the difference".
Yet David E. Sanger, a colleague of Judith Miller (http://tinyurl.com/925b6), who
propagated false and misleading information about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction,
failed to open even a small parenthesis in his piece about the healthy skepticism of
David Albright and others about the laptop.
Nor did David E. Sanger or his respected co-authors mention that the four-page IAEA
report, released on Tuesday, gives a rather glowing impression of Iran's cooperation
with the IAEA.
For example, on page 1 we read: "Iran has continued to facilitate access under its
safeguard agreement as requested by the agency, and to act as if the Additional
Protocol is in force, including by providing in a timely manner the requisite
declarations and access to locations". It cites environmental sampling at Parchin and
elsewhere, with the results "still pending".
Interestingly, the report, written by Olli Heinonen (http://tinyurl.com/c3yrs), the
deputy chief of the IAEA who has just returned from Iran, begins by setting the
benchmark that it contains "factual information" only and that it "does not include
any assessments thereof". http://www.iaea.org/NewsCenter/Focus/IaeaIran/index.shtml
Unless we are all assumed non-English-speaking or with English as our second language
at best, this raises serious question about the report's inconclusive assessments of
the Green Salt Project, ie, it "could have a military nuclear dimension", or "it
appears to have administrative interconnections". This is not factual information,
but rather assessments or conclusions arrived at through deductive reasoning.
The trouble with such inferences is that, whether they are legitimate or deliberately
overdrawn, they can be misconstrued, coming as they do at a critical time coinciding
with Bush's State of the Union address (http://tinyurl.com/dj9n7) and the big US-EU
push at the IAEA.
This is because of the murky nature of nearly all dual purpose technology - after
all, the so-called "green salt" is the name for a catalytic ingredient in the
conversion of uranium ore into uranium hexafluoride, which in turn is enriched into
nuclear fuel - or a bomb.
What is called for at this stage is a candid statement by IAEA experts on the
reliability and relevance of the intelligence fed by the U.S., instead of pursuing a
blind-faith approach to such politically motivated information. That means the need
for a second report by IAEA secretary general Mohammad ElBaradei by March 6, the due
date for his report to the IAEA on Iran's dossier. This second report should address
the quality of the extra-IAEA data on which Olli Heinonen has seemingly relied
uncritically.
On Iran's part, on the other hand, the problem, in addition to the need to provide
greater transparency and thus to put to rest the lingering marginal questions about
its program, is one of regaining the sympathy of the world community after making
incendiary anti-Israel statements. Unfortunately, the Iranian problem is more severe
than that and, by all indications, a fresh rethinking of Iran's nuclear moves and
counter-moves is seriously under way in Iran right now.
Iran's nuclear policy revisited
Not everyone is happy with the course of action pursued on the nuclear front since
Mohammad Khatami ended his term as president some five months ago. In fact, visible
signs of a foreign-policy house cleaning can be seen aplenty in Tehran, in the light
of the highly visible trip of Iran's strongman, former president Ayatollah Ali Akbar
Hashemi Rafsanjani, to the holy city of Qom, where he expressed public anxiety about
the state of the republic and admitted that "we ourselves have not been without
influence" in creating the present "crisis".
In fact, Rafsanjani's careful use of the word "crisis" stands in sharp contrast to
the statements of Ahmadinejad, who a few weeks ago denied there was a "crisis" over
the nuclear issue. Yet today not even his most ardent supporters can escape the fact
that a serious international crisis has dawned on Iran and that their prescribed
hardline foreign policy reorientations led by Ahmadinejad have backfired.
Consequently, it is hardly surprising that Ali Larijani, Iran's chief nuclear
negotiator, who criticized the Paris Agreement between Iran and the EU as an unequal
exchange of "lollipops for pearls", is now making a drastic adjustment, if one is to
believe certain newspaper reports in Tehran, and slowly but surely re-adopting the
nuclear positions and postures of his predecessor, Hassan Rowhani, who works closely
with Rafsanjani.
Throughout the eight years of the Khatami era, Iran's nuclear diplomacy was linked
with rapprochement with the West, Europe in particular, reflected in Khatami's warm
welcome in Berlin, Madrid, Paris, Brussels and Rome. As a political observer
accompanying Khatami on his European tours, this author can confirm first-hand the
conscious decision of Khatami and his inner circle to solicit Western respect for
Iran's nuclear rights via their deft diplomacy of dialogue among civilizations, and
East-West detente. The premise was that only by reassuring the outside world of
Iran's benign intentions and constructive role in world affairs could the desired
objective with respect to Iran's "inalienable right" to nuclear technology be
fulfilled.
That prudent wisdom, cast aside by political rhetoric supplanting foreign policy
during the past few months, is now making a comeback, perhaps requiring a reshuffling
of personnel as well as policies. Even the hardline-controlled parliament (majlis) is
beginning to respond, stepping back from the raw politics of one legislation after
another, the net effects of which have been to further alienate Europeans and others.
One legislator has gone on record warning that sanctions have in fact begun in
discrete fashion, manifested in diplomatic isolation, financial squeeze, and other
punitive measures against Iran.
Indeed, the "loss" of European support for Iran has been a heavy blow, given the
initial goal of Tehran to engage in separate nuclear talks with the EU-3 (Germany,
France and Britain), seen as a "counterweight" to the US. Yet that assumption has
proved baseless now, given the EU's solid alliance with the US against the perceived
"nuclear threat" of Iran, cemented by the anti-Israel statements of Ahmadinejad.
Ordinarily, given the EU's position as Iran's No 1 trade partner and its present and
future energy dependency on Iran, one would expect a little more success from Iran's
EU policy. The fact that the exact opposite has now happened alone should send
shivers through Iran's political strategists and decision-makers. How did things get
so bad?
Untimely transition: The brewing nuclear crisis coinciding with Iran's presidential
elections and the rise of a new group in charge of Iran's national security and
nuclear affairs. This ranks high in the list of causes disadvantaging Iran.
Missteps: One of Ahmadinejad's first measures was a wholesale change of personnel in
the Foreign Ministry, including the ambassadors to Paris, Berlin and London, who
happened to be (a) quite competent and well-liked by their host governments, and (b)
were not replaced immediately, thus leaving an important vacuum at a crucial time.
But of course, even without their replacement, those top envoys of Iran would have
had a hard time at damage-control. For example, Ahmadinejad's statement that Israeli
Jews should be relocated to Germany and Austria caused a backlash in both these
countries. This was especially so in Germany, whose new chancellor, Angela Merkel,
had until then refrained from diverging too much from her predecessor, Gerhard
Schroeder, on Iran.
Coming as "manna from heaven" for the anti-Iran lobbyists in Europe, such statements
from Tehran alienated the new German government, which has set aside its previous
moderate stance relative to France and Britain - yet another self-inflicted wound
according to some Tehran editorials.
A big part of the problem with the presidency of Ahmadinejad is that his inner circle
is crowded by people with little or no experience in international affairs, and yet
carrying a heavy load of ideological baggage smacking of revolutionary
"anti-diplomacy". These individuals, who openly bragged to Tehran's media about
Ahmadinejad's "highly successful" trip to New York last September, are now
hard-pressed to show any, absolutely any, diplomatic gain after nearly half a year.
Iran has now lost China and Russia to the U.S., and many NAM countries have serious
misgivings about the direction of Iran's foreign policy under Ahmadinejad, as do the
moderate governments in the Muslim world who are members of the Organization of
Islamic Conferences (OIC).
A growing consensus among Iranian foreign-policy experts both inside and outside Iran
is that there has been avoidable damage to Iran's foreign policy aims and interests,
caused by a lack of experience, dogmatism, overambitiousness, self-fed sloganism and
miscalculation.
A critical anatomy of Iran's diplomatic hiatus must, of course, weed out the
individual causes from structural or institutional ones, the deliberate ones from the
ones imposed from without, ie, Iran's miscalculations about how Russia and China
would react might have been committed by the previous nuclear negotiation team as
well, if they, too, had opted for resuming nuclear research.
But that is a hypothetical question and, in reality, Iran's leaders must now reckon
with the fact that their novel experimentation with a "unified" government devoid of
multi-layered currents representative of the Khatami era has not been particularly
successful. The latter might explain why Rafsanjani's complaint in Qom about the
"attrition of Iran's republicanism" has resonated with leading figures in Iran's
post-revolutionary polity.
After all, this is a country well seasoned in weathering crisis after crisis. It has
survived a quarter century of U.S. sanctions, attempted coups and assassinations of
its leaders (a president, a prime minister and more than 75 legislators), not to
mention the bloody eight-year war with Iraq in the 1980s.
Yet the present nuclear crisis is increasingly perceived as one of the most serious
and life-threatening crises ever faced by the Islamic Republic. To open a caveat
here, this author recalls that this was precisely the adjective used by the former
foreign minister, Kamal Kharrazi, at a private dinner reception at the Foreign
Ministry's think-tank, the Institute for Political and International Studies, in
December 2004.
But to his credit, Kharrazi and his team were able to advance Iran's diplomatic aims
admirably, as seen in Iran's performance at the 2005 NPT review conference
(http://tinyurl.com/azmc9) in New York, where it almost singlehandedly led the NAM
campaign to defeat the US-led attempt to distract from disarmament and to "close the
loopholes of the NPT".
A close scrutiny of speeches delivered by Iran at that conference clearly shows that
Iran behaved on principle as a weighty developing nation enjoying a great deal of
deference by the international community.
But where is that respect and deference now? And what happened to the hard-earned
fruits of Iran's European diplomacy, on which Iran expended so much focus and energy
during the 1990s and the first half of the 2000s? And, more important, why did the
foreign-policy elite of Iran suddenly prove so thin-boned and so incapable of
stepping in for several months to put a stop to the ruinous policies and positions
adopted by amateurs?
Maybe Michel Foucault was right after all, that the essence of the problem with Iran
today is the excess weight of historical responsibility that it has been carrying,
under the increasingly unbearable heat of a Western superpower and its allies.
It is thinking all the time that a prudent exit strategy from the "unipolar" world
order is possible, that in China or Russia or India it can find a coalition of the
willing to challenge Pax Americana. So how rude an awakening it was this week to the
fact that the Cold War's winner is also aware of this historical contingency.
* 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/HB03Ak04.html