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Disinformation
flies as US raises Iran bar
By Kaveh L Afrasiabi
20/02/08 "Asia
Times" -- -- - A new report on Iran by the
International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) is about to be
released and US "pre-emptive" diplomacy, aimed at preventing an
IAEA "clean bill of health" that could derail Washington's
effort for a new round of UN sanctions on Iran, is at full
throttle - with the timely help of disinformation.
Setting the bar unusually high, the US envoy at the IAEA,
Gregory Schulte, has warned that unless Iran "confesses" about
its "past work on weapons designs and weaponization and the role
of the Iranian military", international efforts to resolve the
nuclear standoff will be "doomed".
Washington's brand new benchmark comes in the wake of a spate of
US media reports that the US has "shared new
intelligence" with the IAEA that corroborates American
allegations of past Iranian nuclear proliferation activities.
According to the New York Times, the US decided to "turn over
intelligence data" and allow the IAEA privileged access for
"divulging confidential information" by reversing "longstanding
refusal to show the data, citing the need to protect
intelligence sources". [1]
A widely published report by Associated Press cites diplomats as
saying that the material forwarded to the IAEA over the past two
weeks expands on previous information from the Americans. [2]
But, we learn, the new information pertains to data from the
same "stolen laptop" that was the source of the previous
information, which was termed unreliable at the time by, among
others, David Albright, the president of the Institute for
Science and International Security (ISIS) in Washington. (For
more on the laptop story see the author’s
The IAEA and the new world order, Asia Times Online,
February 3, 2006.)
Meanwhile, in response to this author’s request for
clarification regarding this matter, a source close to the IAEA
has called the US media reports "misleading". The source said:
"Without going into the intelligence we may or may not have
received, I can say that in my view, these news reports were
misleading. The [IAEA] report [on Iran] is due to come out
Friday or Monday and then things will become clearer for
everyone."
Standing firm
The IAEA must insulate itself from the disinformation campaign
against Iran that has by all indications gone into a higher gear
as we draw closer to the upcoming meeting of the IAEA’s board of
governors, and it must ignore the intensifying American lobbying
efforts and those of its junior partners such as France (at a
recent meeting of France’s President Nicolas Sarkozy and the
IAEA chief, Mohammad ElBaradei, the IAEA was urged to "stay
firm" on Iran).
More important, the IAEA must stay firm on the rules of game and
consider the fact that any overstepping of its bounds - eg, by
pressuring Iran to suspend its uranium enrichment program in
spite of Iran’s legal rights and its nuclear transparency - will
definitely backfire against the agency and, indeed, the entire
non-proliferation regime.
After all, Iran has the solid backing of a bulk of international
community, namely the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), which covers
some 118 member states. Recently, Iran’s ambassador to the UN,
Mohammad Khazaee, met NAM representatives and urged them to
continue with their crucial support for Iran’s right to nuclear
technology. Ambassador Khazaee has also written a letter to the
UN Secretary General about the recent US National Intelligence
Estimate (NIE) on Iran, reiterating Iran’s peaceful nuclear
intentions and urging the UN not to yield to US pressure that
could harm the UN’s legitimacy.
South Africa, a key NAM member, has already played a pivotal
role in making sure that the UN Security Council does not take
any action against Iran before the new IAEA report on Iran.
From Iran’s vantage point, the resolution of so-called
"outstanding questions" as a result of a "work plan" with the
IAEA, which has full scope to monitor Iran’s nuclear facilities
and which has stressed on numerous occasions the absence of any
evidence of military diversion, means that there is no
justification for any UN sanctions or continued UN Security
Council involvement with Iran’s nuclear dossier.
This week, Gholamreza Aghazadeh, the head of Iran’s nuclear
energy organization, traveled to Vienna to provide further
explanation about Iran’s nuclear activities and to dispel the
new suspicions about past activities raised by the US.
Undoubtedly, Washington's new intransigent strategy has its own
limitations. There is only so much emphasis that can be placed
on alleged past activities, when the real concern is and should
be Iran’s present and future nuclear activities.
By placing the bar artificially high, on the other hand, the US
may spoil the steady progress in Iran-IAEA cooperation and,
indeed, set the process back if the IAEA heeds the present US
pressure tactics and refuses to issue a clean bill of health (or
something approximating it) for Iran.
The existence of merely minor or technical questions cannot
possibly be the basis for declaring Iran in breach of its
Non-Proliferation Treaty obligations, which is what the UN
Security Council has done, going well beyond the IAEA’s own
findings.
What lies ahead then? Iran has categorically stated that it will
reject any UN pressure to stop the enrichment program and given
Iran’s rapid technological progress with its P-1 and P-2
centrifuges, a fait accompli according to the IAEA chief, the
US’s rigid insistence on "zero centrifuges" is unrealistic and
in dire need of a revised, new approach that would conceivably
place the focus on nuclear transparency and the full
implementation of the IAEA safeguard measures. [3]
But with Schulte sending the wrong signal, the Iran nuclear
crisis will likely become more aggravated in the coming months
if (1) the US and its allies succeed in forcing a more
circumspect IAEA report that does injustice to Iran, and (2)
Iran fulfills its threat to scale back its work with the IAEA if
the agency permits the powers that be to manipulate its findings
on Iran. Such a negative leap backward is not in anyone’s
interest.
Notes
[1] David Sanger and Elaine Sciolino,
U.S. to Produce Data on Iran’s Nuclear Program, New York
Times.
[2] George Jahn,
US Intel Links Iran With Nuclear Bomb Bid, Associated Press.
[3] For more on this, see the author’s
Realism, not
idealism: Keeping Iran’s nuclear potential latent, Harvard
International Review
Kaveh L Afrasiabi, PhD, is the author of After
Khomeini: New Directions in Iran's Foreign Policy (Westview
Press) and co-author of "Negotiating Iran's Nuclear Populism",
Brown Journal of World Affairs, Volume XII, Issue 2, Summer
2005, with Mustafa Kibaroglu. He also wrote "Keeping Iran's
nuclear potential latent", Harvard International Review, and is
author of
Iran's Nuclear Program: Debating Facts Versus Fiction.
Copyright 2008 Asia Times Online Ltd
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