Brave new world of Iranian nuclear cooperation

[KashifAsrar]

Brave new world of Iranian nuclear cooperation​

By Kaveh L Afrasiabi

Iran's objective of getting its nuclear dossier out of the hands of the United Nations Security Council and back to its "proper forum", the International Atomic Energy Agency, was leapfrogged last week by the IAEA's high-level visit to Iran that culminated in a "serious and substantial" agreement heralding a new level of Iran-IAEA cooperation.

Heinonen, said that Iran agreed on four or five steps. "If the cooperation continues like this, we hope that the problems will be solved, not now but in a reasonable future," Heinonen has been quoted as saying.

If all goes as planned, Iran and the IAEA will draw up a plan of action within the next 60 days to resolve all the "outstanding issues", which include "information relevant to the assembly of centrifuges, the manufacture of centrifuge components ... and research and development of centrifuges or enrichment techniques".

In addition, Iran has agreed to the IAEA's inspection of the heavy-water reactor under construction in Arak, as well as to short-notice inspection of the uranium-enrichment facility in Natanz - "beyond the provisions of its agreement with the IAEA", according to Iran's envoy to the IAEA, Ali Asghar Soltanieh. He was quick to add that IAEA cameras are in place in Natanz, that regular IAEA inspections have been taking place in accordance with Iran's arrangements with the agency, and that Heinonen has stated on record that the IAEA "has no concern about diversion at Natanz".

"According to Article 12 of the IAEA Charter, a country should be reported to the UN Security Council only when the inspectors have confirmed a breach of obligations on the part of that country," Soltanieh insisted in a recent interview with the Iranian Students' News Agency (ISNA). "Yet none of the IAEA reports on Iran make such a claim. All the reports by [IAEA director general Mohamed] ElBaradei mention gaps or shortcomings in Iran's cooperation, but never say that Iran has breached its agreement."

At the same time, Soltanieh and other Iranian officials have insisted that Iran has no intention of complying with the Security Council's demand to suspend its uranium enrichment and reprocessing activities, warning that more UN sanctions would adversely affect Iran's cooperation with the IAEA.

More sanctions or back to the IAEA?
UN Security Council Resolution 1747, adopted in March, calls for "further appropriate measures" should Iran fail to comply "without further delay" with the council's demands, above all to stop the enrichment activities and the construction of the reactor in Arak.

Concerning the latter, Soltanieh in his above-mentioned interview pointed out that radioactive isotopes produced at the Arak facility could serve "200 hospitals" in Iran, and the UN and IAEA have both neglected the "humanitarian" dimension of that project. He has suggested that if the international community is serious about halting the Arak reactor, then they should support the light-water (research) reactor project in Tehran, which requires uranium enriched to 20% U-235.

Soltanieh has a point, particularly since the "5 plus 1" (permanent Security Council members plus Germany) incentive package last year promised to furnish Iran with one or more light-water reactors if Iran shuts down the heavy-water reactor. But is the US really willing to take the risk of furnishing Iran with highly enriched uranium? The answer is that this is highly unlikely, which raises another pertinent question: Hasn't the time come for the US to give up its dream of halting Iran's nuclear-fuel cycle?

According to Dennis Ross, a former US envoy to the Middle East, in a recent interview with Die Welt Online, "Many Europeans are asking the US to set aside its request for the suspension of Iran's uranium enrichment." Clearly, the United States and Europe are beginning to move apart on this matter, raising the prospect that the US will soon be the odd man out.

Not surprisingly, the US has given a lukewarm reaction to the news of Iran-IAEA cooperation, with State Department spokesman Tom Casey maintaining the traditional US skepticism regarding Iran's compliance with its pledges to the IAEA. Yet no matter how the US spins it, the "breakthrough" in the Iran-IAEA talks last week has taken the wind out of the sails of new UN sanctions on Iran for the foreseeable future, barring unforeseen developments.

Another round of nuclear talks between Iran's lead negotiator, Ali Larijani, and the European Union's foreign-policy chief, Javier Solana, will take place shortly, and this may culminate in Iran's re-adoption of the intrusive Additional Protocol. According to Gholamreza Karami, the head of Defense Committee of the Parliament's National Security and Foreign Policy Commission, Iran is open to entertain further cooperation with the IAEA beyond the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

Iran has signed the Additional Protocol but, notwithstanding its unhappiness with the dispatch of its nuclear dossier to the UN, has refused either to legislate it or to re-embrace it after implementing it for nearly two years.

Iran's IAEA-centric approach complements its Europe-friendly energy policy reflected in the memorandum of understanding it has just signed with Turkey, for the transfer of Iranian and Turkmen gas to Europe via Turkey. Once finalized, the Nabucco pipeline will export some 30 billion cubic meters of gas to Europe, which is desperately seeking to reduce its energy dependency on Russia.

Compared with the US, which has no economic ties to Iran, Europe's energy and non-energy trade links with Iran are growing by leaps and bounds, which must introduce new fissures in the anti-Iran trans-Atlantic alliance on the nuclear issue.

United States' options
The US government has no perfect scripts to work with here. Washington has seen its relations with Moscow deteriorate over its planned missile-defense system in Europe, purportedly to shield Europe from Iran's missiles, and Moscow has now delivered on its prior warning by opting to withdraw from a major arms-limitation treaty.

Russian technicians are assisting Iran with the installation of a sophisticated air-defense system to protect its nuclear facilities, which would make any military operation by either the US or Israel against those facilities more difficult, prompting a recent editorial in the Jerusalem Post to claim that the window of opportunity for the military option is closing.

But of course what the Israeli pundits fail to mention is that this window is closing more quickly, politically and diplomatically, because of the new level of Iranian cooperation with the IAEA, the growing wedge between Washington and Moscow, and the EU's clear self-distancing from any non-diplomatic resolution of the Iran nuclear crisis.

"The situation for the US has become a matter of reputation," Soltanieh has stated, and there is a grain of truth about that. That is why Iran has shown sensitivity to ElBaradei's suggestion of direct US-Iran dialogue on the nuclear issue - Iran knows well the disruptive capability of the US, and even Soltanieh has admitted as much by comparing the IAEA battleground to a "mine-infested land".

A mutually satisfactory formula must therefore be found that will not look like a major retreat by the US administration, or by Iran on its nuclear rights.

The IAEA officials have recently reported that Iran has "slowed down" its enrichment activities and have welcomed that as a positive sign. Iran surely recognizes the importance of more such positive signals that would ultimately amount to minimum satisfaction of the UN Security Council demands, ie, by either agreeing to a temporary "time-out" cessation of the nuclear-fuel cycle as proposed by ElBaradei, or adopting the "standby" option whereby there would be no actual enrichment by the spinning centrifuges.

However, it seems unlikely that the US and other members of the "5 plus 1" will bracket their demands together simply because of Iran's increased transparency and other "benchmarks" agreed on between Iran and the IAEA.

Parallel to Iran's verifiably meeting those benchmarks, the Security Council must lower the threshold of its own benchmarks reflected in the two resolutions, 1696 and 1747. Of course, this depends entirely on Washington's willingness to strike a compromise with Iran, which will not be the case so long as the anti-Iran hawks have the ears of US President George W Bush.

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.

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