The futility of inspections
Foreign Policy Passport blog has a quotation from George Perkovich, the nonproliferation expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, in which he says that “ElBaradei and Iran have won this round.”
The conjunction of the director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency with a regime that stands accused of seeking to develop nuclear weapons strikes me as curious, to say the least. Here’s the quotation in full:
ElBaradei and Iran have won this round. In August the IAEA Director General accepted what were essentially Iranian terms for answering the IAEA’s outstanding questions about Iran’s suspicious nuclear activities. This agreement seemed to surrender the IAEA’s rights and responsibilities to conduct follow-up investigations and pursue new leads. The agreement also neglected the U.N. Security Council’s legally binding demands that Iran suspend uranium enrichment and reprocessing activities as long as the IAEA is unable to satisfy itself that Iran’s nuclear activities have been entirely peaceful. Yet Iran and Mr. ElBaradei hailed it as a breakthrough. ElBaradei and others who are convinced the U.S. plans to go to war against Iran felt the agreement would spare the world another catastrophe.
The P5+2 statement reveals that the Iran/IAEA deal effectively neutralized the U.S., French, U.K. effort to tighten sanctions on Iran in response to Iran’s ongoing refusal to accede to U.N. Security Council resolutions. The statement basically says the world should wait and hope that Iran gives the IAEA full answers and that somehow all the outstanding issues are indeed resolved. (If this were so easy, why has Iran waited more than four years to provide such answers and suffered U.N. sanctions for failing to cooperate?) Then, in November the P5+2 will reconvene and, if Iran has not satisfied the IAEA, they will huff and puff some more.
When President Ahmadinejad said last week that the Iran case is closed in the Security Council and the matter is with the IAEA where it belongs, he was absolutely wrong from a legal standpoint. The U.N. Security Council Resolutions remain active and binding. But now some members of the Security Council, following the lead of Director General ElBaradei, are showing that President Ahmadinejad is having his way, at least for now.
This puts me in mind of another article, in which the main exiled Iranian opposition group reports that a new underground facility is being built for enriching weapons-grade uranium:
“Information we have from inside the regime indicates the site is destined for military nuclear activity, mainly for the further enrichment of uranium,” Mehdi Abrichamtchi, of the National Council of Resistance of Iran, said in Paris.
The new site in central Iran consists of a “vast underground area beneath the Karkass mountains linked to the surface by two tunnels and connecting with a third tunnel” to the Natanz nuclear complex 5km away, Mr Abrichamtchi said.
“The site is protected against aerial attack. If Natanz is bombed, it won’t be touched,” he said. “To maintain secrecy, the area has been declared a military zone, and the regime has bought up all the local land.”
All of which raises a serious question. Let’s assume such a facility did exist, and the regime denies it, and its location is secret, and its connection to the main Natanz facility is disguised, and the few Iranians who can confirm its existence or location are under orders, on pain of death, to keep silent. Let’s assume that ElBaradei’s inspectors were permitted unrestricted access to Iran, and they weren’t on side of the Iranian regime. How could they possibly know that it’s there?
