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Iranian Resolution Begins
// Teheran prepares to break off with the IAEA
Nuclear Crisis
The Board of Governors of the International Atomic Energy passes a strongly-worded resolution on the Iranian nuclear program last Saturday in Vienna. There are a list of demands in the resolution that the board knows will not be acceptable to Iran and Iranian authorities have already said that they have no intentions of heeding them. The resolution is a clear victory for Washington, which has been trying for years to have Teheran condemned by the IAEA. The resolution means the conflict between Iran and the United States is almost certain to be settled by force.
Voting Ties
The countries represented on the IAEA governance board negotiated on the text of the resolution for almost a week. Everyone understood that the text would be harsh. The majority of seats on the board are held by European countries, who had decided to voter in solidarity with Washington and the Eurotroika of Great Britain, Germany and France, which also took a very firm position on Iran. A simply majority was all that was needed to pass the document, but its authors wanted the widest possible support, nor at least for Russia and China not to vote against it.
Negotiations between Russia and the U.S. on the IAEA vote began ten days ago when Russian President Vladimir Putin was visiting there. While in attendance at the UN General Assembly, Putin met with the new President of Iran Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and tried to convince him to back down from his radical position on the matter. The Iranian leader was incompliant and said openly that Iran would make no compromises at all because it considers nuclear deterrence an effective policy. Putin probably didn't like that, since nuclear weapons in Iran are as unacceptable for the Kremlin as for the White House.
Iran was a key topic in Putin's negotiations with U.S. President George W. Bush as well. Bush suggested a deal. The U.S. won't object to Russia's nuclear cooperation with Iran in providing it with fuel and taking the spent fuel back for processing. In return, if Iran continues its nuclear research and renews its uranium enrichment work in spite of the IAEA, Russia and the U.S. would apply joint pressure on Iran by whatever means were most expedient.
Thus the Kremlin faced a dilemma last week. It could support its traditional partner and vote against the resolution in the governance board of the IAEA, or abstain, showing its understanding for the American position. The Russian leadership was divided. Security agencies thought that the benefits of the military and technological cooperation with Iran were more important. But they decided in the Kremlin, considering the leaning of those on the governance board, that a “no” vote by Russia would have no effect other than to spoil relations with the U.S. and other Western countries and harm Russia's image, since it already faces accusations of aiding the Iranian regime.
Russia thus abstained. Twelve other countries did as well, including China. Twenty-two countries supported the resolution, including the U.S., the EU countries, Canada, Japan, Australia, India, Peru, Ecuador and Singapore. The only country to vote against it was Venezuela.
A Reprieve in Sentencing
They expected a lot from the resolution. The U.S. and France-Germany-Britain stated that they would demand that Iran be declared in violation of international agreements and that the case be handed over to the UN Security Council for it to impose sanctions on the country. The main cause of ire in the U.S. and Europe was Iran's recent decision to withdraw from the Paris Agreement, in which Teheran promised to stop all activities connected with the enrichment of uranium. In August of this year, soon after the election of Ahmadinejad as president, Iran announced that it would never refute its legal right to implement a “peaceful atomic program,” and renew uranium enrichment.
The anti-Iranian resolution was softened slightly by the U.S. and Great Britain-France-Germany in order to guarantee its passage, however. It was decided to give Iran one more chance before involving the UN Security Council. There is a list of conditions in the text that Iran must meet in order to avoid a Security Council hearing. The first condition is to cease activities in its uranium enrichment program and stop work on the Isfahan atomic center and the plant to produce heavy water at Arak. The second condition is to allow IAEA inspectors broad access to Iranian atomic objects.
Both demands are notable for being completely unacceptable to Iran. And the authors of the resolution are well aware of that fact. The resolution also envisages a new report to be written by IAEA general director Mohamed ElBaradei on the Iranian nuclear program and its level of cooperation with the world community to be considered at the next IAEA session in November. It is already clear that ElBaradei can have nothing good to say. He will report that Iran is refusing to fulfill the conditions of the resolution and that the IAEA governance board has no choice but to appeal to the UN Security Council. Thus, in reality, the resolution only gives Iran a reprieve until November, and that only if Iran makes no hasty moves. The IAEA could meet before November as well.
Preparations for War
The passage of the IAEA resolution was met with a stormy reaction in Iran. Teheran has been on a path to confrontation with the West for several months already, and officials were not hesitant to make than known yesterday.
“From our point of view, the passage of the resolution is unacceptable and has no legal basis under it,” said official Iranian Foreign Ministry representative Hamid-Reza Asefi. “The official reaction to the passage of the resolution will come from Teheran after the return of the Iranian delegation from Vienna and the necessary consultations are made.” The nature of that reaction is not secret either. Speaker of the Iranian parliament Gholamali Haddad-Adel stated yesterday that the parliament will not ratify the supplemental protocol top the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty that makes provision for access by IAEA inspectors to all nuclear objects. “The country's parliament will never ratify a treaty that goes against the legal rights of the Iranian people,” he said.
Yesterday, 180 members of the Iranian parliament signed an open letter to President Ahmadinejad calling for the immediate restoration of the uranium enrichment program and dissolution of relations with the IAEA. Authorities could react even more harshly. “The government must move against the colonial resolution and declare its withdrawal from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty,” Hossein Shariatmadari, official representative of Iranian spiritual leader Ali Khamenei wrote in a commentary in Kayhan newspaper.
Any extreme reaction from Iran will exacerbate the crisis and help in U.S. obtain a stricter resolution against Iran in the Security Council. If Iran breaks of relations with the IAEA, the U.S. may be pushed toward a forceful resolution of the problem. Saddam Hussein's regime's troubles begin when it expelled international inspectors from the country. Various estimates say that America will be prepared for military action against Iran by mid-2006 or in the second half of that year.
According to information obtained by Kommersant, it is just at this moment that Russia is stepping up its military and technical cooperation with Iran. A source in the leadership of the Russian military industrial complex claims that there are at least two explanations for this move. First, as much weaponry as possible has to be sold to Iran before an international embargo is imposed. Second, security officials think that Iran should be as well armed as possible so that, if war unavoidable, the U.S. will be as deeply mired there as it is already in Iraq. In any case, Russian policy is rife with possibilities for international backlash.
The U.S. is taking little care to hide the fact that it is making military preparations simultaneously with its diplomatic efforts to end the conflict. At the end of last week, the U.S. embassy in Azerbaijan officially confirmed that the U.S. will begin building two radar stations in Azerbaijan, on in Astara, on the Iranian border, and the other on the couth slope of the Great Caucasus Mountains.
Analysts think that Washington intends to concentrate on finding a complete solution to the Iranian problem, which explains its hurry to normalize the situation in North Korea. American authorities want that problem quieted while they work on Iran. The White House has assumed that the Iranians, under the leadership of Ahmadinejad, are counting on obtaining nuclear arms in the shortest possible timeframe and that the problems there must be solved before Iran succeeds in it efforts.
Mikhail Zygar
All the Article in Russian as of Sep. 26, 2005
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