It was a true shock to them when it got turned down by Iran as way off anything acceptable. You should have read the newspapers over in Europe when that happened and you would know what I mean.
You're hysterical Taro. Go stand in front of a mirror and slap yourself hard a few times. Here's an article from one of Europe's papers. There is no surprise expressed. And any fear expressed seems to be over Rumsfeld and not Iran.
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Nuclear Powerplay
By Trevor Royle, Diplomatic Editor
When US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld makes a joke it’s not always easy to know if he expects people to laugh or be scared. The subtext has to be examined as well as the punch line and when the body language is all smiles the warning light should switch to amber: Rumsfeld likes living on the edge.
There was an all-too-familiar moment in Washington last week when he addressed the press on the question of Iran and accused the regime of being “unhelpful” by allowing weapons to be smuggled into Iraq.
The other factor was the country’s recent “defiance” in pushing ahead with the development of its Isfahan nuclear plant, following the decision to break the security seals installed by the International Atomic Energy Agency. Asked if his criticism of the country implied a threat, Rumsfeld retorted: “I don’t imply threats. You know that.”
As it turned out, the crisis failed to materialise when the IAEA passed a resolution calling on Iran to suspend its programme for uranium conversion at Isfahan and call a halt to its work on the enrichment of uranium for its fledgling nuclear power industry.
British and European diplomatic sources described the result as “a strong consensus-based resolution which sent a clear message to Tehran” and which avoided direct con frontation, but their counterparts in Washington are not holding their breath.
The hawks in the Bush administration would have preferred passing the issue to the United Nations Security Council, and imposing sanctions on Iran, as a first step to curbing the newly elected regime of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
What the second step would be is not difficult to imagine. Stung by the failure to contain Saddam Hussein and the intelligence blunders in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the hawks are determined not to allow Ahmadinejad to defy the rest of the world by building up a nuclear arsenal.
According to assessments produced by the National Intelligence Council (NIC), Iran is about 10 years away from constructing nuclear weapons and although President Bush continues to maintain that “all options are on the table”, it is clear that the hawks in the military favour a pre-emptive strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities if diplomacy fails.
As a US diplomatic source put it: “We have the right to be highly sceptical and to act according to our best interests. If Saddam was punished for illegally attempting to build weapons of mass destruction, we can’t sit and play possum while the Iranians do the same.”
,b>Playing possum could also involve the Israelis. There are persistent rumours that Israel could act as a proxy by destroying Iran’s facilities on the pretext that they threaten regional stability and are in breach of IAEA resolutions.
The US has recently supplied the Israeli Defence Force with new bunker-busting bombs, capable of penetrating the stoutest defences and during Ariel Sharon’s most recent visit to Washington, the Israeli prime minister called on the US to take action against Iran’s growing nuclear programme. The Israelis certainly have the experience to carry out such a raid: in 1981, they attacked and destroyed Iraq’s nuclear power station at Osirak, cleverly flying in their strike aircraft under the screen of a civilian airliner.
However, what makes this scenario unlikely is the charge of hypocrisy that would accompany it. Not only would an Israeli attack on an Islamic country cause outrage and further destabilise the relationship between the West and the Muslim world – at a time when it is already dangerously stretched by the terrorist bombing campaign in London, but as Norman Solomon, the controversial author of War Made Easy: How Presidents And Pundits Keep Spinning Us To Death, points out, Israeli complicity in any attack would undermine the US in its attempts to win hearts and minds in the Middle East.
“Unlike Iran’s government, Israel is not even a signatory of the Non- Proliferation Treaty,” he says. “With a nuclear bomb stockpile estimated at more than 200 warheads, Israel is fuelling the nuclear arms race in the Middle East. But from the White House to Capitol Hill to newsrooms across the US, the Israeli nuclear arsenal draws scant mention, let alone criticism.”
That conundrum lies at the heart of the US response to both Iran and North Korea, the other “rogue” country pushing ahead its nuclear programme. Sixty years after the first atomic bombs were exploded over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the US clings to its policy of restricting nuclear weapons to a handful of countries, in accordance with the philosophy laid down by President Dwight D Eisenhower in 1953 who was determined to “solve the fearful atomic dilemma” by ensuring that “the miraculous inventiveness of man shall not be dedicated to his death, but consecrated to his life”.
Doing that has proved harder than Eisenhower might have expected. At present, seven countries are known to possess nuclear weapons under the terms of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, signed in 1968 to regulate the possession of nuclear weapons — the US (5300 warheads), the United Kingdom (185 warheads), France (350 warheads), China (400 warheads), Russia (7200 warheads), Pakistan (48 warheads) and India (60 warheads). A further four countries are thought to be on the cusp of production or already in possession of weapons – Israel, Iran, North Korea and Ukraine – and 20 countries have either stopped development or possess the facilities to develop weapons but for various reasons have not proceeded.
These include Libya, which forswore the production of nuclear weapons last year, and Canada, which has the uranium reserves and capability but has never developed weapons. In 1994, Kazakhstan returned more than 1000 nuclear weapons to Russia after the break-up of the Soviet Union and became a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
For the time being, Iran remains the most significant problem for the US. It has been given until September 3 to comply with the IAEA resolution and it is clear that the Iranian administration has been thrown into confusion by the speed and seriousness of the demands. Ahmadinejad is less than a fortnight into office and his response will influence the direction he wants to take. On the one hand, he is known to be keen to co-operate with the IAEA, but on the other he does not want to be seen to be bowing to external pressure, not least from the US.
Earlier this year, Iran’s ambassador to Britain, Dr Seyed Mohammad Hossein Adeli, produced the reasonable argument that Iran has a right to continue its conversion and enrichment programme, for its nuclear industry, as part of the country’s diversification of its energy needs and that attempts to halt it were not only unfair but ungrounded.
At the same time, however, the US remains suspicious that the same programme will be used to begin the manufacture of nuclear weapons.
The impasse is complicated by the presence of Russia, which regards Iran as an important strategic partner and is keen to provide it with nuclear technology through its Scientific Research and Design Institute of Power Technology.
Moscow’s point of view is quite straightforward: it argues that Iran is a signatory to the Nuclear Non- Proliferation Treaty and that, so far, no convincing evidence has been produced by the IAEA to indicate that Iran has embarked on a programme of nuclear arms production (the IAEA’s director Dr Mohamed ElBaradei has merely said that on that point “the jury is still out”.) As happens so often in diplomacy, though, nothing is done for nothing and as a quid pro quo for supporting Iran’s nuclear ambitions, Russia wants to co-operate with Iran on a number of related energy issues, including the development of oil and gas reserves in the Caspian Basin.
For Ahmadinejad, the Russian connection is both a prop and a problem. It gives him the background strength to defy the IAEA but he also knows that resistance or defiance could encourage the US to pressure the UN to introduce sanctions. Until Iran produces its response at the start of next month, Washington’s policy is to “support the Europeans” – secretary of state Condoleezza Rice is minded to give Ahmadinejad the benefit of the doubt – but that stay of execution cannot last forever. So far, Rice has been able to rein in those hawks who argue that engagement and incentives have not worked and that the time has come for a more robust policy of confrontation and containment. Critics of the European approach of working with Iran to produce a peaceful nuclear programme argue that it has failed to encourage a moderating influence in Tehran, where Ahmadinejad’s administration is considered to be conservative and hardline.
“In return for positive incentives, the Europeans have failed signally to build any constituencies within Iran,” claims the Sunday Herald’s US diplomatic source. “Instead we seem to be legitimatising the regime by giving it credence, propping it up and providing tacit support for other rogue states to follow suit.”
That analysis is also applied to North Korea, which has already announced that it is in possession of nuclear weapons and refuses to be bound by the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Following 13 days of six-nation talks aimed at convincing North Korea to halt its production of nuclear weapons, the discussions went into recess last week and are not due to reopen until August 29. The US envoy, assistant secretary of state Christopher Hill, hoped that the North Koreans would “go back, think long and hard what to do” so that the talks could “bridge the remaining gaps” but he will also be looking to China to exert some influence, even though sources close to Hill acknowledge that Chinese pressure will be “limited”.
Ideally the US would prefer a regional solution to what it sees as a regional problem but that approach is stymied by North Korea’s insistence on one-on-one talks with Washington. Whether it likes it or not, the US has to take the lead role and make sure that its two closest allies in the talks, Japan and South Korea, remain on-side. It also needs to produce a package of financial, economic and political enticements and free itself of the scepticism that North Korea is only capable of acting in bad faith – in 1994 the Agreed Framework allowed the exchange of nuclear technology in return for abandoning the weapons programme: that has obviously been breached.
But as the Arms Control Association insists in a recently published discussion document on North Korea, the US has to build on its experience of 10 years of negotiation and make sure that it takes place at the highest level: “To make progress, President Bush must take the next step: test North Korea directly and conclusively. If a positive result materialises, the President must be willing to invest his personal prestige domestically and abroad to make and sell a deal with the North. If the result is negative, having tried the alternative, punitive options will remain viable, and broader support for confronting North Korea’s continued pursuit of nuclear weapons may materialise.”
As with Iran, the outcome is obvious: if diplomacy and the carrot fail to achieve a result Bush can always resort to punitive options. Rice insists that the use of military force against North Korea is not on the agenda and that the current round of talks has brought more results than the US has achieved in 10 years. But all the while there is growing impatience with both Iran’s and North Korea’s refusal to renounce the technology which creates nuclear weapons. John R Bolton, Bush’s nominee ambassador to the UN, put the hawks’ point of view with typical bluntness: North Korea already has nuclear weapons and “if we permit Iran’s deception to go on much longer, it will be too late, Iran will have nuclear weapons”.
sundayherald.com |
