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Politics : American Presidential Politics and foreign affairs -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Peter Dierks who wrote (13117)	10/15/2006 1:27:52 AM
From: Peter Dierks	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 71588

A short history of nonproliferation failure. Saturday, October 14, 2006 12:01 a.m. EDT North Korea's apparent test of a nuclear weapon has once more put the international arms control system in the hot seat. This week the U.N. Security Council did muster 13 votes condemning the test, whatever that means, and today it is expected to vote on new nonmilitary sanctions against Pyongyang. This is better than nothing, though how much better depends on the fine print and the political will to enforce it. China and Russia objected at first to the sternest punishment, especially to inspections of North Korean cargo ships and tough financial sanctions. But according to reports yesterday, the U.N. resolution will allow at least some of these searches. The good news here is that at long last the U.N. is attempting to enforce its own nonproliferation regime. Before the multilateralists get too pleased, however, it's worth recalling that it took an actual nuclear blast following a long-range missile test this summer to motivate the Security Council to take even these modest actions. Years of North Korean cheating on its treaty commitments hadn't been enough. We mention this because the cases of North Korea and Iran are revealing the limits of arms control treaties in restraining rogue states bent on gaining nuclear weapons and other WMD. In the wake of Korea's nuclear test, we are hearing renewed calls for "direct" talks between the U.S. and North Korea akin to those that took place in the 1990s. The idea is to get North Korea to sign another agreement promising to give up its nukes. But one reason we're at the current pass is because Kim Jong Il violated the many commitments he made to the Clinton Administration. Even as it allowed inspectors at its Yongban nuclear facility, Pyongyang was pursuing a separate and secret bomb-building effort. When the world objected once that effort was exposed, North Korea responded by shutting off the U.N. cameras at Yongban, expelling the inspectors and withdrawing from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT). Meanwhile, because the 1994 Agreed Framework had allowed North Korea to keep its plutonium under U.N. "safeguards," Pyongyang was then free to make a bomb with that nuclear fuel. Now it apparently has done so, unless this too turns out to be another lie. The case of Iran has followed a similar arc of deception and U.N. failure. Tehran also signed the NPT, only to pursue its own secret bomb-building effort. The U.N. inspectors working inside Iran didn't discover any of this until they were tipped off by an Iranian opposition group that clearly had better intelligence than the U.N. The International Atomic Energy Agency has since produced report after report documenting Iran's violation and deception, and, under the explicit terms of the NPT, Tehran should have been referred immediately to the Security Council. Yet the IAEA declined to do so for years. And only this summer, after Iran repeatedly rejected European entreaties to stop enriching uranium, did the Security Council finally agree to cite Iran for its arms-control violations. That resolution set an August 31 deadline for Iran to stop enriching uranium, promising dire consequences. But Iran keeps enriching, and so far the U.N. keeps begging it to cooperate. If neither Tehran nor Pyongyang takes these U.N. warnings seriously, this is why. The latest U.N. excuse for doing little is fear that Iran will withdraw from the NPT, as North Korea did--and then where would we be?But at least then Iran would have been forced to brand itself an international rogue, instead of using the NPT as a fig leaf to buy more time to fulfill its obvious nuclear ambitions. If arms control won't stop rogue bomb makers, what can? Well, regime change for one. Saddam Hussein is no longer a potential nuclear threat to anyone because he no longer runs Iraq. But short of deposing a regime, the most successful policy has been the Bush Administration's Proliferation Security Initiative. Operated out of the Pentagon on a "coalition of the willing" basis, PSI helped blow the whistle on Libya's clandestine nuclear program, rolled up A.Q. Khan's nuclear black market and has interdicted North Korean weapons shipments. The difference between this and the NPT is that the PSI doesn't give the feckless or evil a veto over what it does. It is a coalition of countries with a shared sense of purpose, and above all the willingness to act. The world will need more such cooperation and creative thinking to contain a proliferation threat that is only going to grow. But the beginning of wisdom is to realize that the threat hasn't ended merely because a rogue regime signs an arms-control treaty. opinionjournal.com

To: Peter Dierks who wrote (13117)	10/26/2006 2:49:49 PM
From: Peter Dierks	Respond to of 71588

Secretary of State ElBaradei The U.N. arms inspector goes soft on Iran, but hard on Congress. Thursday, October 26, 2006 12:01 a.m. EDT Mohamed ElBaradei, the director general of the U.N.'s International Atomic Energy Agency, is supposed to be the Jack Webb of the nuclear nonproliferation scene, a "just the facts" man who reports his findings to his political superiors in the U.N. Security Council. Lately, however, he's been sounding more like the real life Jimmy Carter than the fictional TV detective. "I don't think sanctions work as a penalty," Mr. ElBaradei opined after meeting with Condoleezza Rice on Monday. The director general was talking about North Korea, of whose leaders he took the forgiving view that they are testing nuclear weapons because "they feel isolated, they feel they are not getting the security they need." As for Iran, "the jury is still out on whether they are developing a nuclear weapon." However, he was quite certain that "at the end of the day, we have to bite the bullet and talk to North Korea and Iran." No doubt Condi was grateful for this free public chiding. Leave aside for now the substance of Mr. ElBaradei's policy views; at stake here is the question of whether the IAEA can be trusted to be "continuously objective and impartial," words the director general has used elsewhere to describe his organization. That's also the line he took when he was lobbying in 2005 for an unprecedented third term against the opposition of then Undersecretary of State John Bolton, keeping the job after Ms. Rice and the White House acquiesced while asking Mr. ElBaradei to be tough on Iran. These assurances look disingenuous now that Mr. ElBaradei is offering confident judgments, well above his pay grade, about Kim Jong Il's motives--and cautious ones about Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's. It's even harder to believe given the selective leaks and political hits the IAEA has recently practiced against the Bush Administration and its allies in Congress. Consider a recent imbroglio between Mr. ElBaradei and Pete Hoekstra, Chairman of the House's Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. In the last year, and initially with bipartisan agreement, Mr. Hoekstra's committee has published regular reports on threats to American security, including on al Qaeda, North Korea and Iran. These reports are generally based on reputable open sources and are intended for broad public distribution and debate. They also repeatedly acknowledge that "the United States . . . [lacks] critical information needed for analysts to make some key judgments." In other words, there's not much to get worked up about here. At least not until the IAEA decided to leak to the press an ostensibly private letter to Mr. Hoekstra detailing its objections to a report on Iran, which the agency variously labeled "outrageous," "dishonest," "erroneous" and "misleading." And what was so dreadful about the report, which had bipartisan blessing? Aside from huffing over two committee "errors"--one of them trivial, the other semantic--the IAEA took furious exception over the committee's statement that the IAEA had decided to remove Chris Charlier, its chief weapons' inspector for Iran, after Mr. Charlier said publicly that he thought the Iranians were intent on building a nuclear weapon. The IAEA insists that it was Iran, not the IAEA, that demanded Mr. Charlier's removal, and that Iran is within its legal rights to do so. That's true. But it is also true that Iran has repeatedly--and illegally--denied IAEA inspectors the multiple-entry visas they need to do their job. "Iran has consistently been in non-compliance with its safeguards agreement on this point," a former IAEA official recently told the Platts news agency. "And until now the IAEA has been unwilling to draw international attention to that fact." Our sources tell us that, in addition to Mr. Charlier, Iran denied entry to two other IAEA weapons inspectors in August alone. This is no small thing. Under Mr. ElBaradei's leadership the IAEA has presented itself as the ultimate arbiter on questions of nuclear proliferation, despite its failures to detect Iraq's nuclear-weapons programs in the 1980s and Libya's in the early part of this decade. Yet if the IAEA cannot get its personnel unimpeded into Iran--and especially if Iran can bar the toughest, most skeptical inspectors--the quality of the IAEA's information and the reliability of its judgments are bound to deteriorate. Had Mr. ElBaradei been doing his real job, he might have made a more strenuous effort at pointing out publicly Iran's failures to comply with its obligations, rather than offer grand pronouncements on diplomacy and making partisan intrusions into American politics by critiquing Congressional white papers and Administration policy. As it is, we have Mr. Hoekstra to thank for bringing to light yet another instance of Iran's bad faith, and of the U.N.'s unreliability. opinionjournal.com