Foreign Policy In Focus

Re-posted from LobeLog.

News media reported last week that Iran had flatly refused the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) access to its Parchin military test facility, based on a statement to reporters by IAEA Deputy Director General, Herman Nackaerts, that “We could not get access”.

Now, however, explicit statements on the issue by the Iranian Ambassador to the IAEA and the language of the new IAEA report indicate that Iran did not reject an IAEA visit to the base per se but was only refusing access as long as no agreement had been reached with the IAEA governing the modalities of cooperation.

That new and clarifying information confirms what I reported February 23. Based on the history of Iranian negotiations with the IAEA and its agreement to allow two separate IAEA visits to Parchin in 2005, the Parchin access issue is a bargaining chip that Iran is using to get the IAEA to moderate its demands on Iran in forging an agreement on how to resolve the years-long IAEA investigation into the “Possible Military Dimensions” of the Iranian nuclear program.

In an email to me and in interviews with Russia Today, Reuters, and the Fars News Agency, the Iranian Permanent Representative to the IAEA, Ali Asghar Soltanieh, said Iran told the high-level IAEA mission that it would allow access to Parchin once modalities of Iran-IAEA cooperation had been agreed on. 

“We declared that, upon finalization of the modality, we will give access [to Parchin],” Soltanieh wrote in an email to me.

In the Russia Today interview on February 27, reported by Israel’s Haaretz and The Hindu in India but not by western news media, Soltanieh referred to two IAEA inspection visits to Parchin in January and November 2005 and said Iran needs to have “assurances” that it would not “repeat the same bitter experience, when they just come and ask for the access.” There should be a “modality” and a “frame of reference, of what exactly they are looking for, they have to provide the documents and exactly where they want [to go],” he said.

But Soltanieh also indicated that such an inspection visit is conditional on agreement about the broader framework for cooperation on clearing up suspicions of a past nuclear weapons program. “[I]n principle we have already accepted that when this text is concluded we will take these steps,” Soltanieh said.

The actual text of the IAEA report, dated February 24, provides crucial information about the Iranian position in the talks that is consistent with what Soltanieh is saying.In its account of the first round of talks in late January on what the IAEA is calling a “structured approach to the clarification of all outstanding issues”, the report states: “The Agency requested access to the Parchin site, but Iran did not grant access to the site at that time [emphasis added].” That wording obviously implies that Iran was willing to grant access to Parchin if certain conditions were met.

On the February 20-21 meetings, the agency said that Iran “stated that it was still not able to grant access to that site.” There was likely a more complex negotiating situation behind the lack of agreement on a Parchin visit than had been suggested by Nackaerts and reported in western news media.

But not a single major news media report has reported the significant difference between initial media coverage on the Parchin access issue and the information now available from the initial IAEA report and Soltanieh. None have reported the language of the report indicating that Iran’s refusal to approve a Parchin visit in January was qualified by “at that time”.

Only AFP and Reuters quoted Soltanieh at all. Reuters, which actually interviewed Soltanieh, quoted him saying, “It was assumed that after we agreed on the modality, then access would be given.” But that quote only appears in the very last sentence of the article, several paragraphs after the reiteration of the charge that Iran “refused to grant [the IAEA] access” to Parchin.

The day after that story was published, Reuters ran another story focusing on the IAEA report without referring either to its language on Parchin or to Soltanieh’s clarification.

The Los Angeles Times ignored the new information and simply repeated the charge that Iran “refused to allow IAEA inspectors to visit Parchin military base”. Then it added its own broad interpretation that Iran “has refused to answer key questions about its nuclear development program”. Iran’s repeated assertions that the documents used to pose questions to it are fabricated were thus dismissed as non-qualified answers.

The Parchin access story entered a new phase on February 29 with a Reuters story quoting Deputy Director General Nackaerts in a briefing for diplomats that there “may be some ongoing activities at Parchin which add urgency to why we want to go”. Nackaerts attributed that idea to an unnamed “Member State”, which is apparently suggesting that the site in question is being “cleaned up”.

The identity of that “Member State”, which the IAEA continues to go out of its way to conceal, is important, because if it is Israel, it reflects an obvious interest in convincing the world that Iran is working on nuclear weapons. As former IAEA Director-General Mohamed ElBaradei recounts on p. 291 of his memoirs, “In the late summer of 2009, the Israelis provided the IAEA with documents of their own, purportedly showing that Iran had continued with nuclear weapon studies until at least 2007.”

The news media should be including cautionary language any time information from an unnamed “Member State” is cited as the source for allegations about covert Iranian nuclear weapons work. It could very likely be coming from a State with a political agenda. But the unwritten guidelines for news media coverage of the IAEA and Iran, as we have seen in recent days, are obviously very different.

Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist specializing in U.S. national security policy. The paperback edition of his latest book, Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam, was published in 2006. 

On occasion, US generals get themselves into trouble when they speak publicly about foreign policy. Perhaps the most famous example is the insubordination of General Douglas MacArthur while he was commander of US/UN forces in Korea in 1950-51, which led to his sacking by President Truman. More recently, General Stanley McChrystal was fired from his role as senior US commander in Afghanistan, after an article appeared in Rolling Stone in which McChrystal and his aides made disparaging and ‘sophomoric’ remarks about President Obama and his senior foreign policy advisers.

The latest member of the military’s top brass to find himself in a spot of bother is General Martin Dempsey, the current chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff. Now, there’s no suggestion that Dempsey has been insubordinate. However, he has inadvertently raised the ire of Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich.

The cause of Gingrich’s displeasure was a recent interview given by Dempsey to CNN’s Fareed Zakaria, in which the general stated that ‘we are of the opinion that the Iranian regime is a rational actor’. Gingrich took exception to this comment, declaring in a GOP debate in Arizona on Wednesday that ‘I just cannot imagine why he would have said it’. Gingrich himself described Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as ‘a madman’ and ‘a dictator who said he wants to eliminate Israel from the face of the earth’.

Gingrich went on to imply that he would support a pre-emptive Israeli strike on Iran, and offered the following justification: ‘If you think a madman is about to have nuclear weapons and you think that madman is going to use those nuclear weapons, then you have an absolute moral obligation to defend the lives of your people by eliminating the capacity to get nuclear weapons’.

Gingrich’s statement about the need to face down a ‘madman’ got me thinking about a former Republican president. Richard Nixon is remembered for many reasons: Watergate, Vietnam, the opening to Mao’s China, détente, and using the CIA to overthrow Chile’s elected president, Salvador Allende, among them. I prefer to remember Nixon for something else: it was he who formulated the unforgettable ‘Madman Theory’ of international relations.

As Stanley Karnow relates in his seminal book Vietnam: A History, Nixon’s plan for ending the Vietnam War was to ‘threaten the North Vietnamese with annihilation’. He discoursed upon his strategy to his chief of staff, Bob Haldeman:

I call it the Madman Theory, Bob. I want the North Vietnamese to believe that I’ve reached the point where I might do anything to stop the war. We’ll just let slip to them that, “for God’s sake, you know Nixon is obsessed with Communists. We can’t restrain him when he’s angry – and he has his hand on the nuclear button” – and Ho Chi Minh himself will be in Paris in two days begging for peace.

Of course, things didn’t work out that way. There was no ‘begging for peace’ on the part of North Vietnam, and Nixon didn’t resort to the nuclear option, although the US military did drop a staggering quantity of conventional bombs on Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos while he was president. It’s worth noting as an aside that Nixon also privately contemplated using the US nuclear arsenal if the Soviet Union invaded China, a not unimaginable scenario considering that fighting broke out along their border in 1969.

If we employ Gingrich’s logic, we must conclude that the United States under Nixon, like Ahmadinejad’s Iran, was not a ‘rational actor’ either. As Nixon himself expressed it, his aim was to create the impression that he was a ‘madman’ who ‘might do anything’, up to and including the use of nuclear weapons against North Vietnam. If we take Gingrich’s argument a step further, North Vietnam had the same ‘absolute moral obligation to defend the lives of [its] people’ as present-day Israel, only in their case the nuclear threat was posed by the ‘madman’ Nixon. 

So where does this leave us in our counter-factual thought experiment? According to Gingrich’s logic, North Vietnam would have been justified in attacking the US. Somehow, however, I can’t imagine Gingrich ever expressing that point of view, notwithstanding his professed belief in the need to confront ‘madmen’ like Ahmadinejad.

Curiously enough, Gingrich has expressed admiration for Nixon in the past. Indeed, it has even been suggested that the former speaker has viewed Nixon as ‘a role model’ throughout his political career. We must assume, therefore, that Gingrich is unaware of Nixon’s ‘Madman Theory’. Still, that’s a little hard to believe. Wasn’t Gingrich a professor of history before he turned to politics?      

Michael Walker has a Ph.D. in International Relations from the University of St. Andrews.

For his blog for the Council on Foreign Relations, Micah Zenko decided to … Ask the Experts: What Would Iran Do With a Bomb? The reply of one, Kyle Beardsley of Emory University, provides an instructive answer to the question of whether nuclear weapons would provide Iran with deterrence.

Given that Iran already has a strong deterrent—via its importance to hydrocarbon supplies, robust conventional forces, ability to disrupt fragile situations in Lebanon and Iraq, and Western war weariness—it is doubtful that Iran will notice much immediate advantage from obtaining nuclear weapons.

Still, never let it be said that whatever it is that drives states to nuclear weaponize is a rational process. Meanwhile, Annie Tracy Samuel of the Harvard Kennedy School's Belfer Center writes:

Iran's possession of a nuclear weapon would be a troubling and disturbing development. … However, there is reason to believe that Iran’s theoretical possession of a nuclear weapon would not profoundly alter the essence of its foreign policy [which] both before and after the 1979 revolution, has been largely pragmatic, particularly in action if not always in rhetoric. 

As a disarmament advocate I'm incapable of acceding to the idea of yet another state acquiring/developing nuclear weapons. But, while it may be impossible to prove that nonproliferation is contingent upon us disarming, we have little recourse other than to try.

As we reported recently:

The new budget for fiscal year 2013 (which begins on October 1) just released, reports Chris Schneidmiller for Global Security Newswire, calls for the

Energy Department's semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration to receive $11.5 billion [which is] $372 million less for weapons programs than it had anticipated requesting as of 2011. 

Most encouraging of all:

The administration aims to freeze development of the Chemistry and Metallurgy Research Replacement complex at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, which would conduct work on materials such as plutonium employed in the U.S. nuclear arsenal. … Under the proposal, funding for the Los Alamos site … estimated to cost up to $6 … would be cut by $165 million and building would be pushed back by no less than five years.

But, as always with nuclear weapons, it's not long before the parade is rained on. At the New York Times, David Sanger and Alan Cowell report that druing a visit to Iran by International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors "Tehran not only blocked access to a site" -- Parchin, to which the IAEA has previously been granted access -- "the inspectors believe could have been used for tests on how to produce a nuclear weapon … but it also refused to agree to a process for resolving questions about other 'possible military dimensions' to its nuclear program."

Of course, Iran's apparent obstinacy may not be due to it's hiding nuclear-weapons work, but because it feels singled out for the West for persecution. But perception, as they say, is everything:

Iran's refusal to deal with the inspectors' questions is likely to increase tension, at a moment of heightened sanctions and after the assassination of nuclear scientists in Iran and suspected retaliation against Israeli diplomats.

Also, Iran bridling at the IAEA's probing comes on the heels of Iran halting oil exports to Britain and France. Also reports Bloomberg, "Iranian state-run Press TV said yesterday 3,000 'new- generation' Iranian-made centrifuges were installed at its main uranium enrichment site at Natanz." Though State Department Spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said that -- Bloomberg again -- "the announcement was 'hyped' for a domestic audience."

But, in addition, as Sanger and Cowell write, Iran also

… struck an increasingly bellicose tone on Tuesday, with an Iranian official warning that the country would take pre-emptive action against perceived foes if it felt its national interests were threatened.

Iran aside, the Dec. 29 fire on Russian nuclear sub Yekaterinburg, undergoing maintenance at the time, might have been more serious than previously thought. Gleb Bryanski of Reuters reports: 

At the time, the Russian Defense Ministry claimed the strategic missile submarine had been unarmed as is required for upkeep activities and that there was no danger of radiation exposure to the public.

But Russian Deputy Prime Minster Dmitry Rogozin

… noted that Soviet rules from 1986 do not mandate the unloading of weapons from submarines for small maintenance projects.

Worst-case scenario:

The prominent news magazine Vlast earlier this month reported that the blaze could have triggered … explosions in the submarine's two atomic reactors and possible detonations of 16 nuclear-armed missiles.

A telling clue that nuclear weapons might have been aboard:

The submarine traveled to the Russian navy's arms depot directly after the fire, which would not be normal for an unarmed vessel that had just been through a fire, according to the magazine.

Important as preventing nuclear proliferation is, it must always be preceded in importance by nuclear risk. Which means it's at least as incumbent on states with nuclear-weapon programs to wind theirs down as it is to keep other states from proliferating.

Excerpted from Other Words.

Greed for oil
Will make us fight;
Iran has got
Endless barrels in sight.

It seems increasingly likely that the United States will attack Iran. The pretext will be that country's alleged nuclear threat to Western civilization.

Doesn't that sound familiar? We followed the same script in Iraq a decade ago. Of course it's a lie this time, just as before. But once the war starts, the policy will just be about supporting our troops.

The Iraq misadventure, it turns out, was enormously successful. No, not for the hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops and families whose lives have been lost or ruined, nor for the hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis, nor for the millions of Iraqis who have been displaced or impoverished.

No, the glorious success in Iraq is the return of Western oil companies to that country. Saddam Hussein had chased them out, but now they're back. Although Iraq has yet to open all its fields for development, BP, Shell, and ExxonMobil have all landed big deals that could prove more lucrative in the future.

Surprise, surprise, this routine also seems to be the template proposed for Iran, with additional wrinkles earned in Libya.

To start, Washington will bomb their suspected nuclear sites. Iran will take umbrage and fight back. Then, the Pentagon will bomb every military and economic target in the country, except the oil wells.

To William Collins's column in its entirety, visit OtherWords.