There’s been a lot of frustration on all sides in negotiations over Iranian uranium enrichment, in part because everyone is suspicious of the motives of their opponents.
U.S. intelligence has determined that Iran does not have a nuclear weapons program, and the Iranian Mullahs have issued repeated assurances that it has no intention to start one, but we are suspicious. Russia and China want to constructively engage the Iranians rather than bully them, but they are also major trading partners with Iran, and so we don’t trust their motives.
We want Iran to come clean on its enrichment program and its nuclear power generation program, but Iran does not trust us. They don’t believe that detailed targeting information from inspections will not be made available to Israel, who will then use that as the basis for military strikes against the Iranian nuclear power facilities.
Awhile back we brokered a deal where Iran would ship its uranium to France to be enriched, but that deal fell through, in part because Iran was suspicious of a country as close to the US as is France. (No, that is not a joke.)
As a result, the US began two different approaches to solving the problem. It gave the go-ahead for Turkey and Brazil to negotiate the same deal with Iran, in the hopes that Iran would be more open on dealing with two countries not in the G8/NATO club. At the same time the US stepped up efforts to get Russia and China to agree to tougher sanctions.
Interestingly enough, both initiatives worked, and at exactly the same time. Last week Iran, Turkey, and Brazil reached an agreement on uranium enrichment where Iran would send half of its low-grade uranium to Turkey, which would in turn send it to France and/or Russia for enrichment to the 19.75 percent grade necessary for Iran’s medical reactor – essentially the same deal the U.S. wanted last October.
But at the same time, negotiations with Russia and China bore fruit, both agreeing to a tougher set of sanctions.
Presented with this embarrassment of riches, we have decided to go with sanctions. After all, why take yes for an answer?
The U.S. argument for why the Turkish-Brazilian deal is no good is that Iran did not promise to stop enriching uranium on its own. Iran counters that the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty allows them to enrich uranium for peaceful use and enrichment to this level is not a violation of any existing treaty – and they are right.
The situation becomes even more bizarre when you consider that no one really has any reasonable expectation that sanctions will make Iran stop its enrichment program. Understanding that may be the beginning of wisdom.
The current round of sanctions is more a product of U.S. internal political forces than a coherent foreign policy initiative. President Obama has decided to cement his alliance with the “moderate hawks” in his own administration – Secretaries Gates and Clinton being the most prominent members of that group – as a hedge against more extreme Congressional war hawks. Gates and Clinton seem motivated less by fear of Iranian nuclear weapons and more by a desire to contain Iran on a regional basis. In that context, sanctions at least become understandable – they are intended to limit Iran’s finances, which make it harder for them to exert influence on their neighbors.
But although it makes sense, it is fundamentally dishonest. It raises the specter of a threat which we know not to be real, in order to justify a policy we know will not achieve the ends we publicly advocate, in order to achieve a secret end to deal with a secret threat. And why are they secret? We can’t get the world to agree to sanction someone just because we don’t like them, so instead we sell the lie.
This is what the British call “too clever by half,” and is exactly the sort of Machiavellian maneuvering which usually blows up in people’s faces. Speaking of which, General David Petraeus has recently authorized U.S. special operations forces to conduct reconnaissance missions in preparation for a U.S. military strike against Iranian nuclear facilities, “in case President Obama orders one.”
Here is a link to an article on the Turkish-Brazilian deal with Iran.
Here is a link to the New York Times article announcing the breakthrough on sanctions.
Here is a link to the SOF news.
Here is a link to a good analysis piece by Juan Cole on the whole developing fiasco.
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Stewart Peterson said:
Just my opinion, but I’d rather have physics on my side than any amount of good will. That would entail ensuring that the Iranians build enough nuclear power plants (specifically, a type called a light-water reactor, essentially a naval submarine engine, which takes enriched uranium and converts it into a mixture of “fission products” or fragments of split atoms, reactively-inert “depleted uranium,” and low-grade plutonium that fizzles out when used in a bomb) to tie down their enrichment plants, and as a bonus, keep those facilities configured for fuel production (which requires the facility to produce a larger volume of lower-grade material, meaning that the linked-together separation centrifuges have to be physically reconnected into more, but shorter, “cascades”).
Better yet, it’s what the Iranians have been saying they want. If they turn this down, there’s no doubt that they’re lying. If they take it, well, there’s nothing they can do to modify the arrangement into a weapons program that won’t be internationally obvious. If they shut down the power plants to reconfigure the enrichment facilities (and due to lack of fuel under those conditions, they would have to), a large part of the Iranian power grid would go down. If they try to build another enrichment plant, the uptick in imports of uranium feedstock and plant components would be equally obvious. Trying to recover the low-grade plutonium from the fuel would take a significant amount of effort (roughly half of the Manhattan Project) and wouldn’t produce a successful bomb unless they were to spend so much time disassembling, refueling, and reassembling their reactors (the plutonium generated inside the fuel rods degrades over time, becoming totally useless during a power reactor’s two-year operating cycle) that, once again, there would simply not be enough electricity.
June 10th, 2010 at 11:10 am
Frank Chadwick said:
Yes. They didn’t turn it down, as it happens. We did, in return for a set of sanctions now widely being compared in their usefulness to “used facial tisues.” This simply makes me more certain that it is not Iran’s nuclear capability we care about at all, but rather their regional fiscal clout. Why else say no to the Turkey?Brazil deal which will reduce the nuclear risk and take fiscal pressure off Iran, and replace it with a sanction program which will do nothing to reduce Iran’s nuclear program but will do a lot to limit their financial muscle? If someone has a better explanation (that doesn’t involve alien mind control or the Illuminati) I’m all ears.
June 10th, 2010 at 11:30 pm
Stewart Peterson said:
Well, I can’t help you with the space aliens, but I’ve never heard of that specific offer being made. The Turkey-Brazil deal was one that would take the enriched uranium out of Iran and use it to manufacture fuel rods elsewhere. My proposal would be to allow (even encourage) the Iranians to manufacture their own fuel from it, in Iran, as long as the final product is loaded into a nuclear power plant. A light water reactor is (a) the most common type of nuclear power reactor in the world, (b) an active impediment to a nuclear weapons program, because it permanently denatures fuel that could otherwise be further enriched to weapons-grade and requires that the facility used to enrich it be used for another purpose, and (c) exactly what the Iranians say they want. Instead of trying to get them to do anything they haven’t already said they want to do, why not ask them to do what they say they want to do? If they want a nuclear power sector, I would say, let them do it. It would divert effort and resources, as well as the dual-use equipment that they already have.
My explanation? Just like in 2002-3, the people who know how the technology works do not have access to the people making the decisions. A nuclear engineer would have said, long ago, “let it go – they can’t do anything with it anyway.” I can only hope that nuclear phobia won’t get us into another war, because apparently, there still isn’t anyone listening at the top.
Then again, I care about resolving the dispute at hand. As you say, some people clearly don’t, and want to use it as an excuse to extract concessions on unrelated points. So goes politics, I suppose.
June 14th, 2010 at 7:03 am