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COMMENTARY
November 20, 2004
Ticking
We will see if the deal between Iran and the "European Three" (Britain France Germany playing at being an alternative superpower) goes into effect on Monday. Under it Revolutionary Iran is supposed to suspend all activities that look suspiciously like making nuclear weapons while it negotiates a comprehensive package of European financial and technical aid. But at the time of writing the deal is coming apart. As I understand the Iranians have already started re-interpreting the provisions tergiversating upon everything to which the Europeans thought they had agreed. This is not a crisis the United States can "bomb its way out of" incidentally. The problem is finally the same as with North Korea: the Americans don't know where all the nuclear facilities are. The Israelis don' t either so far as I can tell. Anyone who has followed the performance of the CIA and related agencies over the last few years will know better than to trust their speculations; though to be fair all the Western intelligence organizations are in the same boat. They have no way to penetrate the inner sanctum of a paranoid totalitarian regime; and never did have one. Democracies usually lose the intelligence battle before any war. And the U.N.'s International Atomic Energy Agency certainly doesn't know. The terms of its monitoring agreement with the Iranians guarantees that it will stay out of the loop. The IAEA has the right only to inspect the civilian facilities to which the Iranian government admits them and test for disparities there. Moreover Mohamed El-Baradei the agency's director has an advanced case of Hans Blix Syndrome. He acts as if undermining U.S. interests is a part of his job. The U.S. administration has no confidence in him -- not even the State Department -- and it was Mr. El-Baradei's agency that returned the compliment by showing around premature and incomplete information about "missing weapons" at Al Qaqaa in Iraq that triggered wild media coverage in the week before President Bush's re-election. Unfortunately Iran's near-agreement with the European Three (or three stooges as one of my informants called them) only buys more time for the ayatollahs while distracting onlookers with false hope. Iran has agreed to stop uranium enrichment but the only place this can be practically checked is at the gas-processing facility at Isfahan where even the Iranians appear to be admitting that the production of uranium hexafluoride has been radically accelerated in anticipation of the Monday deadline. The amount cumulatively produced in that one facility would facilitate the production of at least 200 pounds of weapons-grade uranium or perhaps five crude nuclear warheads -- enough to considerably reduce the population of say Israel. It's worse than that; for by making an agreement in which they acknowledged the legitimacy of Iran's enrichment programme even while demanding its cessation the Europeans have washed the starch out of the "NPT" (Nuclear non-Proliferation Treaty). It was never legitimate despite the ayatollah's claims and in trading away the principle cheaply the Europeans have set back the whole cause of non-proliferation internationally. In return for what? What the Clinton administration demonstrated when it had Jimmy Carter broker a similar ludicrously na?ve deal to buy off North Korea's nuclear programme in 1994 is that arrangements that can't be checked are worthless. (North Korea took the loot and secretly went ahead anyway.) While Iran is slightly less opaque than North Korea thanks entirely to the work of brave Iranian dissidents exporting crucial information to an indifferent world it is also very large. And the same dissidents (the "National Council for Resistance") who blew the whistle on the uranium enrichment programme in the first place two years ago now tell us the ayatollahs have a complete warhead design from the Chinese and have finished adapting missiles to carry them. (To my understanding this is what was behind Colin Powell's alarming statements in the last couple of days.) The hard truth is Western intelligence cannot keep up with dissident revelations and can only confirm them long after any damage has been done. So what can be done to stop Iran from going nuclear in the very near future and in so doing tilting the balance of power across the Middle East in favour of Hezbollah Hamas and Jihad? As far as I can tell nothing. I'm waiting for the Bush administration to surprise me. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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