Time for Reality Check in Iran
LONDON - While US President George Bush has not explicitly excluded a military option to stop Iran’s nuclear program, he and his European allies are currently pursuing economic sanctions to compel Tehran to cease enriching uranium as required by the UN Security Council. However, Iran’s technological advance, the rocketing price of oil and the split among the council’s permanent members may converge to foil the sanctions, inducing the international community to scale down its demand. As International Atomic Energy Agency Chief Mohamed ElBaradei has argued, the goal now must be to prevent Iran from expanding its enrichment program to massive, industrial-level production.
ElBaradei’s comment reported in the New York Times came against the background of hardening Western stance on Iran.
British Prime Minister Gordon Brown warned on November 13 that, if Iran continued to ignore the Security Council demand to suspend uranium enrichment, Britain would call for tougher UN sanctions, including a ban on foreign investments in its oil and gas industry.
The next logical step would be a ban on the purchase of Iran’s oil and gas. But given Iran’s long coastline, its fluvial borders with nine countries, and China and India’s unquenchable thirst for petroleum, it would be impossible to enforce such an embargo.
The November 15 report of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) provided fresh opportunity for the US to reiterate its hard line. Describing Tehran’s cooperation with the IAEA as “selective and incomplete,” the US Mission to the IAEA said, “Iran still refuses to fully disclose the past and present as the IAEA expects, and to suspend fully its proliferation-sensitive activities as the Security Council demands.”
Its statement stemmed from the IAEA conclusion that Iran’s cooperation was “reactive” rather than “pro-active,” and that the IAEA’s grasp of the full scope of the nuclear program was “diminishing” due to Tehran’s suspension of the Additional Protocol that arms IAEA inspectors with extra rights. But Iran had signed up to the Additional Protocol voluntarily and suspended it in retaliation to the IAEA decision to refer its case to the Security Council.
The US Mission seems to have overlooked the IAEA statement: “Iran has provided sufficient access to individuals and has responded in a timely manner to questions.”
On the opposite side, Iran’s nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili, said, “All the claims that Iran’s nuclear activities have a military agenda and are deviant are untrue.” His conclusion rests on the IAEA statement that it had not discovered evidence that Iran was enriching uranium to a level that would produce bomb-grade fuel. Therefore, he argued, the basis for the sanctions “has collapsed.”
Actually, the two sets of Security Council sanctions, centered on boycotting certain Iranian companies and denying travel visas to some Iranian officials, have had a marginal impact on Tehran as it rides a wave of record high oil prices.
If state-owned firms A, B and C are stigmatized, all the Iranian government need do is to set up new companies P, Q and R to conduct the old business under a different guise. With Dubai - a commercial center of laissez-faire capitalism populated by tens of thousands of Iranians - next door, this is a simple exercise.
Ratcheting up UN sanctions to embargo investments in Iran’s hydrocarbons will be a hard sale. Stiff resistance will come from Russia and China.
After much prevarication, Russia’s president Vladimir Putin last week gave a go-ahead to the shipment of nuclear fuel for the power plant that a state-owned Russian company is on the verge of completing near Bushehr in Iran - an unmistakable sign of his divergence from Western policy on Iran.
Moscow is keen to see Iran stay within the IAEA ambit. A Russian official told the Guardian on Friday, “We are most concerned that Iran is cornered and they walk out of the [nuclear] Non-Proliferation Treaty, and break relations with the IAEA.”
China is the world’s second largest oil consumer, with its consumption doubling every five years. It currently imports half of its petroleum needs, a proportion that will rise to 70 percent by 2020. In their desperate search of hydrocarbons, Chinese state-owned oil companies have invested afar as Ecuador. In contrast to Ecuador’s proven oil reserves of 4.7 billion barrels, Iran’s deposits amount to 137.7 billion barrels. Iran also has the second largest gas reserves after Russia.
That makes the prospect of Beijing going along with a ban on investments in Iran’s hydrocarbon industry remote.
Therefore, it comes down to the EU deciding to outlaw such investments. That would create opportunities for Chinese companies.
Consider the case of Germany, which - with $5.6 billion trade with Iran, involving 1,700 companies, in 2006 - is the foremost European trading partner of the Islamic Republic. Bowing to Washington’s pressure, German firms reduced business with Iran by 18 percent in the first half of 2007. China stepped in, with its exports to Iran up 44 percent in the first quarter of this year.
The one Security Council resolution that will critically damage Iran’s economy is a ban on the buying of its hydrocarbons. Once again, China is likely to resist, but it’s possible that Beijing will yield to pressure by Washington and abstain.
Enforcing this resolution would stop supplies from the second largest oil exporter in the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries. With the price of an oil barrel hovering around $95 per barrel, the ensuing upsurge will push the price to record heights.
In any event, such a resolution is almost impossible to implement.
Iran has 900-mile long shoreline, covering the Persian Gulf and extending into the Arabian Sea, not to mention the Caspian. It will be a formidable task to police such a coast. Then there’s Dubai, a smugglers’ paradise. During the 1980s Iran-Iraq War, it served a useful purpose for Tehran to get the civilian and military materials it could not procure directly due to Western sanctions.
Iran has land borders with seven countries. Oil is in such demand that it will be smuggled overland by trucks not only to Turkey and Armenia but also to Pakistan and Afghanistan, which border China.
The Afghan mafia has a well-oiled system of exporting heroin. It won’t take much ingenuity to diversify into importing Iranian oil for re-exporting it to China. The Iranian Revolutionary Guards - charged with safeguarding the country’s borders and already placed on the US list of terrorist organizations - will be glad to oblige.
When the UN banned oil trade with Iraq in the 1990s, the Iranian Guards allowed small seacraft to pick up petroleum from Iraqi ports and sail within the territorial waters of Iran for a fee of $7 a barrel until the craft reached Dubai. The US Navy could do nothing but watch.
Therefore, it again comes down to the EU banning oil purchases from Iran. This embargo will not apply to China and India, free to buy the Iranian crude, particularly if it comes at a discounted price.
The best course for the international community, therefore, is to accept the argument of IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei. Now that the Iranians have mastered enrichment of uranium, he says, we should focus on persuading them to refrain from producing enriched uranium on an industrial scale.
That would mean adopting a Security Council resolution that supersedes the one demanding cessation of uranium enrichment - a measure within the powers of council members. This would keep Iran tied to the Non-Proliferation Treaty and the IAEA and cap its program while preventing a slide to military strikes or ineffective sanctions leading to a split between the Western and non-Western permanent members of the Security Council.
Dilip Hiro is the author of Secrets and Lies: Operation “Iraqi Freedom”, The Iranian Labyrinth, and most recently, Blood of the Earth: The Battle for the World’s Vanishing Oil Resources, both published by Nation Books.
© 2007 Yale Global Online
Good luck. If I were in charge of Iran, I’d immediately offer to observe and follow exactly the same restrictions as those that apply to Israel.
The Three Blind Mice of Europe — Brown, Sarkozy & Merkel — are vying to continue the Poodle’s performance & to follow the US down the road the turning government into a private club to which mere citizens need not apply. Hence the beefy neo-Murrican rhetoric bloodily pouring out their anuses.
I can’t believe that even in country where Cannibas is not outlawed, dependence on petroleum is soaring through the roof like there’s no tomorrow. This planet needs a THOROUGH cleansing !
“Industrial scale” needs to be explained.
Correct me where I’m wrong: Fission bombs can be derived from small scale enrichment; but after Iran generates a mess’a spent fuel from a mess’a reactors…if there are sufficient Plutonium extraction facilities hidden away…then fusion or H-bombs can be derived (granted, with a lot more tech knowledge).
The resolution Hiro says should supercede…it would allow enrichment to current purity (but not extraction of Plutonium via reprocessing)…or it simply would put a limit on the amount of reactor-ready enriched Ur Iran would produce? Sounds iike such a res would be designed to curtail reactor-fuel production beyond what could conceivably be used for power generation, which makes sense. Sounds better than strikes, since as Kucinich brought up…if bunker busters are required the explosions will be huge and the contamination will be great. And after such events (on top of the DU already lying around in nearby in Iraq)…the blowback will be too great.
Has anyone considered that Iran might actually want to develop nuclear power generation for its own sake? If I were sitting on their oil reserves, and they could see a future where oil would be akin to gold, why not save it to sell and generate nuclear power in its place? I am not saying that is their only motive—if I were Iran, looking at what happens to nations in the cross hairs of the biggest nuclear threat on the planet, and its evil twin, I would probably figure I needed some deterance real fast.
That’s not the solution any of us want—we want total disarmament of nuclear death machines, but Iran may be forced to be abit less idealistic about goals and the prospects.
Finally, the whole paradigm of our right to interefere in other sovereign nations business needs to shift. Since when did we accept without any question, such bizzaire characterizations of National policy????
We, the USA, is a huge threat to world peace and stability and most of our citizens remain wilfully ignorant of that reality.
STAR,
It is one of least understood ideas in these troubled times, that the “War on Terrorism”, is in fact, the USA’s terrorist war on almost everyone else on this globe (but you already know that).
Please also visit my comment to you (Creationist Bugaboo Back Again, November 23rd, 2007 1:54 pm), here
Namaste
May I recommend Scott Ritter’s “Target: Iran”? (2006)
He presents well both the history of IAEA dealings with Iran and the opposing perspectives of U.S. vs. Iranian interpretations of the terms of the original NPT and the enhanced Additional Protocol.
Also, Ritter appears occasionally on Democracy Now!’s keynote speaker slot replays of his speech recorded at The Sanctuary for Independent Media in Troy, NY, on April 24, 2007. Democracy Now! aired the speech on 9/19 at 1:00 a.m. (cst) on Dish 9415 FSTV.
nspire—I just went back and finished reading the thread–you offer much to these discussions, We desperately need higher perspectives, and different ones as well. AYMON a case in point.
Ah, yes, our old friend ElBaradei, up to his usual tricks of talking out of both sides of his mouth. Giving the doves some crumbs to feed on, giving the warmongers their casus belli. Just like with Iraq half a decade ago.
STAR,
With so much to say, on so many varying threads, I feel the need for cross-referencing to enable timely contact.
Thank you, Please see my 10:53 comments also
at here,
at here,
at here, and
at here
You’ve become a touchstone for me, as I re-imagine and create a job to sustain my family, after having let my LIGHT out from under the bushel way too often at amongst my recent ex-employer. What they’ve lost has become my gift to CD, until I am better able to plunge into the world once again.
Namaste
STAR,
You’ve become a touchstone for me, as I re-imagine and create a job to sustain my family, after having let my LIGHT out from under the bushel way too often, at and amongst my recent ex-employer. What they’ve lost has become my gift to CD, until I am better able to plunge back into the world once again.
Namaste
Ray Target Iran is an excellent book.
NSPIRE–touch away my dear, for whatever my stone is worth. (smile) Your ex employer’s loss is CD’ers gain, although it really saddens me that speaking TRUTH and shining LIGHT is not universally appreciated. Just shows how much work there is yet to do. We all just do our part and trust in UNIVERSE that will manage to amplify the many and varied “points of LIGHT” as the grid strengthens.
The capitalists’ “geo-strategic interests” have nothing to do with the interests of people. People prefer to moderate their energy consumption and become locally self-sufficient in energy. The only thing that’s stopping the people from achieving this is - no surprise - the capitalists. Suppressing local self-sufficiency is THE PRIMARY MOTIVE behind the capitalist hijack of governments. The proper response is very easy - individuals shift their exchange/association away from the power centers and toward their local economies.
STAR,
Without going into details, let’s just say that my previous life was way out there, almost touching the stars themselves (not at a coffee shop).
Thank you. Perhaps I may leave my email contact information on SIOUXROSE’s site, if she would provide the ethereal linkage, betwixt us? As I hunker again for interesting debates, and sharing a podium with you, in the fight for LIGHT (damn it’s too easy to go for the ‘against darkness’ dis-empowerment thing).
Namaste (with mudra hands clasped in homage, from now on - more powerfully so)
How does the US expect Iran to react to punitive sanctions that purport to aim to change its nuclear policy, when all the signs are that the US always ignores any compliance with any of its demands, and just continues on to war anyway? The rationale for the United States of Israel and its Rapacious allies, is to make unreasonable demands, then use non-compliance as a rationale for making even more unreasonable demands, in order to proceed according to a military timetable to a murderous bombardment. The only possible defence, given the complete lack of reason and empathy in the USI mentality, is a pre-emptive strike on the USI, or massive financial and trading sanctions against the USI. Kill the US dollar. Otherwise, the USI will continue to bully, bluster, and blast its way, country by country, millions of deaths, until the entire middle east is a dead wasteland, in the midst of the remaining warring super states of Russia, China and Europe.
Bushwa Blues-
Power plant reactors use many tons of low-enriched uranium (LEU). Once Iran has used centrifuges to make a reactor’s worth of LEU, they can very quickly run it back through the same centrifuges to make a few bombs’ worth of high-enriched uranium (HEU). They could also reprocess spent power reactor fuel to get plutonium, but it would be crappy plutonium, high in 240 and likely to predetonate. That’s probably why Iran is also building a heavy water moderated natural uranium reactor, suitable for weapons grade plutonium production.
The issue isn’t really fission vs. fusion bombs. The latter are more difficult to make and would benefit from better fissile materials, i.e. higher uranium enrichment and cleaner plutonium, so that the yield of the primary is better controlled (witness North Korea’s embarassingly low test yield). But Iran probably wouldn’t go past trying to make crude fission bombs at first, or maybe ever if their only intent is to create a basic deterrent.
Nuclear talk is a diversion… it’s the oil.
Don’t want oil wars? Don’t burn oil.
http://www.freepublictransit.org
The biggest problem that Iran has from a USA perspective is posture. Presently they do not offer up a position which would allow the USA corporations optimal opportunity to to fuck the whole country.
Sort of like in Canada, except that in Canada we have had a long line of knobgobbling quisling governments stretching back to Lyin’Brian Mulroney who appear to believe that selling out their country as a whore to another is a good thing.
What’s the matter with those Iranians, eh? How come they just won’t knuckle under?
Thanks, dcbeltway.
From Scott Ritter’s “Target: Iran” pages 149-150
“…Iran had been trying to get the United States to engage in direct one-to-one talks since the immediate aftermath of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, even going so far as to propose, via a two-page letter sent through a Swiss intermediary, peace with Israel (indirectly stated in the form of acceptance of the principle of land-for-peace, which builds on a March 2002 declaration in Beirut, supported by such staunch American allies as Egypt and Saudi Arabia, which seeks a comprehensive peace with Israel in return for Israel’s withdrawal to the territory it had controlled before the 1967 war). The Iranians also proposed to cut off funding to Hamas and the PLO, and to seek a halt to terrorist attacks against civilians within the 1967 borders. And, from the nuclear point of view, Iran agreed to abide by the 93+2 formulation of safeguard inspections, which included signing an Additional Protocol. In return, Iran sought an end to all sanctions, and security assurances from the United States, including re-establishment of relations.
The Bush administration never publicly reacted to the Iranian initiative, in large part because its basic policy formulation was one of regime change in Iran, not negotiating the continued existence of that regime….”
star–”I would probably figure I needed some deterance real fast. ”
Absolutely right. i dont blame them for attempting to go nuclear. Its their only way to save themselves against the American juggernaut.
Thanks, Mark A.
Google finds your phrase “heavy water moderated natural uranium reactor” only 4 or 5 times on wide open “net.”
But I’ve found your basic argument again at Wikipedia. What reason could/does Iran give for building this type of reactor, and where does one read about the contention that they are doing so…Ritter’s book?
I thought “Fat Man” was actually used in Japan, but maybe have that wrong. If it was used…I don’t remember at all reading that Pu was essential to any of those bombs.
I see from the site below that “Little Boy” used on Hiroshima was uranium (15 kilotons), and that “Fat Man” used on Nagasaki (21 kilotons) was Plutonium.
http://www.nuclear-history.org/testing.html#beg
So uranium is pretty lethal by itself; not too encouraging when you think of how the economic hitmen have got us such a bad rap the whole world round. But of course already I have come across references from Dean and Chomsky IIRC to statements claiming Al Qaeda has acquired a couple completely assembled nuclear weapons. I believe Dean mentioned the term “suitcase bombs.”