The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) reported last week that Iran possesses detailed drawings showing ways to "cast and machine enriched natural and depleted uranium into hemispherical forms," which is another way of saying the inner core of a nuclear bomb.
So what is the IAEA's Governing Board, including the U.S., doing about it? It has decided not to refer Iran's case to the U.N. Security Council, agreeing instead to allow another round of negotiations, this time with Russia, to run its course. If the mullahs weren't laughing at the IAEA's fecklessness, we'd be tempted to laugh at it ourselves (...).
The latest brainstorm is to see if the mullahs can be persuaded to allow Russia--which currently is building a nuclear plant for oil-rich Iran at the port city of Bushehr--to enrich Iran's uranium at sites in Russia. The idea here is that Russian monitors would ensure that uranium would be enriched only to levels suitable for civilian energy use, and not to highly enriched, bomb-grade levels.
So far, Iran has rejected the idea out of hand, demanding domestic control of all stages of the nuclear fuel cycle. But what if Tehran relents? Europe, the State Department and the rest of the "international community," including most of the media, would surely celebrate a diplomatic triumph, and the sense of urgency that now surrounds Iran's nuclear ambitions would soon dissipate (...).
Nor are we confident that the Iranians might not find ways to corrupt Russian officials responsible for monitoring the enrichment. The relevant template here is the Oil for Food program, through which Saddam Hussein was able to bribe foreign officials who then helped to do his diplomatic and public-relations bidding.
Paul Volcker's inquiry found that Russia was by far the greatest beneficiary of Saddam's largesse, taking in $19.3 billion in Iraqi oil deals and doing $3.8 billion in so-called humanitarian assistance, much of it diverted to military purposes. (By comparison, the French did a mere $4.4 billion in oil deals and $3 billion in humanitarian assistance.)
Mr. Volcker also found that Saddam steered millions of dollars worth of oil allocations to well-connected Russian officials and institutions. Among them were the Russian Communist Party, Vladimir Zhirinovsky's Peace and Unity Party, the deputy prime minister of Russia, the son of Russia's ambassador in Iraq, the president and prime minister of the Russian Republic of Kalmykia, the Russian Political Science Academy and the Russian Ministry of Emergencies.
Also apparently on the take: Russia's presidential office, which was allocated 21,350,000 barrels of oil, according to Iraqi records. In the end, Oil for Food became a bubbling revenue stream the Kremlin steered to its preferred domestic clients while using its veto powers at the U.N. Security Council to advocate on Saddam's behalf. It's possible that more reliable mechanisms could be found to ensure the transparency of a prospective Iranian-Russian arrangement. But the Oil for Food story suggests that Russia isn't the fittest country in the world to monitor and administer Iran's enrichment programs.
Surely no American policy maker wants to allow vital U.S. and international interests to be compromised by the bad faith and avarice of a few foreign governments, in the way they were prior to the Iraq war. It's enough to have one deadly farce at the IAEA without creating a second one in Russia.
So now, a situation is to be created, where, in the end, there won't be any possible pull-out at all. Making this concession to Iran through Russia must really be a big joke. As the WSJ puts it, you'd have to have a big laugh about it, if the mullahs weren't already having it... Supplying Iran with enriched Uranium is obviously the official first step towards an Iranian nuke. And most certainly, it's the next generation of policy makers who will have to deal with it. Looking back, they will see that it is exactly this kind of
pyrrhic "diplomatic triumphs" which allowed an iranian nuclear bomb. This remembers me of what I think about the policy in the beginning of the nineties, when Saddam was allowed to stay in place. By letting a this kind of very unhealthy situation evolve, you make it almost impossible for the next generation to deal with it in an acceptable way. In fact, the only thing you're doing, is to delegate the solution to the next generation - for which it will be much more difficult than for you to handle. That is exactly what happened with Saddam's Iraq in the nineties.
If I was Joschka Fischer (and thank god I'm not), I would say: "I am not convinced!"
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