Iran roundup

As expected, an IAEA report has declared that Iran is in violation of U.N. resolutions regarding its nuclear program, opening the way for more severe sanctions.

Despite uncertainty over Iran's actual capabilities, the report nonetheless said that Iran has or soon will have 1,000 centrifuges for purifying uranium -- short of the 3,000 it expected to have by now (enough to produce one bomb's worth of uranium a year), but more than most outside observers expected.

Update: Here's the report (pdf).

Most everybody, including U.S. officials, say military action isn't imminent. Israel's being a bit mum, but Tony Blair said yesterday that an attack would be a bad idea, finally saying publicly what British officials had been saying privately for some time.

Then there's this:

Senior British government sources have told The Times that they fear President Bush will seek to “settle the Iranian question through military means” next year, before the end of his second term if he concludes that diplomacy has failed. “He will not want to leave it unresolved for his successor,” said one.

That's speculation, of course. If true, I'm of two minds on it. It's good not to let the diplomatic dance drag on indefinitely without results. But the end of his term is a fairly arbitrary deadline, and military action might simply hand his successor an ongoing crisis instead of an unresolved dispute. If we have to bomb -- and I'm on record supporting such a move if it proves necessary -- it should be because the talks went nowhere, not because Bush is preparing to leave office.

Meanwhile, the Guardian reports that our intelligence stinks...

Most of the tip-offs about supposed secret weapons sites provided by the CIA and other US intelligence agencies have led to dead ends when investigated by IAEA inspectors, according to informed sources in Vienna.

"Most of it has turned out to be incorrect," a diplomat at the IAEA with detailed knowledge of the agency's investigations said.

"They gave us a paper with a list of sites. [The inspectors] did some follow-up, they went to some military sites, but there was no sign of [banned nuclear] activities.

"Now [the inspectors] don't go in blindly. Only if it passes a credibility test."

...but Iran has some questions to answer.

One of the "outstanding issues" listed in yesterday's report involves a 15-page document that appears to have been handed to IAEA inspectors by mistake with a batch of unrelated paperwork in October 2005.

That document roughly describes how to make hemispheres of enriched uranium, for which the only known use is in nuclear warheads. Iran has yet to present a satisfactory explanation of how and why it has the document.

Whatever you think ought to be done about Iran's nuclear program, it seems beyond doubt that they are pursuing weaponry.

nuclear, Iran, politics, midtopia

World roundup

We'll finish off the evening with a quick roundup of notable events.

IRAQ
The British will cut their troop presence in Iraq in half -- events permitting -- by the end of the year. Though apparently Prince Harry will still be going there if the Daily Mirror is to be believed.

GUANTANAMO
A federal appeals court has ruled (in a decision that will be appealed to the Supreme Court) that Gitmo detainees can't challenge their internment in U.S. courts, thanks to the Republican Congress stripping that power from them last year. They can thus be held indefinitely until they are tried before the flawed military commissions that Bush has set up. Congressional Democrats have said they will revisit the commission law to fix the most glaring problems. If they plan to do that, they should get to it; it's an affront to liberty to hold people for years without charge, or try them in a court that doesn't afford them full rights.

IRAN
Iran, in a mirror image of recent U.S. charges, has accused the United States of supplying Sunni militants who last week car-bombed a bus of Iranian Revolutionary Guards. Their claim comes complete with bullet cartridges bearing U.S. markings. Does this prove U.S. involvement? No. But it's interesting to note that the Iranians have roughly as much evidence backing up their claim as we have of Iranian involvement in Iraq. And just as it's very likely Iran is meddling in Iraq, would anyone be surprised to discover that we're supporting anti-Iran militants? That is not a reason to turn a blind eye to Iranian meddling; but it is a reason to look askance at the moral outrage the White House has tried to generate over the issue. Meanwhile, there are no updates on the sniper rifles allegedly supplied by Iran. The smoking gun remains elusive.

Separately, Iran is making noises about stopping its enrichment program -- if Western countries do the same. The non-offer comes a day before the International Atomic Energy Agency is expected to issue a critical report that will trigger even harsher U.N. sanctions against the country. Iran once again demonstrates it is not serious about negotiating, and the IAEA report will show that it has expanded, rather than slowed, its enrichment activities. The question is what sort of measures Russia and China will allow the U.N. to take.

MITT ROMNEY
Mitt Romney is somewhat ironically attacking John McCain for being inconsistent on abortion. For my money, though, the funniest thing is that Mitt's guy in charge of conservative outreach is named Marx.

SOMALIA
Finally, the U.N. approved an 8,000-strong African Union peacekeeping force for Somalia, a measure that allows the AU to deploy troops and relieve the Ethiopians that have been propping up the provisional government there. It remains to be seen if such a force will be enough to stop the spiraling violence in Somalia, but it demonstrates the renewed international attention being paid to that country after years of neglect. Let's hope they pull it off.

Gitmo, Romney, Somalia, Iraq, Iran, politics, midtopia

Thanks for the liberation

You may recall that at the time of our invasion, administration officials estimated that Saddam Hussein had killed 300,000 people during his 24 years in power -- not counting combat-related deaths from the Iran-Iraq war or other military operations.

That works out to about 12,500 a year. Not a bad clip. But since we toppled him, we've demonstrated that he was a rank amateur.

Nearly 35,000 civilians were killed last year in Iraq, the United Nations said Tuesday, a sharp increase from the numbers reported previously by the Iraqi government.

Gianni Magazzeni, the chief of the U.N. Assistance Mission for Iraq, said 34,452 civilians were killed and 36,685 were wounded last year.

The Iraqi government disputes the U.N. figures, claiming the true death toll was 12,357 -- a number that itself is still comfortably close to Saddam's efforts. But there are plenty of reasons to be doubtful of the Iraqi figure, prime among them that the Baghdad morgue alone reported 16,000 unidentified bodies last year, most of which were victims of violence. A Health Ministry official told the Washington Post that the true number of casualties was 23,000. All in all, the U.N. figure seems the most unbiased and reasonable.

We should be careful not to morally equate deliberate executions and massacres under Saddam with the casualties of a multifaceted civil war. And theoretically, the current death rates will hold for only a short period of time, as opposed to ongoing killings under Saddam.

But viewed from the perspective of Iraqis, they have little reason to celebrate our arrival. They're now being killed at two or three times the rate they were before, and the pace has been steadily accelerating, not slowing down.

politics, midtopia

The U.N. complex(ity)

A large segment of the U.S. public likes to bash the United Nations at every turn, accusing it of ineffectiveness (while paradoxically accusing it of taking over the world), corruption and harboring socialist, anti-Western mentalities.

They have a few valid points, mostly on the corruption and bureaucracy front. But the "socialist, antiWestern" charge mostly applies to the all-but-powerless General Assembly, while ignoring the fact that when it comes to actual action the U.N. cannot do anything without the approval of the five permanent members of the Security Council. Further, the bills are largely paid by the West. Those facts, combined with the United State's economic and military clout, means the U.N. serves our purposes far more than it undermines them.

The "ineffectiveness" charge springs from that, mixed in with a misunderstanding of the purpose of the United Nations and an ignoring of the many good works the organization performs.

So it was refreshing to see this balanced look at the U.N. from the Economist magazine.

It paints a picture of the organizational and political weaknesses that hobble the U.N., as well as the things it does well. For instance:

the UN's once shambolic relief operations are now regarded as second to none. Around 30m people in some 50 countries currently depend on its services for survival. In March a new $500m central emergency relief fund was launched to deliver assistance within hours, rather than months, of an emergency. Another $250m fund, administered by the UN's new intergovernmental Peacebuilding Commission, has been set up to help finance reconstruction in countries emerging from conflict.

Peacekeeping, which is not even mentioned in the UN Charter, is another of the organisation's recent success stories. The explosion of civil wars and of ethnic and religious violence at the end of the cold war caught the UN by surprise. It had no standing army, no effective military staff, and very little peacekeeping experience. What troops it managed to muster, mostly from developing countries, were often poorly trained and badly equipped. Peacekeeping mandates from the Security Council tended to be far too restrictive both in scope and numbers. Some terrible mistakes were made: the UN's failure to stop the slaughter in Rwanda and the massacre in Srebrenica continues to haunt it. But over the past five years or so there has been a marked improvement.

A 2005 Rand Corporation study of American and UN peacekeeping operations concluded that the blue-helmet missions were not only cheaper, but had a higher success rate and enjoyed greater international legitimacy. Another Canadian study attributed the dramatic decline in the number of conflicts and battle deaths over the past decade to the “huge increase” in preventive diplomacy and peacekeeping over the same period, “for the most part authorised and mounted by the UN”. Never has the demand for the organisation's peacekeeping services been so great

To add some detail to that last point, consider another Economist article and a U.N. fact sheet. About 80,000 U.N. peacekeepers are now deployed in 18 hot spots around the world -- and by and large they are doing a very good job at halting hostilities and providing stability. And they do it for just $4.75 billion a year -- about what we spend in Iraq in three weeks.

The peacekeepers are mostly from developing countries, and the bills are mostly paid by Western countries. One can read all sorts of political meaning into that, but it comes down to a simple case of economics -- comparative advantage, to be precise. Developing countries are poor and wages are low, so peacekeeping duties can be attractive. Western countries have money but limited political will or patience for peacekeeping, and few Western soldiers want to be deployed to remote areas for extended periods. So the rich pay the poor to do the work.

The U.N. has also produced a slew of multilateral treaties and economic agreements that would have been difficult to arrange -- and enforce -- otherwise.

Does the U.N. deserve criticism? Of course. Does it deserve absolute condemnation, a U.S. pullout and extinction? No. What it does require is an understanding of its powers and limitations, and the patience to deal with what is essentially a messy and imperfect democracy of 192 fractious members. Sometimes it doesn't seem worth it; but I think we would come to find that a world without the U.N. as a safety valve -- no forum for discussion, no diplomatic cover for U.S. actions, no moral legitimacy for pronouncements on human rights, for example, or the rights of nations -- would be a world much less to our liking.

United Nations, politics, midtopia

Bolton steps down

Earlier than expected, maybe, but with his nomination clearly dead in the water, his departure was a foregone conclusion.

In a sort of weird aside, the White House went out of its way to dispute the notion that Bolton "resigned." Technically they're right; he will simply leave when his recess appointment expires. But if the White House thinks that anybody outside of Washington reads much significance into the difference, they're wrong. Bolton has essentially withdrawn his nomination for a permanent spot because it's clear he will not be confirmed. The rest is semantics.

While I won't particularly miss Bolton, I do think he deserved an up-or-down vote. The president ought to be able to nominate anybody he wants for serve-at-the-pleasure-of posts like ambassadorships, and barring gross incompetence his choice ought to be respected. Bolton might have been a bull in a china shop, but he was not incompetent. He also comported himself pretty well during his tenure, not proving to be the disaster critics feared. One could argue that he was simply lying low in order to win permanent confirmation, but that's nothing but speculation.

Speaking of speculation, with Bolton leaving the rumor mill turns toward the question of who will replace him. There's some silly stuff, like suggesting Donald Rumsfeld should get the post (if there's one man more unpopular in Congress than Bolton, it's Rumsfeld). Other names tossed out there include Jim Leach, an outgoing Iowa congressman.

The speed with which Bush moves to nominate a successor will provide some indication of how important he views the post. Considering the myriad international issues facing the administration -- Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, North Korea, Sudan, free trade, global warming -- one hopes he moves quickly to name a replacement, and that the person he names is one likely to win quick confirmation.

Bush, Bolton, politics, midtopia

New concerns about Iran's secret nuclear program

United Nations inspectors are raising fresh concerns about a secret Iranian nuclear program.

Fresh evidence has emerged that Iran is working on a secret military project to develop nuclear weapons that has not been declared to United Nations inspectors responsible for monitoring Iran’s nuclear programme.

Nuclear experts working for the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna are pressing the Iranians to make a full disclosure about a network of research laboratories at a secret military base outside the capital Teheran.

The project is codenamed Zirzamin 27, and its purpose is to enable the Iranians to undertake uranium enrichment to military standard.

The evidence is not conclusive yet. But let's connect some dots.

Suspicions have been growing that Iran has a secret military nuclear research programme since UN inspectors discovered particles of enriched uranium at a research complex at Lavizan, a military base on the outskirts of Teheran, in 2003.

The Iranians agreed to allow IAEA inspectors to visit the Lavizan complex but then razed it to the ground before the inspectors arrived.

Gee, that's not suspicious at all. Next dot:

The Zirzamin 27 operation is thought to be being supervised by Iran’s Revolutionary Guards under the direction of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, the head of Iran’s Modern Defensive Readiness and Technology Centre, a top-secret military research site.

Why is this peaceful program being run by the military in a top-secret facility?

One more dot:

According to reports being studied by IAEA officials, scientists working at Zirzamin are required to wear standard military uniforms when entering and leaving the complex to give the impression they are involved in normal military activity. They are only allowed to change into protective clothing once inside the site.

Special attention has also been given to developing specialised ventilation systems to make sure no incriminating particles of radioactive material are allowed to escape.

A top-secret facility that is going to great lengths to hide what they're doing.

Why would Iran do that if their goal is the legal development of civilian nuclear power?

These allegations are as yet unproven, so don't jump to conclusions just yet. But the weight of evidence is against the Iranians. Their behavior simply doesn't square with their claims of peaceful and legitimate intentions.

Update: On the optimistic side of the ledger, Iran has formally accepted parts of a Western diplomatic offer. It was a very qualified acceptance, but depending on how the details shake out it could be the start of a productive agreement. The big questions will revolve around enrichment programs and fully revealing whatever secret efforts it is pursuing.

nuclear, Iran, politics, midtopia

The UN finds its spine

Well, not the UN just yet, but the International Atomic Energy Agency.

The International Atomic Energy Agency said Friday that Iran had enriched uranium and persists with related activities in its nuclear program in defiance of the U.N. Security Council.... The finding set the stage for a showdown in the U.N. Security Council, which is expected to meet next week and start a process that could result in punitive measures against the Islamic republic.

Good. This means the UN will have to take some sort of action.

Iran's reaction was to continue painting targets on itself.

Just before the report was released, Iran's president said the country "won't give a damn" about any U.N. resolutions concerning its nuclear program.... Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said no Security Council resolution could make Iran give up its nuclear program.

The great thing about Iran is the clarity. Oh, there's the question of whether their intent is for peaceful or military use. But that's not much of a question, since they were caught redhanded with a secret enrichment program and have hardened their nuclear sites against attack. You don't really need to do that if you're just pursuing electricity.

No, with Iran there are none of the uncertainties that surrounded Iraq's WMD program. Iran is pursuing nukes, they admit it, and they're daring the world to do something about it. They didn't even bother responding to the Security Council demands for information, a direct diss of the organization.

If the Security Council is to remain relevant, such defiance cannot be tolerated. The question now comes down to what sort of punishment Russia and China will permit -- and whether that will be enough to dissuade Iran from its pursuit. Because that's the bottom line. Try every diplomatic option first. And I mean every diplomatic option. But the only acceptable outcome is for Iran to abandon its nuclear program. We cannot accept a result short of that and call it victory.

Security Council, nuclear, Iran, politics, midtopia

Cracks in the Iranian facade

Iran's hard-line stance on its nuclear program is producing some domestic dissent.

Some people in powerful positions have begun to insist that the confrontational tactics of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad have been backfiring, making it harder instead of easier for Iran to develop a nuclear program.

This week, the United Nations Security Council is meeting to take up the Iranian nuclear program. That referral and, perhaps more important, Iran's inability so far to win Russia's unequivocal support for its plans have empowered critics of Mr. Ahmadinejad, according to political analysts with close ties to the government.

One senior Iranian official, who asked to remain anonymous because of the delicate nature of the issue, said: "I tell you, if what they were doing was working, we would say, 'Good.' " But, he added: "For 27 years after the revolution, America wanted to get Iran to the Security Council and America failed. In less than six months, Ahmadinejad did that."

It remains to be seen whether the opposition has any actual teeth, especially with Iran's top cleric, Ali Khamenei, supporting the hardline approach.

In the end it may require a very delicate diplomatic approach from us: keeping the pressure ratcheted up sufficiently high that we reward neither delaying tactics nor the hard-line approach, but not so high that we push the reformers into a united front with the hardliners.

With luck we can avoid the need for my earlier suggestion.


diplomacy, nuclear, Iran, politics, midtopia