Reprinted from NewsMax.com
ElBaradei: Give Iran 'One Last Chance' Before Sanctions
Tuesday, Nov. 15,
2005
VIENNA, Austria -- International Atomic Energy Agency Director
General Mohammad ElBaradei is pressing members of the agency's board
of governors to give Iran "one last chance" before sending Iran's
case to the United Nations Security Council for possible sanctions,
IAEA officials and European diplomats told Newsmax in Vienna.
The decision to refer Iran to the UN Security Council could come on
Thanksgiving Day, when the IAEA Board of Governors has its next
scheduled meeting to discuss "new information" discovered by
inspectors in Iran, the officials said.
Read
the full story of Iran’s twenty-year record of cheat and
retreat in Countdown to Crisis: the Coming Nuclear Showdown
with Iran. Available from http://www.kentimmerman.com
ElBaradei discussed a potential "face-saving" deal European
negotiators could offer Tehran during meetings with U.S. Secretary of
State Condoleeza Rice in Washington on Tuesday, U.S. and IAEA
officials said.
"Our message to Iran is that they have an opportunity to influence
the timing and nature of the report to the UN Security Council," a
State Department official said.
Portions of the offer, which the Europeans have not embraced, were
leaked to the New York Times, which reported on Thursday that Iran
would be allowed to continue to produce uranium hexafluoride gas
(UF6), the feedstock used for uranium enrichment, as long as it
exported the product to Russia where it would be enriched to produce
reactor-grade fuel.
But a European official directly involved in the negotiations with
Tehran denied that the Russia proposal was even on the table, and
said the New York Times report was false.
"There is no offer," he told Newsmax in Vienna today. "Why should we
make an offer? The Iranians must come to us" since they were the ones
who had reneged on their promises to suspend all enrichment-related
activities.
Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice also denied the New York Times
report. "There is no U.S.-European proposal for the Iranians. I want
to say that categorically," she said on Thursday.
An IAEA official present at the Washington, DC meetings where the
idea was discussed found other inaccuracies in the New York Times
account. "The idea is to allow Iran to make uranium tetrachloride
(UF4) - not UF6 - and to keep it under strict IAEA monitoring," the
official said. "A moratorium or a total ban on all fuel cycle
activities is a non-starter, because of [Iranian] national
pride."
The U.S. continues to push for a "renewed suspension" of all nuclear
fuel processing and enrichment in Iran, a State Department official
said. "This is the bar that has been set by the IAEA, and these are
our instructions: Iran must renew suspension, renew cooperation with
the IAEA, and resume negotiations with the EU3."
The IAEA believes Iran could agree to limit work at Isfahan to UF4
because trial production runs of UF6, which is made from UF4, have
been "crap," a senior IAEA official said. "The quality is just no
good. This will allow Iran to save face."
The European official, who had just emerged from a meeting in Vienna
of the political directors of the three European Union countries
(France, Germany and the UK), insisted that ElBaradei had not
presented the U.S. offer as a done deal or even as an informal
proposal. "Lots of ideas are being discussed," he said.
He called it "something someone wants to float. A trial balloon."
European and U.S. officials insisted that it was not up to ElBaradei
to lobby the board or to float proposals, but to report the results
of IAEA inspections in Iran. "Only the board makes decisions," a
State Department official said.
An IAEA official present at the meeting in Washington said that
Secretary of State Rice had asked ElBaradei to be "the messenger boy"
to Tehran. "Since the Secretary General would like to find a solution
that does not send Iran's case to the UN Security Council, he had no
problem with that," the official said.
Diplomats in Vienna speculated that the U.S. offer, which would allow
Iran to invest in an enrichment facility in Russia but not to enrich
uranium itself, was designed to win Russian support at the Security
Council should Iran veto the offer, which is expected.
The EU-3 are working on a non-paper they will circulate before the
Nov. 24 board meeting that "lays out our red lines and the principles
that must underpin" an eventual agreement, the EU official said.
The IAEA is trying to convince Board of Governors members that
referring Iran to the UN Security Council could prompt Iran's radical
new president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, to expel IAEA inspectors from
Iran.
"It's much better to keep IAEA inspectors in Iran than to send Iran
to the UN Security Council in New York without a strategy," a top
IAEA official told Newsmax in Vienna. "They did that three years ago
with North Korea. And look where we are now"
Iran's new nuclear negotiator, Ali Larijani, has threatened to toss
out IAEA inspectors if the Board of Governors refers their case to
the UN Security Council for possible sanctions. Larijani, a
Revolutionary Guards intelligence officer, once headed Iran's state
broadcasting agency.
"At least now Iran is respecting the Additional Protocol," the IAEA
official said. The Additional Protocol requires Iran to provide
extensive information on previously clandestine nuclear facilities
and to allow international inspectors to visit undeclared sites
throughout the country.
Since signing the Additional Protocol on December 18, 2003, however,
Iran has delayed particularly sensitive inspections for six months
and more.
In the case of a suspected uranium enrichment plant in Lavisan-Shian,
a Revolutionary Guards base in northern Tehran, Iran razed the
suspect facilities and carted away the rubble before it would let the
IAEA onto the site.
Despite the clear pattern of cheat and retreat, the EU-3 agrees with
ElBaradei that some solution must be found to prevent sending Iran to
the UN Security at the end of this month.
"So we go to New York, the inspectors get tossed out, and we get a
war. Then what have we achieved?" the European official said.
Bush administration officials argue that Iran has violated its
safeguards agreements with the atomic agency so flagrantly and so
often that its actions constitute a breach of Article II of the
Treaty on the Non-proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT).
Article II contains an absolute, irrevocable pledge by signatory
states to abandon nuclear weapons research of any kind. In exchange,
the nuclear weapons states agree to transfer nuclear technology to
them for civilian purposes.
The problem is that the technology needed to enrich uranium to four
percent to fuel civilian power reactors, is identical to what's
needed to enrich uranium to 93 percent to make weapons.
"Iran argues that it is promoting the peaceful use of nuclear
technology. It is not. It is subverting peaceful use to pursue a
dangerous course," U.S. ambassador Greg Scholte told the IAEA board
in August.
"Iran has no need for its heavy investment in an indigenous fuel
cycle. Unless, of course, it wants nuclear weapons. Iran doesn't even
have enough natural uranium to enrich for a civil nuclear program.
But it has enough for a small stockpile of nuclear weapons," Scholte
added. Brazil, Japan, Germany, Holland, Australia and other
non-weapons states also have built fuel cycle facilities. Until now,
the IAEA has only placed enrichment plants under safeguards, not
uranium conversion plants such as the Isfahan plant in Iran.
"With Iran, we realized that mastery of the fuel cycle makes you a
virtual nuclear weapons state," the senior IAEA official said. "That
was a wake-up call for all of us." It also explains why the IAEA is
insisting that Iran's conversion facility in Isfahan remain under
safeguards.
The IAEA has no authority to judge breaches of the NPT. Only the UN
Security Council has that authority. "It is important to refer Iran's
case to the Security Council, which alone has the legitimacy and the
authority of the international community," former French nuclear
policy analyst Therese Delpech told a conference in Washington, DC
last week.
Copyright 2005, Kenneth R. Timmerman