Doug Lorimer
The US and three of its European Union allies — Britain, France and Germany (the so-called EU-3) — managed to get an emergency meeting of the 35-member board of governors of the UN's Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) scheduled for February 2. However they have not won enough support to have Iran referred to the UN Security Council for possible punitive "action".
For almost three years, the White House has sought to have Iran referred by the IAEA to the Security Council. US officials have repeatedly claimed that Iran has a secret nuclear weapons program and has therefore failed to comply with its commitments under the 1970 nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and Iran's 1974 safeguards agreement with the IAEA.
"We are ready to take action [against Iran]", an EU-3 official told the January 21 Washington Post. "At the same time, we have to get everybody on board. Clearly Russia and China are not yet on board for referral" to the Security Council.
The US and the EU-3 have been unable to convince Russia and China — both of which are permanent members of the Security Council with veto power over its decisions — that Iran has a secret nuclear weapons program. Along with many Third World governments on the IAEA board, Moscow and Beijing suspect that Washington is seeking to use the UN to prepare an Iraq-style attack on Iran.
"The Iraq experience colours everything about Iran", Mark Fitzpatrick, a former US State Department official who is now a senior fellow with London's International Institute for Strategic Studies, told the January 21 Washington Post. "Those who want to give Iran the benefit of the doubt use the Iraq experience as a reason for doing so: the misuse of intelligence, the mistakes in the intelligence and the way the war has progressed."
'Evidence'
The White House's "evidence" that Iran is seeking to build a nuclear weapon was summarised by Fitzpatrick in a January 18 interview with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. "First of all", he told ABC TV's 7.30 Report, "there's the almost 20-year history of deception of not reporting, as they are obliged to do, their various nuclear activities — the imports of nuclear materials and so forth — for 18 years".
It is true that Iran did not report to the IAEA until February 2003 that in 1991 it had imported 1000 kilograms of uranium hexafluoride (UF6), 400kg of uranium tetrafluoride and 400kg of uranium dioxide from China, for researching the production of enriched uranium as a nuclear fuel. The 1800kg of imported uranium compounds contained 0.13kg of fissionable material (the rare isotope uranium-235).
At the time they imported the uranium compounds from China, the Iranians held the view that they were only required by their safeguards agreement with the IAEA to report the importation of "significant" quantities (i.e., more than 1kg) of fissionable material, since making a nuclear weapon requires at least 25kg of U-235.
US government officials have also alleged that Iran "kept secret for 18 years" its facilities for researching the conversion of uranium ore into UF6 and its facilities for researching the production of enriched uranium (uranium metal with at least 5% U-235) from UF6 gas.
However, under its 1974 safeguards agreement, Iran was not required to report the existence of uranium conversion facilities to the IAEA. Conversion of uranium dioxide into UF6 is not regarded by the IAEA as the production of fissionable material. Nor was Iran required to report to the IAEA the existence of its uranium enrichment facilities until at least 180 days prior to activating them.
The IAEA began inspections of Iran's uranium enrichment research facility at Natanz in February 2003 — four months before the first enrichment tests were conducted there.
After two years of go-anywhere, see-anything IAEA inspections of Iran's nuclear facilities, the UN agency has not found any evidence to even suggest that Iran has a program to build a nuclear weapon.
Nevertheless, last September the IAEA board, under the combined pressure of the US and the EU-3, voted by 22 to one (with 12 abstentions, including Russia and China) to find Iran in "non-compliance" with its IAEA safeguards agreement. While Iran had not failed to comply with its 1974 safeguards agreement, it had failed to immediately meet its commitments under an additional protocol that Iran had not ratified, but had agreed in December 2003 to voluntarily abide by. This required full disclosure of all past nuclear-related activities.
'Non-compliance'
Until last year, Egypt, Taiwan and South Korea had also failed to make full disclosure to the IAEA of their past nuclear-related research, and were thus in non-compliance with the additional "full disclosure" protocol to their safeguard agreements. But, because these countries have pro-US governments, Washington has made no moves to have them declared to be "non-compliant" by the IAEA board.
Fitzpatrick repeated a further claim made by the White House that supposedly shows Iran has a secret nuclear weapons program. The first was that "Iran received from the A.Q. Khan blackmarket network the design for casting uranium metal in hemispherical shapes, what could only be used for a nuclear weapon".
In January 2005, the Iranians, while not obliged to under the additional protocol, turned over to the IAEA a document they had been given by the blackmarket network run by Abdul Qadeer Khan, the former head of the Pakistani nuclear weapons program. The document showed how to cast enriched uranium metal into hemispherical forms. Yet the IAEA inspections found no evidence that Iran did anything more with the document than file it.
In a feature article headlined, "Why US doesn't trust Iran on nukes", the January 24 Christian Science Monitor provided the following as reason why the White House claims Iran has a secret nuclear weapons program: "Iran's leaders have long said they are conducting nuclear research for peaceful purposes. They claim they want only to learn how to produce fissionable fuel for power plants, as they're allowed to do under terms of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
"That explanation makes no sense for a nation with 10 percent of the world's known oil reserves, US officials and some outside experts say. They claim that the concrete and steel of Iran's nuclear infrastructure shows Tehran's true intentions."
What should Iran build its research facilities out of if not "concrete and steel" — candyfloss? Later in the article, the Boston daily notes that "Iran's nuclear program began when the Shah purchased a research reactor from the US in 1959. The Shah had big plans for a network of 23 power reactors, but the US did not consider this a danger, because he was an ally ..."
US attitude change
Washington's attitude to Iran's plans to build nuclear power plants changed only after Shah Mohammed Reza Palhavi and his 20,000 US advisers were kicked out the country by the 1979 anti-imperialist, anti-monarchist revolution, and Iran's oil industry was nationalised. Today Iran is the world's fourth largest oil exporter (after Saudi Arabia, Russia and Norway).
Ever since 1979, the US capitalist rulers have been looking for a way to reimpose a regime in Tehran that will be subservient to US corporate interests.
While the White House gives the impression that Iran is on the verge of building a nuclear weapon, a claim uncritically parroted by most of the Western corporate media, a joint assessment made last August by US intelligence agencies estimated that even if Iran wanted to build a nuclear weapon, it would take at least 10 years.
The August 2 Washington Post reported that the latest National Intelligence Estimate had concluded that "Iran will be unlikely to produce a sufficient quantity of highly enriched uranium, the key ingredient for an atomic weapon, before 'early to mid-next decade', according to four sources familiar with that finding".
Despite not having any proof or even credible "intelligence information" to back its claims about Iran having a nuclear weapons program, the US succeeded in getting the EU-3 to collaborate with it in pressuring the IAEA board to pass a resolution last November alleging that Iran was in "non-compliance" with the NPT.
If the US and its EU-3 allies succeed in getting the IAEA board to refer Iran to the Security Council, it will mark a victory for Washington's drive to lay the diplomatic and propaganda groundwork for a US-led Iraq-style invasion and occupation of Iran.
As with Iraq, Washington's aim is not to remove an alleged threat of (non-existent) "weapons of mass destruction", but to impose a pro-US regime that will surrender control of Iran's nationalised oil industry to the big US oil corporations.
However, with the US military bogged down in an unwinnable counterinsurgency war against the patriotic Iraqi resistance, a US invasion of Iran is not an immediate or even short-term prospect.
From Green Left Weekly, February 1, 2006.
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