Thursday, November 15, 2007

Round Three

The IAEA has announced that Mohamed ElBaradei has circulated his report on the Iran uranium enrichment program to the IAEA's Borad of Governors, and McClatchy is reporting that they've gotten hold of a leaked copy. The report states that Iran has provided some answers about past nuclear activity and accounted for declared nuclear material, but still hasn't provided "full transparency" about its current activities and is still enriching uranium in defiance of previous Security Council resolutions. Here's the money graf:

"The agency is not in a position to provide credible assurances about the absence of undeclared nuclear material and activities in Iran," says the confidential report, obtained by McClatchy Newspapers.

Translation: Iran still hasn't provided IAEA inspectors unfettered access to carry out "intrusive inspections" of the kind called for under the Additional Protocol of the Non-Proliferation Treaty that Iran agreed to in 2003 but has stopped complying with since early 2006.

This strikes me as pretty good news, seeing as the very same kind of report led to a second round of sanctions this spring. Compare the operative clause from that document:

The Agency is able to verify the non-diversion of declared nuclear material in Iran. The Agency remains unable, however, to make further progress in its efforts to verify fully the past development of Iran’s nuclear programme and certain aspects relevant to its scope and nature. Hence, the Agency is unable to verify the absence of undeclared nuclear material and activities in Iran unless Iran addresses the long outstanding verification issues through the implementation of the Additional Protocol (which it signed on 18 December 2003, but has not yet brought into force) and the required transparency measures. (My emphasis.)

Reports in May and August came to the same conclusion, and the only thing that forestalled the third round of sanctions in September was a cooperative framework agreed to by Iran for providing more assurances of the civilian nature of its program. Clearly, they haven't gone very far in that direction.

It could very well be that the Russians and Chinese still refuse to sign on, but frankly, this round goes to the Bush administration. Iran had ten weeks to win friends and influence people, and they've done neither.

Posted by Judah in:  Iran   

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