Bruno Pellaud

Former Deputy Director General, IAEA and President, Swiss Nuclear Forum

Posted: September 29, 2009 05:26 AM

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The current Indian Summer over the Lake of Geneva will not ensure a smooth launching next Thursday of the international negotiations about the Iranian nuclear program. Too many participants have decided to make them fail. Provocation and contempt, threats and sanctions without underlying negotiable proposals, an Orwellian stage pitting the Five Nuclear Weapons States — standing on their self-assigned moral high ground — against a paranoiac, but still Non-Nuclear Weapons State. To secure an Iran without nuclear weapons, a more rational approach will be needed, an approach with strong sanctions complemented by specific technical proposals potentially acceptable to Iran, negotiated in a bilateral framework rather than the now chosen international extravaganza involving too many parties that disagree openly among themselves on how to proceed.

Iran provokes foolishly — with the launching of missiles and with even more silly sound bites from its president. Tipped by the Russians about the imminent Western announcement of the Qom enrichment site, Iran sends only late September a last-minute letter to the IAEA declaring Qom — like a rebelling child displaying stolen cookies. Exposure is inescapable in the age of satellite surveillance; the Iranians would have been clever-and-a-half to declare their second enrichment facility much earlier if eager to pre-empt Western accusation of non-compliance with safeguards obligations. But confusion prevails in Tehran.

Fellow-blogger Joe Cirincione has pointed out here the strategically correct approach adopted by the Obama administration, namely to keep confidential all new intelligence information on Iranian activities until bargaining time. Regrettably, last week, tactical considerations got priority when Obama, Brown and Sarkozy went public frenetically with the short-term hope to enlist Russian and Chinese support for subsequent stringent sanctions. Illusion. The Russians will continue to play double games. As an only ally, they keep the Iranians on a short political leash, while extorting horrendous prices for the nuclear fuel services they provide. In a broader context, the Russians will do whatever they can to foil a grand bargain between the US, Europe and Iran, a bargain that could see Iranian natural gas flowing to Europe, thereby helping Europe to reduce its dependency on Russia. As to the Chinese, they do not care; they only want Iranian gas to continue flowing their way.

What to expect from the forthcoming Geneva negotiations? Not much. For sure, the negotiating framework is ludicrous. On one side of the table, the Iranian delegation alone. On the other side, a big crowd: the Five Nuclear Weapons States, and Germany, and the European Union. The P5, those who carry the day at the Security Council, will claim the main seats (like five noisy drunkards threatening a boisterous youngster tempted by his first glass of wine). Well, without the presence of Germany, the so-called P5+1 have little moral authority on nuclear proliferation. As to the European Union, it disagrees fundamentally within itself on how to handle Iran. Most members oppose the British and French claim of speaking on behalf of Europe, and most oppose decisive sanctions. As with the North Korean negotiations, the presence of so many people across the table will not impress the Iranians.

Quite clearly, the Obama administration needs to revert to a strategically more sensible approach, a road map that would see the US engage Iran with a credible Plan B containing specific technical proposals meant to pull the rug from under an emerging nuclear weapons program in Iran. To be realistic, with Iran in political disarray, with its incompetent and quixotic government, the diplomatic logjam could only be broken through a discrete channel that would involve two experienced negotiators enjoying the trust of their respective leaders, personalities with the authority to move an agenda forward. On the Iranian side, there are not too many candidates; the most obvious being Ali Larijani, Speaker of Parliament, a knowledgeable man in an independent position with a direct link to the Supreme Leader. In the US, the former Under Secretary of State, Thomas R. Pickering, would be the best among many possible candidates.

As to the substance, the US must realize that Plan A is a non-starter — that is, the complete suspension of sensitive nuclear activities in Iran through sanctions alone or military options alone. In the New York Times of September 17, 2009, Roger Cohen wrote concisely what I have advocated for many years: “I cannot see any deal that will not at some point trade controlled Iranian enrichment on its soil against insistence that Iran accept the vigorous inspections of the I.A.E.A. Additional Protocol and a 24/7 I.A.E.A. presence. The time is approaching for the United States and its allies to abandon “zero enrichment” as a goal — it’s no longer feasible — and concentrate on how to exclude weaponization, cap enrichment and ensure Iran believes the price for breaking any accord will be heavy.” An in-depth 2006 report of the International Crisis Group — of which I was a co-author — dealt with one particular option to cap enrichment in Iran. There are indeed several options to forestall weaponization and to cap enrichment; they deserve consideration, because they could open the door to Iran’s acceptance of the vigorous inspections associated with the Additional Protocol to the existing Safeguards Agreement with the IAEA. I will deal with the pros and cons of various options in the coming weeks.

Iran Decision Time approaches for Israel_English_Xinhua

Iran Decision Time approaches for Israel_English_Xinhua

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Jackson Deihl talks about his editorial below on NPR’s Opinion Page.

Op-Ed: Israel’s Gaza Vindication : NPR

When it was launched last December, Israel’s invasion of the Gaza Strip looked to most people in Washington to be risky, counterproductive and doomed to futility. Not only pundits like me but senior officials of the Bush administration predicted that the Israeli army would not succeed either in toppling Gaza’s Hamas government or in eliminating its capacity to launch missiles at Israeli cities. Instead it would subject the Jewish state to another tidal wave of international opprobrium and risk its relations with West Bank Palestinians and Egypt.
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Mostly, we were right. But today, Operation Cast Lead, as the three-week operation is known in Israel, is generally regarded by the country’s military and political elite as a success. The reasons for that are worth examining now that a new and even more hawkish Israeli government is weighing whether to flout Washington’s prevailing opposition to a military attack on Iran.

Israel’s satisfaction starts with a simple set of facts. Between April 2001 and the end of 2008, 4,246 rockets and 4,180 mortar shells were fired into Israel from Gaza, killing 14 Israelis, wounding more than 400 and making life in southern Israel intolerable. During what was supposed to be a cease-fire during the last half of 2008, 362 rockets and shells landed. Meanwhile, between late 2000 and the end of 2008, Israeli forces killed some 3,000 Gazans.

Since April there have been just over two dozen rocket and mortar strikes — or less than on many single days before the war. No one has been seriously injured, and life in the Israeli town of Sderot and the area around it has returned almost to normal. Israeli attacks in Gaza have almost ceased, too: Since the end of the mini-war, 29 Palestinians, two of whom were civilians, have been killed by Israeli action.

Hamas, of course, remains in power and unmoved in its refusal to recognize Israel. It is still holding an Israeli soldier who was abducted in 2006. It is still smuggling material for weapons through tunnels under the Egyptian border and, if it chose to, could resume rocket attacks on Israel at any time.

The point, however, is that Israel has bought itself a stretch of relative peace with Hamas, just as its costly 2006 invasion of Lebanon has produced three years of quiet on that front. From the Israeli perspective, a respite from conflict is the most that can be expected from either group — or from their mutual sponsor, Iran.

“They will never change their ideology of destroying Israel,” a senior government official told me last week. “But you can deter them if they are convinced you are not afraid of fighting a war.”

But what of the grievous Palestinian suffering in the invasion — Israel itself counted 1,166 dead Gazans, including more than 450 civilians — and the international backlash that has caused? Just last week a U.N. commission headed by South African jurist Richard Goldstone condemned what it called “a deliberately disproportionate attack designed to punish, humiliate and terrorize a civilian population,” and suggested that responsible Israelis be hauled before the International Criminal Court on war crimes charges.

Israel’s leaders worried a lot about losing the war that way. But as they see it, they suffered only scratches. Egypt, which quietly collaborates with Israel’s blockade of Gaza, came under pressure to change its policy but held firm. No Arab country toughened its stance toward Israel: According to the Obama administration, as many as five may be willing to offer diplomatic and economic concessions if Israel freezes its West Bank settlement construction.

Perhaps most significant, Hamas’s rival for Palestinian leadership, the West Bank-based Palestinian Authority, is considerably stronger than it was before the war. Probably it will renew peace talks with Israel within weeks. As for the Goldstone report, the heat it briefly produced last week will quickly dissipate; the panel was discredited from the outset because of its appointment by the grotesquely politicized U.N. Human Rights Council.

The Gaza invasion was the second military operation Israel embarked on in less than 18 months despite disapproval from Washington. The other was its bombing of a nuclear reactor under construction in Syria in September 2007. Then, too, officials in Washington feared a dire diplomatic backlash or even a war between Israel and Syria. Nothing happened.

As they quietly debate the pros and cons of launching a military attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities, Israel’s political and military leaders no doubt will be thinking about that history. That doesn’t mean they will discount American objections — Iran would be a far harder and more complex target, with direct repercussions for U.S. troops and critical interests in the region. But, as with Gaza, even a partial and short-term reversal of the Iranian nuclear program may look to Israelis like a reasonable benefit — and the potential blowback overblown.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/09/20/AR2009092001295.html