An Article for the Ignorant on the IAEA

Fingolfin_Noldor SG

NYTimes: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/17/world/middleeast/17elbaradei.html?hp=&pagewanted=all

This is article is for the resident warmongers, ignorant Singaporeans etc. who have no damn inking about what's really going on with the current squabble with Iran and US.

September 17, 2007
To Iran and Its Foes, an Indispensable Irritant
By ELAINE SCIOLINO and WILLIAM J. BROAD

VIENNA Late in August, Mohamed ElBaradei put the finishing touches on a nuclear accord negotiated in secret with Iran.

The deal would be divisive and risky, one of the biggest gambles of his 10 years as director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency. Iran would answer questions about its clandestine nuclear past in exchange for a series of concessions. With no advance notice or media strategy, Dr. ElBaradei ordered the plan released in the evening. And then he waited.

The next day, diplomats from the United States, France, Britain and Germany marched into his office atop a Vienna skyscraper to deliver a joint protest. The deal, they said, amounted to irresponsible meddling that threatened to undermine a United Nations Security Council strategy to punish, not reward, Tehran.

Dr. ElBaradei, an Egyptian-born lawyer, was polite but firm. If Iran wants to answer questions, what am I supposed to do, tell them it cant? he asked.

Then, brandishing one of his characteristic mangled metaphors, he dismissed his critics as living room coaches who shoot from the hip.

Almost five years after he stood up to the Bush administration on Iraq and then won the Nobel Peace Prize for his trouble, Dr. ElBaradei now finds himself at the center of the Wests turbulent confrontation with Iran, derided yet relied upon by all sides.

To his critics in the West, he is guilty of serious diplomatic sins bias toward Iran, recklessness and, above all, a naïve grandiosity that leads him to reach far beyond his station. Over the past year, even before he unveiled his deal with Tehran, Western governments had presented him with a flurry of formal protests over his stewardship of the Iran case.

Even some of his own staff members have become restive, questioning his leadership and what they see as his sympathy for the Iranians, according to diplomats here.

Yet the Iranians also seek to humiliate him and block his inspectors.

He is the man in the middle, said Lee H. Hamilton, a former Democratic congressman long respected for his foreign affairs acumen. The United States and Iran simply do not believe one another. There is deep distrust. And, he added, that makes the situation very difficult for any go-between.

Even so, while Dr. ElBaradeis harshest detractors describe him as drunk with the power of his Nobel, what keeps him on center stage is a pragmatic truth: He is everyones best hope.

He has grown ever more indispensable as American credibility on atomic intelligence has nose-dived and European diplomacy with Tehran has stalled.

For the world powers, he is far and away the best source of knowledge about Irans nuclear progress information Washington uses regularly to portray Tehran as an imminent global danger.

Even the Iranians need him (as he likes to remind them) because his maneuvers promise to lessen and perhaps end the sting of United Nations sanctions.

Dr. ElBaradei, who is 65, seems unfazed, even energized, by all the dissent. He alludes to a sense of destiny that has pressed him into the role of world peacemaker. He has called those who advocate war against Iran crazies, and in two long recent interviews described himself as a secular pope whose mission is to make sure, frankly, that we do not end up killing each other.

He added, You meet someone in the street and I do a lot and someone will tell me, You are doing Gods work, and that will keep me going for quite a while.

It is precisely that self-invented role that enrages his detractors. They say he has stepped dangerously beyond the mandate of the I.A.E.A., a United Nations agency best known for inspecting atomic installations in an effort to find and deter secret work on nuclear arms.

Instead of being the head of a technical agency, whose job is to monitor these agreements, and come up with objective assessments, he has become a world policy maker, an advocate, said Robert J. Einhorn, the State Departments nonproliferation director from 1999 to 2001.

In particular, Dr. ElBaradei is faulted for his new deal with Iran, which has defied repeated Security Council demands to suspend its enrichment of uranium. Critics say the plan threatens to buy Iran more time to master that technology, which can make fuel for reactors or atomic bombs.

Despite Irans long history of nuclear deception, Dr. ElBaradeis supporters cite his vindication on Iraq no evidence of an active Iraqi nuclear program has been found as reason to listen to him now.

He could have saved us a disastrous war if we had paid attention to him, said Thomas M. Franck, an international law professor emeritus at New York University Law School, who taught Dr. ElBaradei there decades ago and has remained a close friend.

After the Iran accord became public, The Washington Post published an editorial branding Dr. ElBaradei a Rogue Regulator. His wife, Aida, who is his closest political adviser, came up with a response T-shirts that succinctly frame the ElBaradei debate: Rogue regulator will be stenciled on the front, Or smooth operator? on the back.

Ambitious, but Reserved

When Dr. ElBaradei received the Nobel Prize in December 2005, he used his acceptance speech to lay out an ambitious agenda helping the poor, saving the environment, fighting crime and confronting new dangers spawned by globalization.

We cannot respond to these threats by building more walls, developing bigger weapons, or dispatching more troops, he said. Quite to the contrary, by their very nature, these security threats require primarily international cooperation.

Yet Dr. ElBaradeis expansive view of himself is a striking counterpoint to his personal style.

That Nobel night, he was celebrating with friends in his suite at the Grand Hotel in Oslo when thousands of people appeared on the street below, holding candles and cheering. Unsure of himself, he froze.

He was clearly nonplused and adrift at what to do, Mr. Franck recalled. His wife told him to wave back.

A tall, shy man with a salt-and-pepper mustache, Dr. ElBaradei is so averse to small talk that he refuses even superficial conversation with staff members in the agencys elevators, aides say.

Rather than venture into the dining room or cafeteria, he brings lunch from home and eats at his desk. He must be arm-twisted to make even the briefest appearance at important agency functions.

He is very reserved, very aloof, Mrs. ElBaradei said recently over tea in their apartment, filled with rugs from Iran and the awards and other baubles that come with her husbands persona as a campaigner for world peace. He thinks these diplomatic receptions and dinners are a waste of time.

He shares confidences with only a handful of associates. He doesnt have meetings where he seeks input, said one former agency official, who like some others would speak about Dr. ElBaradei only on the condition of anonymity. Its, Heres what I want to do.

He has become a compulsive name-dropper, diplomats say. He remains a shy man, but one who is somehow dazzled by his own destiny, said one European nonproliferation official who knows him well. Hes always saying, Oh, I talked to Condi last week and she told me this, or I was with Putin and he said this or that. Hes almost like a child.

The eldest of five children from an upper-middle-class family in Cairo, Dr. ElBaradei grew up with a French nanny and a private school education. At 19, he became the national youth champion in squash. You have to be cunning, he said of the sport.

His father, a lawyer, was the head of Egypts bar association. The son studied law and joined the foreign service, eventually serving in New York. Living there in the late 1960s and early 70s was so transforming, he said, that today he feels greater kinship with New York than Cairo, more comfortable speaking English than Arabic.

Fingolfin_Noldor SG

While working on his doctorate on international law at New York University, he went to New York Knicks basketball games and to the Metropolitan Opera, and stayed up late talking American politics and drinking wine in Greenwich Village bars. His first girlfriend, he said, was Jewish.

Moving up the diplomatic ladder, he eventually settled in Vienna, where he became the nuclear agencys legal counselor and then head of external relations. His ascent to the top job, in 1997, was a surprise.

After none of the proposed candidates received the needed votes, the American ambassador to the agency at the time, John Ritch, led a quiet campaign for Dr. ElBaradei, a close friend. In a cable to Washington, Mr. Ritch recalled, he said the United States could do no better than backing an Egyptian who is a passionate Knicks fan.

Dr. ElBaradei started out with the modest goal of reorganizing the agency, which today has about 2,300 employees. Then came Iraq. Before the war, the Bush administration repeatedly warned of Saddam Hussein getting the bomb, and called on atomic inspectors to confirm that view.
Instead, in March 2003, Dr. ElBaradei told the Security Council that after hundreds of inspections over three months, his teams had found no evidence or plausible indication of the revival of a nuclear weapons program. And while President Bush charged that Iraq was trying to buy uranium in Africa, Dr. ElBaradei dismissed the underlying intelligence as not authentic.

The invasion, 13 days later, was the saddest day of my life, he said.

Even as American troops found no unconventional arms, the Bush administration waged a quiet campaign against Dr. ElBaradei and his agency, barring his inspectors from Iraq and working behind the scenes to keep him from a third term.

He said he had been 99 percent decided against running until he learned that John R. Bolton, then Washingtons United Nations ambassador, was determined to block him.

Dr. ElBaradei recalled a sense of revulsion that such a personal decision should be made by anybody else.

His wife said she had told him, Mohamed, you run tomorrow!

Ultimately, with no candidate of its own and no international support, the United States backed down.

In October 2005, a month into his new term, the Nobel call came.

Breaking the Seals

The standoff with Tehran entered its current phase on Jan. 10, 2006, when Iran broke the I.A.E.A.s protective seals on equipment at its underground site at Natanz and resumed efforts to enrich uranium.

When the West began imposing sanctions, Iran retaliated by cutting back on its cooperation with Dr. ElBaradeis agency and barring dozens of its inspectors. As the Iranians ramped up enrichment, the agency and the rest of the world were steadily going blind to aspects of Irans nuclear program.

Dr. ElBaradei himself was humiliated on a rare visit to Tehran in April 2006. Two days before his arrival, the Iranians announced a breakthrough industrial-level enrichment.

Still, Dr. ElBaradei hoped to meet the supreme leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Instead, he spent much of his time cooling his heels in a hotel room.

Critics say Dr. ElBaradei has responded to such provocations by going soft on Tehran glossing over its violations, caving to its demands and writing reports that bend over backward to be conciliatory.

For instance, they say he has added to inspection woes by moving a half-dozen top investigators off the case, which the agency defends as normal rotations. The agencys chief Iran inspector, Christian Charlier, who spoke out publicly about Irans evasiveness, was assigned to the agencys Brazil file.

Hes naïve and idiosyncratic and that amounts to being dangerous, Mr. Bolton said. His argument for years was that he could talk Iran out of being a nuclear threat. Then it was, O.K., well just let them experiment. Now its, Youre never going to get them to give up.

But Dr. ElBaradeis supporters say he is engaged in a balancing act that deals as much with Washingtons excesses as with Tehrans.

In May, after Vice President Dick Cheney warned from an aircraft carrier off Irans coast that the United States was ready to use its naval power to keep Iran from gaining nuclear weapons and dominating this region, Dr. ElBaradei offered a quick response: he declared that Iran had achieved the knowledge of enrichment implying that it was too late for military action or other Western punishment for refusing to stop its atomic efforts.

The fact of the matter, he said, is that one of the purposes of suspension keeping them from getting the knowledge has been overtaken by events.

His remarks outstripped the analyses of his own inspectors, who were reporting technical problems at Natanz, and contributed to suspicions that he was exaggerating Irans progress as a political maneuver. Even so, that argument that Iran has already crossed an important line is the tacit assumption behind the new accord.

The plan, released Aug. 27, sets a firm timetable for Iran to clear up a half-dozen controversies about past secret activities, while also improving access for I.A.E.A. inspectors.

The diplomats who marched into Dr. ElBaradeis office the next day shredded the plan point by point.

They expressed dismay that the accord, negotiated with no diplomatic input, omitted any stipulation that Iran suspend enrichment. One envoy noted that the plan forces inspectors to ask questions on only one issue at a time, leaving the most delicate topics until the end.

There was general alarm that the document suggested treating Iran like a routine case, instead of a country that had lied repeatedly, and, according to some governments, harbors a secret nuclear-arms program.

Dr. ElBaradeis response, paraphrased by a Western official, was that all you are doing is being suspicious; the agency cannot judge Iranian intentions.

In the days that followed, representatives of other countries hammered Dr. ElBaradei with sharp criticism. But a week later, many governments had begun to believe that their strategy was backfiring. They decided to try to co-opt Dr. ElBaradei rather than isolate him.

The new thinking went like this: he and the Iranians had won this round. Much of the world would consider the agreement on a timetable a step forward. By contrast, Western diplomacy was hopelessly stalled.

On Sept. 7, envoys from the four Western powers again visited Dr. ElBaradeis office. This time, though, they offered support for his effort to clear up the past, and said they welcomed his renewed support in pressing Iran to suspend enrichment and let inspectors conduct wider inquiries.

We told the Americans it would do no good to criticize ElBaradei, that it would only make him look even more like a hero, said one senior European official.

In the interview, Dr. ElBaradei called the shift a complete change a result of his explaining and standing firm. He called his accord a sound step toward defusing the Iran confrontation.

I have no qualm that some people have distrust because of Irans past behavior, he said.

But sanctions alone, he added, would solve nothing. You need to sit together and talk about it and try to work out mechanisms to build confidence.

And if the Iranians do not keep their promises, he said: I told them very openly that it will backfire. Absolutely.

Fingolfin_Noldor SG

Weighing the Risks

Early in September, when the agencys board gathered here in Vienna and discussed the new plan, the American envoy, Gregory L. Schulte, stunned colleagues by praising Dr. ElBaradei. He told the board that the deal was a potentially important development and a step in the right direction.

Even so, diplomats and visitors say that in unguarded moments, Dr. ElBaradei has expressed the conviction that a lasting accommodation with Iran must wait until the Bush administration is gone.

The danger, some analysts say, is that by then, Iran might have acquired the ability to make a bomb. American intelligence analysts put that date at anywhere from 2010 to 2015.

Even if Iran begins to deliver on its latest promises, Dr. ElBaradei faces a potential deal breaker. As part of the accord, he is demanding that the United States give Tehran copies of American intelligence documents related to suspected secret Iranian military work on nuclear warheads. As a lawyer, he said, he was determined to give Iran the access it deserved.

And if it turns out that Iran did, in the past, make secret moves toward nuclear arms? Many countries had ambitions in the past, Dr. ElBaradei said, raising the prospect that, in theory, Iran, too, might have to make certain confessions.

He added that the most important thing is for them to come clean.

Elaine Sciolino reported from Vienna, and William J. Broad from New York.

dracky SG

The IAEA is charged with enforcing the non-proliferation part of the NPT. There is another part of the NPT which calls for the elimination of all nuclear weapons. No great strides has been made in this area, not just among the 5 recognised Nuclear Weapon States. Furthermore, Israel, Indian and Pakistan are not even signatories to the NPT. The IAEA inspections are just a tool for the Nuclear Weapon States to entrench their power.

Iran can justifiably pursue nuclear weapons for national security reasons. Such weapons are a great deterrent and leveller. If necessary, it should just pull out of the NPT and precipitate the collapse of the inequitable NPT regime.

Fingolfin_Noldor SG

After the US invasion of Iraq, most of the states that felt most threatened by US started resorting to nukes to offset their clear conventional arms disadvantage.

But yes, the IAEA has more often than not, used by the Nuclear states to stop other nations from developing nukes.

Quite frankly, the nonproliferation treaty is a joke. The US is known for exporting nuclear arms long ago (Britain got its Trident D5 from the US) and Israel stole Uranium from the US long ago and got away with it. Really, the essence of this entire issue with Iran is the continued supremacy of US and her allies.

Atobe SG

With an Iranian President that had publicly sworn to wipe Israel from the face of the earth - can the World trust Iran to possess a nuclear device ?

Can the World Community trust another radical Muslim sworn to use violence to achieve its religious-political goals ?

Should the World sit back and allow Iran to continue developing nuclear knowledge and engineering techniques that will result in weapons being produced ?

All it takes is for a miscalculation of confidence, and the World will be subjected to the horrific effects of a global nuclear fall-out.

Israel is known to possess nuclear weapons, and will surely retaliate if Iran send a nuclear armed missile to attack Israel.

Arapahoe SG

i think generally there are 2 issues of course we can lump it together.

Atomic energy is probably here to stay and more nations are going to seek out alternate sustainable energy so i think at some point the world would have to look beyond Iran and N.K. and how to hardness these energy without having weapon grade HEU to produce Mass killing weapon.

Uncertainty over N.K. and Iran with their nuke ambitions probably comes from using it to meet ideology or political goals. Since NK is technically at war so having Nuke doesnt help.

However, Could it be that Dr. Elbaradei may be too liberal towards Iran? Or is he opening a can of worm for other countries to follow? I read somewhere that Myanmar and, Indo have the intention. Do these countries have the maturity to manage this type of high energy program?

Our league of national political system is uncertain as it is. Regimes change as political leadership changes. We cant even agree on ideology such as religion, political system, and human rights and of course competing for resources. Could humanity be at stake if we see mushroom cloud rising like the movie The Day After? What are the implications for Sg? Rolling Eyes

1995 -- December 15 SOUTHEAST ASIAN NUCLEAR-WEAPON-FREE ZONE

The seven-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) -- Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam -- joined by Cambodia, Laos, and Burma, approve the creation of the Southeast Asian Nuclear-Weapon-Free Zone (SEANWFZ). The treaty creating the zone prohibits the parties from acquiring, manufacturing, possessing, and stationing nuclear explosive devices.

I wonder if this SEANWFZ still enforce or can it be binding?

Fingolfin_Noldor SG

Atobe, you should know better that all that "destroy Israel" is fluff for the ultra conservative sections of the populace to chew on. Even the Mullahs aren't so stupid as to martyr themselves just for the sake of pride. It is no surprise that within the Iranian regime, there are many disgruntled politicians who aren't too happy about the current President, and the only reason that he still has a political life at the moment, is because the Grand Ayatollah hasn't pulled the plug on the life support system.

Even among the other Arab countries, there are cries on the streets about destroying Israel, but the leaderships themselves know that political realities of the situation. Thus far, Syria and Iran are content to proxy wars rather direct confrontations that they know they would surely lose.