Mohamed El-Baradei doing the work Bush should be doing.
Mohamed El-Baradei is doing the work that Bush should be doing. The New York Times takes him to task for playing into the hands of the Bush administration on the one hand and the lunatics of Iran on the other hand.
Last month, Mr. ElBaradei, the chief nuclear inspector for the United Nations, cut his own deal with Iran’s government, intended to answer questions about its secretive nuclear past. Unfortunately, it made no mention of Iran’s ongoing, very public refusal to stop enriching uranium — usable for nuclear fuel or potentially a nuclear weapon — in defiance of Security Council orders.
In his speech to the United Nations General Assembly this week, Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, wasn’t shy about explaining what a great deal he’d gotten: gloating that the dispute over his country’s nuclear program is now “closed.” That’s not true, but the deal has given Russia and China another reason to delay imposing new sanctions on Iran for its continued defiance.
We’d like to hear the answers to a lot of those outstanding questions. Among our favorites: Has Iran built more sophisticated uranium centrifuges for a clandestine program? And, what were Iran’s scientists planning to do with designs, acquired from Pakistan, to mold uranium into shapes that look remarkably like the core of a nuclear weapon?
But it seems like the reason he is doing all this is because the Bush administration is refusing to ask these questions of Iran. In fact, they are not conducting any kind of meaningful diplomacy and just expecting the Iranian regime to bend to their will.
We have a clear national interest in preventing the proliferation of nuclear materials and nuclear weapons around the world. But we cannot go it alone -- what we have to do is to first come up with a unified plan with the other permanent members of the UN Security Council. Regardless of what the outstanding questions on Iran's nuclear program are, we still have time to come up with a unified plan that even Russia and China can get behind. Then, we have to work within that plan. It's better to engage in a slow, careful plan that takes five years to play out rather than rush to war before we get the weight of the international community, as well as Russia, France, and China behind us. We know what happened when we did not do things right the first time in Iraq.
There are two extremes and a middle ground here -- the one extreme is to shut ourselves out from the rest of the world and decide that what is happening in hot spots like Iran are none of our business. That is no longer an option like it was 100 years ago -- the fact of global warming, for instance, is too real for us to develop a solution on our own. The other extreme is the kind of unilateralist approach that George Bush used. But the middle ground is to convey our fears and concerns about Iran's activities to the rest of the world and then let them evaluate it. It is important that countries like Russia and China do not see this as a fight between us and Iran that they have no business meddling in -- they have to be convinced that this is their concern as well as ours.
The danger is that the Iranians dole out just enough information to keep the inspectors in. But we have to break that footdragging -- we have to introduce diplomacy as a starting point for these negotiations and then go from there. Iran craves recognition as a regional power -- and if we treat them as such, then it will go a long way towards alleviating the tensions between us and them. And it would break the logjam between them and the IAEA regarding the inspections.
Obamathon
