China Matters Iran/NPT Scorecard...

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Did the Israel/Obama Deal Go Down?

In light of Secretary Clinton's determined effort to forestall a Iran nuclear deal brokered by Turkey (see below), I think it's pretty clear that Iran is desperate for a deal and the United States is equally desperate to block one.

I think the only thing that could have persuaded Turkey's Prime Minister Erdogan to turn away from negotiations (negotiations that, in my opinion, would have a very good chance of yielding an agreement) was an assurance by the United States that the NPT Review Conference would see a dramatic announcement by Israel that it's ready to engage with the Obama non-proliferation regime: maybe not joining the NPT outright, but maybe signing the CTBT and/or going along with the fissile material freeze initiative.

This kind of concession, even if symbolic, would probably be enough to spike the guns of Egypt and the Non-Aligned Movement at the NPT Revcon and justify Turkey's move to the sidelines.

Israel's price for this concession would be continuation of the Iran confrontation through sanctions until Iran is denuclearized and "trust" is restored i.e. never.

In the meantime, the stress of stepped up sanctions would keep Iran in a state of internal political disarray that Israel would find quite gratifying.

This would, I believe, represent a 180 from what the Obama administration hoped to accomplish in 2009: a rapprochement with Iran that would compel Israel's entry into the non-proliferation regime.

Instead, the U.S. has retreated from a win-win to a zero-sum arrangement.

Washington doesn't get reduced tensions in the Middle East and a more productive relationship with Iran; it gets a perpetuation of the current debilitating arrangement with Israel enjoying U.S. patronage and Iran back in the doghouse.

Let's see what happens.

Israel's Weapons of Mass Disruption

...and 2001: A Disarmament Odyssey

I have an article up at Asia Times entitled China in the catbird seat on Iran.

It looks at the state of play at the NPT Review Conference and opines that Beijing has done a pretty good job at positioning itself as the intermediary between the West and Iran.

I was lucky enough to interview a U.S. arms control expert and gain a valuable perspective on an important angle: Russia's expectations for the NPT process--getting on the right side (with the United States and India) of the isolate-China equation--and Beijing's steps to frustrate them.

In Moscow's mind, I think the recipe for success looked like this:

• Partner with the United States on the new START treaty and give President Obama's policy that successful multi-lateral sheen;
• Work with the U.S. to solve the Iran problem within the framework of the NPT, either through a definitive sanctions regime or rapprochement;
• Make common cause with the United States and India to gang up on China as the modernizing, weaponizing, destabilizing wild card on the Eurasian continent.

To date, the Iran problem hasn't been solved and the Obama administration, instead of fussing over China's new generation of nuclear attack submarines, has to get China's help with the non-aligned movement to make sure the NPT conference doesn't collapse into a Copenhagen-scale clusterfugue.

And the reason the Iran problem hasn't been solved is Israel, and resentment in the Muslim and developing world over the U.S. grotesque double standard of bullyragging NPT member Iran while non-NPT-member Israel with its nuclear arsenal gets a free pass.

For the time being, at least, the efforts of the U.S. and Russia are concentrated on armtwisting, cajoling, and public relations handjobberai to gut the Egypt-led initiative to demand negotiations for a nuclear free zone in the Middle East, and force the focus back to creating the appearance of a united front on Iran.

The cornerstone of President Obama's non-proliferation-based consensual, multi-lateral global security regime is universal adherence to the NPT. For this system to work, Israel, India, and Pakistan have to participate.

Since May of last year, President Obama has issued several calls for Israel to join the NPT, thereby stripping Iran of the diplomatic defense of harping on its NPT membership and, perhaps, making it possible for moderate elements inside Iran to advocate a more conciliatory nuclear policy.

Joining the NPT shouldn't be too hard for Israel. The Bush deal with India--endorsed by the IAEA under ElBaradei and welcomed by the West--demonstrated that American allies with rogue nuclear programs are eligible for special consideration.

It doesn't look like Israel has too much downside in admitting it has a nuclear arsenal and joining the NPT subject to the same sweet setup that the U.S. and other declared nuclear weapons powers enjoy: a national security exclusion that keeps the IAEA out of all of their nuclear weapons facilities.

This is an accommodation that Israel has been, to date, unwilling to provide. In fact, Israel has told the United States to get stuffed on multiple occasions.

It's possible that Israel is only waiting for the strategically and psychologically opportune moment to announce its willingness to join the NPT and give President Obama a much-needed political gift.

However, I wonder if Israel has a lot of interest in giving President Obama this gift, whose primary utility would be to boost U.S. cred with the Muslim world--and provide Iran with some political cover internally to justify concessions on its program.

Israel has a vested interest in the current cats-and-dogs dynamic of U.S.+ Israel vs. everybody else in the Middle East. It is viscerally opposed to U.S. rapprochement with Iran and gains little from a ratcheting down of nuclear tensions that would allow Tehran to assume the role of a rational, independent, and useful interlocutor with Washington.

From this perspective, Israel's nuclear arsenal is useful primarily as an irritant hindering the resolution of the Iran nuclear crisis, serving--as I put it in the title--as weapons of mass disruption.

China Hand has a weakness for conspiracy theories, especially when regarding the dismal history of the Tehran Research Reactor fuel plate project, which started out as a confidence-building initiative and somehow morphed into an exercise in confidence-destruction and geopolitical paranoia.

I would not be surprised if France--which has pretensions to clout in the Levant and has hopes to replace America as Israel's strategic and utterly uncritical BFF--had a tete a tete with Israel and exploited its role as the fabricator of the fuel plates for the Tehran Research Reactor to insist on getting all the LEU first to incapacitate Iran's nuclear program, stretch out the delivery schedule to improbable lengths, and encourage suspicions of its sincerity to ultimately deliver the fuel plates, thereby helping pooch the deal.

If Israel ostentatiously declines to participate in the NPT regime and the current situation holds, the big loser would be Russia, which made a reckless jump to the U.S. side of the fence on the Iran issue, not only futzing on completion of the Bushehr nuclear power station and joining the sanctions chorus, but also holding up delivery of a anti-aircraft defense system that Iran, apparently, is rather keen to install.

The big winners are Israel, which retains its position as America's indispensable and embattled ally in the Middle East--and China, which gets to occupy the Iran's superpower patron slot previously occupied by Moscow.

Now, moving on to bones, bombs, and monkeys:

Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey is, to my mind, the apogee of his creative achievement.

It is also a movie about disarmament.

President Obama will perhaps be depressed or inspired to learn that, in the opinion of Kubrick and screenwriter Arthur C. Clarke, true disarmament will be a process of finite but not brief duration--maybe 200,000 years.

In 2001's prologue, a pack of put-upon vegetarian apes learns, with the help of an alien monolith, to slaughter competitors and four-legged food opportunities with hand-held weapons.

The prologue ends with the savviest and most bloodthirsty ape, Moonwatcher, flinging his bone club triumphantly into the sky.

As it soars upward, the sky grows dark and--in what has been described as the "longest jumpcut in the history of cinema"--the bone morphs into a spacecraft orbiting Earth many millenia later (the picture at the top of the post).

As one should expect, given Kubrick's obsessive attention to artistic and narrative coherence, the cut is not just a cute, clever transition.

The elongated satellite recapitulates both the shape and function of the bone club: it's an orbiting nuclear weapon.

As Kubrick and Clarke envisaged the narrative (preserved in Clarke's novelization), Bowman--after his accelerated evolution into the godlike Starchild--would return to Earth and, as his first order of business, telekinetically detonate all the space weapons and usher the planet into a post-nuclear nirvana.

However, Kubrick--despite the exemplary forebearance of MGM, which gave him complete artistic control and was permanently barred from the set for its pains--ran out of time and money after three years.

So there is no spectacular explosion, perhaps with those Saturn rings that are so popular these days and, for that matter, no aliens--whose credible depiction was much desired by Kubrick and Clarke but abandoned as unattainable.

Instead, the film stands as a classic of hypnotic, seductive, open-ended ambiguity--much like the disarmament process itself.

Israel, Iran, and Obama’s NPT “Grand Bargain”

A Great Deal for Russia, But Not for China

I have an article up at Asia Times titled US seeks to turn China over Iran sanctions.

I go over the evidence that the United States is trying to shift gears and engage China as a great power with an acknowledged stake in Iran, and not just an amoral, oil-grubbing obstacle to America’s Middle East diplomacy.

I make the case that the Obama administration’s top two China hands, James Steinberg and Jeffrey Bader, don’t have a lot of levers when they go to Beijing this week. The U.S. is intent on rolling back China in the Middle East and elsewhere, and there is little in the way of concrete “strategic reassurance” (Mr. Steinberg’s coinage describing the current U.S. policy) that we have to offer.

That doesn’t mean that China won’t look at the disposition of forces and abstain or even vote “aye” or “yea” or “yippy-ki-yay m***” in the Security Council; it means whatever they do, they won’t be happy about getting pushed to the wall on Iran and they’ll be thinking about short-and-long-term countermeasures.

One of the things that the Chinese will be thinking about is the NPT Reform Conference in New York City in May 2010.

This extremely boring-sounding conference is actually the linchpin of President Obama’s strategy to re-order the international security order on the basis of a multilateralized commitment by the developed world to forestall proliferation of nuclear weapons technology—instead of building military and diplomatic coalitions around America’s need to assert full-spectrum dominance over its enemies and competitors.

I think the correct frame to view America’s rather over-the-top campaign to bring Iran to heel through sanctions is not “mad mullahs must not be allowed to gain nuclear weapons and bully our buddies in Middle East sandbox”.

Instead, neutralizing Iran should be viewed in the context of the Obama’s administrations efforts to universalize its non-proliferation doctrine by dealing with the most aggravating and problematic proliferation issue.

Not Iran.

Israel.

The presence of Israel at the forefront of the effort to impose “crippling” sanctions on Iran is something of an anomaly.

Israel is itself a proliferation bad boy. It isn’t a member of the NPT; it has a highly destabilizing undeclared arsenal of over 200 nuclear weapons; and it proliferated in a major way to the apartheid regime in South Africa.

Arab countries have routinely deplored the West’s double standard in ignoring Israel’s existing nuclear weapons transgressions while fixating on Iran’s unproved and unprovable intentions.

It would appear to be paradoxical for the Obama administration—which makes a fetish out of deep thinking and forward planning—to send Israel around the world to carry the flag for Iran sanctions.

But that’s exactly what happened.

Israel’s Defense Minister, Ehud Barak, just concluded a trip to the United States to lobby for sanctions.

Benjamin Netanyahu paid a high-profile visit to Russia to bargain for its UNSC vote.

An Israeli delegation just returned from beating the sanctions drum in China.

The action is not limited to permanent members of the UN Security Council.

Israeli delegations are also lobbying non-permanent members of the Security Council—countries that can’t veto a sanctions resolution but can contribute to the nine-vote yes tally needed to pass it—far from Israel’s conventional sphere of influence and interest.

Countries like Brazil, Gabon, and Uganda.

To me, all this activity makes sense only in terms of the Obama administration’s overarching desire to reshape the global security regime around non-proliferation.

And I think those plans include an as yet publicly undisclosed role for Israel.

President Obama’s claim to global moral and geopolitical leadership rests in considerable part on his championing of the cause of nuclear disarmament—the primary justification for his Nobel Peace Prize.

The Obama administration’s ambitions for a “grand bargain” reconciling nuclear-weapons and non-nuclear states within the framework of a new and improved NPT are a matter of detailed public record.

They involve universal participation in a stringent NPT regime achieved by a full toolbox of carrots and sticks: a de facto ban on domestic enrichment by nuclear have-nots enabled by an internationalized LEU fuel supply facility in Russia and universal adoption of the adversarial Model Additional Protocol; a new START treaty with Russia, a U.S. commitment to a denuclearized security regime by promulgation of a new, no-nukes Nuclear Posture Review, and negotiation of a ban on creation of new fissile material to deliver on the forgotten promise of disarmament by the nuclear weapons states under the NPT; and U.S. ratification of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.

The whole Obama approach, with its core elements of a new START treaty and Russian hosting of the LEU facility, seems designed to welcome Russia—the most significant player in nuclear weapons outside of the United States—into the world security-regime fold as a key partner instead of an antagonist.

Beating on Iran for its unpopular nuclear program at Washington’s behest would seem to be a small price to pay for the opportunity for Moscow to join Obama’s non-proliferation team, end the U.S. campaign to isolate and harass it geopolitically, and perhaps gain acceptance of the “near-beyond” in Eastern Europe and Central Asia as Russia’s legitimate sphere of influence.

It’s not surprising that Moscow is interested in playing ball with Washington as a result.

Despite all these interlocking and complementary initiatives, it is difficult to see how the nuclear-weapon lions will lie down with the nukeless lambs unless the U.S. also has plans to bring Israel into a new non-proliferation regime, perhaps as part of an India-style deal that allows it to declare and keep its weapons.

In the past, Israeli participation in any international nuclear arms control regime was considered to be impossible.

Israel has not declared its nuclear arsenal and is not a signatory of the Non-Proliferation Treaty which, as recently as May 2009, it derided as totally ineffectual.

However, the Obama administration’s outreach to Iran in early 2009 and a contemporaneous call for all nations—with Israel explicitly named—to sign the NPT treaty elicited great dismay in Israel.

Israel faced the possibility that, in the case of a U.S. nuclear deal and rapprochement with Tehran, Israel would be isolated as the nuclear rogue state and would have to negotiate the status of its arsenal from a position of weakness.

This apparently inspired a sea change in Israeli attitudes toward the NPT regime.

For whatever reason, the U.S. outreach to Iran failed to bear fruit and Israel seems to have made the intricate adjustments necessary to replace Iran as a key supporting element in President Obama’s global disarmament strategy.

By a remarkable coincidence, the crucial event may have been revealed just as the West presented its doomed nuclear fuel swap proposal in Geneva on October 1, 2009:

On October 2, 2009, Eli Lake reported in the Washington Times that President Obama had, at Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s request, agreed to reaffirm the “don’t ask don’t tell” policy toward the Israeli nuclear arsenal that has prevailed since the Nixon administration: that the United States would passively accept Israel’s nuclear weapons status as long as Israel did not declare or test a device.”

In the context of President Obama’s overarching commitment to the NPT, there was immediate speculation as to the possible quid pro quo he demanded for continuing the charade of ignoring Israel’s nuclear weapons status.

Lake quoted David Albright of ISIS as remarking:

"One hopes that the price for such concessions is Israeli agreement to the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and the Fissile Material Cutoff Treaty and an acceptance of the long-term goal of a Middle East weapons-of-mass-destruction-free zone," he said.

The “long term goal” is described in Israel as the “long corridor”:

Israel has declared it will officially eschew nuclear weapons if the nations of the Middle East sign peace treaties acknowledging Israel’s right to exist, and the region is devoid of all weapons of mass destruction, including chemical and biological as well as nuclear weapons, and missile stockpiles have been decreased.

That, of course, brings us to Iran and its enrichment program.

It is difficult to understand Israel’s high-profile involvement in the Iran sanctions negotiations unless Israel has come to an understanding with the United States concerning entry into the non-proliferation regime and has been charged with communicating assurances to the various skeptical nations that it is poised to become an NPT good citizen if the Iran problem is dealt with in a satisfactory way.

If President Obama hopes to bring Israel to the NPT Review party in New York City in May 2010, it looks like he’s going to need Iran’s scalp on his belt—Iran convincingly isolated and ostracized by the family of nations because of its insistence on its enrichment rights.

But he also might just be bringing an Iran mess.

There are signs that the NPT Review Conference in New York in May 2010 is eerily recapitulating the debacle at the Copenhagen climate conference in December 2009.

It appears the Obama administration will enter the conference with only a fraction of the national commitments needed to put it in the moral and diplomatic driver’s seat and impose the deal it made with a small circle of great powers on the hundred-plus developing nations.

Cooperation with Russia on START and establishment of the internationalized LEU fuel facility are well advanced.

However, Laura Rozen reports that the Russian leadership is unwilling to pull the trigger and announce the conclusion of an agreement.

I think the Russians understand that, without the START treaty, President Obama risks going into the NPT conference virtually empty-handed.

America’s own ratification of the crucial Model Additional Protocol for IAEA safeguards is gutted by an enormous national security exemption; thanks to DoD resistance, the Nuclear Posture Review posture calls for continued improvement of the US nuclear arsenal instead of its elimination; and ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and negotiation of a Fissile Material Cutoff Treaty are distant dreams, given the implacable and united hostility of the emboldened Republicans in Congress.

In the absence of significant progress in the United States, a new START treaty and a startling, new public statement by Israel concerning its willingness to enter into the non-proliferation regime are the best hopes for the Obama administration to go into the NPT review conference with some momentum.

I think the Russians realize they have this leverage and are making life miserable for the U.S. negotiators. That includes dancing around on the issue of Iran sanctions which, if my theory holds, has been sold to Moscow by the U.S. and Israel as the linchpin of a new non-proliferation regime with Russia near its center.

China is really the odd man out in this scenario, especially if a non-proliferation united front including Israel, Russia, and the Arab States orchestrated by the United States trumps China’s preferred tactic--economic and diplomatic engagement--as the preferred method for dealing with Tehran.

China may decide to take a leaf from its Copenhagen playbook and act as the spoiler at the NPT conference in alliance with elements in the developing world that will be shut out of the nuclear fuel cycle by the strict new NPT regime envisioned by the United States.

Or, as the U.S. apparently hopes, Beijing will decide to stick to its knitting in Greater China, while leaving the rest of the world as spheres of influence for the United States, Russia, India, and Brazil.

Grand bargain, indeed.

China Sends Iran Back to the IAEA

I have an article up at Asia Times entitled China fine-tunes its Iran strategy.

I read the Chinese tea leaves (People’s Daily and Global Times) to come to the conclusion that China wishes to avoid a UN Security Council vote on Iran sanctions. Beijing fears that any UN vote, with a Chinese yea vote or abstention, or even with a nay vote, will serve as the politically enabling factor for harsh national sanctions that the US and key EU countries are teeing up.

I’m afraid that after Copenhagen, his travails in the U.S. Congress and, most importantly because of his strategy of leaving China as the last sanctions domino to fall (instead of giving Beijing face and reassurance by engaging it first and foremost), President Obama is suffering a credibility and mojo deficit in the eyes of the Chinese, and they will be extremely skeptical of any assurances that he can provide Beijing the opportunity to exert a moderating influence on any post-UNSCR rush to national sanctions.

So I concluded that China would recommend to Iran to try to keep this matter bottled up in the IAEA, despite the replacement of the Iran-friendly ElBaradei with the West-tilting new DG, Yukiya Amano.

I supported this inference with Iranian and Chinese reporting of conciliatory Iranian moves toward the IAEA, and declarations of loyal fealty to the NPT.

Today, there was further evidence of an Iranian charm offensive, in the form of a formal letter to the IAEA re-opening the matter of fuel for the Tehran Research Reactor (TRR).

The TRR swap is apparently the great lost opportunity of US-Iran nuclear diplomacy.

To a certain extent, the conventional narrative concerning the TRR swap (Iran would ship its 3.5% U₂₃₅ Low Enriched Uranium to Russia for further enrichment and receive fuel plates for the TRR in return) appears to be correct.

Iran, by not making an open and positive response to the offer when it was officially tendered in October, blew it.

However, I’m of the suspicion that Iran had plenty of help.

The swap was grew out of a request by Iran in June 2009 for help from the IAEA in obtaining new fuel plates for the TRR, an elderly reactor originally provided by the US to the Shah that still produces medical isotopes in Tehran. The Obama administration was brought into the deal, the response from Iran (presumably representing President Ahmadinejad’s views) was positive, and apparently a great deal of open-hand-not-closed-fist excitement ensued in the White House.

However, it would seem largely because of French and Israeli resistance (which, given France’s desire to assert itself in the Levant as a serious power at Iran’s expense, may be one and the same thing), the trust-building measure turned into an adversarial disablement proposal.

According to an authentic-looking internal French government document that was leaked and posted on the Arms Control Wonk website, the French insisted in September that the EU’s “freeze-for freeze” mechanism (a demand, detested by Tehran, that Iran suspend all enrichment work in return for a suspension of sanctions) be part of the deal; that no less than 1200 kg of LEU in a single shipment be involved; and the deal had to be accepted and the LEU had to come out by the end of 2009 before any plates went in.

And, according to the West, it would take about a year to grunt out the 264 pounds of fuel plates (which would be fabricated in France after the Russians enriched the LEU to 19.75%), an assertion that the Iranians found highly dubious.

The way the whole thing played out made Ahmadinejad look like a chump.

Instead of a friendly, historic exchange with the United States (apparently, rapprochement with the United States is not a matter of serious dispute in Iranian circles; the only question is, which political grouping will get to take the credit and reap the rewards), he was supposed to publicly knuckle under to the West in an adversarial process, give up most of his LEU immediately and without negotiation in exchange for nothing, and wait and hope his plates (and political windfall) showed up a year later.

Like I said, Ahmadinejad blew it, but it looks like he had lots of outside and inside help.

If you look at the situation and drew the conclusion that some parties were determined to make sure that Ahmadinejad was deprived of his “Nixon Goes to China” moment with the Great Satan, well, we’re on the same page.

The current Iranian approach to the IAEA on the TRR has been rejected by the United States and we may very well be looking at nothing more than diplomatic kabuki as both sides gird themselves for the struggle to decide whether the Iranian issue is addressed by a UNSC resolution.

That the Obama administration has given up on its noble aim to engage with Iran is indicated by the rather inexplicable decision to acquiesce to Israel’s assumption of a high profile role as sanctions cheerleader to the EU, Russia, and even China.

Israel is, of course, not a member of the NPT or IAEA , allegedly maintains an undeclared and highly destabilizing arsenal of 200+ nuclear warheads, and proliferated in a major way to the South African apartheid regime.

Not exactly the poster child for the NPT and IAEA.

Which may be another reason why the Chinese would tell the Iranians to push the IAEA angle.

The United States might have a compelling reason to dig a grave for the Teheran Research Reactor swap.

Opponents of the deal—call them cynics, cooler heads, Iran-haters, or, perhaps professional paranoiacs—could seize on the problem that the uranium in the fuel plates that Iran got back would be significantly enriched—from 3.5% up to 19.75%--and apparently in a form that could, without much ado, be used as feedstock for enrichment to weapons grade (80%).

According to Arms Control Wonk, the plates in the Tehran Research Reactor are simply sintered U₃O₈, and Iran already has the chemistry and processing know-how to needed to turn that kind of plate into feedstock for weapons-grade enrichment.

And, at 19.75% enrichment, the West would have already done most of Iran’s enrichment work for it.

Jeffrey Lewis of AWC, offered a useful analogy along these lines: imagine a box filled with 100 tennis balls, of which four are red (U₂₃₅)and the rest white (U₂₃₈). To upgrade the red balls to 20% of the total, you have to throw away 80 tennis balls for a ratio of 4 red to 16 white. To get to 80% red balls, you just have to throw away another 15 balls to get your final ratio of 4:1.

The West would be throwing away 80 of the tennis balls on Tehran’s behalf, and apparently it’s relatively trivial for Iran to take care of the remaining 15.

So the wonderful and thrilling humanitarian gesture of providing new fuel plates for the Tehran Research Reactor could be construed, and probably was construed, by Iran’s legion of informed critics, as a potential acceleration of Iran’s weaponization program.

Oops.

ACW’s Geoffrey Forden proposed that the plates be fabricated as a uranium-beryllium compound, based on the idea that separating out beryllium is a difficult and novel technical task and Iran would have to expend time, money, and conspicuous effort to develop new technology and processes in order to extract the uranium from the fuel plates for the dreaded weaponization breakout.

Unfortunately, just as careful cooks don’t lightly substitute margarine for butter in their recipes, responsible and careful operators of nuclear reactors apparently don’t toss in a brand new type of fuel plate without furrowed brows and lots of technical and safety hand-wringing.

It would be understandable if the Iranians wondered if the US was going to assist Iran with a crash-reengineering and retrofit of the Tehran reactor for the uranium beryllium fuel—and take responsibility if things didn’t go right—and looked at this kind of hocus-pocus with a jaundiced eye.

I suppose, when this chapter in the endless history of the US-Iran nuclear dispute is penned, we’ll find out if the issue of the potential proliferation risk of the new fuel plates was covered ahead of time during the excited White House confabs over Iran’s offer, or came up later as one of those classic “Ms. Titanic-meet-Mr. Iceberg” oh sh*t moments.

If the latter was the case 1) Ahmadinejad would have been suspected of setting a perfidious trap and 2) the White House would backpedaled away from the deal at light speed to avoid appearing to be Iran’s dupe and 3) thrown up a bunch of roadblocks in order to reduce the perceived proliferation and political danger.

In any case, with the help of the revelation of a secret Iranian enrichment facility near Qom (known by Western intelligence for over three years, but somehow not revealed until the eve of the formal conference between Iran and the West on the swap at the beginning of October 2009 and necessitating a critical report by the IAEA in the last month of ElBaradei’s term; bad luck, Mr. Ahmadinejad!), the Tehran Research Reactor deal became a theater for heightened suspicions of Iran’s proliferation intentions and not the confidence-building diplomatic exercise it was originally intended to be.

And the inevitable outcome of suspicion is, apparently, sanctions.

Funny ‘bout that.