In Nuclear Poker, The Deck Is Stacked

It's a tale of two headlines really:

Fox News: IAEA Chief Can't Guarantee Iran's Nuclear Program Is Peaceful.

ElBaradei, whose agency has spent more than four years probing the nature of Tehran's nuclear activities, also said the IAEA remains "unable to provide the required assurance about the peaceful nature of Iran's nuclear program."

Unless Tehran takes "the long overdue decision" to cooperate with the IAEA, it "will have no option but to reserve its judgment about Iran's nuclear program, and as a result the international community will continue to express concern," he told reporters.

"Quite a few uncertainties still remain about experiments, procurements and other (nuclear) activities," he said, alluding to Iran's persistent refusal to meet agency requests for clarification about aspects of its nuclear program.

and

IRNA: No sign of Iran's deviation from peaceful nuclear activities - ElBaradei.

ElBaradei in his report asked Tehran to further clarify the remaining "trivial ambiguities" to enable the agency to come up with a clear stand on the country's nuclear activities.

Fox is the neoconservative news outlet of choice, IRNA is the state news service of Iran. So of course, both would say what they do.

And both headlines are correct, in their way.

That's the problem with talking about this subject - few, if any, of the news reports on Iran's nuclear problem aren't being spun by the motives of the news service as well as by every single government official each decides to ask for comment.

The IAEA are likewise hedging all bets, since they fully realize the pressure they are under from both sides of the argument to produce reports that read in their favor, as well as being fully aware of how everyone was railroaded into believing not finding WMD's in Iraq meant simply that the WMD's must be well hidden. The simple truth is they cannot at present prove Iran's program is intended to make weapons nor can they ever prove it is entirely peaceful. The proof for the first is finding an actual thing, an object - but it's impossible to find definite proof of the second because no object would exist to find. The logical deck is stacked.

The IAEA also realizes the Iranians haven't been fully co-operative, which doesn't look good but is entirely circumstantial:

Iran's verification case is sui generis (one of a kind)," Mohamed ElBaradei, director of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said in opening remarks to a gathering of the IAEA's 35-nation board of governors.


"Unlike other verification cases, the IAEA's confidence about the nature of Iran's programme has been shaken because of two decades of undeclared activities (until 2003)," he said.

"This confidence will only be restored when Iran takes the long overdue decision to explain and answer all the agency's questions and concerns about its past nuclear activities in an open and transparent manner."

But then again, why the hell should they be?

There are exactly ZERO inspections of American or British nuclear facilities after all. Nor are there any inspections in Israel or Pakistan, which get a skate on all Western threats and sanctions even though many nations in the region clearly feel that their (already existant rather than theoretical) nuclear arsenals are a threat.

The Gulf Arab states have said they simply want everyone to be treated equally - to have the right to nuclear energy and the same strictures on nuclear weapons.

A law that doesn't apply to all equally isn't a law at all - that's been the case since the Magna Carta. Maybe it's time for the existing nuclear powers, if they are really serious about non-proliferation, to decide which set of rules will apply to everyone.

Update Yes, I understand that Israel in particular worries about the Iranian nuclear program eventually producing a weapon. But when you can read that Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is discussing how to tighten sanctions on Iran with Stuart Levey, the U.S. Treasury's undersecretary for terrorism and financial intelligence, and you remember that Israel has nukes but isn't a member of the NPT and has no inspection regime - well, it just screams double standard.

Update According to the AP (H/t Raw Story):

Iran seems to have at least temporarily halted the uranium-enrichment program at the heart of its standoff with the U.N. Security Council, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency said Monday.

If this turns out to be true, i predict it will not make one damn bit of difference to the way in which the Bush administration approaches the situation like a belligerent and bellicose bulldozer. It's not really about halting Iran's progress towards nukes, it's about using Iran's nuclear program as an excuse to wield the stick on a nation which the neocons have decided is to be the next on the receiving end of American hegemony.