The International Atomic Energy Agency does not want to be held responsible for starting a war.
The IAEA and its director, Mohamed El Baradei, jointly won the Nobel peace prize in 2005 for their “efforts to prevent nuclear energy from being used for military purposes and to ensure that nuclear energy, for peaceful purposes, is used in the safest possible way”.
So naturally enough, the Egyptian does not wish to sully that highlight on his stellar CV by starting a war with Iran, or at least by allowing others – the Americans, the Europeans or the Israelis – to pick a fight with Iran on the basis of his or his agency’s deliberations.
This, I think, explains some of the caution with which the IAEA talks about Iran. In one breath El Baradei said in Tehran yesterday that Iran would allow access to its previously secret underground nuclear facility near Qum on October 25th – a shift “from confrontation into transparency and cooperation”, as he rosily put it. But then in the next breath the Nobel laureate talked about “concerns about Iran’s future intentions”.
A leaked IAEA report in Saturday’s New York Times goes much further, claiming IAEA experts believe Iran has “acquired sufficient information to be able to design and produce a workable” nuclear bomb.
So will the real IAEA please stand up? Is Iran a threat to global peace and developing a nuclear weapon in secret, or is it not? What is astonishing about the IAEA’s confidential report – and its nuclear experts visit Iran regularly – is that it goes far beyond the cautious assessments of western intelligence agencies.
The CIA is now having to re-evaluate its worst case scenario for Iran, not on the basis of what El Baradei says but on the basis of what he does not say.
For the director is leaving with that Nobel prize firmly intact, and he has reportedly blocked his agency’s own worrying report from being made public. What the IAEA has said in public is that it has “no concrete proof” that Iran ever tried to acquire a nuclear bomb.
The result is that the IAEA is left looking like a two-headed monster – or perhaps a fire-breathing dragon which extinguishes its own flames.
We know from the false assumptions in the run-up to the Iraq war that going too hard on selective intelligence is foolish and dangerous.
But there are presumably other dangers from riding two horses at once – the dangers of damaging the IAEA’s credibility and possibly making it even harder for negotiations with Iran, now involving the Americans, to make any progress.