The author of the following journal article on comparisons between Iran and Iraq's treatment by the UNSC and the US asks whether coersive disamament tactics are "threatening instead of promoting regional and international peace and security?"
The interesting thing -- for me at least -- is how she acknowledges many of the same points I've been making all along: that the sanctions and threats directed against Iran are not only themselves illegan but have nothing to do with any actual nuclear threat, that no amount Iranian compromises will ever suffice, that the goalposts will be kept moving, and ever changing demands will be imposed, because ultimately this is about the US using the UNSC to promote a policy of regime change rather than actually addressing any real nuclear proliferation threats.
The controversial impact of WMD coercive arms control on international peace and security: lessons from the Iraqi and Iranian cases
By Coralie Pison Hindawi
Journal of Conflict & Security Law 16(3), 417-442
In late 2002, it was disclosed by an opposition group that Iran had undeclared nuclear facilities and had imported fissile material without informing the IAEA. … As a response, the Iranian government declared having adopted a policy of full disclosure and, following an agreement with France, Germany and the UK, decided to suspend all enrichment related and reprocessing activities, as well as to sign the Additional Protocol and start applying it in advance of its ratification. In the following months, the IAEA acknowledged good progress in its knowledge of the Iranian program.
Nevertheless, it progressively seemed that the real focus of the IAEA became more and more the issue of suspension of enrichment and reprocessing activities. And indeed, this appeared clearly when the IAEA Board of Governors finally decided to declare Iran in ‘non-compliance’ with its safeguards agreement in September 2005. Interestingly, this decision, which opened the door to the Security Council involvement, was not triggered by any new development of non-compliance with the safeguards agreement, but by the decision by Iran to restart enriching uranium after a break of almost 2 years.
In February 2006, the Security Council adopted a first resolution on the matter and a second one in July, this time under Chapter VII, in which the Council ‘[d]emand[ed] … that Iran shall suspend all enrichment-related and reprocessing activities, including research and development, to be verified by the IAEA’, turning the voluntary, confidence-building measure into a coercive, mandatory one, and starting to create an extraordinary legal status for Iran, including obligations that no other non-nuclear-weapon state has to abide by. …
If the negotiations were already difficult before the involvement of the UNSC acting under Chapter VII, this latter move clearly made things much more complicated and no doubt increased the level of confrontation. While the whole story and its technicalities cannot be presented here, going through the successive IAEA reports it can be seen that the resolutions adopted by the IAEA Board of governors, as well as the successive UNSC resolutions adopted on the issue, provide a certain understanding of the crisis that displays some worrying similarities with the coercive disarmament process of Iraq.
First of all, in both cases, the Security Council has placed additional, specific obligations on a country, which go beyond this state's legal obligations and beyond common international norms in the field. ..
Furthermore, following a pattern similar to that of the Iraqi case, in spite of the cooperation displayed by the Iranians from late 2003 until 2005 (among the most significant signs of which were the implementation of the Additional Protocol and the suspension of enrichment and reprocessing activities), the pressure on that state was not decreased but progressively increased…
In both cases, we are dealing with an arms control process that has no other stated aim than the very vague one of regaining trust in the fact that activities of the targeted state are entirely peaceful, making it difficult or maybe impossible to define clearly what will be necessary and how long it will take to close the arms control file. Accordingly, the process may continue endlessly, regardless of the progress being made, as it may never prove enough to have an absolute picture of previous activities and, more importantly, of future intentions.
In the meantime, we have a state which is subjected to extraordinary obligations and sanctions, evolving with time, and which has no clear idea of how much cooperation will actually be enough to regain its previous status. A state which, given its bad relationship with some permanent members of the Security Council, suspects that no amount of cooperation will ever be enough and may therefore be tempted to stop cooperating and engage in confrontation instead. Such a temptation is even easier to understand if, as in both of the cases studied, the targeted state is, on the one hand, asked for full and proactive cooperation while on the other it is regularly under threat of military action and subject to spying activities or other suspicious actions. In addition, we may have a government that, for domestic political reasons, has more to gain from maintaining an on-going confrontational attitude (even without actually having the intention to develop WMD) than from cooperating with a process which is perceived as humiliating and which can be suspected of leading nowhere.
Looking at the evolution of the crisis it is particularly striking to see how, several times, increased cooperation has actually led to harsher resolutions or further sanctions , or how more than once, it seemed that as soon as one file had been closed by the IAEA, new issues were raised.
…
Given the involvement of the UN Security Council acting under Chapter VII, one may be troubled by the idea that, short of unanimity among the permanent members, Iran under its current leadership may never be considered to have ‘fully complied’ with the Council's demand as long as the relationship between Iran and key Western countries does not improve. There are reasons to fear that we are witnessing, again, a state caught in the trap of the coercive approach to non-conventional arms control.
This is all the more worrying as [Iran] is a state which has chosen to be, and to stay, party to the NPT as a non-nuclear-weapon state, which has ratified a comprehensive safeguards agreement and displayed a willingness to ratify the Additional Protocol as well.
...
Recent Comments