April 9, 2008 – 10:07 a.m.
A panel of experts at a Senate Finance Committee hearing Tuesday dismissed the extremes — war and acquiescence — in the search for answers to dealing with a nuclear Iran, but found no clear resolution in the muddled middle.
Only one thing was certain, said Phillip Gordon, senior foreign policy fellow at the Brookings Institution: Despite the December 2007 National Intelligence Estimate that concluded Iran had halted part of its nuclear weapons program, there was no question the country was pursuing nuclear weapons.
And that situation, most concluded, was untenable for the United States, Saudi Arabia, Israel and the rest of the world.
U.S. sanctions have had a minimal effect, mainly because Russia and China have not stopped assisting the Islamic Republic in its nuclear ambitions on the one hand and buying its oil on the other, the witnesses said.
Oil, the main source of revenue to the Islamic theocracy, has topped $100 a barrel, Gordon said, and is generating $80 billion more per year than it did several years ago. This fact, coupled with the U.S.’s inability to gain China and Russia’s cooperation, has given rise to a bill designed to strengthen the U.S. hand.
The legislation (
The bill, which has 70 cosponsors almost evenly divided between the two parties, would:
• Prohibit the United States from cooperating with Russia on its nuclear program until Russia suspends all nuclear assistance and conventional weapons deals with Iran and Iran halts all nuclear enrichment activities.
• Prohibit imports from and exports to Iran, except food and medicine.
• Prevent trade agreements or World Trade Organization (WTO) membership to Iran and those nations aiding its nuclear and ballistic missile programs.
• Penalize U.S. subsidiaries of foreign companies for violating the laws against dealings with Iran.
• Eliminate certain tax incentives for oil companies that invested in Iran.
• Reduce the U.S. contribution to the World Bank by the amount the bank lends to Iran, with the freed-up revenue going to the U.S. Agency for International Development.
• Support the creation of an international nuclear fuel bank by the International Atomic Energy Agency.
Finance Committee Chairman
“We cannot fail to act because we have concerns. Rather, we must address and resolve the concerns,” Baucus said.
Gordon answered by saying he applauded the effort and the basic approach, but had some reservations.
Any measures that could divide the international community or lead to legal challenges from allies at the WTO or elsewhere would undermine the recent progress made in multilateral sanctions, he said. Effectively isolating Iran would require a broad international effort.
This is evident by the fact that Iran continues to enrich uranium despite U.N. Security Council resolutions demanding its suspension and the “highly misleading” National Intelligence Estimate of 2007, Gordon said.
That estimate narrowly defined a nuclear weapons program as nuclear weapon design and covert enrichment of fissile materials. The fact that Iran was conducting its uranium enrichment out in the open didn’t disqualify it from being labeled as pursuing nuclear weapons, he said.
Iran, Gordon said, is operating a pilot enrichment plant of 3,000 Pakistani model centrifuges at Natanz, which under optimistic conditions could generate enough fissile material for a nuclear bomb in about a year.
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad announced Tuesday that Iran had begun installing 6,000 new centrifuges at Natanz.
It also is building an industrial-scale facility with 54,000 centrifuges, which could produce material for several weapons within weeks. Another plant under construction in Arak could give Iran yet another pathway to the bomb through plutonium reprocessing.
Legislative Questions
Given all that, the witnesses said they still had some problems with the legislation.
Penalizing U.S. subsidiaries of foreign companies could undermine multilateral efforts to isolate Iran, Gordon said. This is particularly true at a time when the international community has been acting to isolate Iran politically and economically.
Since 2006, the U.N. Security Council has required Iran to suspend its enrichment program and imposed sanctions prohibiting the supply of nuclear materials, technology and dual-use items, freezing the assets of nuclear-related companies, restraining arms sales, and banning dealings with certain Iranian banks, Gordon said.
A number of countries have taken their own actions as well, with European banks refusing to do business with Iran and those in Bahrain, United Arab Emirates and Dubai also limiting their dealings with the country. Although Russia and China are stepping into the investment void, the policies are having an effect on the Iranian economy, Gordon said.
The prohibitions against nuclear cooperation with Russia would be too inflexible for presidential maneuvering down the road, he said. The bill includes a presidential certification process for some of its provisions, but it does not include a waiver that would give the president the authority to bypass the sanctions in the interest of national security.
In addition, the World Bank provisions would be ineffective, considering that the bank hasn’t made a loan to Iran in two years, and could set a bad precedent other countries might choose to follow in pursuit of their own foreign policy objectives.
Orde Kittrie, a law professor at Arizona State University and a visiting professor of law at the University of Maryland, said he thought the sanctions could work, as they had with Iraq and Libya, in halting Iran’s nuclear program. But U.S. efforts would be enhanced with the help of Europe, which provides about a third of Iran’s imports, he said. If the European Union followed the U.S. lead with an additional embargo, the international community might quickly see results. Thus far, the level of sanctions have proven too weak.
“This is unfortunate, because Iran’s heavy dependence on international trade leaves it vulnerable,” Kittrie said.
William Reinsch, president of the National Foreign Trade Council and co-chairman of U.S.A. Engage, said passing the bill would come at a heavy price in terms of hindering international cooperation and limiting the president’s ability to conduct diplomacy, and would probably not achieve its objectives.
He cited a Peterson Institute for International Economics study that found unilateral sanctions in place from 1970 to 2000 have achieved their policy objectives only about a fifth of the time, and most of these sought modest changes.
In Iran’s case, the United States is limited because it already has enacted comprehensive restrictions on trade.
“Instead,” Reinsch said, “the best hope for altering Iran’s behavior is through vigorous and unified multilateral pressure in concert with our allies and Security Council partners, combined with direct diplomacy from Iran.”
Plan of Enrichment
At a National Iranian American Council conference Tuesday afternoon, another group of experts weighed in on U.S. options for reassessing the international nuclear non-proliferation strategy in the wake of the recent elections of the Majles, or Iranian parliament.
Hans Blix, chairman of the Weapons of Mass Destruction Commission and former director of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said he shared the views outlined by Thomas Pickering, a former undersecretary for political affairs and ambassador to several nations, in a March 20 New York Times Review of Books article.
In the article, Pickering and fellow authors William Luers, a former ambassador, and Jim Walsh, previously executive director of the Managing the Atom Project at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, argue that Iran should be allowed enrichment activities as part of a multinational, jointly managed effort on Iranian soil, which would make the country’s secretive nuclear activities more transparent, reducing avenues for proliferation and increasing dialogue on common interests.
The NIE and recent direct talks between the United States and Iran on reducing the flow of foreign fighters and improvised explosive devices into Iraq have opened the political space for renewed dialogue on nuclear issues, the authors write.
Talks with North Korea have borne results, Blix said, because it was given a guarantee against attacks or regime change; no such guarantees have been given to Iran.
“The talks with North Korea seem much more promising” he said.
Pickering said a proposal to engage Iran on its nuclear program should have three main points: the United States should be willing to talk with Iran without demanding the precondition that it agree to no uranium-enrichment activities, even for domestic energy use, which is within Iran’s rights under the Treaty on the Non-proliferation of Nuclear Weapons; any enrichment in Iran should be managed by a coalition of nations; and inspections should be conducted more extensively than required by the IAEA.
That approach might bring Iran back into the community of nations and off the track toward becoming a pariah state, Pickering said, but “I cannot tell you I’ve heard joyful noises in Washington on the idea.”
David Allbright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security, said Iran’s plans to double its centrifuges might continue it down that path.
But the U.S. solution requires an EU-like plan of robust inspections, a willingness to pre-negotiate and multilateral actions, not legislation that would punish allies that do trade with Iran.
“We should be seeking ways to work with our allies, not seeking ways to punish them,” Allbright said.
This piece originally appeared in CQ Homeland Security.