The Iranian Inspections Mirage
http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-iranian-inspections-mirage-1437607825
Tehran will have much time and many loopholes to exploit.
‘Around-the-clock monitoring of Iran’s key nuclear facilities.” “Access to Iran’s entire nuclear supply chain.” “Access [to] any suspicious location.” “Access where necessary, when necessary.” “Unprecedented verification.”
These are among the claims President Obama is making about the inspections and enforcement contained in the Iran deal, which are supposed to reassure Americans that Tehran won’t cheat—or at least that it will be promptly caught and punished if it does. A closer look tells a different story.
Take that carefully finessed phrase, “where necessary, when necessary.” This is supposed to be the Administration’s version of “anytime, anywhere” inspections that experts have long insisted needs to be a condition of any agreement.
But what the deal specifies—Annex One, Section Q—is that International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors will first have to ask Iran’s permission to visit a suspicious location: “The IAEA will provide Iran the reasons for access in writing and will make available relevant information.” After that, Iran has the chance to propose “alternative means” to address IAEA suspicions. All of that will take some unspecified period of time.
Only then, presumably, does the clock start ticking on the 14 days specified in the agreement for the IAEA and Iran to discuss the IAEA request. If the two sides can’t agree after two weeks, the matter goes to an eight-member “Joint Commission,” which includes Iran, Russia and China, and which would vote on “the necessary means to resolve the IAEA’s concerns.” That process is supposed to take no more than a week, after which Iran has three days to implement any decision.
Mr. Obama claims this is more than adequate, since it gives Iran no more than 24 days to prevaricate before the IAEA gets to inspect, and because we’ll be watching from satellites to make sure Iran isn’t loading suspicious crates onto trucks. But depending on how Iran interprets such ambiguous clauses as “relevant information” and “alternative means,” this process could stretch to a lot longer than 24 days. Even 24 days isn’t exactly a snap inspection, since a lot of nuclear work—like a bomb itself—doesn’t require vast spaces.
“There is a lot the regime can do [to hide material] in a few hours, let alone days,” Charles Duelfer, the former Iraq weapons inspector, told us last week. “So this allows room for Iran to maneuver and potentially hide much of what it is doing regarding weapons design or component testing.”
This assumes that all sides adhere to the prescribed timetable—doubtful, given the nature of all multinational bureaucracies—and that the Joint Commission, which also includes the U.S. and West Europeans, will always vote to give the inspectors full access, rather than arriving at some lowest-common denominator fudge. Meantime, Iran would seek to find out the IAEA’s sources and methods as it digested the agency’s information and drew conclusions about what else the inspectors might know.
Then there’s the President’s claims about “24/7” monitoring of “key nuclear facilities.” All of those facilities were once hidden and undeclared—a reminder that the whole point of an inspections regime is to discover the non-key facilities where Iran might be doing illicit work.
The Administration is also boasting that the deal establishes a dedicated “procurement channel,” through which it will be required to purchase all of its nuclear-related material. This is supposed to stop Iran from illicitly shopping for spare nuclear parts—which it has repeatedly been caught doing during the 18 months of negotiations.
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Yet as sanctions on Iran are lifted and Iranian companies (or their middlemen) gain commercial access to the West, it will become all but impossible to prevent Iran from buying whatever it wants, wherever it wants. “The procurement channel could work in a world where financial institutions, commercial companies and traders were frightened by aggressive sanctions enforcement,” says Mark Dubowitz of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. But he says the deal makes such enforcement impossible in practice.
Defenders of the deal also claim that while no inspections process is perfect, this is the strongest we’ve ever had. False again. As Mr. Duelfer says, “the forensic inspection activity pursued in Iraq was far more aggressive than it will be in Iran.” Those inspections came about only because the West used coercive diplomacy to extract them—the opposite of our approach to Iran.
All of this adds up to an agreement that appears to have a lot more, and a lot larger, inspection holes than Mr. Obama is claiming. Congress should locate, inspect and then broadcast those holes to educate the public.
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