Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s revelation of documents proving Iran worked on a nuclear warhead have fundamentally changed the debate ahead of President Trump’s May 12 deadline to determine whether or not to walk away from the Iran nuclear deal, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action.
Advocates of the Iran nuclear deal say that Netanyahu’s exposure of 100,000 documents is proof that the Iran deal worked because, they insist, the agreement ended such Iranian work. That is far from clear.
What is worrisome, however, is how proponents of the JCPOA ignore two problems: First is Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif’s previous insistence that Iran had never worked on nuclear weapons, and second was that former President Barack Obama accepted Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s supposed fatwa against nuclear weapons as evidence that Iran was sincere. In reality, Netanyahu’s bombshell shows both Zarif and Khamenei have lied repeatedly, raising questions about their honesty about every aspect of Iran’s nuclear program.
The bigger problem, and one that should lead to resignations, is with the International Atomic Energy Agency. Contrary to those who argue that Netanyahu’s revelations reveal nothing new, the documents show both that the size and scope of Iran’s program was far greater than the IAEA realized and that Tehran sought illicitly to retain the ability to reconstitute its program. And yet, the IAEA missed the extent of Iran’s nuclear program, all the while giving cover for largely political reasons that the deal was working.
This represents the IAEA’s second major failure. In 1991, after the IAEA gave Saddam Hussein’s Iraq 11 clean bills of health certifying that Baghdad was not working on a covert nuclear program, documents and Saddam’s own son-in-law revealed that Saddam had fooled IAEA inspectors. As a result, the IAEA created the Additional Protocol which 129 states have signed and ratified. (While Iran has signed the agreement to close loopholes in the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, it has refused to ratify the agreement and so has not committed permanently to the more rigorous inspection regime which JCPOA advocates imply).
Simply put, the IAEA should be ashamed, and IAEA Director Yukiya Amano should be out of a job. Under Amano, the IAEA succumbed to diplomatic pressure to push aside its standards in order to bless a deeply flawed agreement and maintain the fiction that it could certify Iran’s compliance under its watered down parameters.
Iran, after all, was not the first country whose nuclear program the IAEA was asked to certify to be clean. When the Soviet Union fell, Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan forfeited their legacy nuclear programs. In 1991, South Africa came in from the cold with regard to its covert program. Even with a fully compliant government, however, it still took the IAEA 19 years to certify South Africa’s compliance to be complete.
And yet, without conducting its own inspection of any Iranian military site, the IAEA gave Iran a free pass. The international community, meanwhile, required Libya to physically dismantle its program, a precedent which neither Obama nor the IAEA upheld. Rather than approach Iran with a critical eye, Amano was willing to look the other way. He degraded the IAEA for political reasons. Rather than give Iran a clean slate, Amano should have held Tehran to the same standards the IAEA had held South Africa and the rest. To make an analogy, rather than uphold university standards, Amano decided to dumb down the standard by which Iran would be judged to junior high summer school. On top of all this, the IAEA agreed to look the other way and then equate the resulting lack of evidence with lack of malfeasance.
Iran has cheated, but make no mistake — by allowing itself to become the agent to politicize and twist intelligence instead of dictating to diplomats standards for inspections and verification, the IAEA has degraded itself and permanently undercut its reputation and raised questions about its ability to fulfill its mission. Amano should go.
Michael Rubin (@Mrubin1971) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a former Pentagon official.
