State Department spokesperson Jen Psaki’s sparring with reporters the last week suggests that the White House is either confused, or intentionally confusing the public, about the importance of the IAEA’s current round of inspections of Iranian nuclear facilities.
Journalists, and critics, keep pushing Psaki on the fact that Iran is preventing IAEA investigators from inspecting the full extent of the program, including potential military dimensions in places like Parchin. Psaki’s response Monday was that the implementation of a “monitoring mechanism…will be pivotal to whether Iran is abiding by their agreement.” Iran, she continued, will “be required to abide by any part of the agreement that is agreed to.”
The problem is that the post-agreement inspections Psaki refers to are supposed to be based on the results of the pre-agreement inspections. The IAEA needs to get in and count everything now in order to establish the benchmarks by which the P5+1 would be able to verify whether Iran is complying with any potential agreement. If the White House doesn’t know everything the Iranians have, if Tehran continues to stonewall inspectors, there is no way to know whether or not the Iranians are in compliance with the terms of the agreement. If the IAEA investigators can’t get in to count and catalog what Iran has pre-deal, post-deal inspections are a waste of time, and any agreement coming out of Geneva will not be worth the paper it’s printed on.
Let’s say, for instance, an agreement limits the number of centrifuges Iran is allowed to keep and how many it has to get rid of. If the IAEA doesn’t know how many the Iranians have, there’s no way to tell if the Islamic republic is keeping its word. Accordingly, this is not just another technical issue dividing the two sides, like how many centrifuges the Iranians get to keep, or whether sanctions relief will be immediate or phased. Rather, the verification regime goes to the very heart of any prospective deal.
Olli Heinonen, former deputy director of the IAEA, has been driving this point home for some time now. “There are things we know about Iran’s nuclear program, and things we don’t know,” he told me in Washington earlier this week.
The IAEA’s intelligence, as Heinonen explains, comes from multiple sources. “It’s not just an intelligence officer saying, hey I’ve got something.” It’s documents, says Heinonen, “like procurement records, or end-user certificates.” With that, as Heinonen explains, “the principle is simple: How much do they have? How much have they used? And where is the rest?”
The advantage inspectors have, says Heinonen, is that “Iran doesn’t know what we know.” That is, if they lie about aspects of their program, they’re taking the chance that they’re going to be caught lying.”
The problem, of course, is that it’s not clear this matters to the Obama administration. The fact that the White House is rushing full speed ahead toward the November 24 deadline, even as the Iranians refuse to open up everything for IAEA inspectors, suggests that the P5+1 negotiating team will continue to look the other way.
