MOSCOW (RIA Novosti commentator Pyotr Goncharov) - Although experts from the International Atomic Energy Agency recently started an inspection of Iran's nuclear facilities, without any prior warning, the trip hardly came as a surprise.
This is not simply because the Additional Protocol (safeguards agreements) to the Non-Proliferation Treaty stipulates such inspections without prior warning. Even the date of the inspection, from June 7 to 18, was not surprising. The IAEA Board of Governors is to convene on June 13, and Iran is to hold presidential elections on June 17. The results of the inspection will be crucial in both cases.
This time the IAEA Board instructed its experts to verify how Iran was honoring its commitments to halt uranium enrichment projects. Indeed, there is a serious reason for the inspection.
During the latest, emergency round of Iran-EU talks in Geneva, the European "troika" (Britain, France and Germany) promised Tehran it would compile a new program for solving the "nuclear file" problem by late July or early August. In return, it asked Tehran to prolong the moratorium on uranium enrichment for two months.
Tehran made the promise but its authorities have since signaled that they might not honor it. The other day the Iranian parliament sent an official letter to the president, asking him to permit the resumption of the projects and peaceful study of nuclear technologies. This means that the country has been split into the proponents and opponents of the moratorium and the Geneva obligation may fall victim to their struggle. So, this is the right time to see what is going on.
Another crucial element of the inspection is that the April session of the IAEA Board decided, at the request of the United States, to postpone the election of the IAEA general director until June. The Washington delegate was the only one at that session to sharply object to the re-election of Mohamed ElBaradei for a third term.
The U.S. claims that ElBaradei is too "soft" to Iran. By demanding the postponement to June, Washington hoped to get additional time to win over the ear of other countries on the Board, put ElBaradei out of the running, and advance an alternative compromise candidate to his post.
This gives a whiff of the atmosphere at the planned meeting between U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and IAEA General Secretary ElBaradei in the next few days. Rice said she intended to discuss with him his view of the IAEA plans for the next, crucial few years. According to her, Iran would be a key issue on the talks' agenda.
Suppose the surprise IAEA inspection finds - or does not find - condemning facts concerning Iran's moratorium on uranium projects. The results will influence the meeting of IAEA's head with Rice and his re-election prospects.
The trouble is that Tehran's nuclear pledges made at the talks are frequently denounced by the statements of its top officials or organizations. It is very difficult to see what line Tehran will choose: Will it honor the agreements reached at the talks or act on the statements subsequently made by its top officials?
Tehran surely knows about the U.S. dreams of proving it guilty of having a nuclear weapons program and submitting such proof to the UN in the hope that it would approve sanctions against Iran. It sometimes seems that Tehran is deliberately provoking the harsh actions of its negotiating partner, the European troika, and the U.S., which stands behind them.
Why is Tehran doing this? Is it overconfident of its nuclear policy? Hardly. The inability of the IAEA to prove formally the existence of a nuclear weapons program in Iran and Iran's inability to prove the absence of such a program would not suit the IAEA, or the European troika, or Russia, to judge by President Putin's recent statements, let alone the U.S.
Tehran clearly prepared for the "surprise" inspection. At the same time, the two IAEA experts who have come to Iran for a 12-day inspection will apparently work particularly hard. If they find uranium traces in the Iranian centrifuges, the U.S. will get the much desired levers to pressurize the future Iranian president through the EU. He and his administration will have to dismantle the "uranium obstructions" at the new talks with the EU.
