The “FT”:http://news.ft.com/cms/s/a699d056-dae1-11da-aa09-0000779e2340.html has the text of the draft UNSC resolution that -the US,- France and the UK introduced.

These are the most interesting portions, IMO. Note the blank.

Concerned by the proliferation risks presented by the Iranian nuclear programme, mindful of the threat to international peace and security and its responsibilities in this regard, and determined to prevent an aggravation of the situation,

• Acting under Chapter VII of the Charter of the United Nations,

• Calls upon Iran without further delay to take the steps required by the IAEA Board of Governors in its resolution GOV/2006/14, which are essential to build confidence in the exclusively peaceful purpose of its nuclear programme and to resolve outstanding questions,

• Decides, in this regard, that Iran shall suspend all enrichment-related and reprocessing activities, including research and development, to be verified by the IAEA, and suspend the construction of a reactor moderated by heavy water,

• Expresses the conviction that such suspension as well as full, verified Iranian compliance with the requirements set out by the IAEA Board of Governors, would contribute to a diplomatic, negotiated solution that guarantees Iran’s nuclear programme is for exclusively peaceful purposes, and underlines the willingness of the international community to work positively for such a solution which will also benefit nuclear non-proliferation elsewhere,

[snip]

• Requests in [blank] days a report from the Director General of the IAEA on the process of Iranian compliance with the steps required by the IAEA Board and the above decisions, to the IAEA Board of Governors and in parallel to the Security Council for its consideration,

• Expresses its intention to consider such further measures as may be necessary to ensure compliance with this resolution and decides that further examination will be required should such additional steps be necessary,

• Notes that full verified compliance by Iran, confirmed by the IAEA Board, would avoid the need for such additional steps,

I would simply note that, if the UNSC _means_ that it will leave Iran alone if Tehran complies, then the resolution should _actually say_ that. That last sentence seems kinda vague.

And “according to the FT”:http://news.ft.com/cms/s/6b45c2ee-dae1-11da-aa09-0000779e2340.html, the Chinese aren’t fans:

bq. The move was backed by the US, but faced continued Russian and Chinese resistance to use of the UN’s tough chapter 7 enforcement powers, which determine a threat to international peace and security, and can be used to authorize sanctions or military force. “I don’t think this draft as it stands now will produce good results,” said Wang Gunagya, China’s UN ambassador.

*1.* I have discovered the one good argument for the US not negotiating directly with the Iranians: they would hand us our ass.

I reached this conclusion after reading the Q&A after “Bush’s 10 April speech”:http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2006/04/20060410-1.html at SAIS.

He said:

One of the decisions I made early on was to have a multinational approach to sending messages — clear messages to the Iranians that — that if they want to be a part of the — an accepted nation in the world, that they must give up their nuclear weapons ambitions. And we’re making pretty good progress.

By the way, if you’re studying how to achieve diplomatic ends, it might be worthwhile noting — I think at least — with the United States being the sole interlocutor between Iran, it makes it more difficult to achieve the objective of having the Iranians give up their nuclear weapons ambitions.

It’s amazing that when we’re in a bilateral position, or kind of just negotiating one on one, somehow the world ends up turning the tables on us. And I’m not going to put my country in that position — our country in that position.

He has a point…I think “something like that”:http://www.armscontrolwonk.com/986/sixty-freaking-five-percent actually happened recently.

*2.* I have also discovered the Iranian name for the former US embassy in Tehran. ISNA reported 21 April that Hassan Rowhani, former secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, called the embassy the” Den of Espionage” in a recent speech.

He said this while arguing that Iran should negotiate with countries like the United States.

The Iran hostage crisis was one of his examples:

While noting that there has always been substantial concern in the back of our minds with regards to foreigners, Rowhani highlighted the case of the Den of Espionage [the former US embassy in Tehran]. He said: In the case of the Den of Espionage, one way to have resolved the situation would have been to sit and talk with the Americans. But instead of talking to the other side, we brought emotions into it and procrastinated until we arrived at a juncture where, after the imposition of the war, we agreed to sit and talk with America. But by then it was too late.

The former SNSC secretary added: Perhaps had we agreed to such a conduct [resolving the hostage crisis through talks] we would have reached a consensus more easily and secured our country’s interests better. But unfortunately it should be said that in difficult junctures we always fail to take quick decisions and let our emotions enter into our decision-making.

Pointing to the [American] hostage crisis [November 1979], he added: With regards to that issue, no one dared resolve the crisis until Iraq launched an attack against our country. But after that, we became prepared. We even hurried in the later stages and moved to resolve the situation quickly since it had come to coincide with the [presidential] elections in America.

One claim I have frequently heard from opponents/skeptics of US engagement with Iran is that Tehran has frequently rejected Washington’s past overtures.

So I’d be interested to know if there is any truth to “this afternoon’s _FT_ article:”:http://news.ft.com/cms/s/76a939b6-c5bc-11da-b675-0000779e2340.html

Iran has prepared a high-level delegation to hold wide-ranging talks with the US, but the Bush administration is resisting the agenda suggested by Tehran despite pressure from European allies to engage the Islamic republic, Iranian politicians have told the Financial Times.

A senior Iranian official, Mohammad Nahavandian, has flown to Washington to “lobby” over the issue, aaccording to a top Iranian adviser outside the US. However, the Iranian mission to the United Nations insisted he was in Washington on private business.

Iran’s willingness to engage the US on Iraq, regional security and the nuclear issue, is believed to have the approval of the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. It represents the most serious attempt by the Islamic republic to reach out to the US since the 1979 Islamic revolution.

But the White House insisted on Thursday that its own offer of talks with Iran, extended several months ago by Zalmay Khalilzad, the US ambassador to Baghdad, was limited to the subject of Iraq.
“There are none and none are scheduled,” Stephen Hadley, national security adviser, was quoted by a spokesman as saying about the prospect of talks with the Iranian delegation in Baghdad next week.

A senior Iranian adviser said the Iranian delegation was headed by Ali Hossein-Tash, the main deputy to Ali Larijani who is secretary of the Supreme National Security Council and the chief official dealing with the nuclear issue. Three other negotiators, all attached to the Council, include a deputy intelligence minister who was previously based in Baghdad, a former Revolutionary Guards member and Kurdish expert, and a political specialist.

Mr Nahavandian, a deputy for economic affairs to Mr Larijani, is in Washington, several Iranian sources told the FT, revealing the rare presence of a senior Iranian in the US capital. White House and State Department officials denied all knowledge of his presence.

The Bush administration is resisting pressure from its European allies to engage Iran directly over its alleged nuclear weapons programme rather than leave negotiations to the EU3 of France, Germany and the UK. Frank-Walter Steinmeier, the German foreign minister, raised this issue with Mr Hadley this week, and Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, is understood to have spoken about it with President George W. Bush.

Anyone seen Mr. Nahavandian walking around?

This is the “webcast”:http://webcast.un.org/ramgen/pressconference/pc060329pm.rm of Mohammad Javad Zarif (Iran’s PermRep to the UN) speaking after the UNSC adopted its presidential statement on 29 March.

The interesting part, IMO, starts ~ 17:00 in.

FYI, Zarif is also supposed to appear on the “Charlie Rose Show”:http://www.charlierose.com/ tonight.

On an entirely unrelated note, I am annoyed that Atrios thought of “this insult”:http://atrios.blogspot.com/2006_03_19_atrios_archive.html#114323067041235652 before I did…

*1.* Bernard Gwertzman recently conducted “an interview”:http://www.cfr.org/publication/10326/ with Flynt Leverett (former NSC, now Brookings) containing another description of Iran’s efforts to engage the United States.

Leverett has “previously discussed”:http://www.brookings.edu/views/op-ed/fleverett/20060124.htm this particular Iran offer. Here he says:

bq. In the spring of 2003 we received through this Swiss channel a one-page document, which basically laid out an agenda for a diplomatic process that was intended to resolve on a comprehensive basis all of the bilateral differences between the United States and Iran.

But I think this bit of inside baseball is somewhat new:

BG: I see. So this document pops up on Secretary of State Colin Powell’s desk. It was a very top-secret document, I suppose.

FL:. It wasn’t a classified document. What’s so remarkable about it, it was sent over by the Swiss embassy as an unclassified fax.

BG: I see. That’s why you can talk about it so easily.

FL: Yes, the document was never classified.

BG: So the United States had to make a decision on what it wanted to do. Was there a big debate about this?

FL: By this point I am out of government and I don’t really know how this played out within the bowels of the administration. What I do know happened is that the formal response of the administration to this was to complain to the Swiss foreign ministry that the Swiss ambassador in Tehran was exceeding his brief by talking with Iranians about a paper like this and passing it on.

BG: Let’s then go to the essence. Is this one of these clichés that the neo-cons in the Bush administration wanted regime change and nothing else and didn’t want to talk to the Iranians?

FL: I think you’re right. That’s the basic motivation, that you had a bunch of neo-cons, and even the president himself [against dialogue], it’s not just the neo-cons who wanted regime change and nothing else. Ultimately the president is, on this issue, very, very resistant to the idea of doing a deal, even a deal that would solve the nuclear problem. You don’t do a deal that would effectively legitimate this regime that he considers fundamentally illegitimate. I think that’s the real issue.

BG: And he considers it illegitimate because of what? Because it overthrew the Shah in 1979?

FL: No, in the president’s view you have this unelected set of clerical authorities, epitomized by the supreme leader, who are thwarting the clearly expressed will of the Iranian people for a more open, participatory political system, for more political, social, intellectual, and cultural freedom†all this kind of thing. And so it’s a system that in Bush’s mind is fundamentally illegitimate. It’s a system that needs to change, and he is not going to do a deal that lets this regime off the hook, even if that deal would solve our problem with them over the nuclear issue.

*2.* “This _London Sunday Telegraph_ article”:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/04/02/wiran102.xml details the IAEA’s investigative and monitoring techniques. It is frequently overlooked, I think, that the IAEA was able to discover that Iran had conducted secret centrifuge experiments with nuclear material – even after Tehran went to pretty serious lengths to cover its tracks.

Hassan Rowhani, former head of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, described his reaction to the IAEA’s skills in the “speech Jeffrey posted”:http://www.armscontrolwonk.com/file_download/30 the other day:

… we did not know precisely how accurate their sampling would be or how contaminated our centers truly were. Not only I or our politicians did not know, but even our technical people were not fully informed that our imported machines were contaminated. When the IAEA inspectors came to take their samples, we were happy. We thought that these inspections would show that our activities had been within the framework of the NPT.

When they took samples at Natanz and found out during the testing that there was a high level of contamination, we knew nothing about the source of that contamination. Our experts did not know that the pieces that we had bought from the outside had been contaminated, either. We did not even know from a technical point of view how such contamination was transferred or spread. We did not even know how such contamination is discovered at the lab with such precision. Our instruments are very old, while they use very modern labs. The IAEA uses labs in Europe, the United States, and Russia. Therefore, we were amazed by their remarks and conclusions. When they told us that there is 80% contamination, we were taken aback.

Rowhani, BTW, provided a description the IAEA’s environmental sampling techniques:

bq. They have special handkerchiefs [as published] that they
rub over suspect areas and then take to the lab and examine.
[_Brackets in the original._]

Note my display of self-restraint here…

The “AP”:http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/nuclear_agency_iran&printer=1;_ylt=AtBUUsclasQkDD7VSO2xa6cUewgF;_ylu=X3oDMTA3MXN1bHE0BHNlYwN0bWE has more about the alleged accelerated “pace of Iran’s centrifuge program”:http://www.armscontrolwonk.com/1013/iran-iran-iran.

Some people at the IAEA are none too amused by recent press reports on the matter:

U.N. inspectors should know by next week how far Iran has advanced on the path to nuclear enrichment, diplomats said Saturday †findings that could shape Security Council action against Tehran and hurt U.S. claims that Iran has accelerated its efforts.

The International Atomic Energy Agency †the U.N. nuclear watchdog †is clearly rankled by the U.S. assertions just days ahead of a trip by IAEA inspectors to Natanz, the site of Iran’s known enrichment efforts.

IAEA officials normally refuse to be identified as such when discussing sensitive topics such as disputes with leading IAEA board members, such as the United States.

But reflecting exasperation, a senior agency official dropped such reservations Saturday as he called the U.S. claims that an agency briefing on the advances made by Iran on enrichment was a bombshell “pure speculation and misinformation.”

“It comes from people who are seeking a crisis, not a solution” to the confrontation over Iran, the official said.

The senior IAEA official did not offer details on the spat.

But a diplomat in Vienna, who demanded anonymity in exchange for discussing confidential information, said some U.S. administration officials were misrepresenting a recent briefing by the agency to Vienna-based representatives of America, Russia, China, France, and Britain †the five permanent Security Council members.

The information on where Iran was on enrichment and where it was headed was not new, but the U.S. officials claimed “the … IAEA was blown away by (Iran’s) progress and had the U.S. redefining its timeline” for Iran’s capacity to make its first nuclear weapon down to three years, the diplomat told The Associated Press.

The 2008 worst-case estimate described in the “Knight-Ridder piece”:http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/14171206.htm is about a year ahead of “David Albright and Corey Hinderstein’s”:http://www.isis-online.org/publications/iran/irancascade.pdf.

It seems likely that this accelerated timeline has its roots in “ElBaradei’s last report to the IAEA BoG,”:http://www.armscontrolwonk.com/985/gov200615 which says that Iran plans to install 3,000 centrifuges in the Natanz FEP beginning late this year. That is about “twice the number”:http://www.armscontrolwonk.com/945/iran-focus-part-1-how-close-is-iran-to-the-bomb of centrifuges ISIS says Iran needs for producing enough HEU for a weapon within a year.

So if we take Iran’s claim at face value, Natanz will have more cascades operating by 2007 than the ISIS timeline posits.

Whether Iran will get its _first_ cascades running sooner than ISIS estimates is unclear. US officials may be assuming that Iran’s ability to install more centrifuges earlier than previously thought also indicates that it can get the cascades up and running sooner than previously thought.

FT has “excerpts.”:http://news.ft.com/cms/s/381a5768-b3c2-11da-89c7-0000779e2340,s01=1.html So does “Reuters.”:http://today.reuters.co.uk/news/NewsArticle.aspx?type=worldNews&storyID=2006-03-15T022502Z_01_N14826_RTRUKOT_0_TEXT0.xml&related=true

According to “that news agency,”:http://today.reuters.co.uk/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=worldNews&storyID=2006-03-15T153815Z_01_N14224204_RTRUKOC_0_UK-NUCLEAR-IRAN-UN.xml&archived=False this is the part that the P5 are arguing about:

“Requests that the director general of the IAEA reports to the Security Council in [14] days on Iranian compliance with the requirements set out by the IAEA board, and agrees to keep this issue under review.”

Note the brackets.

It’s unclear, however, that Russia and China’s minds would be changed by giving Iran more than 14 days:

“We are still discussing,” Chinese Ambassador Wang Guangya told Reuters at the close of the hour-long session at the U.S. Mission to the United Nations.

Russia and China are resisting a proposal from Britain and France — and backed by the United States — for a council statement that would express “serious concern” about Iran’s nuclear program and urge it to abide by resolutions from the International Atomic Energy Agency.

Wang said he did not consider the talks deadlocked, and Russian Ambassador Andrei Denisov said there had been progress although he declined to elaborate.

But Wang said Russia and China still had problems with a proposal that the Vienna-based IAEA be asked to report to the council within 14 days on what progress Iran had made towards meeting the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency’s demands.

Both view the reporting requirement as shifting the focus of the Iran dossier to the Security Council, which has the power to later impose sanctions, from the IAEA. They would like any report on Iran’s compliance to go directly to the 35-nation IAEA governing board.

Just one addition to Jeffrey’s sweet “strike package post”:http://www.armscontrolwonk.com/952/iran-the-bomb-3-strike-options.

He wrote:

Esfahan has another feature, however, that suggests a serious problem. North of the facility, there are a pair of roads that clearly reveal entrances to tunnels within the mountain. (Der Spiegel claimed the tunnels housed a secret Uranium Conversion Facility.)

Unlike the underground bunkers are Natanz, I am not sure the IC has any idea what is in those tunnels or their precise location beneath the mountain.

Actually, the IAEA has been able to visit the site. Last April, “I wrote”:http://www.armscontrol.org/act/2005_04/Iran_Goldschmidt.asp that:

bq. [then-IAEA DDG Pierre] Goldschmidt also reported that Iran has begun constructing underground tunnels for storing nuclear materials near its uranium-conversion facility. Tehran notified the IAEA about the project, which Iran says began in September 2004, two days before agency inspectors visited the site Dec. 15. According to its safeguards agreement, Iran should have notified the IAEA earlier about the project, Goldschmidt said.

Furthermore, a State Department official said that

bq. Washington is not concerned about Iran conducting clandestine nuclear activities in the tunnels because the site is subject to IAEA monitoring.

“ISIS noted”:http://www.isis-online.org/publications/iran/esfahantunnels.html that the tunnel facility

bq. …appears too big to be only for storage. It might be intended to house production facilities for some uranium conversion processes. It does not appear large enough to be a complete duplicate of the UCF.

Now, over to TPM Cafe…

Really.

From a “radio interview”:http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2006/01/20060120-1.html today:

Do you believe there are ties between the Iranian regime and al Qaeda, Mr. Vice President?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: I wouldn’t put it in those terms. I think you’ve got to remember that the al Qaeda organization is primarily made up of radical Sunni Islamists, of course, and the Iranian regime is Shia-dominated — Shia. So there’s not a natural fit there. That doesn’t mean that there haven’t been relationships over the years, but I don’t believe it’s close. I haven’t seen any evidence of that.

Note the contrast to Cheney’s “recent departure from reality RE: Iraq and al-Qaeda”:http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2006/01/20060111-5.html, which contained this bit of genius:

bq. …a lot of those documents that were captured over there that have not yet been evaluated offer additional evidence that, in fact, there was a relationship that stretched over many years between Saddam Hussein and the al Qaeda organization.

No need to evaluate documents when you already have the answer…