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IAEA/Iran - US phone intercepts

Al Jazeera reports that the Bush administration has intercepted phone calls between Muhammad al-Baradai and Iranian diplomats, seeking ammunition to oust al-Baradai as head of the IAEA. The wisdom of performing intercept on the communications between states and the IAEA for any reason isn't self-evident, and doing so to fabricate a casus belli for the next Bush War is something that will probably be denounced by the responsible press ... after the mid-terms, after the Iranian nuclear weapons program is found to be as chimeral as the Iraqi nuclear weapons program.

I'm mildly curious if the intercepts were performed under CALECA, having spent over a year on the RAVEN list which is where the IETF abstracted the question presented by the media gateway working group. The question posed was:

"should the IETF develop new protocols or modify existing protocols to support mechanisms whose primary purpose is to support wiretapping or other law enforcement activities" and "what should the IETF's position be on informational documents that explain how to perform message or data-stream interception without protocol modifications".

The interested should read our work product, RFC 2804, it is ... subtle. We dodged the bullet. It was interesting work. How lazy should buffer copy evaluations be in a crossbar switch avoiding head-of-line blocking? How should covert flows be forwarded between network elements? What does the covert control path look like, and covert to whom? But I digress.

This is just an intro, the momentary, a step in the deliberate dance towards a third Bush War. My wife thinks I should comment on something. The person who wrote the thing is pretty sure of himself, and I've no way of judging how many Pesians he's known in his life, or how long he's had the nuclear fuel cycle or the doctrinal issues surrounding weapons and proliferation as interest areas.

I've known communists and islamists at Berkeley and monarchists in "Tehrangeles", during their respective periods in exile, and bazaris in both places and times. I started on the fuel cycle in 1972 at Berkeley in the physics department, peaking at Diablo Canyon and Seabrook as a mass civil disobedience organizer.

I was a lousy middie, but I had the run of the Navy School library and computer facility for a decade and read liberally my mother's students' disertations and I was interested in the problem domain my father worked in at Hunter Liggett, the tactical mix of armor, rotary and fixed wing. I spent two years obsessing on the Fulda Gap problem, and my last tour of a staff library was the winter I was a prisoner of dissent at Leavnworth, the Combined Arms and Services Staff School, where again I had the run of the library.

Some initial points to get out of the way.

First, post-Pahlavi Iran is a wicked careful energy exporter. It doesn't sell oil on the spot market. The only way to buy Iranian oil is to actually refine it, or sell it "downstream". The contracts are long-term.

Second, post-Pahlavi Iran is a diversified energy exporter. It sells hydro power to its northern neighbors.

Third, post-Pahlavi Iran looks to the long term, aware that the surviving creatures of British Petrolium period are living on borrowed political time, and finite oil reserves, and that value increases the higher up the extraction-to-application curve Iran is able to reach.

Forth, post-Pahlavi and pre-Pahlavi Iranians manage to co-exist in Tehrangeles, Paris, London, Dubai, and even Tehran, carefully and by the tens of thousands, divided only by the difference of crown and turban and the beneficiaries of the same system of corruption -- nepotism, croneyism,
etc. Iran is less insular than the US.

Fifth, the fissiles energy market is about to go critical, unless we "aunties" stop it, with one or more reactor starts per year in Asia on plan for the next 20 years. The fissile energy market is owned by the US and Europe, with Japan fatally ensnarled in plutonium. Russia and China are not really in the commercial fissile energy markets, but not for the same reasons.

Incidently for us "aunties" to stop nuclear power a second time we must contest and win the demographic in the US that was born after the Yom Kippur War of 1973 and the oil embargo and the "Hostage Crisis" that brought Reagan's regime into power. For the "reformers" in Iran to stop nepotism and croneyism a second time they must contest and win the demographic that was born after the Winter of 1979, and the "Hostage Crisis" that brought Khomeni's regime into power.

I see the issue as simply the formation of the Iranian equivalent of British Nuclear Fuels. It isn't as prudent as a wind or solar power program, or a conservation or pollution abatement program, but it is not a weapons program.

I don't see the rational military preconditions for a weapons program, by officers trained in American doctrine and technology during the Pahlavi period, and who have had access to Soviet doctrine and technology, and to non-aligned or indegenous doctrine and technology, in the post-Pahlavi period.

The only way the enrichment-means-weapons meme works if one demotes the successor to the civil engineering component of cosmopolitian Pahlavi Iran to the status of a Gulf Emirate, a simply oil pump, and simultaniously demotes the successor to the military engineering component of cosmopolitian Pahlavi Iran to the status of Sudan or Somalia. The excuse for the demotions is the conditional dominance of Khomeni and his successors, who've managed to run a moderatly statist economy (like Iraq) and amass $22bn in reserves while maintaining a broadly middle-class favoring economy.

Here is the writing in question:

NO ISLAMIC REPUBLIC, NO BAN. Reader E.F. writes in apropos of some recent Iran-related commentary to ask: "Why is it automatically assumed that the Iranian nuclear program would be terminated if the rule of the ayatollahs is terminated? Democratic countries like Britain, France and Israel felt no such constraints." Quite true. It's hard to know for certain, but indications are that the nuclear program is reasonably popular on the Iranian street and a democratic government mig
ht be interested in moving forward with it.

On the other hand, even if that did happen, a nuclear Iran wouldn't be nearly as troubling to the United States if the country wasn't being run by an ideologically antagonistic regime with a self-conception as an anti-American revolutionary power. Moreover, a government responsible to the Iranian people would likely be much more concerned about the deleterious consequences to Iranian well-being of withdrawing from the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), and a functioning democracy with a transparent government and a free press would have a harder time cheating on its NPT commitments. But the case of Israel does show that these factors aren't necessarily decisive; a country that feels sufficiently threatened by its neighbors will just stay out of the NPT and build its bomb. Israel isn't a strategic threat to the United States, and a democratic Iran probably wouldn't be either, but if it's proliferation per se that you're trying to stop, there's a need for real NPT reform, some mechanism for moving non-NPT countries into the system, and some demonstrated commitment on the part of the United States, China, Russia, France, and Britain (especially the first two) to their NPT commitment to move toward multilateral nuclear disarmament.

The writer entertains the linkage between the presumed weapons program and the "rule of the ayatollahs", and asserts that the presumed weapons program has broad political support. I've no idea where to look for even narrow political support for an explicit weapons program. Israel has an inventory of 75 to 200 weapons, with adequate regional means of delivery. Pakistan has an inventory of 30 to 50, with adequate local means of delivery. India has an inventory of 30 to 35, also with adequate local means of delivery. A regional deterent program would have to produce between 500kg and 1,000kg of HEU, which would both take years and be the proximal cause for a strike by preemptive Israel, and it wouldn't deter very much -- it wouldn't deter the Americans from a first strike, and it wouldn't deter a spillover of a India-Pakistan exchange, and it could not deter Israel from attempting to preempt it by any means, including first-strike(s). Oddly, it could deter Russian forces under some circumstances. However, each of these threats has deterants that do not have a successful weapons program as a predicate condition.

The writer then entertains a hypothetical good government rational for Iran to end its presumed weapons program, and makes the surprising claim that Israel isn't a strategic threat to the United States. That isn't what Eisenhower thought when Israel shut down the Suez in 1956, or LBJ for the month prior to June 3rd, 1967. It is odd to reason that a state with 100 weapons, a general technological equivalence, and an equivalent force structure, and an independent political existence, could not have a conflict of interests with the United States, or Russia, that could be weaponized.

The author of the piece my wife asked me to write about is Matthew Yglesias.

He's pretty popular.

Posted by EBW at December 11, 2004 11:51 PM | TrackBack