U.N. Action Likely for Iran
China and Russia join the U.S. and Europeans in recommending that the nation be reported for its nuclear activity. Sanctions are possible.

By John Daniszewski, Kim Murphy and Mark Magnier
January 31, 2006
Los Angeles Times
Original Source: http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/la-fg-iran31jan31,1,6182420.story


The five veto-wielding members of the U.N. Security Council reached agreement early today that the U.N. nuclear agency should report Iran to the Security Council for possible sanctions because of its uranium enrichment program.

But the foreign ministers of permanent council members China, Russia, the U.S., France and Britain — as well as Germany and the European Union — said that no Security Council action against the Tehran government should be considered until March.

The agreement appears to resolve, for now, a standoff in which Russia and China opposed any such action by the board of the International Atomic Energy Agency, a U.N. watchdog, which will meet Thursday. A vote to send Iran before the council appears all but certain, though there is some doubt whether it will be unanimous.

The delay provides a window for the Iranian government to reconsider its decision this month to reopen its nuclear facility at Natanz and resume research into enriching and reprocessing uranium. Iran says its program is for civilian nuclear power, but the U.S. and European Union believe the country is taking steps to develop material for nuclear weapons.

Capping a day of marathon diplomacy in London and Brussels, the compromise was hammered out at a four-hour dinner of foreign ministers here, hosted by Britain's Jack Straw ahead of a special meeting of the IAEA in Vienna.

The agreement early today means that none of the five permanent members of the Security Council will oppose discussing Iran's nuclear program at the council.

But it was not clear whether Russia and China were prepared to take the next step: voting to impose penalties, including sanctions, on Iran if it is found to be violating its Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty obligations.

Russia and China have close trade relations with Iran, and Russia is the principal contractor for Iran's nuclear power plant at Bushehr, on the southern Persian Gulf coast, which is scheduled to come on line later this year. 

Getting the Russians and Chinese on board posed a stiff diplomatic challenge for the United States, Britain, Germany and France, all of which had said reporting Iran to the U.N. was necessary in the face of Tehran's continued defiance of the international community's wish that it desist from uranium enrichment in any form.

Iran ended a two-year moratorium on nuclear research Jan. 10 when it broke seals the IAEA had put on its Natanz facility. Russia recently offered a compromise under which it would help Iran enrich uranium on Russian territory, where the material could be safeguarded against diversion to nuclear weapons. Iran has said it is willing to explore the proposal. Iran also has promised that IAEA inspectors could be present and monitor its nuclear research.

Neither of those gestures has allayed Western suspicions that the Islamic Republic's aim is to acquire the know-how to produce weapons-grade uranium.

In March, IAEA Director-General Mohammed ElBaradei is expected to produce a report outlining Iran's nuclear program, and detail aspects of it that inspectors believe need clarification from Iranian authorities.

Sanctions on Iran pose a risk for Western countries. Iran has threatened to end cooperation with IAEA inspectors and hinted that it could cut back production of petroleum, driving up world oil prices.

But that danger apparently was outweighed at Monday night's dinner by the prospect that Iran, one of the most militantly anti-U.S. and anti-Israeli governments in the world, could be on the verge of acquiring technology that would allow it to produce a nuclear weapon in several years. 

Western officials have been particularly alarmed by statements from Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who said Israel had no right to exist in the Middle East.

Speaking before the dinner meeting, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said there was no choice but to bring Iran before the Security Council.

Let's remember what happened here, she said. Several months ago, there was a resolution to refer. The states that voted for that resolution in the [IAEA] board of governors agreed that we would not go through with the referral, to give time for the Iranians to respond. And how did they respond? They responded by breaking their moratorium, ending negotiations and breaking the seals on the equipment so that they could enrich and reprocess. 

So I think we've had our answer from the Iranian government. And it's not a very satisfactory one. 

But Rice also noted that bringing Iran before the council, rather than keeping the matter within the IAEA, would not in itself solve anything.

After all, going to the Security Council is not the end of diplomacy. It is just diplomacy in a different, more robust context, she said.

Officials at China's Foreign Ministry were not immediately available for comment this morning. Russian officials also were not available.

But Shi Yanchun, a retired Chinese ambassador to Yemen and Syria, said China and Russia eventually agreed to the move on the condition that there would still be an opportunity to conduct several weeks of negotiations within the IAEA structure.

China and Russia still don't want the issue handed over to the U.N. Security Council right now, he said. Only if there's no progress [at the IAEA] would it go to the U.N. in March. There's still room for much negotiation, discussion and heated debate.

The prospect of levying U.N. sanctions against Iran puts Russia and China in one of the last places either country wants to be: forced to choose between their economic interests and the wider concerns of the global community.

Russia could lose its contract for the Bushehr plant, as well as $5 billion worth of future construction contracts.

Iran's nuclear program employs tens of thousands of people at numerous companies in Russia.

Russia also has up to $1.5 billion in military contracts with Iran, including one concluded in December for as many as 30 Tor M-1 antiaircraft missiles worth $700 million. The missiles could help Iran defend nuclear sites against a military strike. 

China gets 14% of its oil imports from Iran and soon is expected to become its largest trading partner.

Russia has been hurt before by U.N. actions against countries developing nuclear capabilities. U.S.-led attempts to isolate North Korea and Washington's threatened sanctions over a nuclear power plant in Cuba in the 1990s forced Moscow to walk away from half-finished plants worth millions of dollars. 

In the very early 1990s, we joined the sanctions against North Korea and shipped out everything that was there … [and] it was quite a lot by that time, former Atomic Energy Minister Viktor Mikhailov said in an interview. There were research reactors. We'd conducted rather extensive geodetic surveys. We trained specialists in Russia. And then we gave up all of this. We lost hundreds of millions of dollars on all of this.

China's interests in Iran are mainly focused on energy for its rapidly developing economy. But they also include a longer-term desire to slowly expand influence in the region, analysts say.

In 2004, Beijing agreed to buy oil and natural gas and help develop Iran's huge Yadavaran oil field. The 25-year deal, worth up to $100 billion, is the largest China has signed with another country. 

Since the early 1980s, Iran has also been one of China's largest overseas markets for construction and infrastructure projects, including highway networks and $400 million in contracts to help build the Tehran subway system. Experts say Beijing has supplied weapons for several decades, including surface-to-surface cruise missiles and the anti-ship Silkworm missile.

China's ambassador to Iran said this month that two-way trade exceeded $10 billion. 

Yet China, like Russia, also has a huge stake in maintaining a good relationship with the U.S., the world's only superpower and one of its most important trading partners. 

Last year, Congress threatened a 27.5% tariff on Chinese imports if Beijing didn't revalue its currency. It also applied pressure that helped kill oil firm CNOOC's bid for Unocal.

A confrontation would not be good for Sino-Iran relations nor Sino-U.S. relations, said Ji Kaiyun, a professor at Southwest Normal University. 

China doesn't want to be seen as supporting problem countries, but it doesn't want to be seen as an ally with the United States, said Yin Gang, a research fellow with the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. It's a very difficult balance.

For Russia and China, relations with Iran are more than a matter of economics. A political or military conflagration in Iran could dangerously upset Muslim populations in Central Asia, inside Russia and around the oil-rich Caspian Sea.

Both countries also see themselves as counterweights to U.S. domination of global affairs. Russia in particular has prided itself on being the go-to state for brokering compromises with wayward nations since the dawn of the post-Soviet era.

The theory is that we have these deep relations with rogue states, and so now that we are part of the civilized world, that gives us a lot of opportunities on the level of personal connections to influence these states, to move them without wars, without conflicts, step by step, to a more or less normal level, Moscow military analyst Alexander Golts said.

But that has never worked, he said, because Russia's position often diverges from those of Western countries, and rogue states know how to exploit the differences.

Tehran's confidence that the U.S. is too bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan to launch a military attack against it has substantially undermined Russia's influence, said Alexei Malashenko of the Carnegie Moscow Center.

Iran is much more important for Russia than Russia for Iran, he said.

The issue of military cooperation is part of this complex picture. The Tor M-1 missiles would not be very effective against high-altitude U.S. bombers. But there have been widespread reports that Russia also was negotiating the sale of longer-range S-300 missiles, which could provide better protection to facilities such as Bushehr. Moscow has denied that such talks were taking place, and they reportedly were called off as the current dispute escalated.

In an era when Russia's political clout is diminished by the belief that it would not use its nuclear arsenal, Moscow's ability to sell weapons to other nations provides a different kind of geo-strategic boost, Russian analysts say.

OK, you people in the West think us very reasonable. And you cannot believe we would use something bad against you. Good. You are right, Golts said, interpreting Russia's attitude. But we can sell something very bad to those who would use it.

Analysts add that if pushed, China might abstain from a U.N. vote, thereby allowing sanctions to be imposed.

If it were pushed that hard, however, China probably would seek to soften the blow by helping Iran in other ways, including support for pet infrastructure projects and favorable trade terms.

I think China increasingly will integrate its international responsibility with its national interests, said Dong Manyuan, a research fellow with the China Institute of International Studies, a government-linked think tank in Beijing. It will require some fancy dancing, but it's not a bad thing. After all, the whole world needs oil. It's always a bit of a balance.

Murphy reported from Moscow and Magnier from Beijing. Times staff writer Alissa J. Rubin in Washington and Ding Li in The Times' Beijing Bureau also contributed to this report.