Kieran Lawrence looks at autonomous weapons and the effect they could have on modern warfare
Continuing a series on world leaders, Miles Deverson takes a look at Angela Merkel
Ben Bland examines the fallout from the Iowa caucuses and looks forward to the New Hampshire primaries.
In the first of a series on world leaders, Miles Deverson takes a look at Nicholas Sarkozy
The International Atomic Energy Agency chief Yukiya Amano told a news conference recently that it is his “duty to alert the world” before nuclear proliferation takes place in Iran.
Amano has also made it clear that he intends to send an Iranian mission to the country in an attempt to address the increasing concerns on the nature of its nuclear programme. However, the Iranian parliament is currently debating its relationship with the nuclear agency and is becoming increasingly intolerant of an institution which it believes opposes them.
An IAEA report published last week has raised doubts on the sincerity of Iranian officials’ insistence that its nuclear programme is a peaceful one. It reportedly has evidence that Iran is in posession of designs of potential nuclear weapons. The UN nuclear agency also claimed it had “credible” information that there were “strong indicators of possible weapon development”.
Iran has strongly denied the findings of the report as “unbalanced” and “politically motivated”. Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi has denounced the intelligence on which it is based as a “fabrication” and as part of a “two pronged strategy to smear Tehran, which will continue next week when the UN nuclear agency publishes it’s report”.
However, the report’s findings have seemed to unsettle the West. They have become adamant that the report has laid to rest any notion that the nuclear programme is being used for simple peaceful purposes. The IAEA report has pointed out that Iran will be able to enrich enough uranium to produce a bomb in six months.
According to Reuters, Vienna-based Western diplomats at the two-day IAEA meeting on Thursday, November 17 and Friday, November 18 have said that “six world powers have finalised a draft resolution that expresses deep concern about Iran’s activities and calls to co-operate with the IAEA”. It will be debated on Friday and then voted on.
However, such a report detracts from the stern and hard measures that Israel and the West would appreciate. It rejects the possibility of taking the case to the UN Security Council once again. There is now concern that if the major powers cannot resolve their differences then Israel, which feels most endangered by Iran’s nuclear ambitions, will act on their own.
Mark Fitzpatrick, a former US official and nuclear expert, said that the governing board meeting (IAEA) on Thursday and Friday should “demonstrate serious concern with the findings of the report”. He warns that, “if countries like Israel, that felt most threatened by Iran, lost faith in the international community to act firmly, they could act alone.”
Fitzpatrick has also warned that the threat of an Israeli strike could become more likely in 2012, which is a US presidential election year. He points out that Israeli Prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu might not neccassarily “ask Obama’s permission, if Iran builds a site out of its reach”. This theory is given credence with the comments of a senior US military commander, who told CNN that they do not feel confident anymore that Israel would neccassarily inform the US. Fitzpatrick argues that it is unlikely that Obama would shoot down Israeli planes, when he could potentially jeopardise political support for his election campaign.
Israel has continued its rhetoric on economic sanctions, but its patience and intolerance with Iran seems to be running out. The Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak unsympathetically said of the accidental explosion of munitions on an Iranian military base last Friday, “may there be more like it”.
Israel have been known to have carried out similar strikes in the past. They bombed Iraq’s Osirak atomic reactor (1981) and struck facilities in Syria (2007). Of course, this does not mean that they will again. But “all options are on the table” for Israel, in the words of Ehud Barak.
Roger Cohen, who has written in the New York Times, has pointed out a number of potential consequences of such a conflict. There is the possibility that there will be a ”near certain attack on Israel by Hizbollah and Hamas, which would force Israel to fight its first two front-war in decades; a sharp rise in oil prices, which would hamper an already shaky global economy; and a marked escalation of resentment toward Israel and America in the Muslim world, with an attendant risk of increased terrorism.”
The IAEA report has created a tense situation in which an Israeli and/or American strike is increasingly likely. If Iran refuses to co-operate with the UN nuclear watchdog, then it threatens its own safety. Iran may be running out of time in its dealings with other powers.
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