Iran 70

Als u een werkelijk onafhankelijke en goed gedocumenteerde analyse wilt hebben van de nucleaire impasse tussen de VS en Iran leest u dan dit stuk van Asli Bali, verbonden aan de prestigieuze Yale Law School:

'The US and the Iranian Nuclear Impasse.
Aslı Ü. Bâli

Aslı Ü. Bâli is the Irving S. Ribicoff Fellow at Yale Law School and an editor of Middle East Report.

The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) underwent its most recent five-year review in May 2005. There were numerous proposals on the table for strengthening the global non-proliferation regime. None were adopted. Perhaps even more puzzlingly, in an age when the White House repeatedly invokes the specter of suitcase-size nuclear weapons in the hands of terrorists, the United States did not send a high-level delegate.
The bone of contention at the conference was the bargain at the heart of the NPT: non-proliferation of atomic weaponry in exchange for disarmament by and civilian nuclear energy cooperation from the nuclear powers. Debate centered ultimately on demands by non-nuclear weapons states for stronger disarmament provisions, while the US, backed to some extent by its European allies, sought reinforced verification of treaty compliance and non-proliferation requirements. With North Korea withdrawn from the NPT, US concerns revolved around the Islamic Republic of Iran. Indeed, one analyst interpreted the failure of the conference as a consequence of disagreements between the US and Iran.[1]
In the runup to the meetings, Tehran appeared extremely concerned that the 2005 NPT review might result in strong support for new restrictions on access to the nuclear fuel cycle or even a specific proposal to prevent Iran from producing nuclear fuel. Fortunately, perhaps, from the Iranian perspective, no such proposals were broached during the meetings, where the US deliberately kept the focus on process rather than substance, ensuring that none of the contentious issues before the review session were ever openly debated.
Why would the NPT’s chief architect resist the strengthening of a framework that preserves the status quo of nuclear weapons haves and have-nots? How can we reconcile the US priority on non-proliferation enforcement with the international record of inconsistent enforcement, with known proliferators escaping any consequence and other suspected proliferators facing severe, punitive sanctions? As the case of Iran illustrates, inconsistent enforcement is often a function of US intervention, in partial concert with other great powers, for political reasons that are independent of legal non-proliferation norms. US obstructionism at the 2005 review conference only makes sense when we see non-proliferation as an instrument of US geopolitical strategy rather than an end in itself, or an international legal norm to be protected in its own right.'

Lees verder: http://www.merip.org/mer/mer241/bali.html