Trusting Iran

"[Iran] is under close scrutiny by its neighbors, by Israel, by the United States and others, with satellite imagery going on. And in those cases the intelligence services have spies on the ground and carry out electronic eavesdropping so their knowledge is much greater than any international organization can have."
“But, as … in Iraq and North Korea, providing intelligence came to be part of the overall system. And so the access to this remarkably strong source is available. Once you know there’s a location, getting to it is a matter of request."
"Twenty-four days may sound like a long time, but the other 126 countries that have Additional Protocol don’t even have that as a restriction." 
"It is likely that if Iran were to go forward with a new construction that it might not do it in the hinterlands, but try to come into a city with smaller facilities in a better hidden location."
"Radiation levels from uranium is rather low, so provided the container is hermetically sealed so that nothing gets out of it, you could hide it virtually anywhere."
Thomas Shea, former senior IAEA official, Safeguards Department

Thomas Shea, Former Head of Trilateral Initiative Office, Department of Safeguards, International Atomic Energy Agency. Photo: Screenshot

 A candid interview with a man whose experience within the United Nations International Atomic Energy Agency has familiarized him with the nature of interacting with the Islamic Republic of Iran, so that he acknowledges the fraught manner in which trust placed by the world community in Tehran's pledge to honour its commitments is a friable affair, yet this man was still capable of stating: "What’s happened in the past can be forgiven… And now we have  an agreement and Iran will be expected to stick to the letter of it."

Well, as reality has it, this is a country whose rigidly totalitarian ayatollahs have never compromised on anything that might hamper or impair their aspirations, from ultimate command through conquest of the Middle East, to an extension beyond that immediate geography. No recognition was given to the Republic's position in fostering terrorism, in its suppression of its own people's aspirations, in interfering in the affairs of sovereign countries to advance its agenda.

An Islamist administration which maintains order internally through repression and violence, using the death penalty as a rough cudgel to warn that square pegs don't fit in the round holes prepared for Iranians to abide by the strictures of their government's oppressive regime, and for extra measure inviting families to observe those whom the regime considers enemies of Islam being executed as an entertaining thought they could be next.

The very fact that the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action permits Iran close to a month prior warning of the arrival of an investigating team gives it ample time and opportunity to tidy away matters not meant to be seen by prying eyes. Iran's past measures to escape detection in building a nuclear structure deep into the side of a mountain, and another in a suitably remote area worked for a time; until an Iranian opposition group revealed to the world its existence; the other uncovered by satellite imagery.

The Natanz fuel enrichment plant (FEP) is Iran's largest gas centrifuge uranium enrichment facility. It began operating since February 2007, in contravention of UN Security Council resolutions demanding Iran halt uranium enrichment.

Mr. Shea matter-of-factly advises that having attempted those measures to avoid inspection, Iran could simply be expected now to devise other measures unlikely to be readily revealed to inquisitive eyes through the simple expedient of building where one might least expect a nuclear structure to be installed, in the midst of a bustling city, secure in the expectation that what it would be engaged in might be kept from the knowledge of unauthorized foreign interests.

Iran can be trusted to do all it can possibly conceive of to evade detection of any steps it will take to untangle itself from an agreement which its high-powered interlocutors congratulate themselves for pursuing, purring that it commits Iran to a binding confidence. Whereas Iran, skilled in the kind of negotiations where its position lies in pushing adversaries to the brink of distraction insisting that demands be lessened and it be given a reprieve on punishment exacted, believing itself to be an unfair target of a hostile, interfering power has no intention of succumbing to those expectations.



If there is one area where Iran can be trusted to make every effort conceivable to be true to its word, it is its incendiary threats against Israel, to demolish the Jewish state, and its loathing for the United States where it has command of its proxy militias Hezbollah and Hamas, both of which terrorist groups have infiltrated Europe and North America and have support among some members of the communities of Muslims that have migrated there.

The kind of horrific multi-pronged attack that al-Qaeda mounted on 9/11 to impress upon the United States the hatred in which it is held in certain quarters need not necessarily be repeated; time and the patience that accompanies it will slowly leach away American cultural values, the tenets of its social contract, under the gradual and inexorable weight of a growing Islamic demographic.

It is the expendable Jewish population anywhere in North America and Europe that remains a viable target, one whose isolation through an epidemic of anti-Semitism may succeed in assuring any general population whose Jewish demographic is targeted that it is not they who are in the line of fire, but Jews, and the Holocaust which Iran scorns as never having occurred, will have a second opportunity to achieve what the first never quite managed.