Friedman Thinks Bahrain is a Heroin-Stuffed Teddy Bear

(10 am – promoted by ek hornbeck)

As a writer, Thomas Friedman is a goddamned miracle.

In the space of the first four paragraphs of today’s column in the New York Times, Friedman compares US-friendly Persian Gulf countries to carnival workers at a weight-guessing booth, and also to the stuffed animals that a lucky carnival-goer could win at that booth.  

The United States is — I think, having read this three times — like a carnival-goer trying to win a stuffed animal at the weight-guessing booth.  But Friedman’s point is not that the United States wants to win a US-friendly Persian Gulf country, which is what you’d think Friedman must mean, if those countries are stuffed-animal prizes at the weight-guessing booth; and his point is not that the United States wants to win something from a US-friendly Persian Gulf country, which is what you’d think he must mean if those countries are the carnies running the booth.

His point, which I confess I did not see coming, is that Iran is like a drug dealer.  Paragraph five:

The Gulf Arabs feel like they have this neighbor who has been a drug dealer for 18 years. Recently, this neighbor has been very visibly growing poppies for heroin in his backyard in violation of the law. He’s also been buying bigger and better trucks to deliver drugs. You can see them parked in his driveway.

Maybe a lot of carnies are drug dealers.  Maybe they use stuffed animals to smuggle heroin into the United States, with trucks.  I have no idea.  At various points over the next several paragraphs, the US is the police, and also holding a stuffed animal — but Friedman doesn’t mean that the US is holding a US-friendly Persian Gulf country stuffed with heroin that the US found in a truck.

I don’t know.

What I do know is that Friedman manages to insert a few paragraphs in the midst of that literary tsunami that are both wildly misleading and indicative of current misunderstandings in Washington punditry on the subject of Iranian nuclear enrichment.

Said Gary Samore, [yes, Friedman actually wrote “Said Gary Samore,”] director of studies at the Council on Foreign Relations and a former Clinton administration expert on proliferation: “The U.S. N.I.E., by leading with the statement that Iran has halted its nuclear weapons program, has left the misleading impression that the danger has passed.”

It has not passed, he noted, because Iran is still enriching uranium in violation of U.N. proliferation rules to which Iran had agreed (and testing long-range delivery missiles). Yes, it is still enriching below weapons grade. Iran says this is to fuel nuclear reactors to generate electricity – but it has no such reactors. And to get that uranium enriched to weapons grade, all it has to do is keep running it through its centrifuges.

“That is the hardest part of building a nuclear weapon, and Iran is still doing it,” said Mr. Samore. “Our ability to get strong international sanctions to halt that was already weak,” but by declaring definitively that Iran’s weapons program had been halted, the N.I.E. “has given the Russians and Chinese a good excuse to make sanctions even weaker.”

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the Bush line.  The problem, on this way of thinking, is not that Iran is confounding IAEA efforts to monitor enrichment.  The problem, rather, is that Iran is enriching uranium at all.  

Friedman manages — and by this point the reader could be forgiven for being so confused by all those analogies not to have noticed —  to imply an outright falsehood: that Iran will be violating an agreement it signed for as long as it is enriching uranium.  Further, Friedman avers, enrichment itself constitutes a de facto weapons program.

But here is article IV of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty [PDF]

Article IV

1. Nothing in this Treaty shall be interpreted as affecting the inalienable right of all the Parties to the Treaty to develop research, production and use of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes without discrimination and in conformity with articles I and II of this Treaty.

2. All the Parties to the Treaty undertake to facilitate, and have the right to participate in, the fullest possible exchange of equipment, materials and scientific and technological information for the peaceful uses of nuclear energy. Parties to the Treaty in a position to do so shall also cooperate in contributing alone or together with other States or international organizations to the further development of the applications of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes, especially in the territories of non-nuclear-weapon States Party to the Treaty, with due consideration for the needs of the developing areas of the world.

And here are articles II, III and IV of the Iranian Safeguards Agreement [PDF] that Iran signed in 1974:

Article 2

The Agency shall have the right and the obligation to ensure that safeguards will be applied, in accordance with the terms of this Agreement, on all source or special fissionable material in all peaceful nuclear activities within the territory of Iran, under its jurisdiction or carried out under its control anywhere, for the exclusive purpose of verifying that such material is not diverted to nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices.

CO-OPERATION BETWEEN THE GOVERNMENT OF IRAN AND THE AGENCY

Article 3

The Government of Iran and the Agency shall co-operate to facilitate the implementation of the safeguards provided for in this Agreement.

IMPLEMENTATION OF SAFEGUARDS

Article 4

The safeguards provided for in this Agreement shall be implemented in a manner designed:

(a) To avoid hampering the economic and technological development of Iran or international co-operation in the field of peaceful nuclear activities, including international exchange of nuclear material;

(b) To avoid undue interference in Iran’s peaceful nuclear activities, and in particular in the operation of facilities; and

(c) To be consistent with prudent management practices required for the economic and safe

conduct of nuclear activities.

The UN Security Council has imposed sanctions on Iran for violating the Safeguards agreement, not for enriching uranium as such.  The rhetorical ploy devised by the Bush Administration — that any uranium enrichment at all by Iran constitutes an unacceptably aggressive act — is an affront to the Treaty and is found nowhere in the Safeguards Agreement.

ElBaradei, the General Director of the IAEA and the only obviously sane person in this discussion, has asked for a “time out”.  He has asked that Iran halt uranium enrichment and that the Security Council silmultaneously suspend sanctions for a brief period of time while he and his people verify Iran’s civilian intentions, to the satisfaction of the Security Council.

That would make sense, it ought to be doable, and it would satisfy every aspect of the Safeguard Agreement and the Security Council resolutions concerning Iran.  But Friedman and Bush’s bluster that any enrichment at all, now or in the future, by Iran consitutes a de facto weapons program, puts the US and the larger world in a very poor  position from which to cajole Iran into cooperating.  From Iran’s point-of-view, this rhetoric portends a violation of Article of IV of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty — the one that says all countries get to pursue peaceful nuclear technology.

The issue is straightforward, and no number of heroin-stuffed teddy-bears in the beds of pickup-trucks parked behind weight-guessing booths at carnivals can make it less so.

Thomas Friedman, literary genius, is not helping.