MOSCOW. (RIA Novosti political commentator Andrei Murtazin) - Last week, the Board of Governors of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) met in Vienna to discuss the Iranian nuclear file and the Syrian nuclear mystery.
The IAEA has some misgivings about Syria's al-Kibar nuclear facility, reportedly bombed by the Israeli Air Force (IAF) on September 6, 2007. After IAEA experts found uranium particles at the scene of the attack, Damascus said that Israel had bombed a vacant plot belonging to an inter-Arab agricultural cooperative in the Deir ez-Zor Governorate, 450 km from the Syrian capital, and that uranium particles belong to missiles that had been used during the air strike.
Top IAEA officials remained unconvinced; what's more, Syria refused to admit another expert group to the suspicious facility.
Israel claims that the al-Kibar facility was, in fact, a nuclear reactor, built by Syria with assistance from North Korea. There is still no evidence to refute or to confirm this claim. However, immediately after the bombing Damascus did not raise an uproar and did not demand that the aggressor be punished.
Instead, construction machines demolished all the buildings at the al-Kibar facility. Damascus issued an official statement about the Israeli air strike only several weeks later.
One more fact that does not speak in favor of Syria: On August 1, 2008, Brigadier General Mohammad Suleiman, a close associate of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, was gunned down at a beach resort near the Syrian port city of Tartous. This happened ten months after the Israeli air strike when the IAEA wanted to ask Damascus some more questions. U.S. intelligence reports say that General Suleiman was responsible for the Syrian nuclear program.
The Syrian response to various suspicions and accusations is the central issue so far. Damascus is behaving very much like Iran does in a similar situation.
The IAEA Board of Governors said nothing new about the Iranian nuclear program. On March 3, the so-called Iran Six of international mediators, namely, Russia, China, France, Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States, addressed the Board of Governors and called on Tehran to fully cooperate on all contentious aspects of its nuclear program.
As usual, Tehran replied that the actions of the Iran Six trying to solve the Iranian nuclear-file problem could only harm the country's cooperation with the international community on this issue.
Nor did the first official meeting between Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in Geneva produce any new results. Lavrov reiterated the need for turning the Middle East into a nuclear-free zone and for eliminating all other weapons of mass destruction in the region.
Both sides once again expressed their concern about the Iranian nuclear program's military component and once again demonstrated their differences on the issue. It is common knowledge that Washington opposes this program in any form, while Moscow only opposes its military aspects.
Two weeks ago, Gholamreza Agazadeh, the Iranian Vice-President and Head of Iran's Atomic Energy Organization, said Tehran planned to install 50,000 operational centrifuges at the Natanz uranium enrichment facility in the next five years.
Russia, the United States, Europe and Israel deserve to know why Iran needs so much enriched uranium at a time when Moscow undertakes the delivery of nuclear fuel for the Bushehr nuclear power plant built by Russian power engineers and the disposal of used fuel.
Iran says enriched uranium is needed to guarantee the future of its nuclear program and to prevent dependence on the West and probably Russia. Thus a mystery surrounding Iranian centrifuges is not far off from a Syrian nuclear mystery.
But for Tehran's militant rhetoric, constant threats and verbal attacks against Israel, the United States and some Arab nations, the Iranian nuclear program would not cause so many questions on the part of the international community.
At the same time, Tehran is trying to turn Moscow into a guarantor of its nuclear and political security. Iran expands its contacts with Russia each time the situation becomes aggravated.
It is hardly surprising that the current visit of Sergei Kiriyenko, Head of Rosatom, Russia's state nuclear energy corporation, to Bushehr has coincided with the visit of Iranian Defense Minister Mostafa Mohammad Najar to Moscow.
Although diplomats tried hard to hush up the main purpose of Najar's visit, namely, the sale of S-300 surface-to-air missile (SAM) systems to Tehran, the Iranian media actively discussed the issue. Iran wants to use these SAM systems for shielding its nuclear facilities from Israeli missiles and warplanes.
Although the S-300 contract was initiated two years ago, Moscow is still in no hurry to implement it because of insistent U.S. and Israeli requests, therefore retaining leverage with Tehran. Owing to Russian efforts, the UN Security Council has not yet passed any tough sanctions against Iran, while Israeli warplanes have so far avoided hitting the incomplete Bushehr NPP and reducing it to heaps of twisted concrete and smoking rubble.
Although Russia does not build any NPPs in Syria, it sells weapons to Damascus. The administration of U.S. President Barack Obama has resumed negotiations with Syria for the first time since 2005. Two senior U.S. officials, namely, Acting Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Asian Affairs Jeffrey Feltman and Daniel Shapiro, the head of the Middle East desk at the National Security Council, have just visited Damascus.
At a meeting with Syria's Foreign Minister Walid al-Muallem, both sides agreed on the importance of resumed Syrian-U.S. dialogue for mutual interests and regional peace and security, the Syrian Arab News Agency (SANA) said.
Although no details of the talks were disclosed, it is obvious that Washington is trying to gradually reduce Iranian influence on Damascus. If it succeeds, then the IAEA would have no more questions for Syria.
Incidentally, claims to Tehran may disappear in exactly the same way.
The opinions expressed in this article are the author's and do not necessarily represent those of RIA Novosti.
