Iran's made up African uranium adventure

Tuesday, November 21, 2006


Quick, get Curveball on the phone!That must be what someone somewhere is thinking whenever they get a chance to accuse Iran of seeking to further their nuclear program these days.How else can we explain the bizarre accusations found in a recent United Nations report that Iran was trying to acquire uranium from Somalia of all places? Somalia has uranium? I mean, c'mon - the last I heard, they didn't even have any copper wire in the country because in the decade-plus of chaos they've been experiencing, every bit of anything that anyone could make a red cent from has been pulled out of the country. So, it seems a little strange that we'd start thinking that Somalia is a source of uranium for a country that's trying to build a clandestine nuclear weapons program.But, that doesn't stop people from bloviating. Take the moronic blog Atlas Shrugs which couldn't even stay coherent enough to say uranium - they said the Iranians were trying to get plutonium from Somalia! Indeed, I guess when you've got a fourth-grade understanding of international politics, you may in fact believe that Somalia has naturally occurring plutonium laying around, the periodic table being at least a 7th-grade level skill in our country's educational system.So, where is this coming from? It's in a leaked document posted by the Council on Foreign Relations for the world to play with (thanks, Laura Rozen). The UN Monitoring Group on Somalia was established by the Security Council to determine who was violating the arms embargo on the war-torn, government-less country. Buried amid all of the report's detailed paragraphs and information is this two-lined, thoroughly undetailed paragraph about Iran:

At the time of the writing of this report, there were two (2) Iranians in Dhusamareeb engaged on matters linked to the exploration of Uranium in exchange for arms to the ICU. Like Iraq, this isn't the first time that Iran has been accused of sourcing uranium it would need for a clandestine nuclear weapons program from an African country. This summer, following publication of another UN report, Iran was accused in the Times of London of moving a significant quantity of uranium from the Democratic Republic of the Congo through Tanzania. It was sensationalist, baseless hokum, and well debunked by Jeffrey Lewis at Arms Control Wonk.More than that, the prospects of getting enough uranium to be of any use to a bomb program out of Somalia are even slimmer than they would be from the DRC. For one thing, there's no active uranium mining industry in Somalia - any uranium mining operation would create quite a footprint, and Iran would get caught long before it got a big enough drill bit in the country. But mostly, there just isn't enough uranium in the country. Check out eRiposte over at Left Coaster who long ago spelled out why Somalia could not have been a source of uranium for Iraq (see numeral four in the post in particular), reasons that would go for Iran, too.But even more than that, some analysis of Somalia's uranium reserves, like this one from the World Energy Council, show that they've got only about 6,600 tonnes of uranium in the country, and that commercially, it would only be accessible if there was a prevailing price of $80 to $130 in the uranium market - i.e. it is very difficult and expensive to exploit these reserves.When you consider that Iran has considerable uranium reserves of its own, or at least plenty for a weapons program as the Nuclear Control Institute claims, you start to see that there's really no reason that they'd be trying to set up a mining operation in what is probably the most chaotic country in the world.So while it might be unquestionable that Iran and Hezbollah are helping to arm and train the Islamic Courts Union in Somalia, why are we back in Africa with Iran?The UN Monitoring Group shows that ten states are breaking the arms embargo on Somalia. Some of them are good friends of America's - Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and Djibouti, who our President regularly lauds for being contributors to America's Global War on Terrorism. All are cited for helping out the Islamic Courts Union, which the United States believes is providing safe haven to al Qaida-linked terrorists.But more than that, Ethiopia comes out for a lot of criticism in this report. More than just arming the Transitional Federal Government in Somalia, they appear to be sending troops into Baidoa to prop it up. And the Ethiopian government would seem to have ample reason for burying the fact that they are engaged in a major military adventure inside Ethiopia.So, America has its Curveballs, and the rest of the world may, too. For a change, it may not be our country who is accusing Iran of African uranium adventures in which it has no need to be engaged, but other states in the region who are hoping to bury the true lead here - that they have embarked on a reckless adventure of their own in one of the world's saddest places. It's a useful corrective to keep this fact in mind when someone comes back sometime soon and says that Iran is getting uranium from Somalia.

# posted by Michael Roston @ 10:55 AM 0 comments

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