TEHRAN (Bazaar) – Professor Paul Pillar, who was CIA intelligence analyst for 28 years, says The IAEA has a responsibility to keep trying to resolve issues in its area of responsibility regardless of the perceived likelihood of being able to resolve them.
Pillar told Bazaar news agency that sending the team is not necessarily a sign of any increased optimism on the part of the IAEA.
Following is the text of the interview:
Q: The International Atomic Energy Agency team is going to travel to Iran with the aim of dealing with the remaining safeguards issues. What is your assessment of this trip?
A: The underlying issues have not changed. Until and unless there is movement on the Iranian side regarding full answers to the IAEA's questions about the sources of the uranium traces in question, I don't expect new results from the trip.
Q: Head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI) Mohammad Eslami has said that we hope that we can make effective progress with the agency team in order to remove the obstacles and ambiguities and that a step forward will be taken. What is your assessment of Eslami's words?
A: It is a vague expression of hope that does not provide a basis for expecting that change is afoot.
Q: A European diplomat told Al-Monitor reporter that this trip is good in principle, but Westerners do not expect any progress from it. If we evaluate this comment correctly, what does the sending of this team by the agency mean?
A: The IAEA has a responsibility to keep trying to resolve issues in its area of responsibility regardless of the perceived likelihood of being able to resolve them. Sending the team is not necessarily a sign of any increased optimism on the part of the IAEA.
Q: What is your assessment of the future of the negotiations and how probable do you consider the start of the negotiations at the moment?
A: The Iranian side probably continues to link the safeguards issue to the issues that have prevented a restoration of the JCPOA. To the extent that it does, then a continued impediment to progress on any of these issues is a lack of trust by the Iranian side that it has any chance to receive economic or political benefits even it cooperates with the IAEA or with anyone else. This is on top of the principal impediment to any progress on JCPOA-related issues at present, which is the reluctance of the U.S. or other Western governments to engage with Iran and make any concessions while the Iranian regime is harshly cracking down on popular protests in Iran.
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