“Until now,” writes the Carnegie Endowment’s Mark Hibbs at Arms Control Wonk, “one little item … has gotten scarce attention outside the classified world: the messy diplomatic situation Israel would encounter if any IAEA [International Atomic Energy Agency] personnel were to be casualties of an airstrike on Iran.” Or Washington, should it “react to a serious Iranian escalation by taking matters into its own hands.”
Hibbs explains:
There are IAEA safeguards personnel in Iran 24/7/365. They are there to carry out safeguards inspections at 16 declared facilities plus, if deemed necessary, at nine hospitals in Iran that hold nuclear material [medical isotopes]. The 16 facilities include at least three places I assume would be prime targets of an Israeli air attack in Iran: Natanz … Fordow … and Esfahan.
… So to keep IAEA personnel out of harm’s way, would the U.S. or Israel in advance of launching strikes against Iran … dial up IAEA Director General Yukiya Amano and tell him that he would be well advised to move his inspectors out?
One would like to think so. However
… if the attackers intended to keep Iran in the dark, they would have to consider that if they informed the IAEA of their plans, a subsequent exodus of IAEA personnel from Iran might signal to Iran that an attack was imminent.
And another however on top of that last however:
But the IAEA must be careful in going about it. If after such an attack information were to leak, or if Amano were compelled to reveal that he had been warned by surprise attackers to withdraw his inspectors, and if the IAEA had chosen not to pass that warning on to Iran, Iran might conclude afterwards that the IAEA was party to an invasion of Iran. Any IAEA personnel still in the country would be at severe risk. [Even if not] the IAEA’s relationship with Iran would be over.
Never fear: Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu possesses an amazing talent for keeping his eye on the prize. In other words, when it comes to attacking Iran he wears blinders, and, as with the Neocons and Iraq, is in denial about complications — not just unforeseen, but foreseen.
We’ll leave the last word to a commenter to Hibbs’s post named Hass, who succeeds in putting the issue into its proper perspective. (“Sic” where applicable.)
So let me get this straight: we are seriously talking about an attack on facilities that are subject to IAEA monitoring, even “short term” surprise visits, which are not part of any weapons program, and which Iran has offered to allow even more inspection? Has the world gone mad? What would be the point of that? And seriously, is the lrgal question here about the fate of inspectors rather than the civilians working in a civilian nuclear facility, or even the question of whether such an attack would be legal to start with?