Broadsheets apply varying interpretations of Iran nuclear ‘deal’
21 May 2010
On Tuesday 18 May it was announced that the UN Security Council was set to impose a fourth set of sanctions on Iran, which would be targeted at the country’s Revolutionary Guard, the military apparatus that oversaw the repression of pro-democracy protests following the contested Presidential election results. The draft resolution came a day after Iran had signalled that it was willing to export more than a tonne of its enriched uranium for refining abroad in a deal it had struck with Turkey and Brazil, under the terms of which it would receive fuel rods for civilian nuclear purposes.
The Guardian’s editorial on Wednesday, ‘Blind Man’s Bluff’, lamented the failure to implement the Turkish-Brazilian deal, which it deemed the best alternative to US-proposed sanctions, even while acknowledging there were serious flaws with the plan. The editorial noted that Iran was insisting on ‘producing 20%-enriched uranium… [which] undermined Iran’s argument that the enrichment was for civilian purposes only.’ It also highlighted that, even if the Turkish-Brazilian deal went through, ‘Iran has enough feedstock to make a bomb’.
However, it sought to downplay these facts, by claiming that ‘Iran’s ability to make a bomb depends on its centrifuges, not only on the amount of feedstock it has. And Iran’s insistence that it will continue enriching to 20% can also be viewed as a sop to national pride.’ In light of this view, ‘Blind Man’s Bluff’ ended by commenting that ‘the Turkish deal still represents the closest we have come so far to the start of a resolution to the crisis.’
This commitment to giving Iran the benefit of the doubt no matter what the state does chimes with Just Journalism’s special report, ‘The Gathering Calm’, which examined six months of Guardian editorials on Iran’s nuclear programme. The report found that:
‘Since September 2009… numerous events challenged Iran’s argument that its nuclear programme was for civilian use only, but none of them has significantly altered the line that The Guardian has consistently promoted; namely, that the mullahs must be engaged diplomatically since the risks associated with both military strikes and tougher economic sanctions are too great.’
The Guardian’s hesitancy to provide full context on the now-scuppered Turkish-Brazilian deal was also evident in the main news article on the story. In ‘Russia and China back punitive new UN sanctions against Iran’s nuclear programme’, Ewan MacAskill, the newspaper’s Washington, D.C. bureau chief, wrote that ‘The US and Britain were cool about this deal, saying it did not go nearly far enough’, and that what would ‘add to the Brazilian and Turkish anger is that their deal is similar to one that the US, France, Russia [and several other bodies] agreed with Tehran last October’. Yet nowhere in the article did MacAskill describe why the US and Britain did not think the deal went far enough.
This was in marked contrast with the coverage of the issue in The Independent on the same day. In ‘US persuades Security Council to impose new Iran sanctions’, David Usborne, The Independent’s Washington correspondent, didn’t portray the Turkish-Brazilian deal as similar to the one offered last October, instead noting that it ‘appeared to be a watered-down version’, since Iran had only agreed to ‘export roughly half of its uranium stockpile’, which would leave ‘a significant quantity of low-enriched uranium’ in Iran. And if Iran had gone through with the Turkish-Brazilian deal, it still would not have made any commitment to the total halting of its enrichment programme, which Usborne described as the ‘number-one demand of the foreign community’.
While MacAskill did not mention these concerns, he did discuss the possibility of Israel attacking Iran. Twice in his article he mentioned that failure to solve the Iranian nuclear issue might result in Israel’s conducting ‘long-threatened’ air-strikes against key nuclear facilities, and that while Israel was supporting the sanctions programme, they were still not ‘ruling out an eventual military strike.’ No mention was made of the numerous threats that Iran has made against Israel, or that the Israeli people view a nuclear Iran as an existential threat.
Such news reporting demonstrates a tendency to underplay the danger posed by Iran to its neighbouring states and to international security, while focusing on the possibility of military action from Israel or the United States without explaining those countries’ viewpoints. Again, this reflects the long-standing editorial position of The Guardian, which ultimately views any disciplinary measure against Iran, whether military or economic, as more harmful then diplomacy, regardless of whether or not diplomacy culminates in Iran’s acquisition of a nuclear bomb.