Krane: American Nuclear Reactors for Dubai, Iran’s Best Friend
Jim Krane writes in a guest op-ed for IC
The contrast is startling. Dubai is Iran’s window through the US embargo, one of its largest trading partners, and an offshore Mecca for Iranian business. “Dubai is the most important city on earth to the Islamic Republic of Iran, with the exception of Tehran,” says Saeed Leylaz, the editor of Tehran’s Sarmayeh financial newspaper.
And now Dubai – through the United Arab Emirates federal government – wants American nuclear technology to bolster its overtaxed electric grid.
That a country so central to Iran’s well-being could host American nukes strikes many people as worrying. The US Congress is right to be concerned – but perhaps not for the obvious reasons. Members of Congress now have the chance, albeit unlikely, to scuttle President Obama’s nuclear deal. But they should approve it, with a few amendments.
It isn’t just Iranians who hang around Dubai. The city is the diplomatic equivalent of the bar scene in the first Star Wars. Its array of trading partners and business interests is a gallery of strange bedfellows. Dubai is a major Arab beachhead for Israeli business, especially Tel Aviv diamond dealers tapping into the huge Saudi market. Dubai may have withheld a visa in February from Israeli tennis star Shahar Peer, but the real story is the number of Israelis who do get visas, despite the lack of diplomatic relations.
It gets murkier still. Dubai’s first brush with atomic energy was as the logistics center for the smuggling ring of wayward Pakistani nuclear scientist A.Q. Khan. It’s a place where Afghan opium producers launder their profits, and, along with neighboring Sharjah, where former KGB arms smuggler Victor Bout once organized cargo shipments. Dubai airport, which offers direct flights to Kandahar, Mogadishu and Baghdad, welcomes all sorts of interesting visitors. One was USS Cole bombing mastermind Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, who was detained on arrival and handed to the CIA for waterboarding and threats with a power drill.
Dubai also happens to be a close US ally. It is the US Navy’s No. 1 overseas port, the only Gulf harbor that can berth a carrier or offer shore leave to American sailors. The US consulate in Dubai hosts a lucrative CIA collection operation on Iran, which I detail in my book. And, although Dubai’s ruler allowed Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to hold a giant anti-American rally in a soccer stadium, he closed the main roads in the city and declared a mandatory holiday for the visit of US President Bush.
In short, Dubai is an open city, a Hong Kong-style trading entrepôt with all the spies, smugglers and schemers inherent in that role. It just happens to service the world’s most dangerous region.
Thus the question before Congress is an interesting one. Should it back the sale of U.S. nuclear technology to Dubai and the UAE?
Yes, Congress should back nuclear energy for the UAE. Congress and the Obama administration have scrutinized Dubai’s ties with Iran and have embedded into the deal sufficient guarantees against smuggling. Anyhow, nuclear exporters like France are standing by to pick up America’s slack.
But there is an area where Congress could tweak the deal. UAE residents happen to be the world’s most prolific polluters, using more of the earth’s resources, per capita, than anyone else. (Americans are a close No. 2.) This is precisely why the UAE needs nuclear energy, since the region’s supplies of natural gas – the main feedstock for UAE power plants – can’t keep up with demand. It is a sad-but-true fact that the UAE and other Gulf oil producers are running short of domestic energy.
Rather than turbo-charging the UAE’s squandering of electricity and water, Congress should hitch the nuclear deal to an energy conservation regime that pushes the Emirates to reduce its current carbon emissions. Energy conservation advice may sound ridiculous coming from the world’s largest overall polluter, but there it is.
Nuclear energy, which gives off virtually no carbon, could actually help the UAE clean up its emissions, if it comes alongside cuts in the current overuse of desalinated water and air conditioning. That way, moving the UAE away from the fossil fuels it squanders will benefit all of us. And, if distancing Dubai from Tehran is a goal, the US nuclear agreement could also help. It might make the UAE less likely to conclude a gas pipeline deal with Iran.
___
Jim Krane is the former AP Persian Gulf correspondent whose new book on Dubai, “City of Gold: Dubai and the Dream of Capitalism,”
is available at Amazon.com.
End/ (Not Continued)
posted by Juan Cole @ 9/08/2009 12:13:00 AM
|
Facebook
14 Comments:
Curiously enough, the Iranians have been pooh poohed for pointing out their lack of power generation capability in the debate over their reactor.
Sauce for the Goose, sauce for the Gander
Dubai sits on the cape that narrows the Strait of Hormuz choke-point. A large nuclear power plant on the coast there is a strategic step in the march toward neighborhood nuclear parity, and a strategically vulnerable target.
As supplying superpower, the US would probably guarantee a permanent missile/radar presence to defend it from air or missile attack, and be granted long-term concessions for the nuke/defense package. ('Avoid foreign entanglements...')
The US has gotten the proliferation thing so wrong for so long that we can't even see our role in it. I'm a greenie from way back, but carbon's the least concern in this scheme. If that is the concern, Dubai has sunlight and capital, and a crying need for shade.
It's interesting the read that the UAE, despite being a major producer of fossil fuels, is nevertheless in need of nuclear power. This provides a good counterexample to the frequently heard argument that Iran, as a major producer of oil and gas, can not be possibly in need of nuclear energy, and its nuclear program must therefore be to produce weapons.
Bahrain is the main Gulf port for the US Navy, and where shore leave and off-base living goes on.
Dubai occasionally sees shore leave.
Dubai is about two years behind Jordan who announced plans for a nuclear power station in 2007.
Jordan Nuclear
It will be interesting to see who actually runs the reactor and who guards it.
i was a bit confused by the reflexive fear-mongering vis a vis Iran early in this post. "surely," i thought, "professor cole has not suddenly embraced the cartoonish conventional wisdom that iran is a threat to us. i mean, unlike the kagans and kristols of this world, he actually knows what he's talking about"
then i realized "ah, guest post." i see. come back, juan!
Is there a reason Dubai, with ample sunlight, does not invest heavily in solar power? Why is there an implicit understanding in this article that Dubai needs massive amounts of electricity centrally controlled by the government of Dubai and brought to them by the highly secretive military-industrial complex of the USA? The excuse that solar is a pie in the sky strategy just doesn't hold water, especially being that Germany and China are both investing heavily in it with considerably less sunlight in those places than the deserts of the UAE. The author should be able to see the broader significance of choosing nuclear.
fun read! bizarre P.R. spin, though it is... The author makes a great case ref : “Congress can help stop Dubai's wasting energy!” for the good old boys in Dubai to become nuclear powered — wow! another bauble trophy plaything from The West! And give Mr. Krane credit: you gotta be clever to spin it such that the remedy for the reality of a culture addicted to cheap energy, even moreso than the U.S. (e.g., using desalinated water to make snow) is to drill baby, drill into the nuclear option. "Congress should tie the nuclear deal to assurances that the Emirates will reduce consumption." r - i - g - h - t. Like, that's gonna happen, as a result of giving them more energy! {grin} howzabout: "Congress should tie the nuclear deal to assurances that the Emirates will become the re-processing centre = desert dumping ground for all the world's nuclear waste?" Sure! Instead of extraction-colonialism, we'll call it insertion-colonialism: Whenever they suck an oil field dry, we'll just bury all that nasty old nuclear pooh-poop way down there in their now rapidly depleting empty oil-holes. voila!
Re Jordan nuclear power: Exactly where? Capitalized how?
The only place with cooling water is Jordan's bit of coastline at Aqaba. I guess a combined power-desalinization plant there could make some sense, but sea-reefs at the head of the Gulf of Aqaba are already under intense environmental stress, and that's been an active terror-security flash-zone.
Arabia has also notified IAEC of it's intention to go nuclear. To my ear, that signals Saudi intention to bring home the full nuclear fuel production capability that Arabia helped fund in Pakistan. Although Arabia deniably denies 'nukes on the peninsula', their Chinese-built IRBM force is really only effective when delivering the sorts of warheads that Pakistan is building.
Gulf oil hegemony is in decline, post-peak. Arab states are increasingly becoming net energy consumers, and therefore borrowers.
Nuclear arms are thought to be a guarantee against attack by another state. That doctrine certainly has worked for nuclear-armed Israel.
This is just a sick idea, to replace emission rich technology to use nuclear plants which again will pollute the environment for a million years. And to be honest no human can say what will happen in such a long time with nuclear waste. But second trading nuclear energy rise the likelihood that nuclear weapons are build. Nuclear power plants are the basis for nuclear weapons. So to ban nuclear weapons from earth, as Mister President wishes, means also to ban on the long run this expensive and finally insecure (in a big scale) technology at all. Instead why not use sun energy which should be there enough in Arabia. It is crazy where decisions are lead by greed and money.
Looking at that picture of the spiral arms of the artificial islands, I had the thought that they were going to put windmills at the ends and middle of these arms. They could go big, or stay small and just place them on the rooftops. I agree that this area SHOULD be the testing ground for much of the "alternative" energy that the industrialized world is making today.
The nuclear option is like leaving your door open at night in Compton. You might survive a few nights, but when boredom sets in, you will be a target. Not so with windmills and solar panels.
Nuclear power may not release CO2, but every nuclear power plant releases radionuclides when operating. Go to http://ifyoulovethisplanet.org/?p=1441 to listen to Helen Caldicott explain the dangers.
Here's a morbid question: Would a 3-mile island scenario in the Gulf (in Dubai) be the Nuclear bomb we would drop on Iran?
I don't think American Technology should be anywhere near this because of the blame game later on. "We didn't secure it, we didn't manage it, we didn't protect it, we didn't maintain it..." etc.
It is interesting to see how the responses are directed towards Dubai without questioning the contents of the article. But hey, that's the American way all along! FYI, the nuclear plant is going to be located in Abu Dhabi (the capital) and not Dubai. Krane didn't even bother getting his facts right which applies to the rest of his article as far as I'm concerned. Another issue that I would like to draw your attention to is the fact that there is a lot of political tensions between the governments of the UAE and Iran. They are at each others throats over the 3 UAE islands currently occupied by Iran and this has been going on for decades. Dubai attracts a lot of Iranian investments because people in Iran don't believe in the system there and whoever can invest abroad does and Dubai is one of the main spots simply because its proximity, the infrastructure, lifestyle choice where religion is not forced down their throats as is the case elsewhere in the region as well as the overall sense of freedom in general that people enjoy there. You don't see any signs of Iranian investments in Abu Dhabi though!
My guess is that the nuclear plant will never see daylight as a project. However, its one of the ways the UAE has to pay the US for American protection against Iran plain and simple in addition to the weapons sales. The UAE wants to send the signal to Iran that they will have nuclear capabilities in an attempt to curb any crazy scenarios that Ahmedineajad has in his mind and implant the illusion in his mind (which is not a difficult task) that the nuclear plant is not necessarily going to be for civilian purposes and that the US is going to use it for its own agendas against him if required.
Post a Comment
<< Home