Pitfalls in a nuclear bargain with
Iran By Kaveh L Afrasiabi
The
idea has been floating around for some time, most
recently theorized under the veneer of "grand bargain"
by Harvard's Graham Allison in his book, Nuclear
Terrorism, proposing an economic and security
package deal with Tehran in exchange for it shelving its
alleged nuclear weapons program, and now Democrat
challengers John Kerry and John Edwards have publicly
opted for a watered down version as the Republican
Party's convention takes place in New York.
The
Kerry-proposed "great bargain", reported in the
Washington Post on August 30, closely resembles the
so-called European Three Declaration signed in October
2003, whereby Germany, France and Great Britain pledged
to assist Iran's peaceful nuclear program if Iran
cooperated with the United Nations' atomic watchdog
agency and halted its uranium enrichment program. The
European initiative has been on the verge of collapsing,
heightened by a recent meeting in Paris where Iranian
and European officials hurled charges and
counter-charges at each other.
Thus, while the
European Three accuse Iran of discarding its agreement
by resuming the construction of centrifuge parts, Iran
on the other hand points at its record of greater
nuclear transparency, allowing the atomic inspectors
even to Iran's military site and implementing the
Additional Protocol, even though it has yet to be
ratified by parliament, overlooked by a Europe keen on
patching up with the United States.
Still, the
Iran-EU dialogue on the nuclear issue is far from dead
in the water and there are on-going discussions in
anticipation of the mid-September meeting of the
International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which may or
may not dispatch the matter to the UN Security Council.
From Iran's vantage point, conscientious efforts have
been made to answer all of the IAEA's concerns, above
all with respect to the thorny question of the origins
of the traces of enriched uranium detected by the IAEA's
inspectors last year; these traces, per a recent report
in Jane's Defense Weekly quoting reliable IAEA sources,
came from the equipment provided by the nuclear
smuggling network headed by Pakistan's chief nuclear
physicist, Abdul Qadeer Khan.
This information,
reportedly corroborated by the Pakistani government, for
all practical purposes puts to rest a very contentious
issue at the heart of IAEA's concern, adding pressure on
the atomic agency to close the Iran file as requested by
Tehran. A clue to the IAEA's softening stance on Iran,
the IAEA chief, Mohammad ElBaradei, has admitted in a
recent Interview with Fletcher Forum (Winter 2004) that
the agency's inspection of Iran's program has been
"effective" and that there is no need to worry about
"small lab" research "that would not enable the country
to develop a weapons program".
Indeed, in the
light of the absence of any "smoking gun", Iranian
compliance with the intrusive regime of the Additional
Protocol, and an Iran-Russia protocol on the return of
spent fuel from the Bushehr power plant to Russia, the
momentum against a Security Council consideration of the
Iranian nuclear program is rapidly gaining ground, this
despite the flurry of elections-inspired tough rhetoric
on Iran by both presidential candidates in the US.
The irony of Kerry's Iran approach is that, true
to Kerry's other policy positions, it is Janus-faced,
exuding the air of conciliation and confrontation
simultaneously, threatening to steer the next Democratic
president, in case he succeeds at the upcoming November
elections, toward belligerency against Iran since for
all practical purposes Kerry has boxed himself in an
either or position vis-a-vis Iran, that is, telling Iran
to take the bargain or face sanctions or even tougher
measures, ie, military action. But this paradoxical
carrot-and-stick policy has little chance of immediate
success, given Iran's unwillingness to bow to any
perceived US bullying, thus setting the stage for a
future "President Kerry" to out-do Bush, whom he has
repeatedly criticized for ignoring the "Iran threat".
It is noteworthy that the Kerry approach toward
Iran is intimately tied to Kerry's election politics to
woo the powerful Jewish vote, which explains why the
Massachusetts senator has not made any public comments
about reports of Israeli espionage in the Pentagon
compromising US national security interests, nor has he
ever ventured a word of criticism of the Israeli
government's iron-fist approach toward the Palestinians,
instead limiting himself, as he has in his latest
article on www.forward.com to describing Israel as
purely a "victim of terrorism".
Kerry's
"nuanced" tough talk on Iran, clearly music to the ears
of the American Jewish power brokers, may facilitate his
presidential bid, but one must wonder about its
congruity with his professed "progressive
internationalism" and his more distant record as a peace
activist. After all, Kerry represents a state which
still mourns the death of scores of its residents who
were on the two airplanes hijacked from Logan Airport on
September 11, 2001. In terms of sedimented political
psychology, a question worth posing is, of course,
whether or not Kerry is immune or prone to it?
Assuming for a moment that the IAEA ends up
hurling the Iran nuclear issue into the lap of the
Security Council a mere few weeks from now, then the
perils of the Kerry approach become all the more
obvious. First, the senator's position in favor of UN
sanctions is ill-timed, given the high price of
Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries' oil,
bound to escalate and thus jeopardize the US's economic
recovery in the unlikely event that the UN imposes an
oil embargo on Iran. Besides, UN sanctions did not
prevent Pakistan's proliferation, nor did the Security
Council punish North Korea when it exited the
Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). A toothless Security
Council resolution, regretting Iran's nuclear build-up
and urging it to comply with its NPT obligations, just
as it did with respect to North Korea, will hardly serve
any practical purpose other than highlighting the UN's
impotence, prompting further criticism of the world
organization still reeling under the aftershocks of the
Iraq war. Nor is the US itself fully committed to this
course of action, since Muslim nations would seize on
the opportunity to raise the issue of Israel's arsenals
and US "double standards".
This brings us to a
consideration of the "military option" strongly favored
by Israel and certain hawkish policy-makers in the US.
Aside from the operational difficulties of air raids on
Iran's "dispersed" facilities, there are strong
arguments against it. First, the Bushehr power plant,
supervised by the IAEA, is in accordance with Iran's
NPT-led right to civilian nuclear technology, and any
military strike to dismantle it will cause a huge
international outcry, particularly by the cash-starved
Russians, who are incensed by the post-September 11 US
military intrusion in Central Asia. Second, Iranian
people will react very negatively and stand behind their
government's action and reaction, which will most likely
reach into both Afghanistan and Iraq. And finally, most
likely Iran will rebound from the setback and commit
itself even more energetically to its nuclear program in
the aftermath of any military strike by the US or
Israel.
Notwithstanding the above, the big
bubble of Kerry's Iran policy can be safely burst once
subjected to a careful scrutiny, necessitating a
re-doubling of efforts on the part of his chief policy
advisors to come up with a more coherent policy. A more
candid consideration of Allison's "grand bargain",
alluded to above, may be necessary, and this means a
security dialogue, encompassing Iraq, the Persian Gulf
and the Holy Land, with Iran that is sadly hitherto
lacking.
Kaveh L Afrasiabi,
PhD, is the author of After Khomeini: New Directions
in Iran's Foreign Policy (Westview Press) and "Iran's
Foreign Policy Since 9/11", Brown's Journal of World
Affairs, co-authored with former deputy foreign minister
Abbas Maleki, No 2, 2003.
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