Imagine
a pious Muslim faced with a ban on fabricating a certain
kind of weapon. He is committed to obeying
unquestioningly the fatwas of his religious
leader and yet discovers that producing such a weapon,
or threatening to do so, is a strong lever for gaining
benefits from a powerful group living in the
neighborhood. Replace "a pious Muslim" with "Iran", and
"a powerful group" with the 25-member European Union,
and the above sentences aptly sum up the current
Iranian-EU relationship.
Enriched by millions of
daily encounters in bazaars, Iranians are adept at
bargaining and confident in the knowledge, acquired over
centuries, that skillful bargaining and brinkmanship go
hand in hand. This is what just happened in Paris
between the officials of Iran and the the EU troika -
France, Germany and the United Kingdom. The subject was
Tehran's nuclear program; the occasion, the run-up to
the finalization of an International Atomic Energy
Agency (IAEA) report for its 35-strong board of
governors on November 15. The Iranians dragged out the
bargaining until the last minute before initialing a
deal subject to the approval of the Supreme National
Security Council (SNSC) in Tehran.
It was a deal
that was meant to prepare the way for further
negotiations. Iran has agreed to suspend its uranium
enrichment and reprocessing programs until a "grand
bargain" is reached in which the EU guarantees nuclear,
political, and trade concessions in return for Tehran's
indefinite suspension of the same programs. Though
negotiated by the troika, the agreement's ownership lies
with the EU as a whole. To the undisguised relish of the
Iranians, this deal killed the Bush administration's pet
plan to refer the Iranian case to the United Nations
Security Council for censure or the possible imposition
of sanctions for its alleged breaches of the IAEA
nuclear protocol.
Both Iran and the EU have a
stake in seeing that the next round of negotiations,
starting on December 15, succeeds. By clinching a deal
with the EU, the Iranian leadership aims to achieve two
strategic objectives: improve Iranian living standards
through a trade and cooperation agreement with the EU,
and forestall the Bush administration's "hegemonistic
designs" by widening of the political gap between the US
and the EU over Iran.
The EU threesome has
stayed firmly on the Iranian diplomatic path, despite US
pressures, in order to protect the interests of its
companies, which already have lucrative contracts in
Iran's oil and gas industry and are hopeful of securing
more in the future.
Countering US
hegemony With the collapse of the Soviet Union in
1991, the Islamic Republic's opposition to the imperial
ambitions of the two superpowers narrowed to the winner
of the Cold War: Washington. At a joint press conference
with visiting Russian Defense Minister Igor Sergeyev in
February 2000, for instance, Hassan Rouhani, secretary
general of Iran's SNSC, summarized his country's foreign
policy in this way: "Cooperation among Iran, Russia,
India and China is very important if one hopes to
confront the hegemonic policies of America."
That was one year before the arrival of George W
Bush in the White House, his unveiling of a thoroughly
unilateralist foreign policy based on "preventive"
force, the ominous inclusion of Iran in his "axis of
evil", and, of course, his illegal invasion of Iraq in
2003. That, in turn, led French President Jacques Chirac
to articulate a competing vision of a multipolar world
in which the US, the EU, China, India and Russia all
would be poles. In this context, it was no accident that
Paris was chosen as the venue for the recent Iranian/EU
negotiations.
In Iran, even diehard
conservatives now agree that developing cordial
relations with the EU is an effective and necessary way
to curb Washington's designs on their country. They are
also realistic enough not to underestimate the power of
the Bush administration: it successfully pressured Japan
to withhold its signature on a US$2 billion deal to
develop the enormous Azadegan oilfield in Iran, and the
EU to suspend its nine-month-old negotiations with
Tehran on the trade and cooperation agreement.
But then, Iranian conservatives and others are
equally aware that, singularly, on the issue of Iran,
even the United Kingdom has stood apart from the US and
with its European partners. As a consequence, British
Foreign Minister Jack Straw - as they are well aware -
is derided by the hawks in Washington, the effective
makers of Middle East policy, as "Ayatollah Straw". They
wish to see this policy gap between Washington and
London maintained, if not widened.
To each
its own interests At the same time, Iranian
leaders want to extract maximum possible benefits for
their country in their dealings with the EU. The most
effective way to do this, unsurprisingly, was to acquire
as many bargaining chips as possible. And so they
resumed the manufacture of centrifuges for enriching
uranium in July - but only after the EU troika had
reneged on its part of a deal it had signed with Tehran
in October 2003. The three European countries delivered
neither promised technological and economic benefits to
Iran, nor did they address Tehran's security concerns,
which are closely tied up with the denuclearization of
the Middle East (read: Israel and its sizeable nuclear
arsenal). They even failed to get the Iran file
downgraded at the subsequent IAEA governors' meeting -
as stated in the agreement.
So on October 31,
amid chants of "Allahu Akbar" ("God is great") and
"Death to America", all 247 members present in the
Iranian parliament unanimously called on the government
to restart the country's uranium-enrichment program,
using its already manufactured centrifuges, and to
exercise its right to complete the nuclear fuel cycle
enshrined in the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT)
to which Iran is a signatory.
A nuclear fuel
cycle consists of mining uranium ore (in which only
seven out of every 1,000 uranium atoms are the lighter
fissile isotopes U235, the rest being the heavier U238),
processing it into uranium oxide (yellow cake),
transforming it into uranium tetraflouride (UF4) gas,
and then uranium hexafluoride (UF6) gas, followed by
enriching UF6 to varying degrees of U235 purity: 3.5-4%
pure for use in nuclear power reactors, 10-20% pure for
use in research reactors, and 90%-plus pure and so
usable in nuclear weapons.
In a nuclear power
plant, the fuel consists of sealed rods containing
hundreds of pellets of 3.5-4% pure uranium. When hit by
high energy neutrons, these pellets undergo a controlled
chain reaction, emitting intense heat which transforms
the surrounding light (ordinary) water into steam. That
then runs the plant's electricity generating turbines.
Once these fuel rods have yielded their energy, they are
called "spent rods". These can be reprocessed with the
aim of extracting from them plutonium (Pu239 or Pu241),
which could be used as fissile material for nuclear
weapons. (Although as yet there are no commercial
electric plants using plutonium fuel, Pu239 and Pu241 do
contribute toward generating heat for uranium-fueled
plants.) Nuclear fuel thus produces both electric power
and more nuclear fuel, and is therefore, in principle, a
renewable source of energy.
Therein is the
rejoinder to those in the US who argue that, given
Iran's enormous oil and gas resources, its government
does not need nuclear power plants. Oil and natural gas
deposits, being finite, will not last forever, whereas a
nuclear fuel cycle can be self-perpetuating. These
critics ignore the fact that, despite its vast oil
deposits and the largest gas reserves in the world,
Russia has a thriving nuclear power industry at home.
Furthermore, it exports its technology. Having already
built the Iranian nuclear power station near Bushehr, it
remains the favorite contractor for the eight more such
plants that Iran plans to build in the near future.
Meanwhile, it is Iran's hydrocarbon resources -
an estimated nearly 10% of global petroleum reserves and
the second-largest gas deposits in the world - that are
at the root of the pressures that British and French oil
companies are exerting (discreetly) on their respective
governments to cut a diplomatic deal with Tehran on the
nuclear issue, and thus torpedo the American plan to
take the issue to the UN Security Council with the
possibility of economic sanctions or, in the future,
worse.
The list of the European oil companies
with ongoing oil contracts with Iran - Royal
Dutch-Shell, Elf, Total SA, Agip of Italy, as well as BG
(British Gas), Enterprise, Lasmo, Monument, and so on -
is so extensive that no major EU member can afford to
ignore such interests.
The Europeans are not the
only ones. Last month the visiting Chinese Foreign
Minister Li Xhaoxing signed an oil-and-gas deal with
Iran, and Chinese officials assured Hussein Mousavian,
deputy to Rouhani, in Beijing that China would block any
move at the IAEA to refer the Tehran nuclear dispute to
the UN Security Council.
Bargaining over the
shape of the world Whatever agreement emerges
out of the "grand bargain" between Iran and the EU, its
nuclear component will be verified by the IAEA. In his
annual report to the UN General Assembly on November 1,
IAEA director general Muhammad ElBaradei said that Iran
needed to restore the international community's
confidence by suspending enrichment after previously
providing the IAEA "information that was at times
changing, contradictory and slow in coming".
A
fortnight later, what the EU troika actually got from
Iran was an agreement "to cease to develop or operate
facilities to produce fissile material, including any
enrichment or reprocessing capability". "Reprocessing",
a term that applies to the spent fuel rods, had not been
demanded by the IAEA.
The Iran-EU deal came on
the heels of a direct intervention by Iranian Supreme
Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamanei. In his Friday prayer
sermon on November 5, he declared that "developing,
producing or stockpiling nuclear weapons" is forbidden
under Islam and "our believing nation", and added: "They
accuse us of pursuing nuclear weapons program. I am
telling them as I have said before that we are not even
thinking about nuclear weapons."
What apparently
drove Khamanei to this public statement was his
determination to frustrate the Bush administration's
plan to isolate Iran. He had used a similar argument
when, in October 2003, protests arose at home over
Iran's agreement to sign an additional protocol allowing
IAEA inspectors access to any sites they wished to
visit. He insisted then that the decision to cooperate
with the IAEA was taken "widely and carefully" in the
interests of the Islamic Republic to "foil an
American-Zionist maneuver" to isolate Iran.
Since that moment both Iran and the EU threesome
have raised their horizons. Besides adding in the
reprocessing of the spent nuclear fuel rods from
civilian projects, the Europeans plan to introduce the
issues of human rights and political reform into their
upcoming negotiations with Iran for the "grand
agreement".
Tehran's wish list includes the
reaffirmation of its right to a nuclear energy program
for peaceful purposes; access to imported nuclear fuel
at market prices for its reactors; support for Iran's
acquisition of a light water research reactor; help with
regional security concerns, including combating drug
trafficking; the resumption of talks on the Trade and
Cooperation Agreement; support for Iran's application
for World Trade Organization membership; and the keeping
of the Iraq-based Mujahideen Khalq Organization on the
EU's list of terrorist organizations.
Much tough
talking lies ahead between the EU and the Middle East's
most strategic nation. All the more so when, as 34 IAEA
governors welcomed Iran's decision on the suspension of
all enrichment and reprocessing activities, Jackie
Sanders, the Bush administration's representative,
promptly followed up her very reluctant yes-vote with a
nine-page statement asserting repeatedly that Iran has a
clandestine nuclear weapons program without offering any
backup evidence.
Dilip Hiro is the
author of Secrets and Lies: Operation Iraqi Freedom
and After as well as The Essential Middle East: A
Comprehensive Guide. His forthcoming book is The
Iranian Labyrinth: Journeys Through Theocratic Iran and
Its Furies (Nation Books). He is based in London,
writes regularly for the New York Times, the Washington
Post, the Observer, the Guardian, and the Nation
magazine, and is a frequent commentator on NBC, CNN, BBC
and Sky TV.
(This article appeared on TomDispatch and is used with
permission.)
