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Iran nuclear talks: It's time
to shut up
By Kaveh L Afrasiabi
BERLIN - The nuclear talks between Iran
and the so-called European three (EU-3 -
Britain, France, and Germany) are due to resume May 23 in a
crisis atmosphere filled with accusations and
counter-accusations, with each side blaming the
other for not sticking to the terms of their
agreement signed in Paris last November.
Described as a "last ditch" effort
to salvage the nearly two-year-old talks
once characterized as a "landmark" in
European diplomacy, Iran-EU-3 diplomacy has by
all indications reached a critical threshold where
it may actually be in the interests of both sides
to discontinue it, at least within the
present framework, or more accurately, lack of framework.
Lest we forget, these talks began at the
initiative of the foreign ministers of the EU-3,
who took on themselves the arduous challenge of
finding a diplomatic solution to the perceived
growing crisis over Iran's nuclear program.
Through a flurry of activities, including exchange
of letters, visits to Tehran and several rounds of
talks in various European capitals, the EU-3 hoped
to achieve a breakthrough in the brewing crisis
engulfing the IAEA (International Atomic Energy
Agency) beginning in 2002, after the disclosure of
Iran's clandestine nuclear activities.
Since early 2003, Iran has pursued
two-track diplomacy, through the IAEA and with
EU-3, with the latter acting as a timely catalyst
to resolve the nuclear standoff at the IAEA
sessions discussing Iran, culminating in the Paris
Agreement whereby Iran agreed to temporarily halt
its uranium enrichment and conversion activities
as a "confidence-building measure" as requested by
an IAEA resolution.
However, the problem was, and remains, the absence of
a proper framework for the Iran-EU-3 talks,
in contrast to Iran-IAEA talks, which follow
the parameters set by the non-proliferation regime.
As a result, almost anything goes in Iran-EU-3
talks, and one can clearly see in the Paris Agreement
the conflation of nuclear and non-nuclear issues,
the rigidities of strong "linkage diplomacy"
self-fettering into a boxed position, whereby
today the EU-3 foreign ministers are forced to
send an ultimatum to Tehran that they will seek UN
Security Council action against Iran if it acts on
its recent declarations that it will resume
enrichment activities.
Hence, if the upcoming
round of talks fails to reach an agreement,
such as postponing the talks until after
Iran's June 17 presidential election, then the
EU-3, and indeed the EU as a whole, may have no
choice but to proceed with its ultimatum, without
necessarily having thought through the
consequences of such an action.
A chronology of
events may prove useful here: the EU-3 had
no sooner signed the Paris Agreement when it began
undermining it, first by inviting a leader of
an opposition group, People's Mujahedin, to address
the European parliament, despite the fact that
in the Paris Agreement this group is explicitly
referred to as a terrorist organization.
The next big blow to the Paris Agreement
came a little later when President George W Bush
announced, on his European trip, his explicit
support for the European nuclear talks with Iran,
to the point of even stating that "Europe is
representing us" in these talks. On returning to
the US, Bush went one step further and announced
his official endorsement of the talks and offered
"economic incentives" to Iran, including Iran's
entry to the World Trade Organization, in exchange
for Iran's willingness to scrap its enrichment
program altogether, adding that if Iran refused to
do so, he had the support of Europe to take the
matter to the Security Council.
For the first time
in nearly three months, the EU-3, in their recent
strongly-worded letter to Tehran, explicitly endorsed
Bush's position, thus raising the ire
of Iran's hardline politicians who, in turn, passed
a parliamentary resolution mandating Iran's resumption
of its enrichment program in tandem with
its nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT)
rights and obligations.
The question is, of course, why Europe agreed to the
position of the US president when they had signed
an agreement with Iran, ie, the Paris Agreement,
which the US press, including the New York Times,
had decried as "deeply flawed" since the agreement
recognized Iran's NPT rights and the
"implementation" of those rights, in contrast to the
US's consistent opposition to the idea of a future
resumption of Iran's enrichment program.
After all, the Paris Agreement was a
serious blow to the US's stance toward Iran, and,
therefore, it was impossible for Europe to make
common cause with the US on Iran without either
the US changing its position, which it did not, or
Europe revising itself, which it did by, for all
practical purposes, burying the Paris Agreement
the moment they agreed to Washington's recipe for
Security Council action if Iran failed to heed
their warnings.
Who
killed the Paris Agreement?
Well, at the moment it is not quite dead,
only a short step from its coffin, which is
wrapped in virulent political rhetoric and the Europeans'
duplicity of maintaining the facade of "let's save
the Paris Agreement" while, in effect, doing
everything possible to undermine it, and moreover,
trumping it with newer developments sought after
by Washington.
This, in turn, might explain
why the EU-3 has not given serious consideration
so far to Iran's offer of an objective
guarantee that it seeks only contained, low-grade
enrichment for peaceful purposes under full IAEA
monitoring. Instead, their new argument, in sharp
contrast to the Paris Agreement, is that the only
objective guarantee is the full and permanent
suspension of Iran's enrichment program.
In
other words, Europe has exchanged sincere
talks and honored agreement for diplomatic
chicanery, as if such shenanigans that rekindle
Old Europe's Middle East colonial game (eg,
the Sykes-Picot agreement) can be somehow overlooked
and deemed defensible from the prism of
New World diplomacy. Too bad for Europe, even
UN chief Kofi Annan has explicitly warned that
the Security Council would be deadlocked if Iran's
nuclear issue were raised there, implicitly sending
the message that China, and perhaps Russia,
would perhaps veto any sanctions on Iran in
the absence of any smoking gun on Iran's alleged nuclear weapon
program, and in the light of Iran's
adoption of the IAEA's Additional Protocol
allowing unfettered inspection of Iran's nuclear
facilities by the IAEA.
But, sadly, old habits are hard to kick, and one
can see this in Tony Blair's upping the ante
against Iran with his harsh statement that "all
options are on the table", while in the
same breath insisting that the idea of attacking Iran
"is absurd". In the post-Iraq absurdist
politics of Great Britain, whose government spokesman
candidly admits that recent revelations about
the US and Great Britain manufacturing evidence
against Iraq in early 2002 "is nothing
new", instead of admitting the horrendous failure
of public trust reflected in such revelations, Blair
may have learnt the wrong lesson from the
Iraq fiasco - that Orwellian power politics work
and one needs only to fine-tune them for the
next gambit.
Notwithstanding the European
lack of consistency and their diplomatic zig-zags
dumping their autonomous diplomacy firmly in the
laps of Washington, one wonders about the protean
value, if any, of Iran's continuous dialogue with
Europe, which has adopted a more demanding posture
vis-a-vis Iran than the governing board of the
IAEA. The initial Iranian rationale for separate
talks with Europe, namely, the need to have a
power bloc as nuclear interlocutor and catalyst in
the brewing crisis, may have run its course, and
the advantages, for both sides, of discontinuing the
talks may appear to be overwhelming the
disadvantages, for the following reasons:
First, the EU-3
have clearly negated the terms and spirit of
the Paris Agreement and forfeited their
independent atomic diplomacy by their united front
with Washington. Second, if Iran drops its EU talks without at
the same time resuming enrichment activities
and, instead, focuses its diplomacy on the IAEA
only, then the whole spectrum of Iran-EU trade
and economic relations may have been saved from
the potential backlash of the European nuclear
reductionism discernible in the Paris Agreement's
linkage diplomacy.
Third, various European
leaders, such as Blair, have thrown
down the gauntlet with their thinly disguised
threat of military action, thus depriving
themselves of the validity basis of bilateral
negotiations, namely, the ethics of civility and
soft power diplomacy, showing instead the ugly
teeth of Old Europe resurrecting its hard power
mentality.
Fourth, at this juncture, with the EU having publicly
committed itself to sharply contrasting positions with
the White House on one hand, and the Paris Agreement
on the other, there may be
no middle ground left for Europe. Hence,
notwithstanding these and several other
considerations, a damage-control approach by both
sides may be none other than salvaging their
relations by discontinuing their present talks.
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.
He teaches political science at Tehran
University.
(Copyright 2005 Asia Times
Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us
for information on sales, syndication and republishing.) |
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