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COMMENTARY
The myth of
the EU olive branch
By Kaveh L
Afrasiabi
The crisis over Iran's nuclear
program unfolding before our eyes is by all
accounts one of the most serious challenges facing
the 1979 post-revolutionary system in Iran. This
crisis is potentially capable of re-isolating Iran
in the international community and, thus,
exacerbating internal and regional tensions and,
even worse, igniting the flares of yet another
military confrontation in the turbulent Middle
East.
As Tehran rather heroically defies
Western will and resumes the initial stages of the
nuclear fuel cycle, regardless of strong
condemnation by Europe, as well as Russia, the
United States and the International Atomic Energy
Agency (IAEA), the country also inevitably braces
for the harsh winds of the ramified hurricane
blowing in its direction. This is the threat of
economic sanctions, capital scare and flight, and
the inevitable attrition of foreign trade, at
least with Europe, Iran's number one trade
partner.
Economically, none of this bodes
well for the high-unemployment economy and the
agenda of President Mahmud Ahmadinejad, who has
made job creation his top priority. Sadly, the
stark coincidence of Ahmadinejad's ascendency and
the nuclear crisis simply means that the new
president will have no choice but to focus on
foreign policy, an area completely alien to him
since the former mayor of Tehran has no background
and no experience in foreign affairs.
Undoubtedly, the Iranian people will stand
up to any unreasonable external pressure or
threat, as they have repeatedly in the past, but
the price for the young and aspiring generation,
yearning for steady progress without another
setback, as was the case with the generation of
the 1980s Iran-Iraq war, may prove to be too much.
Certainly, it is still possible to prevent
the degeneration of this crisis into a major one
with long-lasting implications, and hopes for a
compromised solution have not yet expired.
As the IAEA chief, Mohammad ElBaradei,
said on Thursday, there is "still a window of
opportunity", despite the IAEA resolution that
mandates a September 3 report by ElBaradei on
Iran, ie, whether Iran has complied with the
IAEA's request for "full suspension of all
enrichment-related activities".
The
resolution fell considerably short of the US-EU
expectation as a direct result of the input by
Non-Aligned Movement countries resisting pressure
to condemn Iran and to threaten serious reprisals,
a half-victory for Iran.
This resolution,
while recalling that all nuclear material is
accounted for, maintains that the agency is not
yet in a position to declare that there are no
undeclared nuclear material or activities. And
this is echoed by ElBaradei's subsequent statement
that the agency cannot yet account for "the whole
country". All this brings to mind the sour
memories of Iraq, when the UN Security Council and
UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, who has rushed to
endorse the IAEA's latest resolution on Iran,
called on Saddam Hussein to be "proactive" and
prove that he did not have nuclear weapons. Thus,
the Iranians are now asked to somehow prove that
there are no undeclared activities, a harsh demand
bound to backfire and cement the Iranian
objections to the agency's resolution.
However, as a sign of compromise, at the
Wednesday session of the IAEA in Vienna, Iranian
representatives assured the agency's governing
board that that they would continue to have the
activities at the enrichment factories suspended,
and that their conversion activities will continue
to be under full IAEA verification.
Meanwhile,
Ahmadinejad has expressed his government's desire
to continue dialogue with Europe and, in his
recent telephone conversation with Annan, promised
to unveil his own counter-proposal. It remains to
be seen what this proposal contains, and one can
anticipate it containing a central focus on Iran's
"inalienable right" to nuclear technology, which
encompasses the right to fabricate nuclear fuel,
as admitted to by ElBaradei, whose statement, on
August 9, is worth quoting at length:
The flash point, or the main point
of contention in that proposal, as I understand,
is the right of Iran to maintain fuel cycle
activities. This is particularly the enrichment
and reprocessing activities. This is an issue
which goes much beyond Iran. As you again recall
that I have been calling attention to the danger
of disseminating fuel cycle activities around
the world, because that brings us very close to
the capability to develop nuclear weapons and I
have been asking for a new framework for
managing nuclear energy by which countries would
have the right to have nuclear energy to
generate electricity and other applications, but
not necessarily to move forward on a national
basis to have fuel cycle activities. I have been
discussing and consulting with many member
states to develop what we call assurance of
supply scheme by which countries will have
reactor technology and the fuel they need and
not necessarily sit on enrichment facilities or
reprocessing facilities. That could be, may be
organized on a region basis or multilateral
basis. However, this continues to be the
sticking point in the negotiation, but the
European offer is made on the assumption that
this is an offer to be responded to by
Iran. ElBaradei's candid statements,
implicitly criticizing the EU-3, Germany, France
and Britain, for their rather cavalier attitude in
their latest proposal to Iran, cannot be taken
lightly, especially given the uniform anti-Iran
chorus of the Western press blaming Iran for
rejecting the "marvelous" European incentives,
including the nuclear ones.
Sadly, there
has been little objective reporting, paper or
electronic, that has scrutinized the European
proposal without the lens of bias. The main
newspapers in Europe and the US have sounded in
unison with the official interpretation that the
"bad" Iranians unreasonably turned down the decent
offers of the "good Europeans". But what of the
legal basis for Europe's request from Iran to deny
to itself a right they themselves enjoy to the
fullest? And what is one to make of the broadly
vague and indeterminate promises of nuclear and
security cooperation?
Per the terms of
last year's Paris Agreement, the EU-3 were
supposed to provide Iran with "firm commitments"
on the various security, economic and
technological fronts, and, yet, their "Framework
for Cooperation" with Iran is thick on
generalities and thin on specifics, falling
considerably short of the Iranian expectation.
But, on the other hand, no amount of
economic and other incentives could possibly
convince Iran to forfeit its right to produce
nuclear fuel and, instead, rely on external
sources. Anticipating problems with the latter
scenario, the European proposal actually contains
a rather extensive discussion of the procedure for
Iran to follow in the event the promised foreign
sources renege and fail to deliver the fuel needed
by Iran's reactors. From Iran's vantage point,
this of course raises serious concern about the
reliability of the present promises by politicians
who may be out of office soon, given the
precarious state of the European Union right now.
Iran signed the Paris Agreement, viewed as
temporary, calling for the suspension of "all
uranium-enrichment activities" pending a long-term
agreement. Several months later, EU leaders have
now presented a proposal to Iran that seeks to
make permanent a temporary and confidence-building
measure, without one iota of international law
behind their request, except their stated
"suspicion" of Iran's intentions to build nuclear
weapons.
And it is precisely here that
Europe is at its weakest and Iran at its strongest
position in the current argument, in light of
Iran's offer of concrete steps for objective
guarantee of the peacefulness of its nuclear
activities, involving the expanded role of IAEA
inspectors, use of surveillance cameras, etc. Yet,
the European negotiators have so far shown no
interest whatsoever in pursuing this track. To
open a caveat here, at a recent German-Iran
roundtable at Berlin's think-tank, Stifflung Fur
Wissenschaft und Politik, the top German
negotiator even admitted that the EU-3 did not
even bother to accept officially Iran's proposal
in March. This attitude caused this author to
react by saying that if they really respected
Iranian negotiators they would have received the
proposal and studied it seriously, instead of
giving it cursory attention.
The Iranian
reaction, that the EU-3 proposal is "insulting",
can perhaps be better understood in the context of
this background history, where the Iranian
negotiators had to endure such blatant
manifestations of disrespectful behavior, as if
the world has stood still in the late 19th
century, eg notice the tone of the proposal's item
(33): "Effective long-term cooperation between
Iran and the international community in the civil
nuclear field along the lines set out in this
document will, however, require the continued
building of confidence over a significant period."
Seeing how "confidence-building" has been used and
misused to connote an Iranian "waiting for Godot",
this cannot but be interpreted as a European
merry-go-round on their nuclear promises to Iran.
Yet another flaw of the European proposal
is that instead of giving security assurance, it
in fact exacerbates the Iranian anxiety by letting
the door open for nuclear attack in response to a
conventional attack. The proposal, item 4(a)
reads: "The United Kingdom and the French republic
would reaffirm to Iran that they will not use
nuclear weapons against non-nuclear weapon states
parties to the treaty on the non-proliferation of
nuclear weapons except in the case of an invasion
or any attack on them, their dependent
territories, their armed forces or other troops,
their allies or on a state toward which they have
a security commitment."
Indeed, had the
authors of this proposal bothered to put
themselves in the position of the recipient of
this proposal they would have most likely
reconsidered such brazen, aggressive statements
meant to steer Iran away from nuclear weapons.
Some reassurance. Whatever happened to a
categorical rejection of use of nuclear weapons in
conventional warfare?
But as ElBaradei
presciently stated, this crisis could be a
"lose-lose" proposition for both sides if reason
and spirit of compromise do not prevail, and one
can only hope that the opposite occurs and this
turns out to be a prelude for a "win-win"
situation. But for this to happen, it will take
enormous energy and diplomatic dexterity from all
sides, and an important prerequisite is that
Iran's strides of the past two years be fully
recognized:
Iran has signed and fully implemented the
intrusive Additional Protocol
Iran has allowed extensive IAEA
inspections
Iran has provided a detailed account of it
nuclear activities
Iran has for some 20 months maintained a
voluntary suspension of its uranium-enrichment
program as a gesture of good will and
confidence-building
Iran has fully and satisfactorily answered all
the remaining IAEA questions, such as about the
sources of equipment contamination with highly
enriched uranium
Iran has fully participated in marathon,
multi-track negotiations with the Europeans
covering a wide variety of issues other than the
nuclear issue, such as terrorism, drug traffic,
energy transport, technology transfer, trade,
etc
Iran's proposal, offered to the EU on March
23, explicitly called for the following: ceiling
of enrichment at low-grade; open-fuel cycle, to
remove any concerns about reprocessing and
production of plutonium; immediate conversion of
all enriched uranium to fuel rods; and incremental
and phased approach to implementation of the
enrichment cycle
Iran has promised to fulfill the legislative
approval of the Additional Protocol
Iran has pledged to tighten its export control
regulations
Iran has proposed a continuous on-site
presence of IAEA inspectors at nuclear facilities,
an unprecedented move for the sake of objective
guarantee.
But the Iranian initiatives
have been either ignored or downgraded in
importance by the Western media, which have for
the most part obediently followed the official
lines of the governments - in London, Paris,
Berlin and Washington. It is now amply obvious
that with the jolt of Iran's resumption of
uranium-processing activities, policy-makers in
these capitals can no longer afford to ignore
Iran's point of view. In the next round of
negotiations in "hot August", the
European-hoped-for compromise can potentially be
achieved only through a flexible mutual approach
by both sides, and on the European side this may
mean a wholesale change of attitude toward Iran.
Kaveh L Afrasiabi, PhD, is the
author of After Khomeini: New Directions in
Iran's Foreign Policy (Westview Press) and
co-authored "Negotiating Iran's Nuclear Populism",
The Brown Journal of World Affairs, Volume X11,
issue 2, Summer 2005, with Mustafa Kibaroglu.
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