The march across Iran's 'red
line' By Kaveh L Afrasiabi
On the eve of the International Atomic
Energy Agency's meeting on Monday, crunch-time
diplomacy has gone into full gear. This includes a
high-level meeting between the Iranians and the
Europeans that many consider to be the final
opportunity to abort the IAEA's imminent decision
to complain against Iran to the United Nations
Security Council.
Yet all indications are
that unless the principal parties agree to
cross
their self-described "red lines", there will be no
breakthrough and battle will be resumed in the
Security Council.
Iran's nuclear fuel
cycle is, of course, the eye of the storm, causing
the seemingly unbridgeable divide between Iran and
the West, with the former insisting on it as a
matter of right and the latter insisting against
it as a matter of global security.
The
"red line" for Washington is Iran's capability to
enrich uranium, which if it were permitted could
be misused for military objectives.
But,
then again, there appear to be two red lines here,
one the Iranian possession of nuclear weapons,
which US President George W Bush has repeatedly
said he will not "tolerate", and a subsidiary red
line pertaining to Iran's possession of dual-use
technology that can portend a nuclear-armed
Iran. With regard to the latter, various US
officials, including John Bolton, the country's
ambassador to the UN, have said on record it is
unacceptable. The two are interrelated, but one
can detect subtle "yellowing" of the second red
line.
This yellowing is visible in
non-official or semi-official pronouncements, such
as by former US national security adviser Gary
Sick, who has testified in Congress in favor of
the "contained, monitored enrichment" option, a
position recently endorsed more fully by the
International Crisis Group.
And then there
is the position of Mohamed ElBaradei, the head of
the IAEA, who last month used his proxies to
spread the word that "Natanz [Tehran's pilot
enrichment plant] is Iran's bottom line, a
sovereignty issue, a reality we may have to deal
with".
In a sense, the IAEA has crossed
its own "red line" by shyly accommodating itself
to a limited enrichment program in Iran, and its
brave though half-aborted initiative must set an
example to the other players in this crisis to
transgress their own self-described "red lines".
Unfortunately, Washington is clearly
against any such concessions to Iran, which in
turn explains the lack of genuine interest on the
White House's part for any major breakthrough
prior to the IAEA meeting. This is particularly so
since talks between Moscow and Tehran have not
yielded any results and, instead, prompted some
Russian experts to call for more compromises on
Russia's part.
In the aftermath of the
Moscow talks on Wednesday, the director of
Russia's Contemporary Iran Studies Center, Rajab
Safarov, told Interfax, "Iran cannot unilaterally
make substantial concessions on key and important
issues. Therefore, some concessions on Russia's
part are necessary. These concessions concern both
essential and organizational phases of the
uranium-enrichment process."
This week,
Iran and Russia agreed in principle on the
establishment of a uranium-enriching facility on
Russian soil, but this idea appears to be
foundering on Moscow's insistence that Iran give
up all enrichment activities in Iran, something
Tehran is reluctant to do.
And the US is
completely opposed to the idea of participation by
Iranian scientists in the proposed joint venture
in Russia, as requested by Iran, as well as to
Iran's related request that the enrichment process
occur partly inside Iran.
From Iran's
vantage point, there is already a fuel-fabrication
plant in Isfahan and there is no need not to put
such facilities to good use as part and parcel of
a satisfactory formula.
Nevertheless, as
for Iran's "red line" of retaining the right to
enrich uranium, all signs indicate that despite
hardline rhetoric there is a considerable
mellowing, or to put it consistently, "yellowing",
reflected in Iran's (a) recent pitch to the
European Union for a two-year moratorium on
enrichment and (b) self-limitation to limited
"industrial enrichment" along the lines suggested
by ElBaradei.
Iran's softening position is
born by the imperative to secure foreign nuclear
fuel for current and future nuclear projects in
light of both Iran's limited natural uranium and
the technical problems with the conversion of
"yellowcake" to uranium hexafluoride (UF6).
Nevertheless, on Iran's
part, overcoming the "red line" verbiage requires
a theoretical house-cleaning touching on the
entire nuclear strategy of the country. Concerning
the latter, an Iranian official involved with
negotiations, Hosseini Tash, recently stated that
the nuclear issue was a "strategic issue".
Perhaps it would be more apt to say
"geo-economic" rather than "strategic" since
Iran's official position is that the principal
purpose of the nuclear industry is to produce
energy. The appellation "strategic" is a misnomer,
then, so long as Iran denies the West's
allegations that it is engaged in nuclear-weapons
production. Also, labeling a purely economic
industry as strategic is tantamount to making
excess commitment to all its facets as critical
components of the country's national-security
interests, whereas under the present circumstances
this would be stretching it.
Various
Israeli and Western intelligence reports indicate
that Iran will be able to resolve most if not all
of its technical difficulties in the near future,
although the estimates vary from several months to
a few years. Yet there is no disagreement that in
light of Iran's ambitious plans for a rapid
expansion of its nuclear program, self-sufficiency
is not an option and Iran must actively court
partners in its quest to find secure and reliable
sources of nuclear fuel.
As a result, Iran
has begun to refer approvingly of an international
fuel bank and the various proposals for an
IAEA-proof multinational arrangement for fuel
production inside or outside Iran. The No 1
priority of Iran today is to get the Bushehr power
plant up and running, but it faces yet another
delay as a result of Russian foot-dragging that
has postponed it to either some time this year or
early next year. The Russians are committed to
building a US$1.2 billion plant at Bushehr.
But with Russia boxing itself in on the US
side with respect to the IAEA demand for the
resumption of enrichment suspensions in Iran, no
one in Iran can feel secure about the current
Russian promises of insulating the Bushehr deal
from the nuclear crisis, given the various calls
from within the US Congress and the US media for a
Russian ultimatum to cut off all nuclear
cooperation with Iran if it fails to comply with
the IAEA's demands. From Iran's vantage point,
that is Russia's "red line" that it should never
cross.
Of course, breakthrough diplomacy
requires a great deal of concessions on both sides
- one only needs to look at Camp David for
inspiration - and Iran would be ill-advised to
sink its head in the sand and to disregard the
coming confrontation if it sticks to its "red
line".
One option would be to reject the
demands to give up the enrichment pilot plant and,
instead, to put the facility on "cold standby", as
is the case with some similar US facilities, to
make sure about a potential fuel supply and to
weigh properly the pros and cons of the Russian
offer.
Another option is to convert Natanz
into an internationally run facility kept by a
multinational holding company using
state-of-the-art centrifuges kept in "black boxes"
with respect to Iranian scientists. The latter
option would gradually phase out the Iranian
centrifuges and both ease international anxiety
about Iran's diversion and satisfy the Iranian
quest for a steady supply of nuclear fuel.
But the United States at the moment seems
only minimally interested in the various feasible
scenarios for "objective guarantees" of a peaceful
Iranian nuclear program, setting its eagle eyes on
punitive measures against a country that has
tormented its "unipolar moment" for nearly three
decades.
This is not a risk-free option,
however. That is why giving the IAEA more time to
exhaust the options short of the Security Council,
which is sure to over-politicize the issue and to
reduce the room for concessions on Iran's part, is
a wise idea that should not be ignored.
The US-EU rush to the Security Council
most likely will extinguish the Iranian yellowing
of its red line, hardly the desirable outcome for
all concerned.
Kaveh L
Afrasiabi, PhD, is the author of After
Khomeini: New Directions in Iran's Foreign Policy
(Westview Press) and co-author of "Negotiating
Iran's Nuclear Populism", the Brown Journal of
World Affairs, Volume XII, Issue 2, Summer 2005,
with Mustafa Kibaroglu. He is also author of
Iran's Nuclear Program: Debating Facts Versus
Fiction (forthcoming).
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2006 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved.
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