As the world awaits the Iranian response
to the package of incentives by the so-called
"5+1" nations consisting of the United Nations
Permanent Five plus Germany, the air is filled
with positive rhetoric that masks the underlying
possibility of another historic missed opportunity
- not only to end the nuclear row but also to
renew the stalemated US-Iran diplomacy.
Thus Tehran and Washington have
mirror-imaged each other by sending positive
signals about real steps forward, improving
climate and so on, with the Iranian foreign
minister and US secretary of state setting the
tone for meaningful negotiation down the road.
Iran has been given a tentative deadline
of June 29 to respond to
the
package of incentives put forward by the US,
Russia, China, Britain and France, plus Germany,
over Tehran's nuclear program. President
George W Bush himself, on the verge of his
European tour, expressed guarded optimism about
the chances for a diplomatic solution to the
nuclear crisis, reiterating the US demand for a
"full and verifiable" suspension of Iran's
uranium-enrichment and reprocessing activities as
a precondition for the United States' willingness
to join the direct talks with Iran.
Later,
though, Bush said Iran faced the prospect of UN
Security Council action and progressively stronger
sanctions if it rejected the offer aimed at
containing its nuclear program.
So after
the soft words, Bush's ultimatum - of accepting
the package or facing UN sanctions - was ill-timed
and premature, potentially torpedoing the gradual
buildup of favorable sentiments in Tehran. Call it
a self-sabotage.
Thus Iran, while
reportedly lowering its guard and showing some
signs of a new willingness to curb its nuclear
program, has flatly rejected the precondition on
enrichment and has launched a vigorous diplomatic
effort to cause a US change of mind.
The
latter includes efforts with respect to the
Non-Aligned Movement, which has expressed support
for Iran's nuclear rights, as well as the
Organization of the Islamic Conference, which is
holding a summit of its foreign ministers in Baku,
Azerbaijan, this week.
Iranian Foreign
Minister Manuchehr Mottaki has been capitalizing
on Islamist solidarity at this conference to
enhance Iran's international alliance that would,
Iran hopes, lean on the US to back down from its
perceived unreasonable precondition for direct,
multilateral dialogue with Tehran.
The
support by both Saudi Arabia and Turkey, two
strong US allies, is important, which is why
Mottaki has met with his Turkish counterpart,
Abdullah Gul, on the sidelines of the Baku
conference, in light of Turkey's rather spirited
engagement as an effective intermediary between
the US and Iran.
As for Saudi Arabia, the
recent visit to Tehran by Saudi Foreign Minister
Saud al-Feisal was also a minor turning point that
benefits Iran's current diplomatic drive to
pressure the US regarding its set preconditions.
Similarly, Iran has already expended
considerable energy with other Arab nations by
dispatching high-level officials to Egypt, Algeria
and Kuwait, among other countries. Simultaneously,
Iran has much benefited from President Mahmud
Ahmadinejad's participation at the annual summit
of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO),
thus bolstering Iran's regional clout.
While the SCO did not induct Iran as full
member, as expected by certain observers,
nonetheless both Ahmadinejad's attendance and his
"constructive" talks with Chinese and Russian
leaders before and during the summit were positive
developments that removed some of the lingering
barriers to Iran's eventual inclusion. This
would be of some relief for the US, given
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's pre-summit
campaign against Iran's inclusion, while admitting
that the SCO was "excluding" the US from its vast
territory.
All eyes are now set on next
month's Group of Eight summit in Russia, which is
hosted by President Vladimir Putin, who has made
strong pro-Iran statements recently, together with
his Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov.
Thus
while Putin has expressed confidence about Iran's
articulation of a viable response to the nuclear
offer, Lavrov has flatly rejected the military
option against Iran and, simultaneously, made
clear that the Russian offer to produce nuclear
fuel for Iran on Russian territory is "still on
the table".
Meanwhile, Iran has announced
a new date for the completion of the Russian-made
Bushehr power plant: 2007. We shall see if the
much-delayed power plant will meet the new
dateline, or whether there will be more costly
delays, as there have been over the past seven
years.
Grand bargain or
micro-strategies? A "grand bargain" with
Iran has now fully become the fairy-tale favorite
of some leading Iran experts in the US. Harvard's
Graham Allison initially articulated it in his
book How to Stop Nuclear Terror a couple of
years ago and has now been adopted by, among
others, Flynt Leverett, a former White House aid.
He penned in the New York Times that if only the
US struck a grand bargain with Iran, everything
would be cozy and that would ensure America's
hegemony in the Middle East for the foreseeable
future. Such happy prognostications fall by
the wayside, however, the moment one delves into
the specifics of the "grand bargain" theory and
notice the shell of meaning beneath the fancy
facade. A main problem with this theory is that it
is thick on vague promises of future harmony
between the intrusive superpower and the
assertive, and still revolutionary, regional
power, betraying a bit of naive theoretical
atrophy by its bundle of empiricism.
Forget grand bargain and all that naive
idealism. What is required on the United States'
part is prudent micro-strategies that selectively
target specific problems with Iran for timely
improvement, incrementally and step by step, while
adopting relevant lessons from Cold War history,
within limits of course, given the uniqueness of
Islamist Iran's position and its structural
conflict with the US.
The third
option Between such flights of fancy as the
grand bargain and the two opposing options of full
suspension and no suspension, there is a third,
and hitherto unexplored, option based on the
United States' own experiment with the standby
option at its large Portsmouth enrichment
facility.
Although the Iranian and US
contexts are different - for example, the
Portsmouth plant is a gaseous diffusion enrichment
plant, whereas the Natanz facility in Iran
operates older-model centrifuges - there are
sufficient similarities that can be applied.
The US Department of Energy shut down the
Portsmouth plant in 2000, while keeping portions
of the enrichment cascades operating in a "recycle
mode", buffering all of the cells with dry air and
conducting surveillance and maintenance. The cold
standby mode ended after five years, costing the
government a hefty bill of $370 million.
As with the US plant, the Natanz facility
could be put in cold standby, at least for the
duration of the proposed multilateral talks,
whereby a monitored program would be put in place
that would include the replacement of any
components that degraded during shutdown. It would
also include regular maintenance and surveillance
of the facility.
The advantage of the
standby option is that it addresses Iran's
concerns about both equipment decay and preserving
jobs for its nuclear scientists, while
simultaneously providing a nuclear comfort zone
for negotiations. For one thing, it would protect
Iran's decision-makers from the perception of
having caved in to outside pressure.
In
implementing this option, Iranians would need
technical support, and indeed there is no reason
why the US, which has offered nuclear assistance
to Iran, should not do so right away by teaching
Iran how to put its enrichment facility on cold
standby - for example, how to pump dry air into
the cascades to ensure that damp air would not get
in and cause corrosion. Also, the US could provide
assistance in the area of nuclear-waste
management.
In short, the standby option
offers the best means for a verifiable pause in
Iran's uranium-enrichment operations while keeping
its capabilities for the future.
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 also wrote "Keeping Iran's nuclear
potential latent", Harvard International Review.
He is author of Iran's Nuclear
Program: Debating Facts Versus Fiction.
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