In Tehran, things just got more
complex By Kaveh L Afrasiabi
Iran is promising a quick response to an
offer of incentives in return for suspending it
nuclear program, specifically its
uranium-enrichment activities, but the process of
decision-making in Iran requires a consensual
decision that may be hard to achieve in light of
the institutional complexities of the Islamic
Republic.
The latest news from Tehran on
the foreign-policy front is the formation of a new
council on foreign affairs headed by the former
foreign minister, Kemal Kharrazi, and inclusive
of, among others, Kharrazi's predecessor, Ali
Akbar Velayati, as well as heads of military
forces.
The new council was created to
help the process of decision-making on foreign
issues, along with the Foreign Ministry, the
Supreme National Security
Council and the (quasi-legislative) Expediency
Council. Also, mention must be made of the
parliament (majlis), which has an oversight
function per the articles of the Islamic
constitution.
The resurfacing of the
cautious Kharrazi after nearly a year of public
hiatus may be interpreted as a good omen in terms
of the moderate drift of Iran's foreign policy,
which will likely influence the current debates on
the nuclear question toward compromise rather than
confrontation.
But there is now the danger
of "bureaucratic muddling through" of the nuclear
decision-making, as the various inputs from
different institutions within the government bring
forth an even more complicated process aimed at
balancing the multiple vested interests, above all
the national-security apparatuses of the state.
The latter by all accounts have gained new
prominence within the Islamic Republic since the
events of September 11, 2001, and, more recently,
over fears and concerns of a US and/or Israeli
invasion of Iran, notwithstanding the occasional
Washington leaks of clandestine activities inside
Iran, particularly among the country's ethnic
populations.
As Madeleine Albright, US
secretary of state in the Bill Clinton
administration, has pointed out, Iran's
national-security concerns have greatly increased
since the US invasion of neighboring Afghanistan
and Iraq. Yet Albright's point about Iran's
determined quest for nuclear weapons in response
to these developments misses one crucial point -
the old rationale of Saddam Hussein's weapons of
mass destruction is now gone. And that is a major
national-security blessing that operates against
the discourses in favor of proliferation.
Those discourses, more and more openly
articulated by certain clerics from the holy city
of Qom, often fail to contextualize the issue of
regional proliferation and the net benefits to
Iran by forcefully pushing for a Persian Gulf
nuclear-free zone.
Currently, there is
lively debate in policy circles in Iran on the
merits as well as pros and cons of adopting the
notion of a Persian Gulf nuclear-free zone, as a
subset of the Middle East nuclear-free zone.
Chances are that in the near future, as an
expression of its regionalist orientation, Iran
may bandwagon with the Gulf Cooperation Council
and adopt this notion as a pillar of its foreign
policy.
Nevertheless, the problem of
bureaucratic decision-making on the nuclear
question is partly internal, connected to the
spirit of political factionalism and institutional
diversity of the government, as much as to the
external pressures and inputs.
Consequently, it is sheer error on the
part of Western governments and their army of Iran
experts to attribute Iran's delayed response to
the nuclear package as "foot-dragging", since this
interpretation overlooks the complexities of
decision-making in a political system where no one
wants to be blamed in the future for a major
foreign-policy blunder, in light of the serious
stakes in the ongoing nuclear row.
Ultimately, Iran's spiritual leader,
Ayatollah Seyed Ali Khamenei, makes the final
decision, and for now he has opted against direct
dialogue with the United States on the nuclear
issue, while leaving open the door for negotiation
on "controls, verification, and guarantees". By
contrast, North Korean leader Kim Jong-il wants
direct talks with Washington.
Though the
six-party talks in Beijing with the Koreas, China,
Russia, Japan and the United States have failed to
resolve the North Korean nuclear standoff, such
negotiations have more legitimacy under those
circumstances than they would with Iran.
The US lacks legitimacy, as it may have
with North Korea in light of its 37,000 buffer
forces on the Korean Peninsula, to seek North
Korea-style multilateral talks with Iran.
Indeed, a North Korea analogy to Iran
doesn't work, though the US media in particular
have been helplessly infected by it, especially in
light of recent rumors of secret military ties
between Pyongyang and Tehran. But whatever the
nature of their relations, comparisons between
their two situations don't hold water, for several
reasons.
First, unlike North Korea, which
has legitimate national-security concerns with
respect to the United States and South Korea, Iran
does not face quite the same predicament,
irrespective of US force presence in Iran's
vicinity.
Second, whereas North Korea is
openly proliferating and boasting about its
program, Iran has formally renounced nuclear
weapons on religious and national-security grounds
and has neither exited the nuclear
Non-Proliferation Treaty nor terminated its
safeguard agreement with the International Atomic
Energy Agency.
Finally, North Korea is a
hermetic, reclusive Stalinist fortress compared
with the somewhat pluralistic Islamic polity in
Iran.
False analogies often lead to false
expectations and policy decisions, which is why
the sooner the deluge of comparisons of Iran and
North Korea stop the better.
That aside,
at this point one wonders what Iran's
counter-offer to the package of incentives will
look like. Will it be primarily accommodationist
or not? Will it be creative enough to take
advantage of the plethora of incentives offered by
the so-called 5+1 (the permanent members of the
United Nations Security Council - France, the
United Kingdom, the United States, Russia and
China - plus Germany), or will it be hostage to
the bureaucratic process of foreign
decision-making?
We will know the answer
before the summer is over, that is for sure.
Kaveh L Afrasiabi is a political
scientist and author of books and articles on
Iran's foreign affairs. His writings have appeared
in, among others, Harvard Theological Review, UN
Chronicle, Middle East Journal, Mediterranean
Affairs, Global Dialogue, New York Times, Der
Tagesspeigel, and International Herald Tribune.
His latest article is "Negotiating Iran's Nuclear
Populism", Brown Journal of World Affairs (Summer
2005). He is author of Iran's Nuclear
Program: Debating Facts Versus Fiction.
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