US made an offer Iran can only
refuse By Gareth Porter
WASHINGTON - Even before Iran gave its
formal counter-offer to the
permanent-five-plus-one countries (the United
States, the United Kingdom, France, Russia and
China plus Germany) on Tuesday, the administration
of US George W Bush had already begun the process
of organizing sanctions against Iran.
Washington had already held a conference
call on sanctions on Sunday with French, German
and British officials, the Washington
Post
reported.
In Tehran on Tuesday, Iran's top
nuclear negotiator, Ali Larijani, delivered the
official response to an international package to
curb Tehran's nuclear program and suggested that
Iran was prepared for "serious talks" with the six
countries that extended the offer.
Details
of Iran's 23-page written response have not been
released, but they crucially are expected to
confirm that Iran is not prepared to suspend
uranium-enrichment activities without
comprehensive security guarantees, especially from
the US, in return.
The US has never been
prepared to give such guarantees, and thus ends
what appeared on the surface to be a genuine
multilateral initiative for negotiations with Iran
on the terms under which it would give up its
nuclear program.
US Ambassador to the
United Nations John Bolton was reported to have
said that his country would study the Iranian
response "carefully", adding that "if it doesn't
meet with the terms set by the Security Council,
we will proceed to economic sanctions".
The history of the international proposal
shows that the Bush administration was determined
from the beginning that it would fail, so that it
could bring to a halt a multilateral diplomacy on
Iran's nuclear program that the hardliners in the
administration had always found a hindrance to
their policy.
Britain, France and Germany
(European Union Three - EU-3), which had begun
negotiations with Tehran on the nuclear issue in
October 2003, had concluded very early that Iran's
security concerns would have to be central to any
agreement. It has been generally forgotten that
the November 14, 2004, Paris Agreement between the
EU and Iran included an assurance by the EU-3 that
the "long-term agreement" they pledged to reach
would "provide ... firm commitments on security
issues".
The EU-3 had tried in vain to get
the Bush administration to support their
diplomatic efforts with Tehran by authorizing the
inclusion of security guarantees in a proposal
they were working on last summer. In a joint press
conference with US Secretary of State Condoleezza
Rice in July 2005, French Foreign Minister
Philippe Douste-Blazy referred to the need to
"make sure ... that we discuss with [the Iranians]
the security of their country. And for this, we
shall need the United States ..."
The EU-3
and the Bush administration agreed that the
permanent-five-plus-one proposal would demand that
Iran make three concessions to avoid UN Security
Council sanctions and to begin negotiations on an
agreement with positive incentives: the indefinite
suspension of its enrichment program, agreement to
resolve all the outstanding concerns of the
International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), and
resumption of full implementation of the
Additional Protocol under the nuclear
Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which calls for
very tight monitoring of all suspected nuclear
sites by the IAEA.
That meant that Tehran
would have had to give up its major bargaining
chips before the negotiations even began. The
Europeans wanted security guarantees from
Washington to be part of the deal. Douste-Blazy
said on May 8 that if Iran cooperated, it could be
rewarded with what he called an "ambitious
package" in several economic domains as well as in
"the security domain".
The EU-3 draft
proposal, which was leaked to ABC (American
Broadcasting Co) News and posted on its website,
included a formula that fell short of an explicit
guarantee. However, it did offer "support for an
inter-governmental forum, including countries of
the region and other interested countries, to
promote dialogue and cooperation on security
issues in the Persian Gulf, with the aim of
establishing regional security arrangements and a
cooperative relationship on regional security
arrangements including guarantees for territorial
integrity and political sovereignty".
That
convoluted language suggested there was a way for
Iran's security to be guaranteed by the United
States. But the problem was that it was still
subject to a US veto. In any case, as Steven R
Weisman of the New York Times reported on May 19,
the Bush administration rejected any reference to
a regional security framework in which Iran could
participate.
Rice denied on Fox News on
May 21 that the US was being "asked about security
guarantees", but that was deliberately misleading.
As a European diplomat explained to Reuters on May
20, the only reason the Europeans had not used the
term "security guarantees" in their draft was that
"Washington is against giving Iran assurances that
it will not be attacked".
In light of
these news reports, the public comment by Iran's
UN Ambassador Javad Zarif on May 27 is
particularly revealing. Zarif declared that the
incentive package "needs to deal with issues that
are fundamental to the resolution" of the problem.
"The solution has to take into consideration
Iranian concerns."
Zarif seems to have
been saying that Iran wanted to get something of
comparable importance for giving up its bargaining
chips in advance and discussing the renunciation
of enrichment altogether. That statement, which
departed from Iran's usual emphasis on its right
to nuclear technology under the NPT, suggested
that Tehran was at least open to the possibility
of a "grand bargain" with Washington, such as the
one it had outlined in a secret proposal to the
Bush administration in April 2003.
The
partners of the US made one more effort to
persuade Rice to reconsider the US position at
their final meeting in Vienna on June 1 to reach
agreement on a proposal. As Russian Foreign
Minister Sergei Lavrov revealed in a talk with
Russian media the following day, the issue of
security guarantees for Iran was raised by the
negotiating partners of the US at that meeting.
But the Bush administration again rebuffed
the idea of offering positive security incentives
to Iran. In the final text of the proposal, the
European scheme for a regional security system was
reduced to an anodyne reference to a "conference
to promote dialogue and cooperation on regional
security issues".
The Europeans, Russians
and Chinese knew this outcome doomed the entire
exercise to failure. In the end, only the US could
offer the incentives needed to make a bargain
attractive to Iran. A European official who had
been involved in the discussions was quoted in a
June 1 Reuters story as saying, "We have neither
big enough carrots nor big enough sticks to
persuade the Iranians, if they are open to
persuasion at all."
Despite the desire of
other members of the 5+1 for a genuine diplomatic
offer to Iran that could possibly lead to an
agreement on its nuclear program, the Bush
administration's intention was just the opposite.
Bush's objective was to free his
administration of the constraint of multilateral
diplomacy. The administration evidently reckoned
that once the Iranians had rejected the formal
offer, the US would be free to take whatever
actions it might choose, including a military
strike against Iran. Thus the June 5 proposal,
with its implicit contempt for Iran's security
interests, reflected the degree to which the US
administration has anchored its policy toward Iran
in its option to use force.
As Washington
now seeks to the clear the way for the next phase
of its confrontation with Iran, Bush is framing
the issue as one of Iranian defiance of the
Security Council, rather than US refusal to deal
seriously with a central issue in the
negotiations. "There must consequences if people
thumb their noses at the United Nations Security
Council," Bush said on Monday.
If the
EU-3, Russia and China allow Bush to get away with
that highly distorted version of what happened,
the world will have taken another step closer to
general war in the Middle East.
Gareth Porter is a historian and
national-security policy analyst. His latest
book, Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power
and the Road to War in Vietnam, was published
in June 2005.
