Tehran's charm offensive makes
inroads By Kaveh L Afrasiabi
Last week, Iranian President Mahmud
Ahmadinejad made his second pilgrimage to the
United Nations and conducted a whirlwind public
diplomacy that not only put him in the media
limelight but, more important, produced tangible
results benefiting Iran, the United States and,
indeed, the cause of world peace.
Unlike
last year's trip, when neither the president nor
his close advisers saw much need for diplomacy
proper, this year was different. This was partly
because Iran had since been referred to
the
Security Council, which has promised to invoke
Chapter VII and take punitive measures against
Iran if it fails to halt uranium-enrichment
activities.
Seeking to defuse the
potentially dangerous nuclear row, Ahmadinejad and
his foreign-policy team have taken proactive steps
to reassure the world of Iran's peaceful nuclear
intentions, offering guarantees and, at the same
time, emphasizing the role of a "powerful Iran" in
regional stability.
Thus in his UN speech
as well as in other speeches and interviews during
his three-day stay in New York, including at the
Council on Foreign Relations, Ahmadinejad defended
Iran's nuclear rights, criticized double
standards, and reiterated his offer of direct
dialogue with US President George W Bush.
In an interview with the Washington Post,
Ahmadinejad finally conceded that the Holocaust
was a "historical reality that has happened". This
is a welcome development, showing Ahmadinejad's
self-corrective system, in view of his background
as an educator, not to mention the deleterious
effects on Iran's foreign-policy interests and
priorities by such focus on a past tragedy.
The apparent softening of Ahmadinejad's
tone has not been detected by, among others, David
Ignatius of the Washington Post, who in his piece
titled "Ahmadinejad's gauntlet" erroneously
accuses him of lecturing about the Holocaust and
Israel everywhere he went. Not so; in fact,
Ahmadinejad expressed his dismay, at a private
function, that he was "bombarded" with the same
questions no matter who interviewed him.
Nevertheless, Ignatius is on the mark when
recognizing Ahmadinejad's singular emphasis on
Iran's stability role.
Perhaps a similar
softening on Israel might be on the way, given the
explicit self-distancing of Iran's close ally,
Syria. This is reflected in the recent statement
of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad that he did
not think "Israel should be wiped off the map.
Syria wants to have peace - with Israel."
This is as clear an indication as any that
Assad does not share Ahmadinejad's radical vision
and is plotting a different course of action with
respect to Middle East peace. In turn,
Ahmadinejad, an astute observer on the steep
foreign-policy learning curve, is anything but
indifferent to such rumblings. This is why, in the
interview with the Washington Post mentioned
above, he made yet another concession - by
agreeing that if the Palestinians targeted
civilians, then that met the definition of
terrorism.
It would be a pity if such
important signs of cognitive evolution on
Ahmadinejad's part escaped the attention of US
policymakers. The crisis in Iraq is what binds
Tehran and Washington together, more than any
other issue, and the time of slogans overshadowing
national-security issues and considerations has
definitely passed. On a related note,
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez' venom against
Bush actually helped Ahmadinejad, insofar as the
Iranian leader did not attack Bush personally and
focused his criticisms on US policies, while going
out of his way to express his admiration for the
American people.
Bush reciprocated by
praising the Iranian people, even though he
recycled the almost ritualistic criticisms of
Iran's rulers in his General Assembly speech, and
threatened action at the Security Council if Iran
stalled over its uranium-enrichment activities.
As a result, we can say with a measure of
confidence that some ice in US-Iran hostility was
broken as a result of Ahmadinejad's trip to New
York, and the question now is how this can impact
the ongoing nuclear negotiations, in light of the
new October deadline given by the Europeans to
Iran.
In a conversation with this author,
Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi,
who recently visited Beijing as part of his role
in Iran's nuclear negotiation team, expressed
optimism about the upcoming round of talks in
Europe. Araghchi based his optimism partly on what
he termed the Europeans' new realism, ie, their
growing realization that coercive tactics against
Iran are bound to backfire and can only make
things worse.
And increasingly, Russia is
moving a critical distance from the US-led push
for sanctions on Iran. The main argument is, as
per a recent interview of a Spanish newspaper with
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Ivanov, that as
long as there is no empirical evidence of a
nuclear-weapons buildup by Iran, there is no basis
for sanctions.
But as the saying goes, it
takes two to tango, and if the nuclear impasse is
to be resolved successfully it will require a
flexible response by Iran, otherwise the risks of
escalation remain great.
Ahmadinejad told
this author that compared with last year, when
there was a real military threat, that threat had
now passed. We certainly hope so, but recent
history and the record of the Bush administration
tilt us toward caution on such comforting
assurances. Perhaps Ahmadinejad should have had an
audience with some of Washington's
neo-conservative warmongers who are pushing
policy.
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", 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,
and is author of Iran's Nuclear
Program: Debating Facts Versus Fiction.
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