US sends the wrong messages to
Iran By Kaveh L Afrasiabi
The US media are inundated with reports
that the recent United Nations resolution imposing
sanctions on North Korea is meant as a "lesson"
for Iran, and the United States' ambassador to the
UN, John Bolton, has warned Tehran that it could
face similar "international isolation" if it
follows Pyongyang's path toward nuclear
proliferation.
Thus a Wall Street Journal
editorial titled "The arms-control illusion"
glosses over any distinctions between Iran and
North
Korea and accuses Tehran of
following the same path of signing the nuclear
Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), "only to pursue
its own secret bomb-building effort". Another
editorial in the Christian Science Monitor, "The
think-twice sanctions on North Korea", states:
"The UN sanctions approved Saturday against North
Korea won't really roll back its nuclear program.
Yes, they partly punish the North for its atomic
test and may block bomb exports. But the real
target is likely Iran and others eyeing the bomb."
An editorial in The Economist, on the other hand,
claims that Iran and North Korea are "bent" on the
"destruction" of the non-proliferation regime.
After one week, major powers cannot agree
on UN measures to punish Iran over its nuclear
program. US State Department spokesman Sean
McCormack said there was "widespread agreement,
although not total agreement", among the US,
France and Britain on a proposed resolution that
would pressure Iran to halt nuclear-fuel work,
including enriching uranium. The US wants initial
sanctions to target Iranian activities related to
its suspected weapons program - which Tehran
denies.
Indeed, there is no evidence that
Iran is proliferating, that it deserves the same
punishment as North Korea. This is a point
emphasized by the Iranian leadership, as well as
others, including the former chief UN weapons
inspector, Scott Ritter, at a recent talk
sponsored by the Nation Institute in New York,
also featuring veteran investigative reporter
Seymour Hersh, who has written extensively on the
United States' plans for military strikes on Iran.
According to Ritter, whose new book
Target Iran is a powerful jab at the Bush
administration's Iran policy, if the US bombed
Iran's nuclear facilities today, there would be
"no environmental damage" because Iran's
facilities are mostly concrete buildings and
rudimentary equipment with little actual nuclear
material involved. "That is the whole insanity of
this thing. Iran has no nuclear-weapons program
and its enrichment program is at the lab scale,"
said Ritter. He added that the United States' Iran
policy was pushed by a nexus of Washington's
neo-conservatives and Israel's right-wing Likud
politicians who have a "faith-based" rather than a
"fact-based" approach with regard to Iran, that
is, the Israelis have adopted the wrong policy
toward Iran by deluding themselves into believing
that Iran is proliferating nuclear weapons and is
at the advanced stages of this process.
Dangerous consequences What if
there is a military strike on Iran? According to
both Ritter and Hersh, the consequences could be
dire and even catastrophic. Ritter, who has
visited Iran in the recent past, is convinced that
Iran is prepared to inflict pain on the US and its
allies in the region in response to any such
military strike, inviting more punishing blows by
the US. These might include the use of "usable
nuclear weapons" sanctioned by President George W
Bush's nuclear doctrine and the idea of
"preemption".
One scenario entertained by
Ritter is that in a multi-pronged offensive
against Iran, some US forces infiltrating Iranian
territory might be trapped, in which case the US
might resort to small, tactical nuclear weapons to
get them out of harm's way and to bring Iran to
its knees. The present limitations of the US
military imposed by its overstretch around the
world make the notion of "usable nukes" more
plausible from the point of view of the US and, in
Ritter's words, this is the ultimate danger. This
is because if Iran is ever nuked, "You can bet at
some future time, at least one US city will be
knocked out. So take your pick, which city: San
Francisco, Chicago, New York?"
Even short
of such a nightmare scenario, Ritter is convinced
that the US and world economies would be hit hard
as a result of a US war on Iran. First, it could
prompt Tehran to impose an oil embargo on the
United States, perhaps followed by a similar
"sympathy embargo" by Tehran-friendly Venezuelan
President Hugo Chavez, thus depriving the world of
some 4.5 million barrels of oil a day. "American
taxpayers will be hit in the pocket immediately,
and perhaps then they will seriously question the
sanity of Bush's policies," said Ritter.
Compared with Ritter, who is adamant that
the Bush administration will launch its planned
strike on Iran in the near future, Hersh sounded
more cautious without, however, disagreeing with
the gist of Ritter's analysis. "The danger is that
the Bush people believe what they say," said
Hersh.
And now the Bush team has convinced
itself that there is a lesson for Iran from the UN
Security Council sanctions on North Korea,
irrespective of the stark contrasts and
dissimilarities between the two cases. Unlike
North Korea, Iran has neither exited the NPT nor
expelled International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)
inspectors, nor has it embraced nuclear weapons.
Moreover, unlike North Korea's one-man Stalinist
dictatorship, Iran is ruled by an Islamist
democracy with competing factions pushing for
alternative nuclear policies.
Even IAEA
chief Mohamed ElBaradei has called for dialogue
with North Korea and Iran, saying that sanctions
are not the answer. "We need ... to bite the
bullet and find the way to talk to them [North
Koreans], to talk to the Iranians, to talk to all
other adversaries because without dialogue we are
not moving forward.
"I don't think
sanctions work as a penalty," he said, in
reference to sanctions imposed after Pyongyang's
nuclear test. "We have to move away from the idea
that dialogue is a reward; dialogue is an
essential tool to change behavior," the IAEA
director general said. Of course, there are
certain similarities in the geostrategic
predicaments of Iran and North Korea. Both are
faced with the formidable power of the US in their
vicinity. The Eisenhower carrier group (aircraft
carrier USS Eisenhower and its accompanying strike
force of cruiser, destroyer and attack submarine)
has slipped into the Persian Gulf amid reports of
a mission for a possible strike on Iran. This
alone explains Tehran's decision to place the
blame for North Korea's nuclear test on the United
States' "bullying". But given Iran's formal
commitments against nuclear proliferation, one
would have expected a more nuanced approach that
would have reinforce those policy commitments.
Alas, Iran is seemingly drawing its own
lessons from the North Korea situation, that is,
the ceaseless manipulation of UN machinery by "the
hegemonic powers", to paraphrase President Mahmud
Ahmadinejad. That is not exactly what Bolton had
hoped for, but was perfectly foreseeable had
Bolton paid more attention to the dissimilarities
between North Korea and his next target for
sanctions, Iran - for example, Iran's shared
interest with the US in maintaining the new status
quo in Iraq.
Indeed, Iran and the US have
much to gain by cooperating with respect to the
escalating crisis of authority in Iraq. A new
study commissioned by the US Congress urges the
United States to turn to Iran and Syria with
respect to Iraq. Yet this timely call will likely
be buried in the coming weeks and months by the
mutual hostilities generated over the nuclear row.
A careful disentangling of nuclear and
non-nuclear - that is, regional - issues by both
sides is necessary, as difficult as it may be.
Equally necessary is to differentiate regional and
relatively "out of area" issues, such as Lebanon,
which ranks as a second-order priority for Iran's
foreign policy. Overlooking this, Robert Hunter, a
former top US diplomat, in an article titled
"Averting war with Iran", asserts that the recent
war in Lebanon solidified the United States'
hostility toward Iran while simultaneously making
it harder for the US to start a war with Iran in
light of Hezbollah's proven capability to strike
at Israel.
Meanwhile, Bush's recruitment
of former secretary of state James Baker and the
Iraq Study Group to help with Middle East and Iran
policy is a welcome step forward that could be the
harbinger of more positive developments on the
US-Iran front. In turn, this may require a healthy
pause before the US makes its move at the Security
Council with respect to sanctions on Iran, thus
giving dialogue a more realistic chance.
Need for a healthy pause
According to the latest statement by
Iran's Foreign Ministry spokesman, Mohammad Ali
Hosseini, Iran is willing to discuss "temporary
suspension" of the nuclear-fuel cycle "under just
conditions". Iran has made a renewed effort to
resurrect the nuclear talks, receiving timely
backing from Russian Foreign Minister Sergei
Lavrov, who has explicitly stated that there is no
IAEA finding that Iran's nuclear program
represents a threat to world peace and security.
Relatedly, Ali Larijani, Iran's chief
nuclear negotiator, shed much light on the status
of Iran-European Union talks in a recent interview
with Mehr News Agency. Larijani claims that after
four lengthy meetings with Javier Solana, the EU's
foreign-policy chief, important achievements were
reached. These were with respect to Iran's
guarantees of non-diversion (to military
objectives). Yet Larijani has been surprised that
Solana is now singing a much more pessimistic
note.
According to Larijani, the North
Korea crisis has been exploited by the West to
create "artificial comparisons" with Iran in order
to press ahead with sanctions on Tehran. In that
case, Larijani warns, Iran's response will be
"measured and appropriate". He cites recent
legislation in Iran's parliament (majlis) that
calls for the suspension of Iran's cooperation
with the IAEA in the event of UN sanctions.
As for Iran's recent proposal for a
French-led consortium to produce nuclear fuel,
Larijani has expressed surprise that France's name
was invoked, insisting that Iran had no particular
preference as to who should lead any such
multinational consortium.
Another key
point conveyed by Larijani and other top Iranian
officials is the futility of the "carrot and
stick" approach. But that is unlikely to modify
Washington's old habit, now being taken up to the
next level by the US naval maneuvers in the
Persian Gulf, specifically earmarked as a
"warning" to Iran, per the admission of Secretary
of State Condoleezza Rice while in Moscow.
By enlarging the shadow of war on the eve
of Security Council action against Iran, the US
aims to solicit a more favorable response from
Tehran. Yet this is a dangerous proposition that,
ultimately, may not be worth the risk of, at a
minimum, poisoning the well of dialogue.
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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