As Rice's Iran strategy fizzles,
Cheney waits By Gareth Porter
WASHINGTON - US Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice's months-long diplomatic effort
to get five other powers to agree to a tough
United Nations Security Council resolution on
sanctions against Iran now seems certain to fail,
because of Russian and Chinese resistance.
The beneficiaries of that failure in
Washington will be Vice President Dick Cheney and
other hardliners, who have been anticipating that
such a development would help them persuade
President George W Bush to begin the
political-diplomatic
planning for an air attack on
Iran.
For more than seven months, Rice has
based her Iran strategy on the premise that a
coalition of the five permanent Security Council
members (the United States, the United Kingdom,
France, Russia and China) plus Germany (P5 plus 1)
could reach agreement to impose significant costs
on Iran for its refusal to bow to the demand to
end uranium enrichment. As recently as September,
both Rice and Under Secretary of State for
Political Affairs Nicholas Burns, who coordinates
Iran policy, publicly expressed confidence that
the coalition would "stay together".
But
the Rice coalition strategy has been swimming
against a powerful geopolitical tide. Russia and
China have no interest in a weakened Iran, and
have been signaling for months that they are not
on board with Rice's strategy. In May, Rice tried
to trade off the Bush administration's concession
of agreeing to join direct negotiations with Iran
for a commitment by the other five powers in the
coalition to pass sanctions enforceable under
Chapter VII of the UN Charter. But Russia and
China blocked that plan, and the proposal to Iran
from the P5 plus 1 group contained no reference to
sanctions.
Now the Russians, with apparent
Chinese support, are insisting that any resolution
on Iran's nuclear program fall well short of
"sanctions" in the sense of punishment of Iran.
Last month, the Europeans circulated a
draft that would have required that countries
prevent the sale and supply of a long list of
equipment, technology and financing to all of
Iran's nuclear and ballistic missile programs,
including dual-use items and related technologies.
It would have required that states "prevent the
supply, sale or transfer" of such technologies,
ban travel by Iranian officials connected with
either program, and freeze their assets.
But it did not characterize Iran's nuclear
program as a threat to international peace and
security, as Rice wanted. Furthermore, it would
have allowed Moscow to continue its assistance to
Iran for the construction of the Bushehr nuclear
power plant.
As reported by the Washington
Post, Rice proposed amendments to the draft that
would have closed both those loopholes. When the
Europeans rejected those amendments, then US
ambassador to the UN John Bolton threatened to
withdraw US support from the resolution. But the
British, French and Germans held firm.
The
Russians, however, were insisting on a much
narrower set of restrictions than those provided
in the European draft. In early November, the six
nations were deadlocked on the scope of the
resolution. Now the European Union has circulated
a draft that would only prohibit export of the
most dangerous items that could be used to make a
nuclear weapon or a ballistic missile, according
to a report by Bloomberg's Bill Varner.
But the EU draft retains the same travel
ban and asset freeze to which Russia had objected
previously. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov
made it clear on Friday that Moscow would support
"sanctions aimed at preventing nuclear materials
and sensitive technologies from getting into Iran"
but objects to sanctions aimed at individuals,
such as travel bans and the freezing of assets
abroad. "Russia is against punishing Iran," he
declared.
The Russian position on Iran
sanctions appears to ensure that the resolution
will not even be as strong as the commitment
already undertaken by the 45-member Nuclear
Suppliers Group, which includes every country
known to possess the technologies needed to
produce nuclear weapons or ballistic missiles.
The imminent collapse of Rice's coalition
on Iran sanctions reflects the fundamental
conflict of interest between Russia and the Bush
administration, not only on Iran's nuclear program
but on broader geopolitical issues.
Dr
Celeste A Wallander of Georgetown University, who
with Robert Einhorn of the Center for Strategic
and International Studies conducted interviews
with 20 current and former Russian defense
officials and analysts on Russian views on
proliferation, wrote in a recent policy paper that
Russia had no intention of helping create new
nuclear states but would not "risk political
relationships with important regional powers" to
support US non-proliferation efforts.
Russian officials viewed the Iranian
nuclear issue primarily in geopolitical terms,
Wallander wrote, and they doubted that the US
really cared about proliferation per se. They
believed Washington should fix the "demand side"
of the proliferation problem - Iranian insecurity
and fear of US policy - instead of focusing
primarily on the "supply side" of the problem,
according to Wallander.
Chinese interests
on the Iran issue parallel those of the Russians.
Beijing has been seeking to strengthen its
strategic partnership with Russia, particularly
since the Bush administration's invasion of Iraq
and overt strategy of using alliances with Japan,
India and South Korea as leverage on Beijing. Both
China and Russia appear to view the Shanghai
Cooperation Organization (SCO) as a vehicle for
countering US power across Asia. Last year, Moscow
and Beijing signaled their joint interest in
cooperation with Iran against US pressures by
inviting Iran to become a member of the SCO.
Rice appeared to concede last week that
the United States would not get agreement on the
kind of sanctions on Iranian officials for which
she had been pushing. She said she was for
"maintaining unity but I am also in favor of
action. We will just have to look at what the
options are."
Rice was given the Iran
portfolio when she became secretary of state in
January 2005, and has apparently sought to move
administration policy away from the option of
using military force. She even indicated privately
to a few figures outside the administration this
year that she hoped her move to offer talks with
Iran in the context of EU-Iran talks on the
nuclear issue would result in broader US-Iran
negotiations.
But Rice's diplomatic track
on Iran was narrowly constrained from the
beginning by a broader Bush administration policy
of refusing any diplomatic compromise with Iran.
Cheney and then-secretary of defense Donald
Rumsfeld apparently agreed to let Rice go down
that track in early 2005 because they knew that
any diplomatic effort through the Security Council
to get sanctions against Iran would end in failure
and that such a failure was a necessary prelude to
any use of force.
According to an article
by the neo-conservative Lawrence F Kaplan in The
New Republic on October 2, aides to Cheney have
been convinced from the beginning that Rice's Iran
strategy would not be an obstacle to their own
plans because they knew it would fail.
The
aides to Cheney insisted that the administration
was not yet prepared politically for a shift to
the military track, according to Kaplan. But once
Rice's diplomatic effort becomes a highly visible
failure, Cheney and his allies in the
administration are poised to begin the process of
ratcheting up pressure on Bush to begin the
political planning for an eventual military attack
on Iran.
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.
