COMMENT Opportunity
lost over Iran nuclear crisis By Kaveh L Afrasiabi
The Bush
administration has a long record of triggering
crises, without much success in crisis prevention.
The latter is clearly discernible in the cold
shoulder the White House has given the call for a
"time out" in the Iran nuclear crisis by Mohammad
ElBaradei, the head of the United Nations' nuclear
watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency
(IAEA).
ElBaradei has asked for the
simultaneous suspension of Iran's
uranium-enrichment activities and the UN sanctions
on Iran. Whereas Iran has given the call serious
consideration, the United
States has all but rejected
it.
According to IAEA spokeswoman Melissa
Fleming, ElBaradei regards the regional situation
as "potentially explosive" and wants to avert the
escalation of a crisis that, if added to the
present crises, could turn the situation
"catastrophic".
In reaction to ElBaradei's
proposal, Iran has put on hold its plan to install
3,000 centrifuges, and Foreign Minister Manouchehr
Mottaki has stated that Tehran will seriously
"review" the proposal. Iran's top nuclear
negotiator, Ali Larijani, has expressed a similar
sentiment, adding that the nuclear standoff is a
multi-dimensional, complex issue that does not
lend itself to any simplistic solutions.
But that is precisely what may be wrong
with the US approach, which involves upping the
ante against Iran in Iraq, in spite of scant
evidence of Iranian wrongdoing. The US is also
fixated on the idea of a permanent suspension of
Iran's enrichment and reprocessing program, even
though the program is sanctioned by articles of
the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. There is no
legal basis for the United States' request, given
the absence of any "smoking gun" corroborating
allegations of a clandestine nuclear-weapons
program in Iran.
However, the White House
would be wise to take advantage of this temporary
suspension of Iran's nuclear program by pushing
for Moscow's proposal of fabricating nuclear fuel
for Iran on Russian territory.
Subsequent
to the recent visit to Tehran by Igor Ivanov,
Russia's national-security chief, the Iranian
government has publicly renewed its interest in
the Russian proposal, which was openly endorsed by
US President George W Bush two years ago.
A key advantage of ElBaradei's "time out"
proposal is that it represents an intermediate
crisis-prevention initiative with the potential to
evolve into a long-term agreement. While it falls
shy of UN Security Council Resolution 1737, which
calls for an indefinite suspension of Iran's
uranium-enrichment program, ElBaradei's proposal
is closer to various IAEA resolutions since early
2003 that demand suspension as a "non-legally
binding, voluntary confidence-building measure".
Another advantage is that, if agreed by
both sides, the proposal paves the way for a new
round of negotiations that could have a salutary
effect on the Iraq crisis. This would be by
generating a much-needed basis for direct dialogue
between Iran and the US on the grave,
deteriorating security situation in Iraq, as
called for by the United States' bipartisan Iraq
Study Group.
The ISG suggested that the
Bush administration engage Iraq's neighbors in an
effort to stop the growing Iraqi chaos. Even the
new top US commander in the region, Admiral
William J Fallon, favors dialogue with Iran, per
his testimony in the US Congress on Tuesday. "The
extent that we can understand better the thoughts
and actions of others removes substantially, in my
experience, the danger of miscalculation, and so I
strongly endorse that approach," Fallon testified
before the Senate Armed Services Committee.
The question is whether or not other
officials, such as Elliot Abrams, who reportedly
calls the shots on Iran at the US National
Security Council (the hidden hand of the
neo-conservatives?), concurs with the admiral.
Unfortunately, Bush has opted for the
opposite policy of confrontation with Iran by
arresting several Iranian consular officials in
Basra, Iraq, and by issuing an "order to kill"
Iranian operatives who try to "stop our
objectives", as if Iran and the US operate at
cross-purposes in Iraq all the time.
That
is not so, and the sooner the Bush administration
eschews its one-dimensional approach over Iran,
which has cooperated in both Afghanistan and Iraq,
the better.
In Iran there is a growing
sentiment in favor of nuclear compromise and away
from the hitherto hardline position of President
Mahmud Ahmadinejad, yet this positive mood could
quickly evaporate in the face of the United
States' perceived lack of flexibility and outright
hostility.
Indeed, the White House would
be remiss to ignore the window of opportunity to
put the genie of Iran's nuclear crisis back in the
bottle via ElBaradei's prudent initiative.
Kaveh L Afrasiabi, PhD, former
adviser to Iran's nuclear negotiation team
(2004-05), 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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