THE
ROVING EYE Iran, the EU and the Swiss way
out By Pepe Escobar
The
United Nations Security Council deadline for Iran
to stop uranium enrichment is only one week away.
While for the White House escalation hysteria is
the name of the game, Europe once again has
nothing better to do than to demonstrate its
paralysis over bottles of Bordeaux.
Top
Iranian nuclear negotiator Ali Larijani, at the
sidelines of the Munich security conference this
past Sunday, told Javier Solana, the European
Union's top foreign-policy diplomat, that "Tehran
is
ready to unite all its
nuclear activities in a consortium with other
countries". Larijani could only have made this
offer under instructions by Supreme Leader
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Solana admitted publicly
that the meeting was "constructive".
On
Monday, Larijani met with the Swiss foreign
affairs minister as Switzerland offered to act as
a mediator between Iran and the EU under a new
proposal. The Swiss proposal is for Iran to stop
feeding centrifuges with processed
uranium-hexafluoride gas while negotiations
resume.
On the same day, Iranian Foreign
Ministry spokesman Mohammad-Ali Hosseini, at his
weekly press conference, confirmed in Tehran that
all the issues in the nuclear dossier - including
suspension of uranium enrichment - could be
discussed again. Hosseini, stressing that Iran's
nuclear program is totally in accordance with
International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)
regulations, added "we are ready to consider any
plan that guarantees our rights".
The
problem is that right on cue, the EU decided to
implement the UN sanctions.
Yet also on
the same day, Solana's office in Brussels
delivered a document to EU foreign ministers
according to which the Iranian nuclear program was
slowed down only by "technical constraints" and
not "diplomatic pressure". The gist of the
document is that it may be "too late" to stop Iran
from "enriching enough uranium for a weapons
program". In essence, sanctions won't work,
Solana's office said to the EU, while Solana
himself believes dialogue remains possible.
What is it going to be?
It may be,
once again, a case of the heavily disunited EU
shooting itself in the foot. No one in Brussels -
apart from a bunch of hawks closely connected to
the North Atlantic Treaty Organization - wants
confrontation with Tehran, as for the EU, Iran in
the long run is the ultimate, ideal gas supplier,
capable of balancing the overwhelming power of the
Gazprom nation (Russia).
The US
administration's over-the-top tactics - where
Iranians are not only the new nuclear evildoers on
the block but also the cause of the US disaster in
Iraq - in essence cut no ice in Brussels. These
tactics will only tend to get more far-fetched -
as in Pentagon "evidence" of Iran supplying
weapons for Iraqi Shi'ites to kill Americans.
Brussels diplomats were livid on reading
reports that President George W Bush had ordered
StratCom - the military command in charge of
nuclear weapons - to plan for the possibility of
an air and naval strike against Iran. They may be
as livid as many in Tehran, where the mood is that
the Chinese and the Russians - not the Europeans -
will have to make a significant move at the
eleventh hour to prevent a US attack.
All
over this dangerous escalation, there is the
implied assumption - especially in the US but even
in Europe - that Iran is developing a nuclear
bomb. This fallacy is never questioned. To make
matters even more absurd, it is Iran itself that
is being targeted - by the US - for a preemptive
nuclear attack.
A recent, wide-ranging
poll conducted by WorldPublicOpinion.org reveals
that the majority of Americans are against such an
attack. Fifty-five percent of Americans support
Iran's right to enrich uranium, as long as UN
inspectors have full access to its nuclear
installations. That's exactly what Iran has been
doing for the past three years; and the IAEA has
found absolutely no sign of a nuclear-weapons
program.
For their part, 84% of Iranians
say their country has the right to enrich uranium
- which is guaranteed by the nuclear
Non-Proliferation Treaty. But 66% also approve
continuing membership of the NPT - which prevents
a nuclear-weapons program.
For world
public opinion, it's abundantly clear who the
warmongering minority is: the same disgraced
neo-conservatives who sold the Iraq quagmire. In
this volatile situation the European (dis)Union
could at least decide not to side with irrelevance
- and give all power to the hope of a Swiss
mediation.
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