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2 Calling time out on UN
sanctions By Kaveh L Afrasiabi
both countries are about to meet
again in Istanbul - over Iraq - but with definite
ramifications for the larger matters, including
the nuclear issue?
Unless there are
delusional policymakers in Washington who think it
is possible to isolate issues and somehow gain
Iran's cooperation on Iraq just as the White House
is tightening the screws around Iran and trying to
isolate it internationally, there is
no
logical answer to the above question except to
concede that South Africa's proposal merits
serious attention.
The Iranian version of
a linkage diplomacy makes it nearly impossible to
perpetuate such delusional thinking for long, and
before the gains of the recent Baghdad summit are
washed away by a third UN resolution, it is better
for the White House to get into salvage mode,
salvaging the security summit's windfalls and
seeking to telescope it to better relations with
Iran all around.
Regarding the latter, Ray
Takeyh of the Council on Foreign Relations has
penned an article in Foreign Affairs calling for a
US-Iran detente and then connecting this to a
support for political change inside Iran in favor
of "pragmatists" over the "hardliners". This is
nice, but it is only a minor improvement over the
hawkish "regime change" approach toward Iran, by
stubbornly clinging to a moderate version of the
same paradigm. In fact, what is needed is a new US
policy on Iran that would reaffirm what the White
House inked in Algiers in 1981, by promising not
to interfere in Iran's internal affairs.
That commitment, long forgotten, is now
reintroduced through the back door by the likes of
Takeyh and others whose noble intentions are
undermined by their less than savory ideas
nowadays endorsed by a segment of the US
foreign-policy elite, including Henry Kissinger.
The US has no manifest destiny, no holy
mandate, to "democratize" other nations, including
the ones in the Middle East. Nor, as the United
States' solid backing of 19th-century oil
sheikhdoms of the Persian Gulf or the apartheid
state of Israel clearly show, is this an ideal put
in practice consistently by Washington, rather
than an instrument of influence mostly used
against America's adversaries.
The
dictates of US national interests issue forth no
global Jeffersonian march to democracy, and to the
extent that certain pundits in and out of the
administration of President George W Bush still
think so, they need to balance their views with a
strict construction of national interests that are
not surrogates for extraneous, pro-Israel,
considerations.
This aside, the question
of rapprochement will get more attention when
Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad addresses the
Security Council. Again, the US media have gone on
the offensive castigating and condemning
Ahmadinejad before his speech, with articles in
the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post and Los
Angeles Times accusing him of seeking to "bully"
and "lecture" the council.
Of course, it
matters a great deal how Ahmadinejad performs at
the UN. A good speech fine-tuned to bolster South
Africa's position, instead of rousing the feelings
and passions of converts at home, may be what is
needed at this point. He could, for instance,
announce that Iran will stop injecting
uranium-hexafluoride gas into the centrifuges
during the negotiations, putting them on standby
mode, as a timely stopgap measure.
US
officials and elements of the media are, on the
other hand, hoping that Ahmadinejad inflames the
Security Council with yet more fiery rhetoric,
whereby whatever resistance of Russia and China to
go along with the third resolution there is would
melt and the express train of sanctions would
disembark at its new station. President
Ahmadinejad's moment at the UN can be a memorable
one. It can be a small, constructive step that
would also be a giant step toward democratizing
the UN system, whereby the non-permanent members
of the Security Council can feel respected again
and with real, not make-believe, influence, and
that certainly is something to hope for in the
months and years to come.
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 ofIran's Nuclear
Program: Debating Facts Versus Fiction.
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