Page 2 of 2 Iran: A mountain that doesn't
move By Kaveh L Afrasiabi
British
sailors could be directly connected to London's
leading role against Iran in the nuclear row. This
raises the prospect of a long ordeal over the
sailors, who Iran claims have "confessed" to
transgressing into Iranian waters.
Already, a top Iranian lawmaker has
supported the action by Iran's Revolutionary
Guards in taking the sailors and hinted at lengthy
legal proceedings, much to the chagrin of the
British government,
which has demanded their immediate release.
A political analyst close to the
government told this author that
Tehran may not release them until all the Iranian
"hostages" in the United States' hands are free.
Six diplomats and scores of others, deemed
"agents" by the US, are in its custody. London's
plans to extricate itself quietly from Iraq may
now be in jeopardy.
From Iran's vantage,
however, what matters is to drive home the point,
expressed by Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei last
week, that those who inflict pain on Iran will
have to pay a price.
The escalating crisis
may not, after all, develop into the kind of air
campaign that the likes of US investigative
journalist Seymour Hersh have been penning for
some time. Rather, it is beginning to spiral in an
entirely different direction that poses a serious
threat to regional and international peace - that
is, small skirmishes combined with proxy attacks,
hostage-taking, intelligence war and the like,
which can easily trigger bigger and deadlier
showdowns.
Again, Iran insists that the
nuclear dispute is "easily resolvable" through
candid negotiation, and to that effect it has
given an implicit nod to the so-called Swiss
proposal that calls for "dry centrifuges", that
is, putting enrichment on "hot standby" to give
negotiation some breathing space.
Unfortunately, the US has given this and
similar proposals the cold shoulder and is simply
keen on piling up the pressure on Tehran to comply
with its demand for a complete halt to its
uranium-enrichment program and the construction of
a heavy-water reactor in Arak.
But what if
Iran frustrates the rosy expectations of the
diplomats devising the US approach in this crisis?
Is the US willing to risk a nightmare regional
conflagration then?
Already, given the
growing interlocking of the nuclear crisis and the
Iraq crisis, the fate of the next multilateral
security summit on Iraq scheduled for Turkey next
month has been cast under a cloud of uncertainty,
and it is fairly certain that things will grow
worse instead of getting better any time soon.
Time might be running out on the United
States' international coalition against Iran, in
light of Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's
call for respecting Iran's right to produce
nuclear fuel. Manmohan made this policy
announcement in a recent meeting with former
Iranian president Mohammad Khatami.
In
addition to India, Iran can now count on growing
support from Indonesia, South Africa, many Latin
American nations and, indeed, most of the
developing world. With the bubble of
"international consensus" with regard to Iran's
supposed nuclear threat wearing thinner and
thinner and about to burst, and with the indirect
infusion of Israel into Security Council debates,
as mentioned above, Iranian policymakers are not
about to throw in the towel and resign themselves
to the pressures of sanctions.
With a
mixture of a hard-power approach in Iraq and the
region on the one hand and soft-power diplomacy in
the world community on the other, Tehran is
betting on causing a sea-change in terms of
sympathy for its stance against the hypocrisy of
the nuclear-armed states that control the Security
Council.
This is a high-price gambit that
may backfire on Iran, as some claim it already
has, with reports of Russian technicians leaving
the Bushehr nuclear power plant they have been
building in Iran unfinished. And many still
believe that Iran needs to show a serious
willingness to accommodate the anxieties of the
international community over its nuclear program.
European diplomats addressing the Security
Council this weekend uniformly reiterated the
European Union's seriousness about the
comprehensive offers of nuclear assistance
submitted to Iran last June. Iran reacted somewhat
favorably to that "international package of
incentives" and should now re-examine the package
and seek a formal answer to its response.
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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