Page 1 of
2 A win, win, win ending for
Tehran By Kaveh L Afrasiabi
Even as Iran basks in worldwide praise for
its handling of the crisis over the 15 British
sailors and marines it seized and then released
after two weeks, President Mahmud Ahmadinejad has
ensured that the focus stays on his country by
announcing that Iran has the ability to produce
enriched uranium at "industrial scale".
This presses the point that,
technologically speaking, Iran has reached a point
of no return and henceforth the best the West can
hope
for is to negotiate over the "objective
guarantees" regarding the peaceful use of Iran's
nuclear technology.
In a speech at Natanz,
Iran's main nuclear site, Ahmadinejad said on
Monday that 3,000 centrifuges had been installed
in an underground facility, allowing Iran "to
produce nuclear fuel on an industrial scale".
Earlier, The Times of London
wrote, "For the first time in his 20-
month presidency,
Ahmadinejad made a magnanimous gesture to the
West," adding that Iran's president had achieved a
"huge publicity coup" by his decision to free the
15 captives.
A German leftist daily, Der
Tageszeit, has also written about Iran's "PR
coup", suggesting that British Prime Minister Tony
Blair could learn from Ahmadinejad.
Overnight, from constant vilification, the
British and other European media have shifted
gears to praise Iran's "gesture of magnanimity"
hailing the "triumph of diplomacy over force" in
causing an abrupt end to the two-week-long
conflict between Iran and Britain.
While
we are too close to this event to draw more than
tentative conclusions, with crucial facts about
the behind-the-scenes negotiations between Tehran
and London or the decision-making process inside
Iran that culminated in its act of clemency still
to be revealed, this much is clear: from the
outset, this was a crisis of opportunity for Iran,
and the trick was not to get carried away with it,
but rather cash in on the immediate gains for the
sake of long-term goals and objectives.
Ahmadinejad's position
stronger Without doubt, both domestically
and externally, Ahmadinejad's government has been
strengthened as a direct result of this crisis. To
many experts, both inside and outside Iran, the
whole episode showed Iran's statecraft at its
best, combining determination, resolve, stamina
and deft diplomacy, as a result of which Iran has
managed to get more mileage out of this crisis
than could have been anticipated when the British
sailors were seized by Iran's Revolutionary Guards
on March 23.
Tantamount to a new Iranian
"charm offensive", Ahmadinejad's maneuvers are
bound to have significant ripple effects on nearly
all facets of Iran's foreign policy, strengthening
its hands in the nuclear standoff, in inter-state
relations in the Persian Gulf, and beyond.
By standing up to a Western power, Iran
has added new potency to its regional clout at a
time when nearly all its Persian Gulf neighbors
sheepishly toe the US line. The symbolic
importance of Iran's taking on the British forces
goes beyond the question of who was right or wrong
and is empowering Iranians and their friends in
the region.
No matter how Blair seeks to
put a positive face on the "firm and resolute"
British diplomacy, the basic fact is that his
government was badly bruised by an Iranian
initiative that set back the Western hegemonic
policies in the Persian Gulf region.
Understandably, certain elements of the US
and European media are putting the opposite spin
on "the lessons", one being how this crisis
"tarnished Iran's image". Such self-serving
analyses are blind, however, to how this is played
out in the Arab, Muslim and Third World streets,
adopting instead a Eurocentric interpretation.
As expected, the US media have been rather
tongue-in-cheek, to put it mildly, about the
ramifications of Iran's behavior. A correspondent
for ABC (American Broadcasting Co) News reporting
on the release of British service personnel boldly
stated, without bothering to elaborate, that this
"deepens suspicions of Iran's nuclear intentions".
Another US network, on the other hand, ran
a report on how upset the US government has been
with the British conduct in Persian Gulf,
questioning why Britain did not engage the
Iranians, and so on. It failed to mention that the
British may have acted wisely by not playing
America's game.
At the same time, the US
is keen on taking some credit for the diplomatic
breakthrough, with some White House officials
telling the New York Sun that the highest US
officials in the administration of President
George W Bush chose to free an apprehended Iranian
diplomat in Baghdad.
Promoting the idea of
an indirect, or rather "soft", quid pro
quo, the paper also claims that Iran's request
for a visit to the other Iranians in US custody in
Iraq has been part of the deal. If so, that ought
to set a positive tone for the US-Iran meeting at
the Iraq summit scheduled in Istanbul for this
month.
The generally negative inputs by
the US media and government are hardly surprising:
the United States' coercive approach toward Iran
is now put on the defensive, seeing how the
British proved that diplomacy can work with Iran,
and the US media and politicians are plainly
incapable of giving the devil its due, some simply
accusing Iran of engaging in "theatrics" with the
sailors.
Clearly, the US is now in the
danger of appearing as the odd man out, with the
likely improvement of the Iran-European
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