Page 2 of
2 A win, win, win ending for
Tehran By Kaveh L Afrasiabi
climate as a direct result of the
happy conclusion of this crisis. Not only that,
Washington may soon discover that its closest ally
in Europe, Britain, is now beholden to the
Iranians and can no longer be counted on to lead
the march against Tehran in Europe. From Iran's
strategic perspective, this may be the most
important result of the sailors crisis.
Coinciding with the arrival of sailors in
London was the ominous
news
that four British soldiers had been slain in the
southern Iraqi city of Basra, reminding the
British public of the exorbitant price it is
paying for bandwagoning with the US Middle East
policy and the need for a revised, more balanced
approach that is more European than American. In
this regard, Blair's open support for Israel's
disproportionate military response to Hezbollah's
raid last summer still haunts him.
Henceforth, Iran's diplomatic machinery is
likely to telescope the graceful exit from the
sailors crisis to a more nuanced, carefully
constructed dialogue with the EU, to the detriment
of US policy that continues to show signs of a
built-in schizophrenia, pushing the arches of
conciliation toward Iran simultaneously.
Foreign Minister Manuchehr Mottaki is a
major beneficiary of the crisis too. His ministry
has been on the sidelines of the nuclear talks,
but this may change in light of Mottaki's
effective role, equal to that of secretary of the
Supreme National Security Council Ali Larijani
(and Iran's chief nuclear negotiator), in
resolving the dispute with London.
On a
related note, Turkey gained a few points too by
using its rapport with Iran for a speedy
resolution, and this should be a timely plus in
its current bid to join the EU. Syria also, it
turns out, played a constructive role, which
serves to undermine the current US efforts to
drive a wedge between Tehran and Damascus.
Iran and the UN Security Council Another potential windfall of this crisis for
Iran may turn out to be with respect the United
Nations sanctions diplomacy vis-a-vis Iran. In his
press conference announcing the release of British
sailors, President Ahmadinejad made a point of
trying to put the Security Council on the
defensive. His denunciation did not make it into
the US and British coverage, for the most part,
and is worth quoting at length:
Today, no member state can complain
against the US and United Kingdom to the
Security Council and expect attention to their
complaint ... the structure of Security Council
should be reformed ... according to the
principle of justice, and that is a necessary
requirement. Until then, every state should
expect that the rights of their country and
their people will be denied by certain powers at
the Security Council ... The Security Council,
although it did not satisfy all of [the] British
demands due to the resistance of some
independent states, yet without examining the
facts and the key documents passed a resolution.
People of the world ask: Why? The question is,
where is the Security Council going with this
trend?
That is, indeed, an apt
question that must be probed by the UN community
as to whether or not the unbalanced influence of
big powers vividly seen in the Security Council's
above-mentioned instant action may have gone too
far in undermining the very viability of the world
organization.
Over the long run, should
the present unhappy trend continue, the developing
nations may have no choice but to set up a
parallel global organization that would be immune
from the rather pathetic state of affairs at the
Security Council today.
A fair and
impartial Security Council would not have readily
dismissed Iran's complaint that there had been an
intrusion into its territorial waters by the armed
forces of a foreign country. By adopting the
British version of facts, subsequently revised by
the British Foreign Office itself, reflected in
Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett's "regret" in
her interview with Iranian television last week,
the Security Council made a mockery of itself and
its pretension to rule of international law.
It is noteworthy that several of the
British sailors, while in Iran's custody, freely
admitted that they were trespassing in Iranian
waters, and their admission would have counted in
any court of law, irrespective of the
unpleasantness of the video footage. Had this case
been examined in an international legal forum, the
sailors' admission would have weighed heavily in a
final verdict.
But in today's
Western-dominated hierarchical global system, very
rarely do the world's underdogs win their day when
contesting the world's powers that be, and this
crisis represents an exception that is bound to
make the Western powers redouble their efforts to
make sure it does not happen again.
Still,
no matter how the anti-Iran spin doctors in the
Western media twist the lessons of this crisis in
their favor, the fact remains that the UN Security
Council has been delivered a black eye over its
rush to judgment against Iran, and this is bound
to backfire on the US-UK-led campaign at the
council for the next round of UN action against
Iran.
On the contrary, with the fissures
of a new US-EU split on Iran somewhat inevitable
as a result of the successful conclusion of the
sailors crisis, and London facing great new
constraints on its hitherto unreconstructed
bandwagoning with the US, chances are that the
wind has been taken out of the UN's sails in
regard to sanctions on Iran. This depends, of
course, on Iran's ability to demonstrate the
necessary acumen in terms of new flexibility in
nuclear talks with the Europeans in the coming
days and weeks.
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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