Page 2 of 2 Iran rises to its
missile
defense By Kaveh L Afrasiabi
Arabia, which has acquired
medium-range missiles from China, and Iran, which
prides itself on its "home-grown" missile
technology, with a little help from abroad.
Manufacturing an Iranian
threat Articulating the United States'
position in a recent article in the Wall Street
Journal, Robert Joseph, the US special envoy for
nuclear non-proliferation, stated that Iran is
likely to acquire long-
range
intercontinental missiles by 2015, thus putting
both Europe and the east coast of the US in
potential jeopardy.
But there are serious
flaws in this argument. On the one hand, Iran has
no nuclear warheads, and is nowhere near the
technological know-how to manufacture them. The
complex warhead technology is shared by a few
countries in the world and it is highly unlikely
that any of them would pass that technology on to
Iran. That includes the Pakistanis, who have
recently angered Iran by their blunt statements
about Iran's proliferation risks. And the North
Koreans are making amends with the US and, at any
rate, have to deal with the increasingly robust
export-control limitations known as the
Proliferation Security Initiative that has so far
led to interdiction of a number of ships bound to
or from North Korea on the high seas.
Nor
is the range of Iran's missiles at present, or in
the near future, enough to reach most parts of
Europe, given the view of most (European) experts
that the Shahab-3 medium-range missiles, modeled
after the North Korean Nodong, cannot be developed
much further into longer-range missiles.
"The US should look for another scapegoat
to justify its post-Cold War sway over Europe,"
the Iranian mission to the United Nations
responded to Joseph's article in a letter
published in the Journal, calling the idea of an
Iranian missile threat against Europe "ludicrous".
In language reminiscent of Noam Chomsky in his
criticism of the United States' global hegemony,
Iran's letter calls for a shift in the "old power
paradigm" on the part of the US.
This is
an apt suggestion, as it bears on the future of
US-Iran relations, in light of the recent meeting
in Egypt over Iraq, which was attended by both US
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Iranian
Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki. At a
post-conference press interview, Mottaki once
again urged the US to "change its policy toward
Iran" and to "respect Iran's rights".
In a
conversation with the author last September,
Mottaki praised Iran's bilateral relations with
specific European countries and expressed optimism
about the future of Iran-European Union relations.
[1] Yet, nine months later, that optimism is
soured by a growing concern about a pro-US drift
in European politics. Germany's right-wing
chancellor, Angela Merkel, at the recent US-EU
summit at the White House, sang in unison with
President George W Bush about Iran's nuclear
threat. And this week US-friendly Nicholas Sarkozy
won the presidential race in France; in his
campaign speeches, Sarkozy repeatedly called for
tough sanctions against Iran.
None of this
bodes well for Iran, which must still rely on
Germany, its top European trade partner, as its
chief interlocutor with the US, and which is in
danger of losing some of its support base among
non-aligned nations because of rifts at the recent
NPT meeting in Vienna. Not everyone is alarmed,
however.
"US officials conveniently forget
that compared [with] the US, which has zero
business with Iran, there is actually a great deal
of economic and energy interdependence between
Iran and Europe that works against the threat
scenario," a Tehran political analyst told the
author.
That does not mean, however, that
Europe should not expect reprisals from Iran
should it continue the present path of
collaboration with the US on the nuclear issue
and, worse, in the event a military showdown
between the US and Iran. With European forces on
the ground in Afghanistan and Iraq, Iran might
retaliate against them in the worst-case scenario.
Few in Iran want this to happen.
On the
contrary, irrespective of the EU's bandwagoning
with the US on the nuclear front, there are still
plenty of political optimists in Tehran. They
caution that in the years to come, Europe's energy
dependence on Iran will only grow, given the
continent's current search to diversify in its
energy sources, especially to avoid heavy Russian
dependence. This alone militates against the
negative scenarios mentioned above. "Iran is not
irrational to deprive itself of valuable economic
partners," the Tehran analyst insisted.
But Tehran might underestimate the new
winds in the sail of US-EU trans-Atlantic
relations in light of the right-wing drift of
European politics. The election results in France
as far as Iran is concerned are a bad omen that
spell more, and not less, trouble for its
relations with Europe. On this account alone, the
United States' planned missile-defense system for
Europe has just gained a new ally, much to the
chagrin of Iranians.
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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