Page 2 of 2 Brave new world of
Iranian
nuclear cooperation By Kaveh L Afrasiabi
Gholamreza Karami, the head of
Defense Committee of the Parliament's National
Security and Foreign Policy Commission, Iran is
open to entertain further cooperation with the
IAEA beyond the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
Iran has signed the Additional Protocol
but, notwithstanding its unhappiness with the
dispatch of its nuclear dossier to the UN, has
refused either to legislate it or to re-embrace it after
implementing it for nearly
two years.
Iran's IAEA-centric approach
complements its Europe-friendly energy policy
reflected in the memorandum of understanding it
has just signed with Turkey, for the transfer of
Iranian and Turkmen gas to Europe via Turkey. Once
finalized, the Nabucco pipeline will export some
30 billion cubic meters of gas to Europe, which is
desperately seeking to reduce its energy
dependency on Russia.
Compared with the
US, which has no economic ties to Iran, Europe's
energy and non-energy trade links with Iran are
growing by leaps and bounds, which must introduce
new fissures in the anti-Iran trans-Atlantic
alliance on the nuclear issue.
United
States' options The US government has no
perfect scripts to work with here. Washington has
seen its relations with Moscow deteriorate over
its planned missile-defense system in Europe,
purportedly to shield Europe from Iran's missiles,
and Moscow has now delivered on its prior warning
by opting to withdraw from a major arms-limitation
treaty.
Russian technicians are assisting Iran
with the installation of a sophisticated air-defense
system to protect its nuclear facilities,
which would make any military operation
by either the US or Israel against those facilities
more difficult, prompting a recent editorial
in the Jerusalem Post to claim that the
window of opportunity for the military option is
closing.
But of course what the Israeli
pundits fail to mention is that this window is
closing more quickly, politically and
diplomatically, because of the new level of
Iranian cooperation with the IAEA, the growing
wedge between Washington and Moscow, and the EU's
clear self-distancing from any non-diplomatic
resolution of the Iran nuclear crisis.
"The situation for the US has become a
matter of reputation," Soltanieh has stated, and
there is a grain of truth about that. That is why
Iran has shown sensitivity to ElBaradei's
suggestion of direct US-Iran dialogue on the
nuclear issue - Iran knows well the disruptive
capability of the US, and even Soltanieh has
admitted as much by comparing the IAEA
battleground to a "mine-infested land".
A mutually satisfactory
formula must therefore be found that will not look
like a major retreat by the US administration, or
by Iran on its nuclear rights.
The IAEA
officials have recently reported that Iran has
"slowed down" its enrichment activities and have
welcomed that as a positive sign. Iran surely recognizes
the importance of more such positive signals
that would ultimately amount to minimum satisfaction
of the UN Security Council demands, ie, by either
agreeing to a temporary "time-out" cessation of
the nuclear-fuel cycle as proposed by ElBaradei,
or adopting the "standby" option whereby there
would be no actual enrichment by the spinning
centrifuges.
However, it seems unlikely
that the US and other members of the "5 plus 1"
will bracket their demands together simply
because of Iran's increased transparency and other
"benchmarks" agreed on between Iran and the IAEA.
Parallel to Iran's verifiably meeting
those benchmarks, the Security Council must lower
the threshold of its own benchmarks reflected in
the two resolutions, 1696 and 1747. Of course,
this depends entirely on Washington's willingness
to strike a compromise with Iran, which will not
be the case so long as the anti-Iran hawks have
the ears of US President George W Bush.
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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