France knocks heads over its Iran
diplomacy By Kaveh L Afrasiabi
There is something amiss when French
President Nicolas Sarkozy, who is leading his
country to a new nuclear-arms modernization
program that clearly breaches the nuclear
Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) obligation of
nuclear states on disarmament, calls on Iran to
"honor its commitment".
But Sarkozy, with
US-French relations still in the recovery mode
after the 2003 invasion of Iraq, may be treading a
fine line between
rallying the cause against
Iran and his commitment to steer France clear of
new external headaches.
With a more
"activist" French foreign policy clearly put on
display this week with the Baghdad visit of French
Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner, Sarkozy is now
on the verge of leading the European march against
Iran, which continues to press ahead with its
nuclear program irrespective of United Nations
sanctions. Both Paris and Washington have called
Iran's cooperation with the International Atomic
Energy Agency (IAEA) "insufficient" and demanded a
full suspension of the country's uranium
enrichment and reprocessing activities.
Yet Sarkozy and his circle of policymakers
may be swimming against a current that began in
March 2005 when then-president Jacques Chirac met
with Iran's then-nuclear negotiator, Hasan Rowhani
and openly endorsed the idea of a "limited
enrichment program" for Iran. The endorsement,
though, was brief after Chirac was forced to
retract his statement by intense opposition from
Washington and London.
Since then, a
growing number of European diplomats and experts
have come to the same conclusion as Chirac,
however, in light of a recent statement by the
IAEA's director general, Mohammad ElBaradei, that
Iran's mastery of the nuclear fuel cycle is a
fait accompli.
Sarkozy's closing
ranks behind the US vis-a-vis Iran may backfire by
weakening a united European diplomatic consensus
on the Iranian nuclear crisis, which is currently
spearheaded by the European Union's foreign-policy
chief, Javier Solana. Solana is due to meet with
Iran's nuclear negotiator, Ali Larijani, in the
near future. Both men have said they hope to build
on the "solid progress" attained by their previous
meetings.
Why is the Larijani-Solana duet
making progress while other channels are not? The
answer is persuasive diplomacy, for Solana has
wisely used quiet diplomacy and rationality,
rather than the rhetoric of Washington and London.
Rationality is in short supply these days in the
United States, where the media have rallied behind
the "pressure Iran" paradigm virtually without
exception. Even a nuanced version of this
"paradigm" reflected in a Christian Science
Monitor editorial that offers more carrot as a
reward for Iran's cooperation fails to admit that
threats are no way to deal with Iran. [1]
Sadly, the only language the US knows how
to use is coercive diplomacy, which is one reason
the US-Iran dialogue on Iraq's security has not
made progress. Given the slew of anti-Iran
accusations by the US military that have coincided
with those talks, it's a small miracle that they
haven't been terminated.
As usual, the US
has used more coercion than diplomacy and, in
doing so, raised fears in Iran that it is
preparing to attack its nuclear facilities under
the pretext of striking the Iranian Revolutionary
Guards Corps (IRGC), which the White House
recently labeled as a "specially designated global
terrorist" group.
Is Sarkozy willing to
sign on to such a scenario and, if not, why is he
quiet about it when the signs of the White House's
military intentions against Iran are becoming
increasingly pronounced? Obviously the same
question applies to other European leaders,
particularly German Chancellor Angela Merkel and
British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, whose
governments have been part of the European troika
negotiating with Tehran since 2003.
Unfortunately, there is a false impression
in the West that threatening Iran has yielded
results and that even more threats are needed to
get Iran's full cooperation with the UN Security
Council.
After making several trips to
Iran, IAEA officials, who have time and again
confirmed the absence of any evidence of military
evidence, have reported serious progress, yet
their reports have been mad music to the ears of
White House, which now accuses Iran of trying to
evade UN sanctions "through nuclear transparency".
The question, of course, is whether the
White House strategy of pushing for more sanctions
by ignoring the positive developments in the
Iran-IAEA front really washes with the
international community.
The answer is
that it does not, which is why the White House is
using the "terror" angle on the IRGC to muddy the
picture, thus attempting to create a direct
linkage between Iran and Iraq, all to the
detriment of its own interests in Iraq. This makes
no sense and, should the US and its European
allies bully the UN Security Council into another
round of sanctions against Iran, then the most
likely victim will be the IAEA, in light of Iran's
warning that it will curtail or even cease its
cooperation with the UN's atomic agency if that
happens.
A chain reaction, facilitating
the "military option", will likely follow, all the
more reason for the Europeans in particular to
think twice about the wisdom of ganging up on
Iran, action reportedly charted by the hawks led
by US Vice President Dick Cheney.
For
sure, threatening Iran with "tactical nuclear
weapons" or even "monster bunker-buster" bombs is
not the right tactic. Nor is France's nuclear
strategy of allowing a nuclear strike against
conventional attacks conducive to the cause of
non-proliferation.
A pledge of "no first
use" of nuclear weapons is woefully absent in the
US, French and British national-security
doctrines, which instead rely extensively and
strategically on nuclear arsenals as weapons of
prestige, deterrence and compliance, irrespective
of the NPT norms of disarmament.
The
bottom line is that as long as the idea of
disarmament remains dead, the NPT's lofty
non-proliferation cause is equally lost and
nuclear proliferation remains the norm. This is
the simple equation missed by France's new
president, who will continue to remain ignorant if
he continues to ask others to honor their
commitments when he and other nuclear states have
failed to honor their own.
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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