New steps in the war dance over
Iran By Kaveh L Afrasiabi
A day after French Foreign Minister
Bernard Kouchner apologized to Iraq for his
inappropriate call for a leadership change in that
country, President Nicolas Sarkozy added his own
blunder by tacitly endorsing the military option
on Iran. Clearly, the new US-friendly leader in
Paris has much to learn about international
diplomacy and Middle East politics, or he risks
taking France down a path where only the dogs of
war and clashing civilizations prowl.
Coinciding with a relentless anti-Iran
campaign riveting the US
media, Sarkozy's comments on
Iran have been "well received in Washington",
according to news reports, although some French
commentators and spin doctors have tried to nuance
those comments in less incendiary and more benign
directions.
In his first major
foreign-policy speech as president, Sarkozy said
an Iran with nuclear weapons is unacceptable, and
he warned that Iran could be attacked militarily
if it dies not meet its international obligations
to curb its nuclear program.
Not to be
outdone, US President George W Bush gave his
strongest warning ever on Iran when he said on
Tuesday that "Iran's pursuit of the atomic bomb
could lead to a nuclear holocaust in the Middle
East". He then promised to confront Tehran "before
it is too late".
Bush was reacting to
comments the same day by Iranian President Mahmud
Ahmadinejad, who said a power vacuum is emerging
in Iraq and Tehran is prepared to fill it.
Sarkozy coupled his Iran comments with a
call for a timetable for foreign troops to leave
Iraq. With regard to Iran, he has ingratiated
himself with the White House. But over Iraq he has
distanced himself, which, ironically, puts him
closer to Iran, which has been equally insistent
on the need for a timetable.
But any idea
of closer Iran-France relations, portended by the
news of a possible visit to Tehran by Kouchner,
has now been put on the back burner by Sarkozy's
blunt statements on Iran, including his alarmist
depiction of the nuclear standoff as "undoubtedly
the most serious crisis before us today".
That is rather strange, seeing how
cooperation is growing between Iran and the
International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), to a
point where the United Nations' nuclear watchdog
has virtually normalized Iran's nuclear dossier. A
just-released note of understanding between the
two sides reaffirms, among other things, the
following:
The agency has been able to verify
the non-diversion of the declared nuclear
materials at the enrichment facilities in Iran
and has therefore concluded that it remains in
peaceful use. [1]
Details of a
working document agreed between Iran and IAEA
inspectors were released this week. The two sides
want to resolve questions about Tehran's nuclear
program and set a timetable for "transparency" by
December. Iran has already drawn several rounds of
sanctions from the UN Security Council over its
nuclear program.
Indeed, Sarkozy should
have consulted with IAEA officials before making
his rash statements on Iran. Had he listened to
this week's interview of IAEA director general
Mohamed ElBaradei with the Austrian weekly Profil,
Sarkozy would have learned that ElBaradei is
convinced that Iran is "unlikely" to seek to
develop nuclear weapons. According to ElBaradei,
"It was unlikely that any country in the Middle
East would be after an atomic bomb, unless it felt
threatened by other states."
The irony is
that the subtle and not so subtle threats of
military action against Iran may have the
unintended consequence of reinforcing the very
opposite of what Sarkozy and other Western leaders
seek when they raise the specter of "bombing
Iran", ie, strengthening the hands of those in
Iran who point at the "irrational" Westerners who
can be held at bay only through deterrent bombs.
"If they take an irrational move, then
Iran's cooperation with the agency [IAEA] will be
sterile," Iran's nuclear negotiator, Ali Larijani,
has stated. Both Larijani and Ahmadinejad have
said that Iran's nuclear file should be
"normalized", since the lingering questions about
Tehran's nuclear activities are being "cleared up"
and the IAEA has full-scope monitoring of Iran's
nuclear facilities.
Various IAEA
officials, as well as a number of European
diplomats, have told this author that the IAEA
would be able to detect any military diversion, or
for that matter any uranium enrichment above a low
grade, as long as the Iran-IAEA safeguard
agreement remains intact.
Yet Sarkozy acts
according to his own articles of belief about
Iran, irrespective of the empirical counter-facts
mentioned above, his ears glued to the Iran
nuclear-myth makers who have their own agenda,
regardless of the facts. (See Debunking Iran's nuclear myth
makers, Asia Times Online, January 25.)
The validity of Sarkozy's comments on the
gravity of Iran's nuclear crisis is questionable,
as are his stark "alternatives" of "an Iranian
bomb, or bomb Iran" - particularly since the
hypothetical scenario of a "nuclear-armed Iran"
remains unproved in the absence of any smoking gun
and the relatively robust Iran-IAEA cooperation.
Sarkozy is correct that there is an Iran
nuclear crisis, but wrong in overlooking it as a
crisis not of necessity but of choice - by Western
governments that exaggerate and recycle the media
frenzy about an Iranian bomb, despite the absence
of credible proof. [2]
Sarkozy has called
on Iran to "back down in its nuclear standoff",
yet it is he who should back down from his
warmongering and alarmism and perhaps even
apologize to Iranians for suggesting that an
unprovoked war on their country can be somehow
legitimized.
Interestingly, in the same
speech, Sarkozy listed as France's "first
challenge of the 21st century" the priority of
avoiding a clash between Islam and the West -
appropriately so, given France's large Muslim
minority and the French ability to steer clear of
Muslim backlashes seen in Britain and Spain.
Sadly, a simple point evades Sarkozy:
France and other Western governments, considered
"neo-colonialist" in many parts of the Islamic
world, must avoid threatening Muslim states such
as Iran if they are to avoid clashing
civilizations.
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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