In a new report bound to cause shivers among the Washington hawks applauding
the White House's anti-Iran escalations, the United Nations' atomic agency has
confirmed "significant progress" in Iran's cooperation with the International
Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) since May.
Throwing cold water on the hot furnace brewing yet another war in the volatile
region, the report by IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei raises hope that the Iran
nuclear crisis may be resolved one step
at a time, unless the United States and Israel somehow manage to derail the
process, just as happened with Iraq five years ago.
Lest we forget, the current White House rhetoric on Iran bears strong
resemblance to that used in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq; it was based on
public deception as well as complete disregard for the findings of UN weapons
inspectors, who after some 400 inspections of every conceivable site in Iraq
had not found any evidence of weapons of mass destruction.
Little wonder some members of the US Congress, such as Democrat Peter Welch,
have drawn comparison between the two cases. "I don't trust the president on
Iran. He's demonstrated a willingness to play it fast and loose when he was
justifying Iraq. So I don't have confidence in what the president said [about
Iran], and I don't have confidence in his judgment," Welch said in an interview
after President George W Bush's latest salvo against Iran.
The US media have toed the official line, however, as if no lesson has been
learned from the fiasco of the Iraq war, aptly summarized in a recent public
television program hosted by the Public Broadcasting Service's Bill Moyers
titled Buying the War.
Sadly, history repeats itself and the mainstream US media have once again
accommodated themselves to the Washington warmongers targeting Iran, led by the
right-wing Fox TV and Washington Times, which have made this a top priority
with their slew of "experts" counseling the advisability of bombing Iran.
Clearly, selling war on Iran is good media business, even though it may be a
nightmare for the US - let alone the global - economy.
The latest IAEA report on Iran should, logically speaking, give a healthy pause
to right-wing European leaders such as French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who
have bandwagoned with Bush's blistering anti-Iran campaign. The Associated
Press has quoted ElBaradei's deputy, Olli Heinonen, who brokered the latest
Iran-IAEA agreement, [1] as highlighting the importance of the agreement and
noting that "Tehran's past refusal to answer the IAEA's questions triggered
[UN] Security Council sanctions in the first place".
In other words, it is a sheer error on the part of US officials and media
pundits who insist that Iran has completely disregarded the Security Council
resolutions. Rather, it is more apt to say that Iran has partially complied,
with the sections of those resolutions calling for transparency on Iran's part,
thus raising hopes for a sequential resolution of the nuclear standoff, in
light of the IAEA's hints of potential further breakthroughs with Iran.
Yet it is unclear whether the White House really welcomes any such
breakthrough, given the utility of the nuclear crisis to press forward with the
hegemonist policy of "divide and conquer" whereby the US leads an anti-Iran
camp of "moderates" in the Middle East, as part and parcel of a "new cold war".
This explains Bush's apocalyptic imagery of a "nuclear holocaust" and the need
to act "before it is too late". Bush's rhetoric resonates fully with the
Israeli "point of no return" statements on Iran, even though US intelligence
estimates leaked to the press do not corroborate those statements.
But from Iran's vantage point, reflected in President Mahmud Ahmadinejad's
recent statement about "nuclear Iran", the country has already reached the
threshold of mastering the nuclear fuel cycle, thus declaring this a closed
issue. The issue for the US and its allies in the Security Council now is how
to respond to ElBaradei's report, which dampens the momentum for another round
of sanctions.
A reasonable response would be to forgo the desire to shut down Iran's
uranium-enrichment program, which is sanctioned by the nuclear
Non-Proliferation Treaty, and to focus on the so-called "objective guarantees"
that this program remains perpetually peaceful. This is a realistic approach
that shuns idealism and any undue expectations that cannot be met by any
politician in Iran.
Given the dual nature of nuclear technology, the best available option in
dealing with Iran is, indeed, none other than the one now pursued by the IAEA
that may culminate in Iran's readoption of the intrusive Additional Protocol
and, possibly, Iran's acceptance of other "confidence-building measures" above
and beyond existing agreements with the IAEA.
Come this autumn, with the White House counting on a US military progress
report on Iraq, which hinges partially on the state of US-Iran relations and a
Middle East peace conference, the hot summer of simmering words of war may pave
the way to a cooler climate of reasonable discourse and dialogue.
This may well be unwelcome news to the hawks in Washington. The open-ended
question is whether or not they and their army of influence in Washington (and
Paris and London) will succeed in spoiling the progress cited by the IAEA and
thus letting history repeat itself.
In conclusion, the only way to move forward on the tortuous path of US-Iran
relations is to focus on areas of shared interests and to avoid contradictory
steps that add to the "wall of mistrust" talked about by former Iranian
president Mohammad Khatami. Only then might it be possible to see the full
color of new horizons opened by the US-Iran dialogue on Iraq, eg, a proactive
Iranian role with respect to the Middle East peace process, no matter how
readily this is dismissed by the United States' and Israel's hawks as wishful
thinking.
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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