US and Europe drain Iran's
half-full glass By Kaveh L
Afrasiabi
Officially, they are committed
to a peaceful resolution of the Iran nuclear
crisis, and yet their behavior - of refusing to
endorse fully the Iran-IAEA (International Atomic
Energy Agency) agreement and rushing toward
another sanctions resolution at the United Nations
Security Council - speaks louder about the true
intentions of the US government and some of its
European allies.
Not surprisingly, Iran
has reacted to the news of the United States'
determination to push for a new round of sanctions
irrespective of the positive
developments in Tehran's relations with the UN
atomic agency, by warning that its cooperation
with the IAEA could come to a halt if the Security
Council adopts a new resolution against Iran.
Iran has agreed to tell the IAEA about
previously secret details of its atomic program.
According to the plan agreed on August 21, Iran
says it will answer a series of questions on its
program.
The stage is now set for two
diametrically opposed developments, one at the
IAEA, which has hailed Iran's cooperation as a
"significant step in the right direction", and the
other at the UN, where secretary general Ban
Ki-moon has reiterated the Security Council's
demand for a complete suspension of Iran's
uranium-enrichment and reprocessing activities.
This is in contrast to the position of
IAEA director general Mohamed ElBaradei, who has
called for a "double timeout", that is, the
simultaneous halt to UN sanctions and to Iran's
nuclear-fuel-cycle program, to give diplomacy a
"breathing chance".
Unhappy with the
European Union's failure to endorse fully the
IAEA's agreement with Iran, which sets a strict
timetable on resolving the so-called "outstanding
questions", ElBaradei showed his displeasure this
week by walking out of an IAEA session in Vienna
at which the EU's statement on Iran was being
circulated.
ElBaradei is not alone, as the
118 member states of the Non-Aligned Movement
(NAM) have thrown their weight behind him and the
IAEA by endorsing the agreement and criticizing
some nations' "interference" in IAEA affairs. They
also fully support Iran's rights to peaceful
nuclear technology. The NAM's position on Iran was
supported by the Russian delegate to the IAEA
meeting, thus indicating signs of a coming
US-Russia rift over Iran.
Russian
President Vladimir Putin has reportedly agreed to
visit Iran in mid-October for a summit of Caspian
littoral states. This is excellent news for Iran,
given that at the recent summit of the Shanghai
Cooperation Organization (SCO), unlike China's
president, Putin refused to hold a meeting with
Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad. Putin's
willingness to visit Iran at this critical
juncture represents a bad omen for Washington and,
more especially, for US Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice. Her State Department has been
trying, rather desperately, to maintain the
fragile coalition against Iran at the UN.
It could be that Moscow is beginning to
drift apart from the US on the Iran question. Or
it could simply be another maneuver on Russia's
part to bargain with the US. It is difficult to
assess, as Russian news agencies have not, as of
this writing, confirmed the news of Putin's
acceptance of Iran's invitation to attend the
Caspian summit. Nor have Russian officials or
nuclear contractors confirmed a statement by
Iran's chief nuclear negotiator, Ali Larijani,
about progress in talks with Russia regarding its
completion of the Bushehr power plant in Iran.
Putin and his advisers certainly have
important decisions to make in the coming weeks,
and to avoid inconsistencies. For instance, it
would be awkward for Putin to speak of expanding
Russia's business ties with Iran when at the same
time the nuclear power plant in Bushehr remains in
limbo.
Although Security Council
resolutions clearly exempt Bushehr from the
purview of sanctions, the continuation of
Iran-Russia nuclear cooperation when Russia
remains on the UN sanctions bandwagon is not easy
and, in fact, represents a major policy dilemma
for the Kremlin.
Besides Russia, the US
also has to worry about China, whose President Hu
Jintao made a point of meeting Ahmadinejad at the
SCO summit, and China has now surpassed Germany as
Iran's No 1 trading partner. China is unhappy over
the recent US-India civilian deal on nuclear
cooperation and US naval exercises in the Indian
Ocean, and it is possible to assume that China is
inclined to resist any toughening of UN sanctions
on Iran.
All this poses, without doubt, a
major challenge to US policy toward Iran, which is
not limited to the nuclear issue. In Iraq, the US
and Iran are gearing up for a fourth round of
talks on Iraq's security, and Iranian Foreign
Minister Manuchehr Mottaki and Rice will have
another opportunity to talk at next month's
meeting of Iraq and its neighbors in Turkey. Amid
rising criticism of Iran's spoiler behavior in
Iraq, there are strong voices, such as that of
former US senator Lee Hamilton, that call for
"higher-level meetings" between the two countries.
However, several factors could jeopardize
the ongoing US-Iran communication on Iraq. One is
the threat of an Israel-Syria military
confrontation, and the other a potential clash of
US and Iranian military personnel in Iraqi
territory. This follows a recent statement by an
Iranian diplomat in Baghdad suggesting that Iran
might enter Iraq in hot pursuit of ethnic
militants causing trouble inside Iran.
Those militants are considered by some
Western pundits to be elements of a "proxy war"
with Iran in response to Iran's own proxy war
against the US and coalition forces inside Iraq.
The US commander in Iraq, General David Petraeus,
has testified in Congress that he has been
surprised by the depth of Iran's involvement in
Iraq, hinting that a key purpose of the United
States' long-term presence in Iraq is to contain
the Iran threat.
In response, Iran's
officials have called on the US to spell out an
exit strategy, with Ahmadinejad leaving no
ambiguity as to Iran's desire to see the United
States' departure from Iraq and the whole region.
"US forces will be targeted if they stay,"
Larijani has also told the press. He and other
officials have dismissed reports that a US strike
on Iran is imminent, insisting that the US does
not have the capability to do so in light of its
"quagmire" in Iraq.
So much talk on the
military option is, indeed, counterproductive. It
is born partly of a persistent failure to
appreciate the half-full nuclear glass, and also
partly by an equally resistant attitude with
respect to Iran's contributions to regional
stability. This double failure has led US policy
on Iran on a schizoid path that nullifies with one
hand the progress made by the other hand. Clearly,
this a self-defeating strategy.
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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