A smart side to US
intelligence By Kaveh L
Afrasiabi
The European Union needs a
wake-up call and, unfortunately, none seems to be
forthcoming, despite the earth-shattering new US
intelligence report on Iran which warrants a
wholesale change in the West's confrontational
approach to that country. Instead, Europe
continues to carry on with business as usual and,
sadly, is even less predisposed to do otherwise
due to various implications of the National
Intelligence Estimate (NIE).
Thus, the
leaders of the European troika of Germany, France
and Britain, who have been at the forefront of
nuclear diplomacy with
Iran
since 2003, have remained completely oblivious to
the profound policy implications of the new NIE
indicating that Iran has no nuclear weapons
program today, contrary to what has been
vociferously alleged by the US and Europe until
now.
On the contrary, instead of factoring
in the sea-change caused by this report, French
President Nicolas Sarkozy, German Chancellor
Angela Merkel and British Prime Minister Gordon
Brown have joined hands in a desperate show of
unity, calling for staying the course and
initiating new sanctions if Tehran continues to
defy "the will of the international community".
The will to fabricate goes far indeed, no matter
how thin its legitimacy now in the European
consciousness and public sphere. It emerges that a
non-existent threat, causing an unnecessary crisis
to endanger world peace, has been the focal point
of European diplomacy, combining carrots and
sticks, to force Iranian non-proliferation. [1]
But, too bad for Europe, the net result of
the NIE is that, in effect, it makes Europe
redundant in the nuclear diplomacy, by depriving
it of the stick of US hard power that has
constantly lurked in the background every time
European officials met with the Iranians and
pressed their (unreasonable) nuclear demands.
These were that Iran should forever forego its
right to peaceful nuclear technology simply
because of unfounded allegations and hyped-up
fears.
This is, indeed, the nub of the
paradox of the new situation as a result of the
NIE: it has raised Iran's expectations for a more
proactive European role precisely when Europe is
now deprived of the necessary muscle to deal with
Iran, hitherto provided by the US's credible
threat of military action. With the latter
jettisoned from the equation for now, Europe's
cards for dealing with Iran have diminished
considerably. All the attention has been deflected
from Vienna and other European capitals to
Washington, which until now has "outsourced" its
Iran nuclear diplomacy to Europe.
The word
outsource, though, is a bit of misnomer since (a)
the US has always been indirectly involved in the
minutest details of European negotiations with
Iran, and (b) Europe's foreign policy head, Javier
Solana, continues to claim that in September the
US granted him permission to negotiate with Iran
on its behalf.
But, with the Solana option
pretty much drying up after the most recent failed
meeting between him and Iran's negotiator, Saeed
Jalili, Europe now faces the conundrum of how to
continue with its active diplomacy toward Iran
when the foundational premise of that (coercive)
diplomacy has been thrown in the whirlwind of
serious doubts and question marks.
Another
pertinent question deals with the US's own
intentions behind the NIE, which apparently has
been in the making more than a year. Is
side-stepping Europe and the "embracing the
dragon" approach one of the hidden intentions of
this report? This would nail the US's hegemonic,
leadership role, feebly questioned even by the
pro-American Sarkozy, who wants to have his cake
and eat it by putting Paris ahead of London as the
US's most reliable European ally while, at the
same time, charting an independent French Middle
East policy.
Now, with the effective
Americanization of Iran's nuclear dossier due to
the inescapable implications of the NIE report,
the US must decide how to shuffle the nuclear
negotiation deck so that new trans-Atlantic
fissures are not introduced that may threaten the
well-spring of the Sarkozy- and Merkel-led
pro-American drift of European politics.
Most likely, what will transpire is a
European atrophy in which the formal EU role in
the Iranian nuclear standoff increasingly becomes
a shell of its past, with the US in total command,
dictating even the mini-steps. Can it be avoided?
Can Iran do anything to avoid it? A provisional
answer, based on the trajectory of the present
overall circumstances, is no.
This is
because Iran, seizing on the NIE report as a
victory, has simultaneously denied the NIE's
allegations of a pre-2003 weapons program and, by
all indications, will continue its present path of
building its nuclear fuel cycle. The awkward
conundrum for Europe above-mentioned, on the other
hand, will likely preclude serious policy
modifications, as a result of which we will likely
witness the absence of any fundamental changes in
the posture of the various parties, with the sole
exception of the US, which has its own "mixed
motives" with regard to Iran. That is, it relies
on Iran's good will to succeed in Iraq and, at the
same time, cannot possibly reach a satisfactory
victory in Iraq as long as Iran's meddlesome power
challenges it.
What is more, the White
House, already piling up sufficient justification
as well as congressional authorization for an
attack on Iran's Revolutionary Guards Corps,
labeled as terrorists, does not really need the
nuclear threat as part of its military
contemplations against Iran. Any strike on Iran's
Guards can easily escalate and extend to the
nuclear facilities. All the more reason then to
reject media speculation that the US military
threat against Iran has altogether disappeared for
the remaining year or so of the George W Bush
presidency.
All that has happened is a
shift of the rationale, despite Bush's perfunctory
statement at his latest press conference that
refused to remove the military option "from the
table". Put simply, that option has now been
wholly relocated on another plate, dealing with
Iran's conventional military threat spilling into
Iraq, which will come up at a potential fourth
round of US-Iran dialogue in the near future.
Still, in light of the serious spins to
the NIE by various US politicians and media
experts for the need to set US-Iran relations on a
more constructive path, Europe's auxiliary role
may be none other than concentrating on
complimenting the catalytic efforts to bring about
a comprehensive US-Iran dialogue covering the
myriad outstanding issues between the two
countries.
However, with Europe incapable
of dishing out anything tangible in the realm of
security, and the US and Iranian militaries
eyeball-to-eyeball in the Persian Gulf region, the
US and Iran are perhaps better off dispensing with
Europe altogether. They could then focus on how to
reach a means of cooperation in a region
considered vital for the national security of both
nations, seeing how the US's energy dependency on
Middle East imports has been on the rise with no
sign of any improvement.
This brings one
to a consideration of other, intended or
unintended, side-effects of the NIE, including the
following: the report, released at a time when
Iran's President Mahmud Ahmadinejad was in Qatar
to participate at the summit of the Gulf
Cooperation Council (GCC), has the side effect of
undermining Iran's regional policy by depicting
Iran as a paper tiger that shelved the nuclear
program due to cost-benefit analysis. This lessens
the fear of the GCC states of Iran and their
related proclivity to bandwagon with Iran on
regional security and other issues. The "torpedo
effect" of the NIE in grounding, if not sinking,
the ship of Iran-GCC cooperation, deemed
undesirable from the prism of the US's
interventionist policies and priorities, is
unmistakable.
In conclusion, the NIE may
have been the brainchild of bureaucratic
infighting aimed at fettering the
neo-conservatives pinning their hopes on a US
attack on Iran by the lame-duck president. But
equally important is the other side effect of this
report in dampening oil prices at a critical time
when the US, and perhaps the global economy, is
headed toward recession, according to many
economists. And also when the Organization of
Petroleum Exporting Countries cartel is
contemplating shifting its currency exchange away
from the US dollar.
A pre-emptive strike
against that move was needed by the US and, it
turns out, the NIE has precisely such a policy
effect, on a broad range of issues. Who knows, in
retrospect, the NIE, reflecting one of the most
flagrant cases of US intelligence reversals in
history, may be remembered as also a unique
example of American smart power.
Note 1. For more on this
see Afrasiabi and Mojtahedzadeh, Crisis of choice, not
necessity International Herald Tribune,
August 12, 2005.
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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