From Shanghai to Berlin
and New York, where United Nations secretary
general Ban Ki-moon has intervened by praising
Iran's cooperation with the UN's atomic agency
while urging Tehran to comply with the demands of
the UN Security Council regarding sensitive
nuclear work, several diplomatic initiatives are
underway. These are aimed to address the Iran
nuclear standoff and, given Iran's stated
willingness to engage in new nuclear talks, the
stage may be set for a mini-breakthrough in this
international crisis.
In Shanghai, news
from the meeting of the Five plus One - permanent
Security Council members China, the United States,
Russia, Britain and France plus Germany - confirms
the absence of any major development save the
parties' commitment to continue their multilateral
discussions and hopefully iron out
their
differences on the content of a
new "package of incentives" to Tehran.
On
the eve of this meeting, wary of China taking
undue credit for any potential breakthrough, US
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice dampened
expectations by stating, "This is not the time, I
think, to expect major changes in terms of either
incentives or sanctions."
She may have
wanted to say "the place" instead of the time,
given the US's ambivalence about China's role in
the matter. Lest we forget, recently President
George W Bush praised Russia's "leadership role in
the Iran nuclear issue", and that means Washington
is uncomfortable with Beijing sharing that role in
light of extensive Iran-China energy and
non-energy connections and the complexities of
US-China relations.
According to He Yafei,
China's assistant foreign minister leading the
Shanghai talks, there is an interest in engaging
Iran directly in the Five plus One talks and some
Iranian pundits have reacted favorably to the idea
of an Iran-inclusive Six plus One. Officially,
however, Tehran insists on limiting the nuclear
talks to the International Atomic Energy Agency
(IAEA), yet signs of new flexibility suggesting
Tehran's willingness to sit at the same table with
US officials present can also be discerned.
Meanwhile, the IAEA's director general,
Mohammad ElBaradei, has his own sleeves rolled up
for the agency's input in the on-going diplomacy,
by conferring with German officials in Berlin on
the sidelines of an international conference on
nuclear fuel.
This is an opportune moment
to explore various options, such as Iran's formal
proposal for an international consortium to
produce nuclear fuel on Iran's soil, which has
found as its corollary related proposals, by the
Swiss and others, that contemplate a situation in
which sensitive nuclear technology kept in a
"black box" is shared with Iran. Another proposal,
for an international nuclear fuel depot, that
could in turn guarantee a steady supply of nuclear
fuel to Iran, is a long shot that has little if
any chance of being materialized in the near term.
From the vantage point of Tehran, which
announced the installation of three new cascades
of 164 P-1 centrifuges each on the eve of the
Shanghai meeting, Iran's rapid technological
advance makes redundant US-led efforts to deprive
Iran of nuclear know-how that could be applied to
military purposes.
But to do that, Iran
would have to reassemble its centrifuges, which
would be easily detected by the IAEA, which
certified in its February 2008 report that Iran's
enrichment is at a low grade of 4% or lower. To be
used as the fissile core of a nuclear weapon, the
uranium has to be enriched to more than 90% and be
produced in large quantities. In other words,
minimal proliferation risk is involved as long as
the robust IAEA inspections and verifications
standards are in place.
To open a caveat,
at a recent roundtable on US-Iran relations
sponsored by the United Nations Association of the
US (UNAUS) in New York, this author raised the
issue of "objective guarantees" proposed by Iran
to address international anxieties regarding
Iran's "nuclear intentions", and that includes the
possibility of Iran's re-adoption of the intrusive
Additional Protocol of the nuclear
Non-Proliferation Treaty, as hinted at by Ali
Larijani, Iran's former chief nuclear negotiator,
in a recent interview with the Iranian media.
UNAUS has been involved in "track II"
diplomacy with Iran, by bringing former US
officials and diplomats, such as former US envoy
to the UN, Thomas Pickering, and Iranian experts
and academics together, with the blessing of the
US Department of State.
A key advantage of
non-official or even semi-official "track II"
diplomacy is that it provides a complementary
channel of communication between the US and Iran
as well as the opportunity for indirect policy
input by experts on both sides and, who knows, may
be one day prove as a catalyst for the hitherto
absent "track I" diplomacy. That is, direct,
face-to-face dialogue between the US and Iranian
officials - that has transpired for the first time
in nearly 30 years over Iraq, under the guise of
"trilateral dialogue on Iraq's security".
Per a recent interview of Hassan Kazemi
Qomi, Iran's ambassador to Baghdad, the fourth
round of US-Iran dialogue on Iraq will happen
after the US's ambassador to Iraq, Ryan Crocker,
who testified before the US Congress last week,
returns to Baghdad.
Clearly, in addition
to the "Iraq chessboard", to paraphrase Larijani,
the US and Iran are also involved behind a second
chessboard, the nuclear one, that affects and is
affected by the moves and counter-moves on the
first chessboard. This is particularly so if both
sides set aside their current hesitations for
direct, albeit multilateral, nuclear talks.
An important question, however, is whether
or not such a breakthrough is possible when the
Iraq chessboard is moving in hostile directions,
in light of last week's blistering attacks on Iran
by the top US commander in Iraq, General David
Petraeus, not to mention President George W Bush's
follow-up warning against Iran, suggesting a new
White House flirtation with military action
against Iran?
The answer, extrapolated
from the net of US-Iran common interests in Iraq,
is yes, depending on both sides' ability to arrive
at a set of agreed-on goals with respect to Iraq's
stabilization. Regarding the latter, it is
noteworthy that Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri
al-Maliki, touring Europe this week, singled out
not just Iran but also Saudi Arabia, Syria and
others for meddling inside Iraq, in sharp contrast
to the US, which has simply zeroed in on Iran.
Yet, as far as Iran is concerned, it is in
competition with Saudi Arabia and a number of
other Arab states for influence in post-Saddam
Hussein Iraq, and Tehran is equally unnerved by
the US's other "surge", that is, in collaborating
with anti-Shi'ite Sunni groups in Iraq, even
though this is a Faustian bargain that may well
come to haunt US policy-makers when and if the
newly-armed Sunnis and the Shi'ites confront each
other in a bloody civil war.
The mere
possibility of such a nightmare scenario prompts
Iran to continue its support of Iraqi Shi'ites,
splintered into so many groups and even cells, who
distrust the US's intentions and, less so, the
ability of the Baghdad government to protect them
against a Sunni backlash in the future.
Both the US and some Sunni Iraqi
politicians have begun linking Iran and al-Qaeda
in Iraq, per an article in the Wall Street
Journal, even though there is no evidence to
support this. Indeed, there is plenty of obverse
evidence, such as vehement denunciation of Shi'ite
Iranians deemed "heretical" by al-Qaeda leaders,
as well as by the Wahhabi clergy in Saudi Arabia.
But if the US's intention is to hit at
Iran's Revolutionary Guards Corps inside Iran,
perhaps as a trigger for attacking Iran's nuclear
facilities as a follow-up step, such dubious
reports of Iran-al-Qaeda connections serve a
political and propaganda purposes, just as similar
accusations against Saddam played a role in paving
the road for the US's invasion of Iraq in 2003.
Misperceptions of the "enemy" have always
played a part in instigating wars, and by the look
of it, the lame-duck president in the White House
is hardly disinclined to resort to them for the
sake of another legacy. Hawkish manipulation of US
public opinion can be found aplenty these days
and, despite reasoned talks for US-Iran dialogue
by former US president Jimmy Carter, and a number
of other influential US politicians, there remains
another threat to world peace in the few remaining
months of Bush's presidency.
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. He is a
professor of international relations, Bentley
College.
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