New offer threatens Iran's 'red
line' By Kaveh Afrasiabi
Iran has been quick to play down the
supposed new initiative by the international
community over its nuclear program. Iranian
Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mohammad Ali
Hosseini said that Iran has not yet officially
received the "new package", but Iranian officials
have rejected the demand to suspend the country's
enrichment program, which they feel they are
entitled to under the articles of the nuclear
Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), to which Iran is a
signatory.
Addressing a separate issue,
Hosseini said Iran would not take part in any new
talks with the US on Iraq, accusing US-led forces
of a "massacre" of the Iraqi people. The two
countries have held
three rounds of
discussions to date. "Concerning this [present]
situation, talks with America will have no results
and will be meaningless," said Hosseini.
Last week, the foreign ministers of the
"Iran Six" countries (United Nations Security
Council permanent members the United States,
Russia, China, France and Britain plus Germany)
reached an agreement on a new offer to Iran to
give up its controversial uranium-enrichment
program in exchange for what French Foreign
Minister Bernard Kouchner described as "very
generous" incentives. These reportedly include
promises of considerable trade, technology and
even security cooperation with Iran, and thus are
considered a "refinement" of a similar offer in
2006. [1]
A high-level "Iran Six"
delegation is due in Tehran shortly to formally
deliver the new proposal, although signs of fresh
fissures among them can be seen aplenty, in light
of Russia and China's strong rebuff of London's
statement, at the NPT meeting in Geneva,
suggesting a consensus among them on the perceived
threat of Iran's nuclear proliferation.
Indeed, the second session of the
preparatory committee for the 2010 NPT review
conference, April 28-May 9, has so far been a
scene of clashing views, with the nuclear-weapon
states (NWS) prioritizing the threat of
"non-proliferation" and the others, that is,
non-nuclear weapon states (NNWS), emphasizing
disarmament and, for the lack of better word, the
lack of it.
Forty years after its historic
signing, the NPT is clearly in trouble, with new
weapons states - India, Pakistan and Israel - not
even parties to the non-proliferation regime, and,
to quote the International Atomic Energy Agency's
(IAEA's) report to the conference, with 30 states
without the required safeguard agreements and more
than "100 NPT states without an additional
protocol".
The sheer number of nuclear
warheads may be shrinking in the post-Cold War
era, but a new generation of warheads and
nuclear-armed submarines are being built for
example, by the US, France and Britain, and,
worse, the latter have dispensed with any
hesitation about their declared willingness to use
their nuclear arsenal against non-nuclear weapon
states.
But, as a representative of the
Non-Aligned Movement, Gusti Agung Wesaka Puja,
articulated the views of developing nations, the
failure of NWS toward their NPT obligations,
ranging from failure to implement the "13 steps"
on disarmament reached at the 2000 NPT review
conference, to reaching an effective fissile
material cut-off treaty, or their willingness to
use their weapons to threaten NNWS, operate
against an aggressive counter-proliferation
target.
Speaking of double standards,
France, whose President Nicolas Sarkozy is on
record as defending his country's (modernizing)
nuclear arsenal as "a key element in Europe's
security", can be heard paying lip service to
"genuine disarmament", even though it is
abundantly clear that France's new nuclear posture
is counter-productive and, in fact, fuels the very
proliferation tendencies to which the NWS are so
adamantly opposed.
In light of recent
verbal threats against Iran, for example by
Israeli cabinet ministers and US presidential
hopeful Senator Hillary Clinton, to "obliterate
Iran", President George W Bush's warning to Iran
that Israel's recent attack on suspicious Syrian
targets is a "lesson for Iran", and related
Pentagon statements regarding the US's war plans
against Iran, a growing number of experts have
questioned the wisdom of Western policies. These
seek Iran's "de-nuclearization" by pursuing
hawkish and warmongering policies and postures
that only enhance Iran's sense of national
security vulnerabilities and strengthen the hands
of those who argue in favor of Iran's need for a
"nuclear shield".
This does not make sense
at all, except in the broader context of failure
of disarmament and the indirect utility of an
"Iran threat" for such NWS as France, the US and
Israel to rationalize their own nuclear
proliferation.
Thus, contrary to British
Foreign Secretary David Miliband, who has referred
to the new "incentive package" as part of a
"twin-track strategy", the other being United
Nations sanctions, there is actually a third "war
track", the drumbeat of which can be heard loud
and clear in Washington and Tel Aviv.
But,
if the big powers are sincere in their peaceful
intentions toward Iran, then what better way to
prove it than by using the ongoing NPT meeting to
issue a joint statement pledging no use of nuclear
weapons in the conventional theater.
China, after all, has long adopted the
doctrine of "no first use" of nuclear weapons and
Russia has come pretty close to echoing China, so
what excuse is there for the rational NWS in the
West to evade this? The answer is none at all,
except self-serving interests serving their
hegemonic intentions to project power above the
heads of non-conformist NNWS around the world.
With respect to Iran, the new pitch is
that Iran should suspend its enrichment program
"for the duration of the talks". This is a step
forward, compared with the previous inflexible
positions that called for permanent suspension of
the Iranian enrichment program and, theoretically,
Iran could agree to a time-specific negotiation
that would both appease the UN Security Council
and lessen the impact of sanctions.
Meanwhile, Iran's slow but steady advances
in the realm of centrifuges represents a "new
reality", to echo Alaedin Boroujerdi, the powerful
head of Iran's parliamentary committee on national
security and foreign affairs, that Iran expects
other countries, above all Russia, to reckon with.
"We expect Russia to become active in the
direction of new realities about Iran's nuclear
program," Boroujerdi stated.
Russia, as
Iran's sole nuclear partner in that it is building
the Bushehr nuclear plant in Iran, has, like
China, opposed tough new sanctions against Iran,
and Russian Foreign Ministry officials have
questioned the British representative's statement
at the NPT conference suggesting a "five plus one"
consensus that Iran's nuclear program "poses a
serious threat to regional stability".
What Boroujerdi and other Iranian
politicians would like to see in the near term is
a more assertive stance by China and Russia with
respect to Iran's NPT right to produce nuclear
fuel, as long as it is fully monitored by the
IAEA.
In a nutshell, that means the nature
and purpose of the "incentive package" thrown at
Iran must be revised so that nuclear transparency
and complete peacefulness of Iran's enrichment
program is guaranteed through robust international
inspections, thus minimizing the risks of
proliferation embedded in the civilian program.
Unfortunately, the new Western pitch sings the
same old song of "no enrichment in Iran", and that
is simply a "red line" no Iranian politician dares
to cross.
Note 1. For
more on the 2006 incentive package, see Nuclear talks: Saving
face with Iran Abbas Maleki and Kaveh
Afrasiabi, International Herald Tribune, August
25, 2006.
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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