This week, Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki is in New York to attend
a meeting of the United Nations' Economic and Social Council, as well as to
shore up support for Iran's embattled diplomacy.
Increasingly, Mottaki has been playing a leading role in the nuclear crisis and
much depends on his ability to conduct skillful diplomacy with regard to the
"Iran Six" group that has recently proposed a package of incentives to Iran in
exchange for Iran's suspension of its uranium-enrichment program. The group
comprises the United States, Britain, France, Russia, China and Germany.
On Monday, Mottaki met with several US editors and reporters at
Iran's mission to the UN, and in addition to sounding conciliatory and in favor
of earnest negotiations without preconditions, he promised to reply to the
letter of the "Iran Six" foreign ministers accompanying their package "within a
couple of weeks".
At the outset of his interview, Mottaki emphasized the need to have a "correct
analysis" of situations, otherwise it would lead to "incorrect policies". He
also emphasized the importance of "common understanding" of problems and hinted
at his own flexibility by stating that "the first word a diplomat learns is
compromise".
On the question of Israel's reported preparedness to attack Iran's nuclear
facilities, Mottaki dismissed that possibility as "near zero" and blamed Israel
for seeking to assert itself through such threats partly to make up for its
"defeat in the hands of Lebanese resistance".
When asked about the US threat, Mottaki stated that this issue "has appeared in
American public every six months" and then went on to add that "some of our
friends" informed Iran last year that the attack was imminent and even
"furnished the date, the places that would be hit" and "other detailed
information". Mottaki interpreted this as a form of "psychological warfare" and
added that "we do not deny that it is not plausible, yet what we deny is that
the consequences are predictable". However, Mottaki doubted that the American
public would be willing to embrace such a nightmare scenario.
With respect to the recent news of President George W Bush's authorization of
covert action inside Iran, Mottaki said that for some 30 years the US has
pursued coercive policies toward Iran and now it is time for US leaders "to sit
down and rethink their policy". He reminded his audience that the "Iranian
people will never trade the 'sweet' of their independence with the 'bitterness'
of American dependency".
In response to a question about the impact of sanctions on Iran, Mottaki stated
that the easiest thing in the world today is trade and then meaningfully added,
"right now some US companies are doing business with Iran but we will not name
them for obvious reasons". He also added that, "in the past six months, we have
signed major contracts with European companies and with the Asian countries".
The deals, he said, have been even more important and Iran's non-oil exports in
2007 have been twice that of the preceding year, 2006.
Mottaki accused the US of "taking risks out of Europe's pocket" and charged
that when the US's own interests are at stake, such as with regard to Iraq's
oil, Europe is kept out. Still, Mottaki sounded conciliatory toward the US and
encouraged cultural and academic exchanges. He proposed direct flights between
US and Iran and defended the idea of a US interests section in Tehran. He also
defended the US-Iran dialogue on Iraq's security and described the end goal of
this dialogue to be none other than finding a solution for Iraq's crisis.
On the question of presumptive Democratic US presidential candidate Barack
Obama's idea of sitting down with Iranians without setting any preconditions,
Mottaki stated that Iran looks at real policies and not the declared policies
and has learned through time not to pin its hopes on this or that US candidate.
With respect to the nuclear negotiations, Mottaki indicated that the recent
Tehran trip of European Union's foreign policy chief, Javier Solana, was
"serious and somewhat different from the past" and emphasized the "common
points" between Iran's package and the "Iran Six" package of incentives and
added that he was happy that the latter nations had viewed Iran's package
"positively".
"We see dialogue as a sound basis for pursuing this issue ... and on this basis
the two packages present a good potential for translating into a work agenda
... dialogue is a good means to reach common points acceptable to all. This
appears to be the message of '5 +1' [Iran Six] letter to me that raises the
possibility of a resolution."
On the other hand, Mottaki refused to answer questions about the demand for
Iran to suspend its uranium enrichment program and confined himself to saying
that the commencement of a new round of negotiations was a distinct
possibility. He denied adamantly that Iran was proliferating nuclear weapons
and said that Iran "saw no need for nuclear weapons" which are "weapons of the
past".
On Iran-Syria relations and Syria's on-going talks with Israel, Mottaki
described those relations as solid and supported Syria's bid to regain its lost
territory (for example, the Golan Heights) from Israel.
Regarding Afghanistan, Mottaki blamed the US's past policies as a root cause of
extremism and reminded his audience that at one point the US even trained those
extremists (fighting the Soviets) and then, when they rose to power, the US
fought them and dislodged them from Kabul and then "met them at Mousa Ghale and
in European capitals; where are they going with this policy?"
Mottaki insisted that Iran has never benefited from extremism in the region and
described Iran's "biggest interest in the region" as "regional stability". He
claimed that the security situation in Afghanistan is deteriorating and that
most Afghani people feel less secure now than they did in 2007, and "less in
2007 than they did in 2006, etc".
Turning to Iraq, Mottaki predicted that the Iraqi government would not sign the
controversial security pact with the US that allows a long-term US military
presence in Iraq. According to Mottaki, the US has artificially linked that
pact with Iraq's current status under UN's Chapter IIV, adding that the two
main reasons for that status, namely Iraq's supposed weapons of mass
destruction and its occupation of Kuwait, are no longer relevant and therefore
Iraq today should not be "penalized for Saddam Hussain's crimes".
"The US uses the threat of terrorism to justify its presence ... the US armed
the first Iraqi militia and even today there are several militias that operate
outside the purview of the Iraqi government and are supported by the US."
Mottaki described Iran as "one of the biggest supporters of the Iraqi
government" and confirmed that Iran played a mediating role between Baghdad and
the Shi'ite militias in Basra and urged the US government to take the US-Iran
dialogue on Iraq's security more seriously. The reason Iran was sensitive to
the US-Iraq security pact was, according to Mottaki, due to the fact that
"security issues impact the whole region", which is why Iran pursues the goal
of "collective security".
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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