In the shadow of war and peace with Iran
By Kaveh L Afrasiabi
The George W Bush administration is reportedly on the verge of officially
requesting a consular office in Iran and, if implemented, this would be a
timely step in the right direction.
Given the contrary news of two weeks ago, that the administration was
withdrawing this idea largely in deference to the Republican presidential
hopeful, Senator John McCain, this shows that US Secretary of State Condoleezza
Rice is intent on leaving office with a more praiseworthy legacy with regard to
Iran than simply as the promoter of sanctions and coercive diplomacy - that has
failed to yield any results.
This is not yet a done deal, and a potential mini-breakthrough in
the long-stalemated US-Iran relations could be thwarted by the traditional
forces opposed to such a development.
There are such complicating factors as the continuing US and Israeli
saber-rattling against Iran and the prospect of military action against Iran by
the next US administration: the still fresh memory of the US hostage crisis in
Iran in 1980 must be taken into consideration.
The small initiative of a US interest section is, as a result, tied in with the
much larger issues of war and peace, unless both the US and Iran can somehow
reach an honorable agreement that no matter what lies ahead in their troubled
relations, the safety and sanctity of the US diplomatic office in Iran would be
guaranteed.
On Iran's part, providing such a guarantee is relatively easy: the central
government is strong and fully in charge, unlike at the time of US Embassy
crisis, and US diplomats in Iran would be fully protected.
Assuming that is still a lingering concern in Washington, then an alternative
would be to open a consular office not in the capital city of Tehran, but
rather in places such as the southern city of Khoramshahr (where there used to
be a US consular office until the revolution of 1979), or the Persian Gulf
island of Kish. One advantage of the latter would be to turn this office into a
low-key media center and to disallow the potential scene of a long line of
applicants for US visas to be a point of embarrassment for the government.
On a related point, the US government has also given authorization to the
American-Iranian Council (AIC), a mostly American advocacy group, to set up an
office in Iran. Although a powerful Tehran politician, Alaedin Boroujerdi, has
rejected this move, the group may still be able to pull it off, depending on
meeting certain reservations about its elite approach, undemocratic leadership
and scrutiny of its financial and other activities.
Considered a "second-order" quasi-diplomatic initiative, Washington's decision
on the AIC can go either way. It could act as a catalyst for increasing US-Iran
dialogue on multiple fronts, or serve as yet another impediment as a result of
serious questions about the group's leadership and its motives.
Regarding the latter, the AIC's president, Hooshang Amirahmadi, a US citizen
who does not meet the residency requirement for Iranian presidency, has signed
up as a candidate in past presidential races and has criticized his exclusion
as "unfair".
According to some Iranian political analysts, Amirahmadi's real intention is to
become a mirror image of Iraq's Ahmad Chalabi, yet Iran is not Iraq and despite
certain similarities between Amirahmadi and Chalabi, particularly with respect
to ingratiating themselves into the US foreign machinery and combining lofty
national goals with personal self-aggrandizement, the institutionalized Islamic
Republic is unlikely to let anyone mildly viewed as a Washington stooge partake
in its political game.
This aside, unfortunately, a number of Iranian-American pundits, such as Vali
Nasr of the Council on Foreign Relations, have put a wrong nuance on US-Iran
dialogue by insisting that a main goal should be to cause a "wedge between
Moscow and Tehran".
On the contrary, if history is an apt instructor, the next US president should
avoid looking at the US-Iran dialogue from the false prism of a new cold war,
which will only complicate this dialogue by making Iran act more cautiously in
deference to Moscow's leaders, who have of late stood up for Iran's rights and
are making good on their pledge to finish the Bushehr power plant in Iran.
What is more, Nasr in his recent article in the Wall Street Journal erroneously
claims that Iran is resisting Russia's quest for a larger percentage of the
Caspian Sea. No such thing. Iran and Russia have excellent relations when it
comes to Caspian affairs. They both oppose any North Atlantic Treaty
Organization or outside force's presence in the sea, have commonly objected to
a US-European Union backed trans-Caspian pipeline, mainly on ecological
grounds, and, contrary to Nasr, are also in agreement regarding a common usage
of the Caspian's surface water.
Iran does not have any problem with Russia's percentage of the Caspian,
proportionate to its coastal line (19%), and, rather, it is Iran that wants a
larger percentage than what is allotted to it - 11-13%.
In the same article, Nasr commits a major falsification of President Mahmud
Ahmadinejad's speeches in his recent trip to New York by claiming that
Ahmadinejad expressed implicit concern about Russia's action in Georgia and
defended Georgia's sovereignty and territorial integrity. Not so.
Both at his press conference at the UN immediately after his speech before the
General Assembly, as well as his subsequent interviews and speeches in New
York, Ahmadinejad repeatedly addressed the issue of the crisis in the South
Caucasus, blaming NATO and Tblisi's military miscalculation and invoking
reference to Kosovo, without once making the statement attributed to him by
Nasr. Similarly with Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki, who gave a talk at
the Council on Foreign Relations and echoed Ahmadinejad without digressing an
inch.
The factual errors and distortions of what Iran's president stated both on and
off the record, as this author was present at a private reception of
Ahmadinejad with US academics that included Nasr and Ahmadinejad never made the
kind of comment on Georgia attributed to him by Nasr, remind of the need to be
on guard about "expert opinion" on Iran by various US think-tanks.
For instance, one of the experts of the Council on Foreign Relations, Michael
Gerson, wrote an incendiary article in the Washington Post advising the next
president not to waste any time before dropping bombs on Iran. This is
particularly disturbing as it is said Democratic presidential candidate Senator
Barack Obama looks to the council for foreign policy advice.
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. For his
Wikipedia entry, click here.
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