Obama moves the 'red line' on Iran
By Kaveh L Afrasiabi
Just days before Iran's presidential elections on Friday, the International
Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) released another report on Iran's nuclear program
that confirms the absence of any evidence of military misuse as well as Iran's
nuclear transparency. The report nonetheless fails to give Iran a complete
clean bill of heath and raises questions about the alleged studies and
"possible military use". [1]
This new report by the IAEA's director general Mohammad ElBaradei will be
discussed by the agency's governing board later in June. For now, it appears to
have given some ammunition to disparate and diametrically opposed positions on
Iran's nuclear program.
While Iran's official reaction is that the new report confirms the peaceful
nature of its nuclear program, some former officials, such as Iran's former
envoy to the IAEA, Mohammad Sadegh Ayatollahi, have criticized it as ambiguous.
In the West, the focus
has been on the report's claims about Iran's ability to install some 7,000
centrifuges, to pile up more low-enriched uranium, as well as Iran's refusal to
allow IAEA inspection of the heavy water reactor under construction in Arak.
The IAEA report is bound to perpetuate the present nuclear standoff,
irrespective of its crucial conclusions regarding the agency's surveillance of
Iran's enrichment facilities, improvements in Iran's nuclear accountancy, and
27 unannounced inspections of the enrichment plant in Natanz.
In his Paris visit over the weekend, United States President Barack Obama
joined his host, French President Nicolas Sarkozy, in issuing a dire warning
about the dangerous consequences of Iran's possession of nuclear weapons. That
it would set off a dangerous nuclear arms race in the Middle East. The concern
followed Obama's much-anticipated speech in Cairo, in which he claimed that
Iran's nuclear program has "reached a decisive point".
US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has echoed her boss by stating, "I think
part of what is clear is we want to avoid a Middle East arms race which leads
to nuclear weapons being in the possession of other countries in the Middle
East. And we want to make clear that there are consequences and costs."
The trouble with such policy statements is that Israel possesses hundreds of
nuclear warheads. The US has no clue how to bring Israel into a serious
discussion on a nuclear weapons' free zone in the Middle East. This was
illustrated by Obama's rather vacuous reference to the issue in his Cairo
speech - a passing reference to general disarmament. If Obama is serious about
dialogue with the Muslim world, many believe he must seriously consider the
Muslim Middle East's anxieties about Israel's nuclear arsenal.
With respect to Iran, whose leaders adamantly insist that their nuclear program
is completely peaceful, all the four presidential candidates are in unison over
Iran's nuclear right. Very little change in strategic terms should be expected
after June 12, no matter who the winner is.
In fact, President Mahmud Ahmadinejad has accused his reformist rivals of
demonstrating weakness in nuclear negotiations and compromising Iran's nuclear
rights. His challengers barked back by defending the past policy of suspending
the enrichment program under former President Mohammad Khatami as "limited and
temporary", to paraphrase Iran's former nuclear negotiator, Hassan Rowhani. An
important point made by Rowhani and other former officials is that short of the
"confidence-building" temporary suspension, Iran would have not been able to
resume the enrichment activities, as it did in early 2006, without facing
severe consequences.
Still, there are substantive differences among the four presidential candidates
on the nuclear issue. These divergences, however, appear to be on the secondary
"tactical" issues and the degree of flexibility that is deemed legitimate in
the course of upcoming negotiations.
Ahmadinejad appears to have the upper hand in the current national debate on
the nuclear issue because the West's "red line" on Iran's program has for all
practical purposes evaporated. This came about due to Iran's rapid mastery of
the nuclear fuel cycle and has introduced a great deal of policy uncertainty on
the part of the "Iran Six" - the five permanent members of the United Nations
Security Council - the United States, Britain, France, Russia and China, plus
Germany.
In Europe, a new policy movement to adjust to the changing realities is slowly
emerging. A recent statement by Slovenia, the current president of the European
Union Council, calls for "restoring confidence between Iranians and the
international community". If Ahmadinejad is re-elected, as anticipated by some
pollsters inside Iran, changes in Iran's approach to confidence-building can be
expected.
At this stage, it is unclear what the Obama administration's posture in future
negotiations will be. Obama's has said he is willing to respect Iran's nuclear
rights as long as Iran's activities complied with Iran's obligations toward the
IAEA. In the latest Iran report cited above, ElBaradei called for a "new
modality" of information-sharing on Iran's nuclear program, thus calling into
question the adequacy of US efforts to inform the agency about Iran's so-called
"alleged studies."
The drift of Washington's Iran policy appears to be setting the stage for
talks. This is evident in Obama's soft-selling of the Iran nuclear issue in his
Middle East tour last week and the earlier regional tour by his point man on
Iran, Dennis Ross, who Time magazine said was on a mission aimed at "drawing
everyone in". The articles quotes a senior administration official who
commented on Ross's trip to the Persian Gulf states: "we 're also setting a
stage that creates a justification, if this doesn't work, to dramatically
different things".
All the talks of "crippling sanctions" may mean the US is using upcoming
multilateral negotiations with Tehran as a ruse to rationalize further coercive
actions against Iran. If this is the approach the Obama administration is
quietly plotting toward Iran, it is almost certainly bound to fail. It will
lead to the opposite of confidence-building.
At a time when Iran feels confident and its leverages in the region have been
bolstered, the only chance of exiting the nuclear standoff is a coherent
Western strategy that respects Iran's right to possess a nuclear fuel cycle on
the basis of rigorous IAEA inspections.
Kaveh L Afrasiabi, PhD, is the author of After Khomeini: New
Directions in Iran's Foreign Policy (Westview Press) . For his Wikipedia entry,
click here. His
latest book,
Reading In Iran Foreign Policy After September 11 (BookSurge Publishing
, October 23, 2008) is now available.
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