The foreplay is nearing
completion on the Iran situation. The surest sign
is that there were no serious takers in Western
capitals for the Israeli smear campaign this week
that Tehran's agents had been going about placing
bombs in New Delhi, Tbilisi and Bangkok. Simply
put, there is growing impatience that it is way
past the time for histrionics.
Several
indicators are available that matters are moving
towards a substantive plane. One cluster of events
this week consists of the Iranian reply to the
letter from the European Union foreign policy
chief, Catherine Ashton, penned by Tehran's chief
negotiator, Saeed Jalili. Simultaneously, Tehran
announced it was developing a new generation of
centrifuges and augmenting its number of
centrifuges from 6,000 to 9,000 as well as loading
a research
reactor with Iran's
first batch of domestically produced fuel.
While Tehran's announcement of new nuclear
"achievements" might have appeared as a
belligerent move - Washington derided it as "hype"
meant for the domestic audience in Iran - the
contents of Jalili's letter, and, more important,
the initial responses of cautious optimism it
generated within hours in Western capitals convey
that there are positive stirrings in the air.
The reaction in Washington is particularly
noteworthy. A White House official was quoted as
saying, "It [Jalili's letter] could lead to
further diplomacy, provided that they [Iranians]
are serious about it. We have made clear that this
has to be a dialogue about their nuclear program
specifically."
Jalili's letter apparently
said Tehran would have "new initiatives" and
indicated Iran's openness to discussing the
nuclear issue. It suggested that "[A] constructive
and positive attitude toward the Islamic Republic
of Iran's new initiatives in this round of talks
could open a positive perspective for our
negotiation".
Jalili concluded, "Therefore
... I propose to resume out talks in order to take
fundamental steps for sustainable cooperation in
the earliest possibility in a mutually agreed
venue and time." Significantly, neither Ashton nor
Jalili raised any pre-conditions for the talks.
Quite obviously, Brussels has already begun
consultations with Washington on setting the date
and venue for the resumption of talks between the
"Iran Six" and Iran after a gap of three years.
The "Iran Six" - also known as the "P5+1",
includes the five permanent members of the United
Nations Security Council - the US, France, China,
Russia, Britain - plus Germany.
A second
cluster of positive signs is the virtual toning
down of rhetoric on both sides. The most
significant contribution to an easing of tensions
came from senior American intelligence officials
in the course of a US Senate Armed Services
Committee hearing on Thursday - within a day of
receiving Jalili's letter. It is interesting that
the hearing itself came on the heels of a
bipartisan draft resolution being mooted by 32
senators "ruling out a strategy of containment for
a nuclear-armed Iran".
James Clapper, the
US director of national intelligence, assessed
that as of now, Tehran has not decided whether to
build a nuclear weapon, although it has been
acquiring some skills. He doubted whether Iran
would really take the plunge, either:
We [US] believe that the decision
would be made by the Supreme Leader [Ayatollah
Ali Khamenei] himself and he would base that
decision on a cost-benefit analysis. I don't
think he'd want a nuclear weapon at any price,
so that I think plays to the value of sanctions.
They are keeping themselves in a position to
make that decision, but there are certain things
they have not yet done and have not done for
some time.
Conceivably, Clapper was
also acknowledging Washington's appreciation of
the self-restraint Tehran has been showing in not
optimally pursing its nuclear program. In parallel
testimony, the director of the US Defense
Intelligence Agency, Lieutenant General Ronald
Burgess, added that "Iran today has the technical,
scientific and industrial capability to eventually
produce nuclear weapons" and notwithstanding the
international pressure through sanctions "we
assess that Tehran is not close to agreeing to
abandon its nuclear program".
Putting both
testimonies together, the Barack Obama
administration has unambiguously indicated that
the time is most opportune to engage Tehran in
talks. Both Clapper and Burgess downplayed the
prospect of Iran posing security threats to the US
or to the Strait of Hormuz.
A fascinating
aspect of the testimony was that the US officials
virtually admitted that Tehran was on the whole
being reactive rather than being provocative or
belligerent in ratcheting up tensions. Burgess
went to the extent of saying Iran could be
expected to respond if attacked, but that in the
US estimation it was unlikely to start any
military conflict on its own.
Clapper went
a step further, directly linking any shifts in
Tehran's peaceful nuclear program to an
eventuality where "the [Iranian] regime feels
threatened in terms of its stability and tenure".
Clapper also agreed with Defense Secretary Leon
Panetta that at any rate, producing a bomb "would
probably take them [Iranians] about a year, and
then possibly another one or two years in order to
put it on a deliverable vehicle of some sort".
Clapper added, "It's technically feasible
[making a bomb] but practically not likely. There
are all kinds of combinations and permutations
that would affect how long it might take, should
the Iranians make a decision to pursue a nuclear
weapon." In sum, Clapper poured cold water on the
Israeli scenario of "apocalypse now". (He also
repeated that Israel was not planning to attack
Iran.)
On the whole, these testimonies
must be seen as a comprehensive assurance being
held out to Tehran that there are, after all,
enough folks in Washington who haven't lost their
sanity through all these months of shadow-boxing
and grandstanding in the US-Iran standoff.
Alongside, in a third cluster, Tehran,
too, has resorted to a bit of public diplomacy to
project its interest in constructively engaging
the US. Prominent among these have been three
articles penned by Seyed Hossein Mousavian, who
held a key position in Iran's nuclear negotiating
team until six years ago (besides serving as
Iran's ambassador to Germany for seven years.)
His opening article was featured in the
influential US magazine Foreign Affairs. Mousavian
looked back at the US-Iran standoff on the nuclear
issue over the past eight years as a chronicle of
wasted time, of missed opportunities and
misunderstandings and mutual misconceptions
feeding on each other with both sides resorting to
miscalculations that ultimately didn't help
matters, leave alone end the stalemate.
He
placed the blame squarely on successive US
administrations for not having cared to explore
repeated Iranian overtures for a normalization of
relations.
His refrain throughout has been
that the nuclear issue should never have been
regarded as a "stand-alone" question that could be
dealt with separately from the larger issues of
the confrontational relationship that the two
countries have had since the 1979 Iranian
revolution.
As he put it, "There won't be
a solution to the nuclear dispute as long as
officials in Tehran and Washington continue to
base their relationship on escalating hostility,
threats and mistrust, particularly if the ultimate
US goal is regime change." (By an interesting
coincidence, this was also the grain of what
Panetta and Clapper said this week.)
In
his latest and concluding third part, Mousavian
suggested the "bottom lines" in the upcoming
negotiations: "For Iran, this means the ability to
produce reliable civilian energy, as it is
entitled to do under [nuclear] Non-Proliferation
Treaty. For the US and Europe, it means never
having Iran develop nuclear weapons or a
short-notice breakout capability."
How are
the expectations of the two sides to be
harmonized? Mousavian has the following to say:
Specifically, the West should
recognize the legitimate right of Iran to
produce nuclear technology, including uranium
enrichment; remove sanctions; and normalize
Iran's nuclear file at the UN Security Council
and the IAEA [International Atomic Energy
Agency]. To meet the P5+1 conditions, Iran
should accept the maximum level of transparency
by implementing the IAEA's Subsidiary
Arrangement Code 3.1 and the Non-Proliferation
Treaty's Additional Protocol, which broadly
enable intrusive monitoring and inspections of
nuclear facilities.
To eliminate Western
concerns about a possible nuclear weapons
breakout using low-enriched uranium, any deal
should place a limit on Iran's enrichment
activities to less than 5 percent ... A deal
should also cap the amount of low-enriched
uranium hexafluoride that Iran can stockpile;
limit its enrichment sites during a period of
confidence building; establish an international
consortium on enrichment in Iran; and commit not
to reprocess low-enriched uranium during the
confidence-building period.
The
"Mousavian suggestion" is somewhat modeled on
Russia's "step-by-step" plan that also includes
full supervision by the IAEA; implementation of
the Additional Protocol and Subsidiary Arrangement
between the IAEA and Iran; limiting enrichment
sites to one; and temporary suspension of
enrichment.
Moscow proposed that in
return, Iran would expect the "Iran Six" to remove
sanctions and normalize Iran's nuclear file in the
IAEA and the United Nations Security Council.
To what extent Mousavian's opinions
reflect the thinking within the Iranian regime is
hard to tell and indeed he is conscious that the
"domestic political climate in both countries" has
come in the way of meaningful negotiations between
Washington and Tehran in the past.
But
what is striking is that the testimonies by
Clapper and Burgess are in broad harmony with what
Mousavian has suggested as the way forward.
Ambassador M K Bhadrakumar was a
career diplomat in the Indian Foreign Service. His
assignments included the Soviet Union, South
Korea, Sri Lanka, Germany, Afghanistan, Pakistan,
Uzbekistan, Kuwait and Turkey.
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