NEW YORK - On Saturday, a new round of
nuclear chess between Iran and representatives of
the "Iran Six" nations will resume in Istanbul
after a 13-month hiatus in talks on Tehran's
nuclear program.
Iran has responded
positively to Russia's and China's request to show
flexibility and will come to the meeting with a
"positive approach". Tehran's expectations are
that this will yield mild progress and set the
stage for a follow-up round in Iraq's capital,
Baghdad. The other members of the "Iran Six" -
also known as the P5+1 - are the United States,
France, the United Kingdom and Germany.
Both Saeed Jalili, Iran's top nuclear
negotiator, and Ali Akbar Salehi, the foreign
minister, have expressed a desire to see a
constructive meeting that will "show the common
points between
the two sides and the
fuel for amity and cooperation", to paraphrase
Salehi.
The talks come after months of
increased tensions between Iran and the US, along
with other Western countries, which suspect that
Tehran's nuclear program might not be as peaceful
as it claims. Sanctions have been placed on Iran
by the United Nations as well as individual
countries, including the US.
On Wednesday,
Jalali promised that Iran was "ready to hold
progressive and successful talks on cooperation"
and added that "the language of threat and
pressure against the Iranian nation has never
yielded results".
The latter statement was
clearly aimed at the US government, which has been
making veiled warnings of a military strike by
stating that the "window of time for talks is not
infinite", to quote US Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton. Adding teeth to the hard-power tactic of
making credible military threats for the sake of
eliciting favorable concessions from Iran at the
negotiation table, the US has announced that it is
dispatching a second aircraft carrier to the
Persian Gulf.
Amid much media specualtion
about a US/Israeli plan to escalate their campaign
of sabotage inside Iran, Tehran has responded with
the news that it has nailed a vast network of
Israel-trained operatives in Iran.
"The
complicated and months-long measures and moves
made by the Iranian intelligence forces to
identify the devils led to the discovery of the
Zionists' regional command center ... and
discovering the identity of the agents active in
that command center," a statement from the Iranian
Intelligence Ministry said, according to the Fars
News Agency.
Complementing Iran's
counter-infiltration strategy has been the
decision to hit several European countries with an
oil embargo, such as Greece and Spain, with
Germany and Italy to follow in coming days. Iran
has already cut oil exports to France and Britain
in response to US-led sanctions imposed on the
Iranian oil industry, after the European Union
announced plans on January 23 to impose a ban on
purchasing oil from Iran.
This is sure to
introduce painful pinches in the economically
troubled eurozone. At the same time, Iranian
President Mahmud Ahmadinejad has told the public
that even without exporting a barrel of oil, Iran
has enough reserves to survive on for two to three
years.
At the same time, Tehran is pleased
with the latest announcements from China, urging
all parties gathering in Istanbul to show
"flexibility" and issuing strong condemnation of
any future attacks on Iran. Moscow has followed
suit; Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Rybakov
admitted that there were differences among the
"Iran Six" and once again stated Russia's position
that Iran's nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT)
rights should be respected. As a signatory to the
NPT, Iran has the right to enrich uranium for
commercial and research reactors.
All the
above means that the US's attempts to portray the
Istanbul meeting as a "do or die" opportunity have
already backfired, even with the Europeans, in
light of a statement by the EU's foreign policy
chief, Catherine Ashton, that Europe is pursuing
"a sustained and continuing process". In other
words, there will be no one-shot deal as hoped for
by Washington and Tel Aviv.
Scrutiny of
US conditions Crafting a successful Iran
strategy has not been a US strength for several
decades and the Barack Obama administration may
not be any different.
The White House
opted for a poor pre-talk tactic, leaking its
assortment of demands from Iran at the Istanbul
talks. Per reports in the US media, these are:
The closure of the underground Fordow
enrichment facility.
Iran's agreement to stop its 20% uranium
enrichment program.
Iran should ship out its bundle of enriched
uranium.
In response, Fereydoon Abbasi,
the head of Iran's Atomic Organization, has stated
that Iran will not pursue 20% enrichment beyond
what is needed since that would represent a "waste
of resources". Abbassi's statement has been widely
interpreted in the Western media as a sign of
Tehran's willingness to make some form of
compromise that may meet the other side's demands
halfway.
Iran has produced enough nuclear
fuel to keep the Tehran medical reactor going for
five to eight years, well below the 10 to 11 years
estimated by some Western nuclear pundits.
It also has plans for a new 10-megawatt
(MG) thermal reactor that would require twice as
much as the five MG Tehran reactor, and Tehran may
well put the issue of outside assistance for
building this new power plant on the table.
Given the long record of Western broken
promises and reneging on signed nuclear contracts,
it is a sure bet that nothing short of firm,
iron-clad commitments to provide Iran with the
necessary nuclear fuel would convince Tehran to
shelf its operating enrichment program.
According to a Tehran foreign policy
expert who has spoken to the author on the
condition of anonymity, two years ago, Russia and
France were willing to provide the fuel rods Iran
needed, but the US objected.
"Another
problem is the unpredictable US politics," says
the Iran expert. "Who knows, if Obama loses [the
presidential election in November] and there is a
new president at the White House, would he honor
the US agreement?".
With all the Western
media talk of "trust but verify", in reference to
a US nod to Iran's low-enriched uranium program, a
main stumbling block is the difficulty in
convincing Tehran that future US administrations
would be bound by the agreement with Tehran, and
this is a promise that no one at the White House
or in the US Congress can deliver with a great
deal of certainty.
Lest we forget, Mitt
Romney, the Republican candidate for the
presidency, has repeatedly criticized Obama's Iran
policy as weak and branded himself as the
president who would stop Iran's nuclear program.
US's extra-legal demands
Although the US's and its Western
partners' proliferation concerns are
understandable, nonetheless the question of the
legality of those demands cannot be shoved under
the rug. This is because many other nations enjoy
the right to possess a civilian nuclear fuel cycle
and are allowed to enrich even at a much higher
grade than 20% without impunity. Therefore, one
must ask on what legal ground is the West asking
Iran to deprive itself of a right enjoyed by
others.
As Mohamed ElBaradei, the former
director general of the International Atomic
Energy Agency (IAEA) has confirmed in his book,
The Age of Deception: Nuclear Diplomacy in
Treacherous Times, "Many research centers
worldwide also use 90% enriched uranium fuel for
peaceful purposes, such as to produce medical
isotopes ... Roughly a dozen countries have
significant nuclear fuel cycle operations."
Iran boasts of having joined this elite
"nuclear club" by mastering the full cycle in all
its constituent stages of mining, building
centrifuges, making "yellow cake" and injecting
gas into the centrifuges - an impressive
technological achievement that is a source of
national pride in Iran.
Iran is looking to
a future when it can have a slice of the pie, that
is, the global nuclear technology market, nowadays
expanded to Iran's rich Arab neighbors in the
Persian Gulf with zeal and enthusiasm, and with
zero concern about military diversion, by Western
governments acting as shrewd nuclear salesmen.
China and Russia are also making inroads, in light
of Turkey's decision to acquire a Chinese-made
reactor.
Consequently, it would be an
error for the "Iran Six" to simply focus on the
potential threat of Iran's nuclear program and to
conveniently jettison from the talks Iran's
ambitions to be a nuclear power provider in the
future, something it will be unable to do if its
nuclear wings are clipped.
Yet, as Iran's
envoy to the IAEA, Ali Asghar Soltanieh, recently
reminded his audience in Vienna, Iran has provided
for one of the most exhaustive inspection regimes
in IAEA history, via more than 4,000 inspector
days and about 100 unnanounced inspections, mostly
with about two hours notice. In addition, the IAEA
has surveillance cameras at the enrichment halls
and these provide important tools for constant
monitoring of Iran's enrichment activities.
Mohammad Javad Larijani, a top Tehran
politician and advisor to Supreme Leader Ayatollah
Ali Khamenei, has recently proposed a "permanent
IAEA human presence" to monitor the country's
entire enrichment program, including the one at
Fordow, which is also covered by the terms of the
Iran-IAEA safeguard agreement.
Concerning
Fordow, legally speaking, simply because it poses
a tough military target for destruction it cannot
be put on the demand list.
"What the US
should do instead of focusing on a specific
location, which can be replicated easily by Iran,
is to focus on a workable concept within which the
issue of Fordow can be discussed, not the other
way around," says the Tehran expert mentioned
above.
In other words, Tehran believes
that the US has put the cart before the horse,
thus giving rise to the suspicion that it
represents a US/Israeli maneuver to "win one
trench at a time, beginning with the most critical
ones".
But Fordow is Iran's ace and no one
at the Istanbul meeting should be naive enough to
expect Iran to dispossess itself of one of its
trump cards, or do so without substantial
incentives from the other side.
Even if
offered lucrative incentives, the problem of trust
and fulfillment of the Western promises looms
large in Iran, in light of unsavory past
experiences, such as the Europeans' failure to
deliver the goods promised as a result of the
November 2004 so-called Paris Agreement, under
which Iran's chief nuclear negotiator announced a
voluntary and temporary suspension of its uranium
enrichment program.
If there is to be an
Istanbul Agreement, what Iran wants is firm
guarantees that it does not turn into another
Paris Agreement.
In his book, ElBaradei
confirms that negotiations with Iran in 2005
failed because "the offer prepared by the
Europeans proposed few of the benefits discussed
at the time of the Paris Agreement".
Finally, with respect to Russia's position
at the Istanbul talks, Tehran is convinced that
Western plans for Syria, likely to result in a
negative geopolitical shift to the detriment of
their interests, prevents Moscow from any
meaningful bandwagoning with the US on Iran. To do
that at this crucial juncture would be purely
dysfunctional for Russia's national security
interests.
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