Iran
tests America's grasp of
reality By Pepe Escobar
In Election 2012's theater-of-the-absurd
"foreign policy" debate, Iran came up no less than
47 times. Despite all the fear, loathing, threats,
and lies in that billionaire's circus of a
campaign season, Americans were nonetheless
offered virtually nothing substantial about Iran,
although its (non-existent) WMDs were relentlessly
hawked as the top US national security issue. (The
world was, however, astonished to learn from
candidate Romney that Syria, not the Persian Gulf,
was that country's "route to the sea".)
Now, with the campaign Sturm und
Drang behind us but the threats still around,
the question is: can Obama 2.0 bridge the gap
between current US policy (we don't want war, but
there will be war if you try to build a bomb) and
Persian optics (we don't
want a bomb - the Supreme
Leader said so - and we want a deal, but only if
you grant us some measure of respect)?
Don't forget that a soon-to-be-reelected
President Obama signaled in October the tiniest of
possible openings toward reconciliation while
talking about the "pressure" he was applying to
that country, when he spoke of "our policy of...
potentially having bilateral discussions with the
Iranians to end their nuclear program."
Tehran won't, of course, "end" its (legal)
nuclear program. As for that "potentially", it
should be a graphic reminder of how the
establishment in Washington loathes even the
possibility of bilateral negotiations.
Mr President, tear down this
wall Let's start with the obvious but
important: on entering the Oval Office in January
2009, Obama inherited a seemingly impregnable
three-decade-long "Wall of Mistrust" in Iran-US
relations. To his credit, that March he directly
addressed all Iranians in a message for Nowruz,
the Iranian New Year, calling for an "engagement
that is honed and grounded in mutual respect". He
even quoted the 13th century Persian poet Sa'adi:
"The children of Adam are limbs of one body, which
God created from one essence."
And yet, he
was crippled from the start by a set of Washington
misconceptions as old as that wall, and by a
bipartisan consensus for an aggressive strategy
toward Iran that emerged in the George W Bush
years when congress ponied up US$400 million for a
set of "covert operations" meant to destabilize
that country, including cross-border operations by
special forces teams. All of this was already
based on the dangers of "the Iranian bomb."
A September 2008 report by the Bipartisan
Policy Center, a Washington think tank, was
typical in assuming a nuclear-weapons-capable Iran
as a fact. It was drafted by Michael Rubin from
the neo-conservative American Enterprise
Institute, the same AEI that had unashamedly
promoted the disastrous 2003 invasion and
occupation of Iraq.
Several future Obama
advisers "unanimously approved" the report,
including Dennis Ross, former senator Charles
Robb, future Deputy Secretary of Defense Ashton
Carter, Anthony Lake, future UN ambassador Susan
Rice, and Richard Clarke. The 2007 National
Intelligence Estimate by all US intelligence
agencies stating that Iran had ended any nuclear
weapons program in 2003 was bluntly dismissed.
Mirroring the Bush administration's "all
options are on the table" approach (including
cyberwar), the report proposed - what else? - a
military surge in the Persian Gulf, targeting "not
only Iran's nuclear infrastructure, but also its
conventional military infrastructure in order to
suppress an Iranian response." In fact, such a
surge would indeed begin before George W Bush left
office and only increase in scope in the Obama
years.
The crucial point is this: as tens
of millions of US voters were choosing Barack
Obama in 2008, in part because he was promising to
end the war in Iraq, a powerful cross-section of
Washington elites was drafting an aggressive
blueprint for a future US strategy in the region
that stretched from North Africa to Central Asia
and that the Pentagon was then still calling the
"arc of instability." And the key plank in this
strategy was a program to create the conditions
for a military strike against Iran.
R.e.s.p.e.c.t.? With an Obama
2.0 administration soon to be in place, the time
to solve the immensely complex Iranian nuclear
drama is now. But as Columbia University's Gary
Sick, a key White House adviser on Iran during the
Iranian Revolution and the Tehran hostage crisis
of 1979-1981, has suggested, nothing will be
accomplished if Washington does not start thinking
beyond its ever-toughening sanctions program, now
practically set in stone as "politically
untouchable."
Sick has proposed a sound
path, which means that it has no hope of being
adopted in Washington. It would involve private
bilateral discussions by credible negotiators for
both sides based on a mutually agreed-upon agenda.
These would be followed by full-blown negotiations
under the existing P5+1 framework (the five
permanent members of the UN Security Council - US,
Russia, China, France, and Britain - plus
Germany).
Considering the frantic
post-2009 seesawing of sanctions, threats, cyber
attacks, military surges, and colossal mutual
incomprehension, no one in his right mind would
expect a pattern of "mutual respect" to emerge
easily out of Washington's "dual track" approach.
It took Ambassador Hossein Mousavian,
research scholar at Princeton University's Woodrow
Wilson School of Public and International Affairs
and spokesperson for the Iranian nuclear
negotiating team from 2003 to 2005, to finally
explain it all last August in a single sentence:
"The history of Iran's nuclear program suggests
that the West is inadvertently pushing Iran toward
nuclear weapons." Chas Freeman, former US
Ambassador to Saudi Arabia, agrees, suggesting in
a recent speech that Iran now "seems to be
reenacting Israel's clandestine weapons
development program of five decades ago,
developing capabilities to build and deliver
nuclear weapons while denying that it intends
actually to do any such thing."
What makes
these developments even more absurd is that a
solution to all this madness exists. As I wrote a
few weeks ago (see War
fever as seen from Iran, Asia Times Online,
August 22, 2012), to satisfy the concerns of the
West regarding Iran's 20% stockpile of enriched
uranium:
A mutually acceptable solution for
the long term would entail a "zero stockpile".
Under this approach, a joint committee of the
P5+1 [the five permanent members of the UN
Security Council plus Germany] and Iran would
quantify the domestic needs of Iran for use of
20% enriched uranium, and any quantity beyond
that amount would be sold in the international
market or immediately converted back to an
enrichment level of 3.5%. This would ensure that
Iran does not possess excess 20% enriched
uranium forever, satisfying the international
concerns that Iran is seeking nuclear weapons.
It would be a face-saving solution for all
parties as it would recognize Iran's right to
enrichment and would help to negate concerns
that Iran is pursuing nuclear
weapons.
Time to hit the New Silk
Road(s) The current US strategy is not
exactly a raging success. Economist Djavad
Salehi-Esfahani has explained how Tehran's
theocratic rulers continue to successfully manage
the worst effects of the sanctions and a national
currency in free fall by using the country's
immense oil and natural gas wealth to subsidize
essential imports. Which brings us to the bedrock
question of this - or possibly any other - moment:
will Obama 2.0 finally admit that Washington
doesn't need regime change in Tehran to improve
its relationship with that country?
Only
with such an admission (to itself, if not the
world) are real negotiations leading to a Wall of
Mistrust-blasting deal possible. This would
undoubtedly include a genuine detente, an
acceptance of Iran's lawful pursuit of a peaceful
nuclear program, guarantees that the result would
not be a covert weapons project, and a turning
away from the possibility of a devastating war in
the Persian Gulf and the oil heartlands of the
Greater Middle East.
Theoretically, it
could also include something else: an Obama "Nixon
in China" moment, a dramatic journey or gesture by
the US president to decisively break the deadlock.
Yet as long as a barrage of furiously misinformed
anti-Iran hawks in Washington, in lockstep with
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's Israeli
government, deploy a relentless PR offensive
burning with incendiary rhetoric, "red lines,"
deadlines, and preemptive sabotage of the P5+1
negotiations, such a moment, such a gesture, will
remain the faintest of dreams.
And even
such an elusive "Obama in Tehran" moment would
hardly be the end of the story. It would be more
like a salutary twist in the big picture. To
understand why, you need to grasp just how crucial
Iran's geopolitical positioning is. After all, in
energy and other terms that country is the
ultimate crossroads of Eurasia, and so the pivot
of the world. Strategically, it straddles the
supply lines for a sizeable part of the globe's
oil and gas reserves and is a privileged hub for
the distribution of energy to South Asia, Europe,
and East Asia at a moment when both China and
India are emerging as potential great powers of
the 21st century.
The urge to control that
reality lies at the heart of Washington's policy
in the region, not an Iranian "threat" that pales
as soon as the defense spending of the two
countries is compared. After all, the US spends
nearly a $1 trillion on "defense" annually; Iran,
a maximum of $12 billion - less, that is, than the
United Arab Emirates, and only 20% of the total
defense expenditures of the six Persian Gulf
monarchies grouped in the Gulf Cooperation
Council.
Moreover, the Iranian nuclear
"threat" would disappear for good if Obama 2.0
ever decided to push for making the Middle East a
nuclear-free zone. Iran and the GCC have endorsed
the idea in the past. Israel - a de facto (if
never officially acknowledged) nuclear power with
an arsenal of up to 300 warheads - has rejected
it.
Yet the big picture goes way beyond
the strategic gaming of the US and Israel about
Iran's possible future arsenal. Its position at
the ultimate Southwest Asian strategic crossroads
will determine much about the future New Great
Game in Eurasia - especially whose version of a
modern Silk Road will prevail on the great energy
chessboard I call Pipelineistan.
I've
argued for years that all these intertwined
developments must be analyzed together, including
Washington's announced Asian military "pivot" (aka
"rebalancing"). That strategy, unveiled in early
2012 by President Obama, was supposed to refocus
Washington's attention away from its two
disastrous wars in the Greater Middle East to the
Asia-Pacific region with a special focus on
containing China. Once again, Iran happens to lie
right at the heart of that new policy, given how
much of its oil and natural gas heads east to
China over waters patrolled by the US Navy.
In other words, it hardly matters that
Iran is a rickety regional power run by aging
theocrats with an only modestly impressive
military. The relationship between Obama 2.0 and
Iran is guaranteed to involve the nuclear
question, but also (whether acknowledged or not)
the global flow of energy across Pipelineistan,
and Washington's future relations with China and
the rest of Asia. It will also involve Beijing's
concerted movements to prop up the yuan in
relation to the dollar and, at the same time,
accelerate the death of the petrodollar. Finally,
behind all of the above lies the question of who
will dominate Eurasia's 21st century energy
version of the old Silk Road.
At the 2012
Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) meeting in Tehran,
India, Iran, and Afghanistan pushed for the
creation of what might be called a new southern
Silk Road - really a network of roads, railways,
and major ports that would connect Iran and its
energy wealth ever more closely to Central and
South Asia. For Delhi (as for Beijing), getting
closer to both Afghanistan and especially Iran is
considered crucial to its Eurasian strategy, no
matter how much Washington may disapprove.
India is betting on the port of Chabahar
in Iran, China on the port of Gwadar in Pakistan
(and of course a gas pipeline from there to Iran)
as key transshipment hubs linking Central Asia and
the Gulf. Both ports will be key pawns in
Pipelineistan's New Great Game, which is quickly
slipping from Washington's control. In both cases,
despite its drive to isolate Iran, there is little
the Obama administration can do to prevent these
and other instances of closer Eurasian
integration.
Washington's grand strategy
for a "Greater Central Asia" under its control
once centered on Afghanistan and India. Its
disastrous Afghan War has, however, blown a hole
through its plans; so, too, has its obsession with
creating energy routes that bypass Iran (and
Russia), which looks increasingly irrational to
much of the rest of Eurasia. The only version of a
Silk Road that the Obama administration has been
able to devise has been war-related: the Northern
Distribution Network, a logistical marathon of
routes crisscrossing Central Asia for bringing
military supplies into Afghanistan without relying
fully on an increasingly unreliable Pakistan.
Needless to say, in the long term, Moscow
will do anything to prevent a US/NATO presence in
Central Asia. As with Moscow, so with Beijing,
which regards Central Asia as a strategic
rearguard area when it comes to its energy supply
and a place for economic expansion as well. The
two will coordinate their policies aimed at
leaving Washington in the lurch through the
Shanghai Cooperation Organization. That's also how
Beijing plans to channel its solution for
eternally war-torn Afghanistan and so secure its
long-term investments in mineral and energy
exploitation. Ultimately, both Russia and China
want post-2014 Afghanistan to be stabilized by the
United Nations.
The ancient Silk Road was
humanity's first globalization highway centered on
trade. Now, China in particular is pushing for its
own ambitious version of a new Silk Road focused
on tapping into energy - oil and natural gas -
from Myanmar to Iran and Russia. It would, in the
end, link no fewer than 17 countries via more than
8,000 kilometers of high-speed rail (on top of the
8,000 kilometers already built inside China). For
Washington, this means one thing: an evolving
Tehran-Beijing axis bent on ensuring that the US
strategic target of isolating Iran and forcing
regime change on that country will be ever just
out of reach.
Obama in
Tehran? So what remains of the initial
Obama drive to reach out to Iran with an
"engagement that is honed and grounded in mutual
respect"? Not much, it seems.
Blame it -
once again - on the Pentagon, for which Iran will
remain a number one "threat," a necessary enemy.
Blame it on a bipartisan elite in Washington,
supported by ranks of pundits and think tanks, who
won't let go of enmity against Iran and fear
campaigns about its bomb. And blame it on an
Israel still determined to force the US into an
attack on Iranian nuclear facilities that it
desires. In the meantime, the US military build-up
in the Persian Gulf, already at staggering levels,
goes on.
Somebody, it seems, has yet to
break the news to Washington: we are in an
increasingly multipolar world in which Eurasian
powers Russia and China, and regional power Iran,
simply won't subscribe to its scenarios. When it
comes to the New Silk Road(s) linking South Asia,
Central Asia, Southwest Asia, and China, whatever
Washington's dreams may be, they will be shaped
and constructed by Eurasian powers, not by the
United States.
As for an Obama 2.0 "Nixon
in China" moment transplanted to Tehran? Stranger
things have happened on this planet. But under the
present circumstances, don't hold your breath.
Pepe Escobar is the roving
correspondent for Asia Times, an analyst for
al-Jazeera and the Russian network RT, and a
TomDispatch regular. His latest book is Obama
Does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009).
Head
Office: Unit B, 16/F, Li Dong Building, No. 9 Li Yuen Street East,
Central, Hong Kong Thailand Bureau:
11/13 Petchkasem Road, Hua Hin, Prachuab Kirikhan, Thailand 77110
