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2 Crisis of opportunity for Iran and
the US By Kaveh L Afrasiabi
may be overstating his case and,
looking back at the Iran moderates' overall record
on national-security issues, it leaves a lot to be
desired.
With the Iranian debate on
nuclear diplomacy on-going, several developments
have made it likely that the month of November
will be filled with newsbreaking stories, not only
with respect to the crisis over northern Iraq but
also on the Iran nuclear standoff, in
light
of the mid-November report due by the
International Atomic Energy Agency's (IAEA's)
chief, Mohamad ElBaradei.
This week,
ElBaradei's deputy, Olli Heinonen, was in Tehran
finalizing the Iran-IAEA recent agreement with
respect to "outstanding questions" and nuclear
transparency. For all practical purposes, Iran
considers the nuclear issue "closed" and ripe for
being treated as "normal", away from the United
Nations Security Council and in the hands of the
IAEA, its proper format.
Yet, given the
new "Five plus One" meeting in London on Friday,
discussing further sanctions on Iran, the
prospects of new UN actions against Iran as a
result of Iran's defiance of the resolutions
calling for a suspension of uranium-enrichment
activities, can hardly be discounted by Tehran.
(The Five plus One includes the Security Council's
permanent five - the US, Russia, China, France and
the United Kingdom - plus Germany).
Nor
can Iran count on Russia and China's veto of
further sanctions, irrespective of China's
official rebuffing of Israeli lobbying, or
Moscow's stated opposition to new sanctions,
reiterated by Russian Foreign Minister Sergei
Lavrov in his surprise visit to Tehran this week.
Reports from Tehran indicate that Lavrov in his
meeting with Ahmadinejad pushed for Iran's
acceptance of a proposal by President Vladimir
Putin, which he submitted recently to Iran's
spiritual leader, Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
Although the details of Putin's proposal
are undisclosed, various unofficial reports from
Tehran suggest that Putin has called on Iran to
agree to the "time-out" proposal by ElBaradei.
Regarding the latter, in a recent interview,
ElBaradei was more time-specific and stated that a
"six-month suspension" by Iran to give diplomacy a
chance is what he means by 'time-out".
Time-out or not? This is,
indeed, the million-dollar question pondered by
Iranian officials, some of whom rightly argue that
Iran complied with a prior "time-out" when it
agreed to suspend for nearly two years the nuclear
fuel cycle, per the terms of the October 2004
Paris Agreement.
What then? That is the
key question posed by various Iranian officials,
who openly wonder what the time-out option will
achieve, other than a stop-gap measure that is
bound to raise the crisis anew once the window of
time closes and Iran restarts enrichment-related
activities.
This is a question that needs
to be addressed now. After all, the Security
Council resolutions are not time-specific, nor do
those resolutions call for the termination of
Iran's nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty right to
produce nuclear fuel, instead of relying on
foreign sources.
Therefore, as this author
has repeatedly stated, a temporary suspension, no
matter how long, will likely appease the UN and
expedite Iran's nuclear diplomacy. Iran's new
ambassador to the UN, Dr Mohammad Khazaee, has
recently written a letter of complaint to UN
Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, complaining of the
US's "unilateral and illegal" steps against Iran.
This is all the more reason for the Iranian
government to show more respect toward the UN and
its various institutions.
In fact, the
Iranian statement at the above-mentioned
conference on NATO begins by confirming the role
of the UN in global peace and security. Deflecting
the US-Israeli war drive against Iran, this may be
the biggest advantage of Iran's compliance with
the time-out proposal by the IAEA chief.
In the most recent US presidential debate,
Democrat Senator Hillary Clinton, under much
pressure from her colleagues for voting for an
anti-Iran congressional measure, stated that it is
no longer a question of "if but when and with what
weapons" the Bush administration will attack Iran.
This is ominous news not only for Iran,
but also for the world facing record oil prices
approaching US$100 a barrel without even one
bullet being fired on the Iran-US front, and
enough warning for all sides to put in overdrive
their efforts at war-prevention. The irony,
however, is that the prospects of a regional
flareup in the Kurdish crisis may prove to be the
fire extinguisher on the other war.
Note 1. For more on the
need for US and Iran to broaden their dialogue,
see the author's Time to broaden the
dialogue San Francisco Chronicle, July
19, 2007.
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.
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