Page 2 of 2 Iran: The uninvited guest at peace summit
By Kaveh L Afrasiabi
in breach of United Nations Security Council resolutions that is determined to
dominate the region.
From Iran's vantage point, the hidden agenda of the Annapolis summit is to
cause a regional isolation of Iran and to escalate the pressures on it over the
key nuclear issue, warranting certain policy adjustments on Tehran's part,
especially on the nuclear issue.
Annapolis summit and Iran's nuclear crisis
Many Tehran political analysts are in agreement that if Tehran is not careful,
the US and Israel will exploit the Annapolis summit to undermine Iran's
position in the ongoing nuclear standoff, by
inflicting a public relations coup against Iran depicted as "extremist" and out
of step with mainstream Middle East.
Any overt linkage of this summit with Iran has its own perils, potentially
backfiring on the US and Israel, showing them to be not serious on the core
Palestinian issues and, as Tehran has put it, pursuing "their own interests and
objectives". On the other hand, a soft linkage, whereby Syria's pro-Iran
proclivity can be chipped away and Iran's international standing suffers, has
its own dividends.
"Iran should follow the strategy of avoiding confrontation," writes a Tehran
analyst, Ibrahim Motaghi. After all, the latest IAEA report, despite its minor
shortcomings, has been rightly viewed by Tehran as a timely plus, enhancing its
hands in the nuclear negotiations and weakening those of the US. Yet, the
Annapolis summit and the likely negative spins against Iran around it are aimed
at eroding Iran's nuclear gains and facilitating US-led coercive diplomacy at
the UN and beyond.
But, one wonders if, indeed, this is a wise policy on the US's part, which has
been relatively blind to what another Tehran analyst, Elias Hazrati, has termed
as "substantial reduction of radical and offensive positions in Iran's foreign
policy during the past few months". In his "The road for compromise with Tehran
is open", Hazrati has, however, placed disproportionate blame, for lack of
adequate progress in resolving the nuclear crisis, on the government of
Ahmadinejad, without adequately taking into consideration the US's
schizophrenic, contradictory, approach that, as in the run-ups to the Annapolis
summit, fuels the very Iranian radicalism that it purports to disfavor. This it
does by falsely accusing Iran in Iraq and ignoring the impressive results of
Iran-IAEA cooperation in a relatively short time.
"We are committed that the IAEA's next report will be even more positive,"
Iran's Deputy Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi told the French paper Le Monde.
According to Araghchi, Iran and France are now engaged in a "real discussion"
over Lebanon, and Iran is prepared to take confidence-building steps on the
nuclear issue.
Closing the 'confidence gap'
"The work plan agreed by the secretariat and Iran in August, in which Iran has
finally committed itself to address the outstanding issues relevant to its
nuclear activities, is proceeding according to schedule," IAEA's director
General, Mohamad ElBaradei informed the IAEA's board of governors last week.
Iranian officials, on the other hand, have revealed that the IAEA has formally
closed its investigation of two lingering issues, that is, the history of P-1
and P-2 centrifuges, and uranium metals, in letters sent to Iran.
The problem, however, is that whereas ElBaradei has reported "good progress" on
Iran-IAEA cooperation, this has not had any impact on the US-led road to
tougher UN sanctions on Iran, except perhaps small speed bumps. China, which
balked at participating at the last "Five plus One" meeting on Iran (the
Security Council's permanent members plus Germany) , is now under pressure to
go along with tougher sanctions, as is Germany, which like China has much to
lose in lucrative business with Iran as a result of a sanctions regime.
But, again, a major problem for the US's Iran policy is none other than the
IAEA itself, whose findings, of the absence of any military diversion, etc,
serve Iran's purpose of rallying the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), comprising the
majority of UN member states, behind its cause, in light of the NAM's
resolution at the recent IAEA meeting that warned against the meddling
influence of "certain governments" in the IAEA's relations with Iran.
Iran's ambassador to the United Arab Emirates, Hamid Reza Assefi, has aptly
stated: "Initially the American were referring to ElBaradei's reports, but now
that ElBaradei and his team at the agency have had sufficient opportunity to do
their own investigations, the Americans reject them and claim that this report
is not acceptable."
All eyes are now set on the upcoming meeting of the European Union's foreign
policy chief, Javier Solana, and Iran's nuclear negotiator, Saeed Jalili,
scheduled in London on November 30. Solana has told the press that he has been
given "complete authority" by the Five plus One to negotiate with Iran
"regarding a long-term agreement". That means the US, too, and, henceforth, it
is important to see how the US's delegation of authority to Solana will or will
not intersect with its, and Israel's, map of action with regard to Iran.
Certainly, the summit diplomacy of both the US and Israel with respect to Iran
has the potential to digress substantially from the course of action presently
contemplated by Solana, that is, the "dual suspension" of sanctions and Iran's
enrichment program. Lest we forget, the last time Solana and the Iranians met,
the reaction of US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was to denigrate it as
"unimportant". Is the US willing to revise its traditional antipathy toward the
Solana channel now? For now all the vital signs do not suggest a positive
answer to this question.
"Jalili will propose new ideas to Solana," Iran's Foreign Ministry spokesperson
has announced and, for his part, Jalili has told a press conference in Tehran
that "confidence-building is a two-way road", calling on the UN Security
Council to show a "positive reaction to ElBaradei's report".
As for the less than positive aspects of ElBaradei's report, such as his
criticism that Iran has been acting "reactively" rather than "proactively",
Iran's envoy to the IAEA, Ali-Asghar Soltanieh, has effectively debunked this
criticism by pointing out that per the IAEA-Iran workplan, "The nature of the
'workplan' is such that we should first receive the questions and then respond.
This is not a negative way of thinking, but a practical method."
With respect to ElBaradei's request from Iran to implement the intrusive
Additional Protocol of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), [1] the head
of Iran's atomic energy organization, Gholamreza Aghzadeh, has called it
"premature". Iran halted its voluntary adoption of the Additional Protocol in
reaction to the IAEA's dispatch of Iran's dossier to the UN, and the
re-adoption of this protocol now serves as an ace in Iran's nuclear diplomacy,
particularly with respect to Europe, which is somewhat at odds with the US on
the latter's "zero-sum" insistence on the complete halt of Iran's sensitive
nuclear work.
By leaving the door for future compliance with the IAEA's demand with respect
to the Additional Protocol, Iran now has the unique chance of gaining on the
issue of suspension, Suspension is legally problematic given the absence of
treaty constraints warranting a long-term suspension of Iran's nuclear fuel
work under the articles of the NPT, particularly since the UN resolutions on
Iran fail to specify the duration of the requested suspension.
Despite such egregious shortcomings of the UN resolutions, the US and France
and Britain continue to refer to them and demand their full compliance by Iran
as if they contain a comprehensive resolution of the substantive issues of the
Iran nuclear crisis; the fact is they do not.
Only by resorting to bad-faith negotiations, misinterpreting the "suspensions"
as "termination", as Britain's ambassador to the UN, John Sawers, has done, can
this strategy possibly succeed. [2] Iranians are, however, too proud and
politically savvy to fall into such a trap. Cognizant of the structural limits
and constraints of the UN Security Council initiatives against them, the
Iranians are more and more seriously pondering the pros and cons of Solana's
"dual suspension" proposal. This could be at minor variance with ElBaradei's
"double suspension" preceding it, simply by not scaling the two ramparts
equally, ie, suspension of sanctions may become permanent after only a
temporary suspension of Iran's confidence-building suspension of uranium
enrichment and reprocessing activities.
In conclusion, the potential for a successful resolution of the Iran nuclear
crisis has now gained unprecedented momentum and erasing that momentum by a
"peace conference" is also a distinct possibility that, hopefully, will be
avoided by the triumph of reason and a peace mindset at the Annapolis summit.
Notes
1. Interestingly, in his oral report at the IAEA meeting, ElBaradei admitted
that the report's reference to his agency's "diminishing" knowledge of Iran's
nuclear program due to the lack of implementation of Additional Protocol is not
necessarily an Iran-specific problem but rather a more widespread problem with
the numerous states that have yet to adopt this protocol: "However, as with all
states that do not have an Additional Protocol in force, we are unable to
provide credible assurance about the absence of undeclared nuclear material and
activities," ElBaradei stated.
2. For more on this, see the author's
Iran, nuclear challenges The Iranian Journal of International Affairs,
Spring 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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