by Peter Jenkins
Seyed Hossein Mousavian, the lead author of Iran and the United States: An Insider’s View on the Failed Past and the Road to Peace, has two objectives: to help American readers understand the Iranian perspective on the fraught US-Iranian relationship, and to advocate a sustained attempt to break the cycle of hostility that was triggered by the 1979 Islamic revolution.
Such is the suspicion on both sides of this relationship that some readers may wonder about the extent to which Mousavian’s descriptions of the Iranian perspective can be trusted. This reviewer’s opinion is that Mousavian—a former Iranian ambassador who has been living in the US since 2009—whom the reviewer has known since 2004, is not trying to pull wool over anyone’s eyes. There is corroborating evidence for much of the information he advances. If in places the reader senses that he or she is not getting the full story, a respectable explanation is to hand: those who have worked at the heart of a government, as Mousavian has done, are bound to be “economical” with certain truths, as a British cabinet secretary once put it.
The Iranian political establishment can be reduced, simplistically, to two broad currents. The first contains those who nurture so great a sense of grievance towards the US, and so deep a mistrust, that they have no wish to end the intermittent cold war of the last 35 years. In the second current are those who understand that nurturing grievances is futile, who recognise that the US has legitimate grievances of its own, and who believe that a measure of détente is in the interest of both countries.
Mousavian belongs to the second current. So do Iran’s president since August 2013, Hassan Rouhani, and his foreign minister and chief nuclear negotiator, Mohammed Javad Zarif. Iran’s ultimate decision-maker and religious leader, Ayatollah Seyed Ali Khamenei, straddles the two camps. He is deeply distrustful of the United States, which he suspects of being bent on the overthrow of the Islamic Republic and of having no interest in détente, but he is ready to give the second current opportunities to prove him wrong.
Iran’s president from 2005-13, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad—who created a deplorable impression in the West, and gifted Israeli propagandists, by denying the reality of the Holocaust—came to office as a member of the first current, a “hard-liner.” But one of the revelations of this book is that he made more attempts than any previous leader to engineer a thaw in relations with the United States.
Mousavian’s intriguing thesis is that Ahmadinejad believed that achieving détente would be so popular with Iranian voters that it would help him to become Iran’s equivalent of Vladimir Putin.
Amb. Mousavian was the spokesman for Iran in the negotiations over its nuclear program with the international community 2003-05.
The middle section of the book is given over to an account of the US-Iranian relationship from the author’s first-hand experience. Mousavian does not flinch from addressing all the episodes that have generated a sense of grievance on one side or the other, from cataloguing the false starts and missed opportunities, or from exploring the incidents that have set back relations just when an improvement seemed to be in the offing.
He has been so well connected to several leaders of Iran’s nezam (establishment) during most of the last 35 years that these chapters amount to a fascinating story, told from the inside of a political system that many foreigners find opaque.
It is somewhat remarkable how often relations have been set back just when it seemed that a thaw was about to set in. In 1992, intelligence about Iranian nuclear purchases undermined the good will created by Iran’s intercessions to secure the release of US hostages in the Lebanon. In 1996, the Kolahdooz incident set back relations with Europe that had been improving since the early 90s. In 2002, the Karine A incident negated the cooperation that the US had been receiving from Iran since 9/11, and it led to the infamous naming of Iran as a member of the “Axis of Evil” in a State of the Union address.
Mousavian suspects that these and other setbacks were not coincidental; they were the work of people who had no interest in a thaw. That theory would account for the haste with which Iran’s enemies have asserted Iranian responsibility for such incidents. But in the last analysis, answers to these puzzles of responsibility have yet to be authenticated.
In any case, how realistic is it to suppose that an improvement in US-Iran relations can be achieved?
Mousavian admits that there are formidable obstacles to a full normalisation, and he seems to doubt that the US and Iran will become best buddies any time soon.
Chief among the obstacles, seen from the US side, are Iran’s refusal to modify its view that the Jewish character of the Israeli state, proclaimed in Israel’s constitution, is bound to result in injustice, oppression and humiliation for Palestinians living in Israel, and has in fact done so—plus Iran’s determination to support a fellow-Shia movement that Israel and the US deem to be terrorist, Hezbollah.
On the Iranian side, Ayatollah Khamenei fears the consequences of anything more than a modest rapprochement. In his view, the opening of a US embassy in Tehran, for instance, would create opportunities for US subversion of the Islamic Republic; and greater exposure of the Iranian population to all things American would undermine respect for Islamic values. He remains convinced that the US seeks the overthrow of the Islamic Republic.
Yet Mousavian believes that there is a middle ground between mutual hostility and full normalisation. He sees scope for the US and Iran to work together, on a basis of mutual respect, to achieve common objectives in areas where their interests coincide. At present those areas include Afghanistan, counter-narcotics, WMD counter-proliferation, energy security, and combating the Jihadi threat in Iraq and Syria.
Developing what Mousavian terms “a framework for cooperation” should be accompanied, he suggests, by an agreement to lock the drawer that contains both sides’ equally long lists of historic grievances, and by a commitment to eschew the rhetoric of enmity and aggression.
The key to taking relations on to a new plane, he argues, is resolving the dispute over Iran’s nuclear activities. This dispute has been fuelled by Israel, partly perhaps for Palestine-related reasons, and by the US’ strategic balance of power considerations.
He believes that a resolution is nonetheless possible. The progress made by American and Iranian negotiators since September 2013, and the alarm that this has caused Israel’s prime minister, suggests that he is right.
Mousavian warns his readers against pressing Iran to cut back its uranium enrichment capacity from the current level, which, objectively, is modest and cannot reasonably be construed as threatening as long as its use is monitored by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). He fears that the US and EU negotiators will fail to appreciate the cultural and psychological factors that would lead the Iranian nezam to prefer no deal to the kind of capacity reductions that the US and EU have been seeking.
The Islamic Republic is rooted in nationalist as much as in religious values, he explains. The nezam is quick to perceive threats to Iran’s sovereignty and national dignity. They would rather defy than be humiliated. They are ready to engage in reasonable compromise but they will not capitulate.
It is these insights into the Islamic Iranian mind-set that are likely to make this book exceptionally interesting for all but students of Iran—and even they may like to compare their views with those of Mousavian.
He will doubtless be pleased if the book sells well, as it deserves to do. But what will please him most, I suspect, is if it contributes to a better understanding of Iran in the US and in Europe, and if it helps bring to a close a quarrel that reflects well on neither side.
]]>by Derek Davison
The challenge of rebuilding the once strong but now broken ties between the United States and Iran was the topic of a June 3 Atlantic Council event, “US-Iran Relations: Past, Present, and Future.” The discussion, moderated by Barbara Slavin, included John Marks, founder of the international NGO Search [...]]]>
by Derek Davison
The challenge of rebuilding the once strong but now broken ties between the United States and Iran was the topic of a June 3 Atlantic Council event, “US-Iran Relations: Past, Present, and Future.” The discussion, moderated by Barbara Slavin, included John Marks, founder of the international NGO Search for Common Ground, and former Iranian diplomat, Seyed Hossein Mousavian. Much of the event focused on Mousavian’s insights from his time as a member of Iran’s nuclear negotiating team (2003-05), and his involvement in talks between the US and Iran on combatting Al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan in late 2001.
Mousavian identified three distinct stages in Iran’s historical relationship with the United States. From 1856, when the first treaty between the two nations was signed, until 1953, when the CIA participated in a coup that overthrew the elected government of Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh and replaced it with the autocratic rule of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, US-Iran ties were friendly, albeit not extensive.
Mutual distrust
Iranians believed that the American people and their government supported Iranian reform and anti-colonial efforts (an American missionary, Howard Baskerville, was killed by government forces while participating in Iran’s 1909 constitutional revolution). But the 1953 coup, and the response by the US and UK to Mossadegh’s plan to nationalize Iran’s oil industry, represented a fundamental shift in America’s policy toward Iran. Where it once opposed colonialism and autocracy, America, as a co-sponsor of the coup and as the Shah’s new great power patron, was now, as far as Iranians were concerned, fundamentally identified with both. According to Mousavian this period of “dominance,” ended in 1979 with the Islamic Revolution and the hostage crisis. Hostility has been at the root of US-Iran relations ever since.
There are many reasons to believe, as Mousavian does, that the current state of hostility between Iran and the United States cannot be maintained. The international sanctions that have been levied against it to force the government to agree to limits on its nuclear power program are not meant to last forever. They rely on an international consensus that is almost unprecedented and can be disrupted by any discord among the P5+1 member nations (US, UK, France, China, and Russia plus Germany).
Sanctions have severely damaged the Iranian economy, which President Hassan Rouhani promised to fix during his 2013 election campaign. Politics aside, the human cost of sanctions is also growing by the day. The progress that has already been made in the nuclear talks makes the current moment critically important; if negotiations break down now, it’s difficult to see a way forward without a resurgence of the debate here over military action.
Amidst the debate over how much uranium enrichment capacity Iran “needs” and how much it actually wants, or the dispute over modifications to the proposed heavy-water reactor at Arak, the basic, almost insurmountable challenge to the nuclear talks is that the US and Iran simply do not trust the other side to abide by the terms of a final settlement.
Washington, which maintains diplomatic relations with every country it fought a war with in the 20th century apart from North Korea, is unable to move past the 444 days from 1979-81 in which Iranians held 52 Americans hostages in Tehran, despite the fact that no American hostage was killed in the process. The Iranians meanwhile remember the US’ role in the 1953 coup and its support for Saddam Hussein during the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq War. Mousavian argues that broken American promises have also contributed to Iranian (and particularly Revolutionary Guard) mistrust. The IRGC worked to secure the freedom of Americans taken hostage in Lebanon in the 1980s, and likewise cooperated with US military actions in Afghanistan post-9/11 because, according to Mousavian, American diplomats promised that those efforts would lead to closer US-Iranian ties. In both cases, though, those ties never materialized.
Comprehensive negotiations
The solution, as Mousavian sees it, is for the US and Iran to engage in talks on a broad, comprehensive range of issues rather than focusing only on Iran’s nuclear program. He suggests starting with those areas where the two countries’ interests are broadly aligned: the need for stability in Afghanistan and Iraq, the fight against regional drug trafficking, the effort to contain Salafi extremism and to combat Al-Qaeda-style terrorist movements, and the need for security and stability for Persian Gulf shipping.
These talks can be supplemented with what Marks characterizes as informal, “person-to-person” diplomacy, especially cultural and scientific exchanges, perhaps eventually leading to formal apologies — from the Iranians, for the hostage crisis, and from the Americans, for the 1953 coup and the 1988 downing of Iran Air Flight 655. Once rapport has been built on these areas of common ground, the two sides can begin to tackle more challenging issues, such as (from the US perspective) Iran’s support for Bashar al-Assad in Syria and Hezbollah in Lebanon, its relations with Israel, its ballistic missiles program, and its human rights record.
While Mousavian may be right that a comprehensive approach to US-Iran talks would be preferable to the current process, there’s a problem: comprehensive negotiations will take a very long time. The fact is that the current state of affairs around the nuclear talks will resolve itself, one way or another, long before any comprehensive US-Iran talks have a chance to achieve anything. Likewise, the crisis in Syria, which continually threatens to engulf the region, is too immediate a problem to be part of an extensive long-term framework. Mousavian accordingly suggests a two-track approach, where issues of critical, near-term concern are handled in a multi-lateral way, while longer-term, more comprehensive bilateral talks are undertaken. This may not be ideal, but it’s possible that such an approach could have real benefits. As he points out, the nuclear talks, specifically the P5+1′s recognition of Iranian needs with respect to uranium enrichment, offer a blueprint for progress (to wit, the US being receptive and responsive to Iran’s wishes) on a range of other issues.
This is a critical point for the possibility of renewing US-Iran relations. Regional stability requires Iran and the US to find a way of cooperating together, and the resurgence of Salafi extremism and terrorist groups in the region has aligned the interests and incentives of both countries. But working toward that stability requires a considerable commitment to open, comprehensive negotiations before this potentially vital relationship can be repaired.
Photo: After decades of no contact between high-level US and Iranian officials, a historic meeting between US Secretary of State John Kerry, left, and Iran’s Foreign Minister Javad Zarif occurred on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly meeting in New York on September 13, 2013 — one month after Iran’s presidential inauguration of the moderate cleric, Hassan Rouhani.
]]>by Jasmin Ramsey
Seyed Hossein Mousavian, who worked with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani when Rouhani was Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator and who has been living in the US since 2009 following dubious charges of espionage during the Ahmadinejad administration has returned to Iran, reports the New York Times.
The ambassador [...]]]>
by Jasmin Ramsey
Seyed Hossein Mousavian, who worked with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani when Rouhani was Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator and who has been living in the US since 2009 following dubious charges of espionage during the Ahmadinejad administration has returned to Iran, reports the New York Times.
The ambassador served as an unofficial spokesperson for the Iranian government during his stay in the US where he was a Princeton research scholar. His Dec. 19 participation in an Asia Society expert panel on the Geneva deal that included former top US diplomat Thomas Pickering and former US negotiator Robert Einhorn appears to be Mousavian’s last US public appearance.
When Rouhani was elected during Iran’s June presidential election, some wondered whether the ambassador would go back to Iran to work with the Rouhani administration. It’s not clear why he has chosen to return now — it could be that he has been called back, or that he simply feels it’s safe enough to go home now — but Mousavian said he has returned to Iran “to stay”, according to the Iranian Student News Agency.
I interviewed the ambassador at length in July 2013 following Rouhani’s election. Although Iran and world powers were at that time far from the interim agreement that was signed on Nov. 24 in Geneva, much of it seems relevant even now. Here’s an excerpt:
]]>Q: Your article for the Cairo Review, which was written more than a month before Mr. Rouhani’s election, has generated a lot of discussion over the suggestion that one of Iran’s options is withdrawing from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). Is Iran seriously considering this?
A: As I reiterated in the article published by the Cairo Review, the first and most favorable option for Iran is to continue seeking a peaceful resolution to the standoff. I explained the five major demands the P5+1 [U.S., Britain, France, China, and Russia plus Germany] made in recent nuclear talks to prevent Iran’s breakout capability and to ensure a maximum level of transparency. Iran, in return, had two major demands: lifting sanctions and recognizing Iran’s rights under the NPT. I have also proposed that the world powers and Iran place their demands within a package, to be implemented in a step-by-step manner with proportionate reciprocation.
Withdrawing from the NPT has never been Iran’s intention. The US and Israel have initiated “all options on the table”, leaving open the possibility of a military attack on Iranian nuclear facilities. This policy goes against the UN charter, the NPT, and non-proliferation, where nuclear-armed states — the U.S. and Israel — are threatening to attack Iran, a non-nuclear weapon state. Therefore, as long as the U.S. policy of “all options on the table” remains valid, Iran as a sovereign state is forced to also have “all options on the table”.
by Peter Jenkins
I had the pleasure of talking to Ambassador Hossein Mousavian around the time when the thoughts that underlie his controversial article, “Five Options for Iran’s New President”, were forming in his mind. His mood, it seemed to me, was more pessimistic than I had known [...]]]>
by Peter Jenkins
I had the pleasure of talking to Ambassador Hossein Mousavian around the time when the thoughts that underlie his controversial article, “Five Options for Iran’s New President”, were forming in his mind. His mood, it seemed to me, was more pessimistic than I had known it before. He was starting to despair of the Obama administration finding the political courage to square up to Congress and Israel, and clear a path to the resolution of the nuclear dispute by offering Iran toleration of a peaceful nuclear program and meaningful sanctions relief.
I am therefore inclined to see Mousavian’s highlighting of withdrawal from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) as an attempt to stiffen the administration’s resolve by reminding them of the potential cost of continuing to allow this dispute to fester.
I am also inclined to see it as a reminder to all of us that since 2001, the US, UK and France have been abusing the NPT, and that this is short-sighted and foolish. But before I elaborate on that, let me make a few points about Iran and NPT withdrawal.
Mousavian suggests that the NPT has failed to bring any benefits to Iran. Really? The NPT has delivered a world in which there are only four nuclear-armed states, in addition to the five Nuclear Weapon States. In 1970, when the NPT entered into force, people feared that by now there would be 20 nuclear-armed states. A largely nuclear-weapon-free world is a great benefit for all, including Iran (and the great free-rider, Israel).
Mousavian implies that withdrawal from the NPT would be a painless option for Iran. Of course, he knows better than that. “You ain’t seen nothing yet” is how the US, UK and France would react to withdrawal.
Even more painfully, I suspect, for the Islamic Republic’s leaders, all the hard work put into establishing Iran as a responsible international actor, albeit nobody’s poodle, would be undone. Only a handful of non-aligned states would sympathise. Iran would lose the friendship of Russia and China, two states that take their NPT responsibilities very seriously. Iran would revert to its outcast status of the early 80s.
Mousavian intimates that the world should accept the Supreme Leader’s fatwas as a better guarantee of Iran’s non-proliferation commitment than adherence to the NPT. That is fanciful, I am afraid. Rightly or wrongly, the world fears that what the Leader bans today, he can licence tomorrow.
Mousavian is on much firmer ground when he accuses the US and its Western allies of abusing the NPT as an instrument of pressure. Article IV of the NPT does not oblige the holders of dual-use technologies to make those technologies available to other NPT parties, as Iran has sometimes seemed to be claiming. Equally, however, it does not confer a right to coerce other NPT parties into surrendering technologies that they have developed for themselves, provided the technologies are in peaceful, safeguarded use.
In 2003, after the Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) had reported several Iranian failures to comply with its IAEA safeguards obligations, there existed, to my mind, a moral and political basis for requiring Iran to suspend the use of dual-use technologies. But that justification faded once those failures had been corrected and once the US intelligence community had concluded that Iran was no longer decided on getting nuclear weapons.
Sadly, this abuse of the NPT is of a piece with other short-sighted missteps that, over time, can undermine Non-Nuclear Weapons States’ (NNWS) support for the treaty:
- in 2001 the George W. Bush administration went back on a commitment made to NPT-parties by the Clinton administration to achieve the early entry into force of the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty, and reduced funding to the CTBT Provisional Treaty Secretariat;
- in 2004 President Bush proposed a freeze on the peaceful use of dual-use technologies by NNWS, but then insisted that covert South Korean research into uranium enrichment did not amount to IAEA non-compliance;
- in 2005 the Bush administration set about asking for an exception, to benefit India, to an understanding that Nuclear Suppliers would only make nuclear material and equipment available to non-NPT nuclear-armed states under very restricted circumstances;
- at the 2005 NPT Review Conference the US and France all but said out loud that Article VI of the NPT is for the birds; and the US protected Israel from non-aligned pressure for a conference on creating a nuclear-weapon-free Middle East.
Obviously things have improved since Barack Obama moved into the White House. At the 2010 NPT Review Conference, the US signed on to a final document that brought it back into concurrence with the compromises on which the NPT is founded; and the US and Russia signed an agreement that demonstrates a will to move towards nuclear disarmament. Just recently, President Obama made plain his desire to move further in that direction.
But when it comes to Iran, nothing has changed. The administration, like a weasel caught in the headlights of an oncoming car, seems paralysed by a Congress that Israel’s Prime Minister has bewitched. No attempt is made to challenge Congress with an analysis of the implications for Iran policy of the relevant provisions of the NPT. Instead, Congress is left to luxuriate in the conviction that international treaties can be a useful tool for policing the rest of the world but can be ignored by the good, old U.S. of A.
Mousavian’s mood may have improved since Iranians elected a president with whom Western leaders can afford to be photographed; and since it became blindingly obvious that the West needs Iranian cooperation to restore peace to Syria (and in Afghanistan from next year). But until Mousavian sees the administration stand up to Congress on Iranian policy, he is likely to continue fearing the worst.
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