Iran seems to be maintaining its previous stance on uranium enrichment — a key issue for Western powers and Israel — ahead of proposed talks by the 6-power P5+1 negotiating group. On Tuesday, Fereydoun Abbasi-Davani, the head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organisation (AEOI), said Iran would ”not suspend 20 percent [...]]]>
Iran seems to be maintaining its previous stance on uranium enrichment — a key issue for Western powers and Israel — ahead of proposed talks by the 6-power P5+1 negotiating group. On Tuesday, Fereydoun Abbasi-Davani, the head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organisation (AEOI), said Iran would ”not suspend 20 percent uranium enrichment because of the demands of others.”
Iran insists that it has an “inalienable right” to enrich uranium on its soil. That right is guaranteed by the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), to which Iran is a signatory, but the US and Iran appear to interpret it differently. Several UN Security Council resolutions also demand that Iran suspend its enrichment program until IAEA concerns are satisfied.
The US believes Iran is working towards nuclear weapon capability, but has not decided to build a nuclear weapon. Interestingly, some high-level US foreign policy luminaries have called the US position of 0% Iranian enrichment untenable, as Tony Karon has reported.
Laura Rozen points out that Abbasi-Davani’s comments “came a day after Iran’s foreign minister struck a conciliatory tone, expressing optimism about prospects for progress at upcoming nuclear talks.” Last week, Herman Nackaerts, the deputy director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), said the agency had a “good meeting” in Tehran even though Iran refused to allow the agency to enter its Parchin military site at this time.
These developments suggest it’s anyone’s guess at this point whether resumed talks, if they go so far, will lead to substantive progress during the diplomatic process. But it’s easy to forget that while all this is going on, a related cyberwar is quietly taking place.
While telling Israel’s Army Radio that Israel’s “red line” with Iran is still “our top priority”, Moshe Ya’alon, Israel’s Likudnik Vice Prime Minister, brought up the issue today:
“In the meantime, there are interesting things happening in Iran, such as worms, viruses and explosions,” alluding to clandestine cyber-warfare operations targeting the Islamic Republic that many suspect are carried out by Israel.
Yesterday, Iran reported that its computers are being targeted by malware that wipes data from hard drives. The source is unknown.
I’m not sure how cyber attacks, particularly large-scale ones, affect Iran’s negotiating stance or its alleged nuclear ambitions. But is it fair to say that this is an important issue that’s overlooked when assessing “defiant” Iran’s unreasonable stance towards the West, just as the now forgotten issue of targeted assassinations against Iranian scientists was? Not to mention cyber blowback and another potentially calamitous form of warfare that’s slowly being unleashed upon the world, be it from Iran, or anyone else. Those issues may deserve some attention now too.
]]>The Congressional Research Service (CRS) published a report on December 6 titled “Iran’s Ballistic Missile and Space Launch Programs,” which the Federation of American Scientists has posted. It casts doubt on a long-held view by the US Intelligence Community that Iran could test-fly an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) by 2015 if [...]]]>
The Congressional Research Service (CRS) published a report on December 6 titled “Iran’s Ballistic Missile and Space Launch Programs,” which the Federation of American Scientists has posted. It casts doubt on a long-held view by the US Intelligence Community that Iran could test-fly an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) by 2015 if it received “sufficient foreign assistance.”
The report assesses that Iran has not been receiving adequate amounts of critical foreign assistance from China or Russia over the last decade while sanctions have made it increasingly difficult for it to obtain required components and materials to test fly an ICBM. It also states that without a workable nuclear warhead, which according to US intelligence Iran does not have and has not as of yet decided to build, ”the proliferation of Iranian ballistic missiles is arguably not an imminent significant threat.”
The CRS report also notes that Iran’s advancement in missile technology has developed alongside the sanctions regime imposed upon it. “Perhaps the irony of a restrictive nonproliferation regime is that Iran became largely self-sufficient,” writes report author Steven A. Hildreth, a specialist in missile defense. Elsewhere he states: “A determined adversary such as Iran has not shown that it is deterred or dissuaded by U.S. conventional military superiority, or by U.S. and international sanctions, or by the deployment of U.S. BMD capabilities.” In the absence of regime change, the report assesses that Iran is unlikely to change its behavior, hence the US has little option but to continue to on its “current apparent path”:
For the time being, however, Congress will likely continue to take a focused interest in Iran’s role in the region and in its missile programs. Beyond efforts to impose increasingly stringent sanctions, it is unclear whether there is more Congress itself can do to affect Iran’s commitment to its ballistic missile and space launch programs.
A December 7 CRS Reportby Kenneth Katzmann also assesses that “U.S. and U.N. sanctions have not, to date, accomplished their core strategic objective of compelling Iran to verifiably limit its nuclear development to purely peaceful purposes.”
According the the US government, Iran has the largest number of ballistic missiles in the Middle East, but the vast majority of Iran’s heavy artillery rockets and ballistic missiles are short-range of less than about 500 kilometers. These missiles “could not strike U.S. or allied bases in the region unless they were moved far from their operating base and launched from vulnerable positions along Iran’s Persian Gulf coastline,” writes Hildreth.
In what looks like a direct response to the report, the Times of Israel reported that Iran’s air force commander said Tuesday that Israel is Iran’s “longest-range target”.
“We don’t need missiles with more than a 2,000-kilometer range, even though have the technology to build them,” said Brig. Gen. Amir Ali Hajizadeh.
But according to the CRS report, Iran has “proven itself capable of misleading and deceitful statements regarding its ballistic missile and space launch programs” casting “serious doubt on relying heavily on Iranian statements about their ballistic missile and space launch programs.” Hildreth references a Washington Post article about “a photo-shopped “successful” test of a failed Iranian SRBM launch in 2008″ as an example of “Iranian misinformation” about its ballistic missile capabilities.
]]>As the Iranian leadership prepares to engage in negotiations with the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council plus Germany (P5+1), the conversation inside Iran has moved beyond the nuclear issue to include a debate about the utility of or need for engaging in direct talks, even relations, with [...]]]>
As the Iranian leadership prepares to engage in negotiations with the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council plus Germany (P5+1), the conversation inside Iran has moved beyond the nuclear issue to include a debate about the utility of or need for engaging in direct talks, even relations, with the United States.
Public discussions about relations with the US have historically been taboo in Iran. To be sure, there have always been individuals who have brought up the idea, but they have either been severely chastised publicly or quickly silenced or ignored. The current conversation is distinguished by its breadth as well the clear positioning of the two sides on the issue.
On one side are the hard-liners who continue to tout the value of a “resistance economy” – a term coined by the Leader Ali Khamenei — in the face of US-led sanctions. On the other side is an increasing number of people from across the political spectrum, including some conservatives, who are calling for bilateral talks.
The idea of direct talks with the US was openly put forth last Spring by Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, former president and current chair of the Expediency council, through a couple of interviews. He insisted that Iran “can now fully negotiate with the United States based on equal conditions and mutual respect.” Rafsanjani also conceded that the current obsession with Iran’s nuclear program is not the US’ main problem, arguing against those who “think that Iran’s problems [with the West] will be solved through backing down on the nuclear issue.” At the same time, he called for proactive interaction with the world, and for understanding that after recent transformations in the Middle East, “the Americans… are trying to find “new models that can articulate coexistence and cooperation in the region and which the people [of the region] also like better.” Rafsanjani added that the current situation of “not talking and not having relations with America is not sustainable…The meaning of talks is not that we capitulate to them. If they accept our position or we accept their positions, it’s done.”
In Rafsanjani’s worldview, negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program are merely part of a process that will eventually address other sources of conflict with the US in the region.
Rafsanjani is no longer the lone public voice in favor of direct talks. In fact, as the conversation over talks with the US has picked up, he has remained relatively quiet. Instead, Iranian newspapers and the public fora are witnessing a relatively robust conversation. Last week, for instance, hundreds of people filled an overcrowded university auditorium in the provincial capital of Yasuj, a small city of about 100,000 people, to listen to a public debate between two former members of the Parliament over whether direct talks and relations with the US present opportunity or threats.
On one side stood Mostafa Kavakabian who said
…whatever Islamic Iran is wrestling with in [terms of] sanctions, the nuclear energy issue, multiple resolutions [against Iran] in [international] organizations, human rights violations from the point of view of the West, the issue of Israel and international terrorism is the result of lack of logical relationship, with the maintenance of our country’s principles, with America.
Sattar Hedayatkhah on the other hand argued that “relations with America under the current conditions means backtracking from 34 years of resistance against the demands and sanctions of the global arrogance.”
In recent weeks the hard-line position has been articulated by individuals as varied as the head of the Basij militia forces, Mohammadreza Naqdi, who called sanctions a means for unlocking Iran’s “latent potential” by encouraging domestic industry and ingenuity, and the leader’s representative in the Revolutionary Guard (IRGC), cleric Ali Saeedi, who said that Washington’s proposals for direct talks are a ploy to trick Tehran into capitulating over its nuclear program.
Standing in the midst of this contentious conversation is Leader Khamenei, who, as everyone acknowledges, will be the ultimate decision-maker on the issue of talks with the US. During the past couple of years he has articulated his mistrust of the Obama Administration’s intentions in no uncertain terms and since the bungled October 2009 negotiations over the transfer of enriched uranium out of Iran — when Iran negotiator Saeed Jalili met with US Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs William Burns for the P5+1 side of the meeting — has not allowed bilateral contact at the level of principals between Iran and the US.
Yet the concern regarding a potentially changed position on his part has been sufficient enough for the publication of an op-ed in the hard-line Kayhan Daily warning against the “conspiracy” of “worn-out revolutionaries” to force the Leader “to drink from the poison chalice of backing down, abandoning his revolutionary positions, and talking to the US.” The opinion piece goes on to say that
…by offering wrong analyses and relating all of the country’s problems to external sanctions, [worn-out revolutionaries] want to make the social atmosphere inflamed and insecure and agitate public sentiments so that the exalted Leader is forced to give in to their demands in order to protect the country’s interests and revolution’s gains.
The idea of drinking poison is an allusion to Revolution-founder Ruhollah Khomeini’s famous speech wherein he grudgingly accepted the ceasefire with Iraq in 1988 and refered to it as poison chalice from which he had to drink. Hard-liners in Iran continue to believe that it was the moderate leaders of the time such as Rafsanjani who convinced Khomeini to take the bitter poison, while conveniently omitting the fact that the current Leader Khamenei was at the time very much on Rafsanjani’s side. This time around it is the “worn-out revolutionaries” who, in the mind of the hard-liners, despite being conservative and acting as key political advisors to Khamenei or holding key positions in office, are suspected of pressuring him to accede to talks.
Basirat, a hard-line website affiliated with the IRGC’s political bureau, has taken a different tact and instead of denouncing pressures on Khamenei, has published a list of “Imam” Khamenei’s statements which insist on long-standing enmity with the US. Presumably, the intended purpose is to make it as hard as possible for him to back away from those statements.
The hard-liners face a predicament, which is essentially this: Having elevated Khamenei’s role to the level of an all-knowing Imam-like leader, they have few options but to remain quiet and submit to his leadership if he makes a decision in favor of direct talks. Hence their prior moves to portray any attempt at talks as capitulation at worst, or unnecessarily taking a bitter pill at best.
It is in this context that one has to consider Khamenei’s potential decision over the issue of direct talks. Whether he will eventually agree to them is not at all clear at this point and in fact is probably quite unlikely, unless the US position on Iran’s nuclear program is publicly clarified to include allowance for limited enrichment inside Iran.
In other words, while Khamenei may eventually assent to direct talks, the path to that position requires some sort of agreement on the nuclear standoff — even if only a limited one — within the P5+1 frame and not the other way around.
The reality is that US pressure on Iran has helped create an environment in which many are calling for a strategic, even incrementally implemented, shift of direction in Iran’s foreign policy regarding the so-called “America question.” But this call for a shift can only become dominant if there are some assurances that corresponding, and again, even incrementally implemented shifts, are also in the works in the US regarding the “Iran question.
- Farideh Farhi is an independent researcher and an affiliate graduate faculty member in political science and international relations at the University of Hawaii-Manoa. A version of this article appeared on IPS News.
]]>By Michael Brenner
Graham Allison and Shai Feldman, the two distinguished authors of the “Coming Clash over Iran“, have reduced the complicated, contentious issue of Iran’s relations with the United States to the tenor of dealings between Washington and Jerusalem. Means, methods and strategies for “keeping them on the same [...]]]>
By Michael Brenner
Graham Allison and Shai Feldman, the two distinguished authors of the “Coming Clash over Iran“, have reduced the complicated, contentious issue of Iran’s relations with the United States to the tenor of dealings between Washington and Jerusalem. Means, methods and strategies for “keeping them on the same page” is, they suggest, the priority concern. In so doing, they have demonstrated the problem while adding nothing to the search for a solution.
They begin with the odd proposition that “the two country’s leaders seemed to be able to set aside their mutual animosity and distrust, working together to defuse the crisis” in Gaza. What they did in fact was collaborate to create the crisis. Then, when their plans went awry, they hopped on the Morsi bandwagon so as to cut their losses. In the process, they strengthened Iran’s hand.
The glaring truth is that to the extent that President Barak Obama accommodates Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, the chances of a settlement with Tehran go down. The prerequisites for finding a modus vivendi are two-fold. One is for the Obama administration to make an independent, sober assessment of American stakes in its relations with Iran and to set that as the reference mark for fashioning policies to secure them. The other is to recognize that only a comprehensive approach that embeds the nuclear issue in discussions of wider security concerns holds out the prospect of success. Unhappily, there is no evidence as yet that we have begun to proceed accordingly.
– Michael Brenner is Professor Emeritus of International Affairs at the University of Pittsburgh and a Fellow of the Center for Transatlantic Relations SAIS Johns Hopkins. His commentaries appear regularly in the Huffington Post and a number of news outlets elsewhere in the world.
]]>Academics Graham Allison and Shai Feldman predict a “Coming Clash over Iran” between the United States and Israel in the National Interest. Significant developments during the next 6 months — further Iranian nuclear progress; potential reinvigorated attempts at diplomacy by the US and Iran; more Israeli apprehension [...]]]>
Academics Graham Allison and Shai Feldman predict a “Coming Clash over Iran” between the United States and Israel in the National Interest. Significant developments during the next 6 months — further Iranian nuclear progress; potential reinvigorated attempts at diplomacy by the US and Iran; more Israeli apprehension about Iran’s nuclear program; and an Israeli election that may result in an even more right-wing Israeli leadership — may result in further strain in US-Israel relations over the Iran issue. The authors accordingly discuss how the two countries can avoid further strain, such as by agreeing on “rules of engagement” for conducting future dialogue about Iran:
…Specifically, they should agree to avoid the kind of public squabble on Iran in which they were engaged before the U.S. elections. Instead, their discussions of this issue should follow the quiet manner in which Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and President George W. Bush dealt with Syria’s nuclear reactor, destroyed in 2007.
A subtle caveat is found in the conclusion:
Despite the depth and breadth of the U.S.-Israeli alliance, each is a separate national state with its own national interests. Each has a democratically-elected government that is responsible for protecting its nation’s vital interests as it sees them. And neither can be expected to subcontract its survival to the other.
]]>
According to former top advisers to George W. Bush and Barak Obama, the United States will preventively strike Iran in 2013 if no diplomatic settlement is reached over its nuclear program. From the Times of Israel:
During an on-stage discussion with Dennis Ross and Elliott Abrams halfway through the [...]]]>
According to former top advisers to George W. Bush and Barak Obama, the United States will preventively strike Iran in 2013 if no diplomatic settlement is reached over its nuclear program. From the Times of Israel:
During an on-stage discussion with Dennis Ross and Elliott Abrams halfway through the evening, Washington Institute director Robert Satloff asked the former officials, “Will either America or Israel employ preventive military action against Iran’s nuclear program – yes or no?”
The two replied in unison, “yes.”
“Will this happen in 2013?” Satloff pressed.
“Yes,” said Ross.
“Yes, I agree,” added Abrams.
Last week the International Atomic Energy Association (IAEA) said Iran could be referred to the United Nations Security Council if it had “not begun substantive cooperation with the IAEA” by March 2013. This caused Micah Zenko to speculate about a deadline for a US attack, while others suggested the path is simply being prepared for another resolution.
Some well-informed Iran watchers are saying that Ross and Abrams’ prediction is on par with that of White House insiders. Whether that’s true or not, it’s undeniable that pressure will be very high on Obama to ‘do more’ if no headway is made with Iran in the next 6 months.
But according to Zenko, deadlines, while helpful on the pressure-front, can also be detrimental:
]]>Setting a March deadline provides some certainty and perhaps coercive leverage to compel Iran to cooperate with the IAEA. But declaring deadlines also places U.S. “credibility” on the line, generating momentum to use force even if there is no new actionable intelligence that Iran has decided to pursue a nuclear weapon. Based on what we know right now, that would be a strategic miscalculation.
Iran is unlikely to agree to curb its nuclear programme unless the U.S. and its Western allies are prepared to ease tough economic sanctions imposed against the Islamic Republic over the past decade, according to a major new report signed by more than three dozen former top U.S. foreign-policy [...]]]>
Iran is unlikely to agree to curb its nuclear programme unless the U.S. and its Western allies are prepared to ease tough economic sanctions imposed against the Islamic Republic over the past decade, according to a major new report signed by more than three dozen former top U.S. foreign-policy makers, military officers, and independent experts.
While recent sanctions “may well help bring Iran to the negotiating table, it is not clear that these sanctions alone will result in agreements or changes in Iranian policies, much less changes in Iran’s leadership,” the report, “Weighing Benefits and Costs of International Sanctions Against Iran”, concludes.
“If Iran were to signal its willingness to modify its nuclear program and to cooperate in verifying those modifications, Iranian negotiations would expect the United States and its allies, in turn, to offer a plan for easing some of the sanctions,” according to the 86-page report.
But, “(a)bsent a calibrated, positive response from the West, Iran’s leaders would have little incentive to move forward with negotiations,” it stressed, noting that the administration of President Barack Obama should have a plan at the ready that would make clear how and in what sequence Washington might ease sanctions in exchange for Iranian cooperation.
The new report, which is signed by 38 foreign policy luminaries, including three Republican former cabinet secretaries, former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, and half a dozen retired Army and Marine Corps generals with substantial Middle East experience, comes at a particularly sensitive moment.
On the one hand, Congress, prodded by the powerful American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), is moving to enact as part of the 2013 defence bill tough new sanctions against foreign companies and individuals still doing business in several key Iranian economic sectors.
The final bill, which may seek to reduce Obama’s ability to “waive” such sanctions, could also include policy language adopted by the House urging the administration to build up its military presence in the region to make the threat of an attack against Iran’s nuclear facilities more credible.
On the other hand, the administration, which opposes the pending sanctions package and any limitation on the president’s waiver authority, has been meeting with its partners in the P5+1 group -the U.S., Britain, France, Russia, China, and Germany – to forge a common negotiating position in preparation for a new round of talks with Iran that will probably take place next month.
In the clearest statement to date, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton last week said Washington was also willing to engage Tehran on a bilateral basis in order to gain an accord.
She and other officials have said in the past that Washington is willing to ease sanctions in return for Iran’s cooperation, but the administration has been vague about the timing, suggesting it would consider taking such steps only after Tehran took specific concrete steps.
These include shipping its stockpile of 20-percent enriched uranium out of the country, closing its Fordow enrichment plant, and clearing up long-pending questions by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) about Tehran’s possible past research into the military applications of nuclear energy.
“So far, neither the United States nor the UN Security Council has stipulated the precise criteria that Iran must meet to trigger the lifting of sanctions, or the sanctions that would be lifted in exchange for Iran’s actions,” noted the new report, which was also signed by more than a dozen retired top-ranked diplomats, including former U.N. ambassador Thomas Pickering. “There is no action-for-action plan that all parties understand.”
Given the prominence and bipartisanship of the signatories, who also included Michael Hayden, a retired four-star Air Force general who served in top intelligence positions under Bill Clinton and George W. Bush and advised Mitt Romney in his unsuccessful election bid against Obama, the new report could well influence both the debate in Congress and within the administration.
The Iran Project’s first report – on the costs and benefits of a possible U.S. or Israeli military attack on Iran – received considerable attention here after its release in mid-September.
That report, which concluded that even a massive U.S. assault would set back Tehran’s nuclear programme by only four years at best, highlighted the growing concern in establishment foreign-policy circles about the beating of the war drums by the right-wing government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and its supporters here.
Like its predecessor, the latest report, does not advocate a particular policy.
But it notes that the benefits of U.S. sanctions against Iran “have often been taken as a given,” in part because they offer an alternative to military action. The costs of sanctions, on the other hand, have not been “routinely addressed in the public or policymaking debate”.
Moreover, it said, “sanctions alone are not a policy,” and their effectiveness “will depend not only on the sanctions themselves, but also on the negotiating strategy associated with them.”
Assessing the costs, as well as the benefits, of sanctions, it said, should “enhance the quality of debate about the sanctions regime and the role of sanctions in overall U.S. policy toward Iran.”
Among the benefits sanctions have provided, according to the report, have been a slowdown in the expansion of Iran’s nuclear programme; a relative weakening of its conventional military capabilities; growing concerns in the regime about public unhappiness with the economy which “appears to have been significantly weakened” as a result of these measures.
It also cited “some indications of a greater willingness on the part of the Iranian leadership to negotiate seriously” over its nuclear programme, although the report also expressed doubt “that the current severe sanctions regime will significantly affect the decision making of Iran’s leaders – any more than past sanctions did – barring some willingness on the part of sanctioning countries to combine continued pressure with positive signals and decisions on matters of great interest to Iran.”
On the costs side of the ledger, on the other hand, the report cited tensions between the U.S. and Russia, China, India, Turkey, and South Korea, among other countries, which have been pressed to comply with Washington’s increasingly comprehensive sanctions.
It also noted increased influence by hard-line factions, such as the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), over the cash-strapped economy; the political empowerment of those same factions which can depict the sanctions as U.S.-led aggression; and the sanctions’ potential negative humanitarian impact as U.S. and foreign companies and groups that sell or provide food and medicine to Iran find the licensing procedures too burdensome and the banks needed to provide credit for such transactions increasingly unwilling to do so.
Insofar as the sanctions lower the quality of life for the average Iranian, they may also contribute to long-term alienation between the two countries.
In addition, the sanctions are creating “new international patterns of trade” that are resulting in increased market share for Chinese and Indian goods in Iran at the expense of Western products, while the “rapid expansion of unofficial, black-market trade between Iran and Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, and Turkey is distorting and undermining the economies of those states and the region,” according to the report.
]]>According to Ambassador Seyed Hossein Mousavian, the spokesperson for Iran’s nuclear negotiating team (2003-2005) and now a visiting scholar at Princeton University, an Iranian nuclear weapon “would provide only a short-term regional advantage that would turn into a longer-term vulnerability”.
Arrested for apparently politically motivated reasons during Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s presidency, [...]]]>
According to Ambassador Seyed Hossein Mousavian, the spokesperson for Iran’s nuclear negotiating team (2003-2005) and now a visiting scholar at Princeton University, an Iranian nuclear weapon “would provide only a short-term regional advantage that would turn into a longer-term vulnerability”.
Arrested for apparently politically motivated reasons during Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s presidency, Mousavian has become an important source for many in Washington who want to gauge regime thinking.
Among Mousavian’s top 10 reasons for why Iran doesn’t want a bomb is the desire to avoid North Korea-level isolation and regime survival:
9. Deterrence: A major accusation levied against Iran is that once it acquires nuclear weapons, it will use it against the United States and Israel. This makes no rational sense, since any provocation by Iran against two states that possess thousands and hundreds of nuclear weapons respectively would result in Iran’s total annihilation. Iran has publicly acknowledged this fact.
As always, Mousavian concludes by listing the terms that Iran could agree to for a negotiated settlement over its nuclear program:
]]>Tehran would only accept a deal in which the P5+1 recognizes Iran’s legitimate rights of enrichment under the NPT and gradually lifts the sanctions. In return, to assuage Western worries, Iran would operationalize Ayatollah Khamenei’s fatwa banning nuclear arms, implement the Additional Protocol and the Subsidiary Arrangements (Code 3.1), and cooperate with the IAEA to resolve technical ambiguities and its worries about possible military dimensions. It would also export its enriched uranium stockpile beyond domestic consumption or convert it to fuel rods, cap enrichment at 5 percent, and establish a multilateral consortium for enrichment in Iran.
This package can guarantee Iran’s legitimate NPT rights of enrichment while ensuring that Iran will remain a non-nuclear-weapon state forever.
From the English language transcript of a VOA interview with Columbia Professor Gary Sick, an acute observer of US-Iranian relations who served on the National Security Council staffs of President Ford, Carter and Reagan:
SD: You’ve presented a deal in which the US agrees to some enrichment [...]]]>
From the English language transcript of a VOA interview with Columbia Professor Gary Sick, an acute observer of US-Iranian relations who served on the National Security Council staffs of President Ford, Carter and Reagan:
SD: You’ve presented a deal in which the US agrees to some enrichment and removes sanctions and Iran agrees to limits and full monitoring of its nuclear program. Do you see any readiness from either side toward this final deal?
GS: I think as with most long running problems the outlines of the solutions are pretty well known. It is not a mystery what would need to be done by either side. The question is really one of political will. Is Iran willing in fact to have private negotiations with the United States, creating an agenda that would then be used for public negotiations? Would the United States officially accept the reality that Iran is enriching and will probably continue to enrich? Again, it’s not so much that these are difficult things to imagine, it’s that they carry very heavy political consequences. For Iran the United States is the Great Satan. It is the enemy. And so by dealing with the United States you undercut that position and that has political consequences in Iran. In the United States Iran is a very unpopular country, there is no support structure in the United States, no constituency for Iran, and so taking a step that is contrary, to say what Israel would like to do is going to have real consequences for the United States politically. So it takes political sacrifice or political courage on each side and over the last 30 some years it has been very unusual to have a time when both parties were actually prepared to exercise that kind of courage. So the solution is there but getting to the solution is much, much harder than just describing it.
(Don’t miss Dr. Sick’s IPS review of Becoming Enemies, a fascinating new book on US policy during the Iran-Iraq war.)
]]>Last week I attended an event hosted by the Arms Control Association and the National Iranian American Council on how to make diplomacy work with Iran. I wrote about it here. Keynote speaker Zbigniew Brzezinski was the last to speak and showed up minutes before he took [...]]]>
Last week I attended an event hosted by the Arms Control Association and the National Iranian American Council on how to make diplomacy work with Iran. I wrote about it here. Keynote speaker Zbigniew Brzezinski was the last to speak and showed up minutes before he took the stage. The former National Security Advisor to President Jimmy Carter politely denied an interview request with Voice of America before making his way to the podium, whereupon he joked about being presented with — as a child — the opportunity to become the foreign minister of Iran during the Shah’s era.
Around this time last year, the famed geostrategist was urging the Obama administration to engage Iran when few were so bold. Now, when many are talking about diplomatic strategies to avoid a costly war, Brzezinski is discussing US options if diplomacy fails.
Brzezinski emphasized that he prefers a “negotiated outcome that meets to some extent the principle desires of our negotiating side but doesn’t necessarily humiliate the Iranians”, and that war would be an “act of utter irresponsibility” and “significant immorality if the United States was part of it.” He also showed a little of his characteristic pep when he stated that the US shouldn’t follow like “a stupid mule, whatever the Israelis do.” But his focus on what to do if talks head nowhere — as they have in the past — suggests he’s not optimistic about their prospects.
There have been some positive signs from the White House. On Friday, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said the US wants bilateral talks at Brookings’ Saban Center. The administration also expressed opposition to yet another sanctions bill approved on Friday by the Senate. But as Josh Rogin notes in his report, the Obama administration has often touted the sanctions regime pushed by Congress even while criticizing it. Add to this Iran’s own paranoid, hardening domestic political environment, and Brzezinski’s position is hard to dismiss.
Following are 4 options Brzezinski offered should talks fail. From the transcript:
]]>Then, what really are our options in that setting? My bottom line answer to the question which I have just posed is that there are no good options. But there are, of course, still options, but they range from the worst to the least bad. But at least, there’s a choice. The least attractive – the worst, in fact, would be if the United States and/or Israel, or jointly, attacked Iran. I think that is a fact. I have spoken to that many times.
So let me merely say in brief that this would produce a regional crisis and widespread hatred, particularly for the United States because the United States would be seen as the deciding partner in such an undertaking, whether jointly with Israel or subsequent to Israel or by the United States alone. The United States would be drawn into, therefore, a protracted conflict in the region, first of all with the Iranians and perhaps the Iranian people as well.
For while the attitudes of the Iranians by and large, to the extent that we can tell, towards the United States are not hostile and on the whole, in the larger cities, quite benign, a conflict in which the United States was acting as, in their perspective, an aggressor and engaging in military action would certainly precipitate long lasting hatred for the United States. And that would be a fact of life in that part of the country, and not an insignificant one since it would involve some 85 million people.
In the more immediate perspective, of course, there would be regional disruption. The region would be literally set aflame with the conflict probably spreading through Iraq to Syria, creating one large belt of conflict, complicating our withdrawal from Afghanistan, particularly in the western parts of Afghanistan where Iran has the capacity to make life miserable for us. It would be disruptive of course in terms of the security of oil flowing through the Strait of Hormuz, even if it was kept open by the United States. But still, even then the price of insurance for the flow of oil would dramatically increase.
And there is a further uncertainty involved in that kind of an operation, namely how successful would it be. In fact, in estimates by Israeli experts regarding Israel’s potential to be decisively effective, are pessimistic. And American estimates depend on the scale of the American attack. Even a relatively modest attack by the United States would inflict in any case serious casualties on the Iranians, precipitating the death of a large number of Iranian scientists and probably, in some cases given the location of the facilities, also civilians.
And there is still the unknown factor of what happens if radiation is released as a consequence of these attacks. And that could be a significant factor in terms of civilian casualties, particularly in places that are larger, semi-metropolitan. And of course, some facilities that would be destroyed are located – for example, Isfahan.
All of that, I think makes an attack not a very attractive remedy for dealing with the problem, a problem which then would pale in insignificance compared to the consequences of the attack once the dynamic consequences were set in motion. So I dismiss that as a serious alternative. I think it would be an act of utter irresponsibility and potentially a very significant immorality if the United States was part of it.
A second alternative, not either very good – neither are very good is a campaign of covert subversion – ranging from sabotage through assassinations, maybe even to cyberwarfare – directed at Iran in order to prevent it from acquiring an effective nuclear weapon. I think the result of that is troublesome, not in terms of its immediate outcome because the asymmetry of capabilities between the United States and Iran is so wide that obviously Iran would be much more negatively affected.
But in the longer run, we cannot entirely dismiss the fact that inherent in such a strategy one sets in motion a degradation of the international system, a degradation of the international rules of the game, which could prove, in the longer run, very damaging to American national interests, if one assumes that the United States wishes to be essentially a status-quo power, not one that precipitates massive disruptions of the international order, but has a national interest in consolidating the international order and, indeed, even in expanding its international effectiveness.
So the losses in that sense to American national interests of such a campaign would be significant. And it is not clear that they would necessarily lead to the desired – otherwise desired outcome, namely deprivation of Iran of capability to have a militarily significant nuclear potential. Indeed, implicit perhaps in that second strategy would be an eventual outcome very similar to the first strategy, that the United States would find it necessary, would find itself compelled or driven by others into undertaking option one, but making it even in a more negative context.
The third not desirable option, but perhaps somewhat less immediately destructive, is of course a policy of the continuous imposition of sanctions on Iran that would range from painful to strangulating. That is to say, a policy in which one assumes that at some point Iran would accommodate and accept an outcome which otherwise was not achieved in the process of negotiations.
This is a complicated undertaking because it’s very difficult in that context to clearly distinguish between what sanctions are designed to achieve the nuclear objective, and which ones are designed to achieve other objectives on the grounds of which they were initially imposed. For example, support for Hezbollah and for other so-called terrorist organizations.
In other words, will we be trying to change the behavior of the regime? Would we be trying to force it to comply with our position on the nuclear issue? Or would we be trying to change the regime? Careful discrimination of this context is very difficult to achieve and, hence, it is also very difficult to envisage an outcome in advance that would be clearly productive insofar as the original point of departure for the sanctions is concerned.
And that brings me to the fourth and least – the least objectionable of the bad options, all of that being based on the assumption that we’re not able to achieve our desired outcome by serious negotiations. And that is to combine continued painful, but not strangulating sanctions – and be very careful in that distinction – with clear political support for the emergence of eventual democracy in Iran, an objective with which I think many Iranians would associate themselves.
And at the same time an explicit security guarantee for U.S.-friendly Middle Eastern states, including Israel, modeled on the very successful, decade-lasting protection of our European allies from an overwhelming Soviet nuclear threat, and also modeled on the successful protection of South Korea and Japan from the recently emerged North Korean threat, and perhaps earlier on, implicitly but not explicitly, from possible Chinese intimidation.
We succeeded in that policy over many decades and with good result for all concerned, including the Soviet Union and us, including the Russian people and the American people, and certainly to the benefit of those whom we were protecting. We now know, for example, from secret Soviet war plans, that the Soviets were contemplating, even in the case of the conventional war in which they were moving westward, the use of nuclear weapons against cities.
For example, on the third day of a Soviet offensive, according to Soviet war plans, tactical nuclear weapons, several of them, were designed or were targeted for use against Hamburg – a very large urban center. And there were others in Western Europe, depending on how the offensive was moving forward. All of that was avoided by a policy of deterrence that was credible.
This is then the fourth option, which is not the same as the achievement of our objective, but it is an option which creates a condition which might endure for quite a while, because it is difficult to imagine any Iranian regime embarking on a nuclear adventure if it simply has the bomb. What does that mean, it simply has the bomb? Has it really been tested? Is it already related to delivery system? Does one use it when one has only one? Does one wait until one has 10?
One has to consider in these circumstances the consequences of their use. And given an explicit commitment by an overwhelmingly stronger nuclear power, which has demonstrated a willingness to protect with others with credibility and commitment, I think that at least is some degree of assurance that we are gaining time in a very turbulent setting, in a very turbulent time. And that in itself is an advantage.
This is not an argument for it to be the central focus of our policy. Obviously a negotiated outcome that meets to some extent the principle desires of our negotiating side but doesn’t necessarily humiliate the Iranians and forces them into an unconditional surrender, so to speak, is still preferable.
But short of that, if in fact the negotiations do not succeed in the near term, I think a shift by the United States to a combination of sanctions, but oriented specifically to the promotion of internal democratizing change and at the same time to serve as a deterrent and involves all of our friends in the Middle East, is the best option – or it’s the least objectionable options of the options that have failed otherwise in the achievement of their ultimate objective.