Enough dancing

A diplomatic shuffle on Iran
By Kaveh L Afrasiabi

From Shanghai to Berlin and New York, where United Nations secretary general Ban Ki-moon has intervened by praising Iran's cooperation with the UN's atomic agency while urging Tehran to comply with the demands of the UN Security Council regarding sensitive nuclear work, several diplomatic initiatives are underway. These are aimed to address the Iran nuclear standoff and, given Iran's stated willingness to engage in new nuclear talks, the stage may be set for a mini-breakthrough in this international crisis.

In Shanghai, news from the meeting of the Five plus One - permanent Security Council members China, the United States, Russia, Britain and France plus Germany - confirms the absence of any major development save the parties' commitment to continue their multilateral discussions and hopefully iron out their differences on the content of a new "package of incentives" to Tehran.

On the eve of this meeting, wary of China taking undue credit for any potential breakthrough, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice dampened expectations by stating, "This is not the time, I think, to expect major changes in terms of either incentives or sanctions."

She may have wanted to say "the place" instead of the time, given the US's ambivalence about China's role in the matter. Lest we forget, recently President George W Bush praised Russia's "leadership role in the Iran nuclear issue", and that means Washington is uncomfortable with Beijing sharing that role in light of extensive Iran-China energy and non-energy connections and the complexities of US-China relations.

According to He Yafei, China's assistant foreign minister leading the Shanghai talks, there is an interest in engaging Iran directly in the Five plus One talks and some Iranian pundits have reacted favorably to the idea of an Iran-inclusive Six plus One. Officially, however, Tehran insists on limiting the nuclear talks to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), yet signs of new flexibility suggesting Tehran's willingness to sit at the same table with US officials present can also be discerned.

Meanwhile, the IAEA's director general, Mohammad ElBaradei, has his own sleeves rolled up for the agency's input in the on-going diplomacy, by conferring with German officials in Berlin on the sidelines of an international conference on nuclear fuel.

This is an opportune moment to explore various options, such as Iran's formal proposal for an international consortium to produce nuclear fuel on Iran's soil, which has found as its corollary related proposals, by the Swiss and others, that contemplate a situation in which sensitive nuclear technology kept in a "black box" is shared with Iran. Another proposal, for an international nuclear fuel depot, that could in turn guarantee a steady supply of nuclear fuel to Iran, is a long shot that has little if any chance of being materialized in the near term.

From the vantage point of Tehran, which announced the installation of three new cascades of 164 P-1 centrifuges each on the eve of the Shanghai meeting, Iran's rapid technological advance makes redundant US-led efforts to deprive Iran of nuclear know-how that could be applied to military purposes.

But to do that, Iran would have to reassemble its centrifuges, which would be easily detected by the IAEA, which certified in its February 2008 report that Iran's enrichment is at a low grade of 4% or lower. To be used as the fissile core of a nuclear weapon, the uranium has to be enriched to more than 90% and be produced in large quantities. In other words, minimal proliferation risk is involved as long as the robust IAEA inspections and verifications standards are in place.

To open a caveat, at a recent roundtable on US-Iran relations sponsored by the United Nations Association of the US (UNAUS) in New York, this author raised the issue of "objective guarantees" proposed by Iran to address international anxieties regarding Iran's "nuclear intentions", and that includes the possibility of Iran's re-adoption of the intrusive Additional Protocol of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, as hinted at by Ali Larijani, Iran's former chief nuclear negotiator, in a recent interview with the Iranian media.

UNAUS has been involved in "track II" diplomacy with Iran, by bringing former US officials and diplomats, such as former US envoy to the UN, Thomas Pickering, and Iranian experts and academics together, with the blessing of the US Department of State.

A key advantage of non-official or even semi-official "track II" diplomacy is that it provides a complementary channel of communication between the US and Iran as well as the opportunity for indirect policy input by experts on both sides and, who knows, may be one day prove as a catalyst for the hitherto absent "track I" diplomacy. That is, direct, face-to-face dialogue between the US and Iranian officials - that has transpired for the first time in nearly 30 years over Iraq, under the guise of "trilateral dialogue on Iraq's security".

Per a recent interview of Hassan Kazemi Qomi, Iran's ambassador to Baghdad, the fourth round of US-Iran dialogue on Iraq will happen after the US's ambassador to Iraq, Ryan Crocker, who testified before the US Congress last week, returns to Baghdad.

Clearly, in addition to the "Iraq chessboard", to paraphrase Larijani, the US and Iran are also involved behind a second chessboard, the nuclear one, that affects and is affected by the moves and counter-moves on the first chessboard. This is particularly so if both sides set aside their current hesitations for direct, albeit multilateral, nuclear talks.

An important question, however, is whether or not such a breakthrough is possible when the Iraq chessboard is moving in hostile directions, in light of last week's blistering attacks on Iran by the top US commander in Iraq, General David Petraeus, not to mention President George W Bush's follow-up warning against Iran, suggesting a new White House flirtation with military action against Iran?

The answer, extrapolated from the net of US-Iran common interests in Iraq, is yes, depending on both sides' ability to arrive at a set of agreed-on goals with respect to Iraq's stabilization. Regarding the latter, it is noteworthy that Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, touring Europe this week, singled out not just Iran but also Saudi Arabia, Syria and others for meddling inside Iraq, in sharp contrast to the US, which has simply zeroed in on Iran.

Yet, as far as Iran is concerned, it is in competition with Saudi Arabia and a number of other Arab states for influence in post-Saddam Hussein Iraq, and Tehran is equally unnerved by the US's other "surge", that is, in collaborating with anti-Shi'ite Sunni groups in Iraq, even though this is a Faustian bargain that may well come to haunt US policy-makers when and if the newly-armed Sunnis and the Shi'ites confront each other in a bloody civil war.

The mere possibility of such a nightmare scenario prompts Iran to continue its support of Iraqi Shi'ites, splintered into so many groups and even cells, who distrust the US's intentions and, less so, the ability of the Baghdad government to protect them against a Sunni backlash in the future.

Both the US and some Sunni Iraqi politicians have begun linking Iran and al-Qaeda in Iraq, per an article in the Wall Street Journal, even though there is no evidence to support this. Indeed, there is plenty of obverse evidence, such as vehement denunciation of Shi'ite Iranians deemed "heretical" by al-Qaeda leaders, as well as by the Wahhabi clergy in Saudi Arabia.

But if the US's intention is to hit at Iran's Revolutionary Guards Corps inside Iran, perhaps as a trigger for attacking Iran's nuclear facilities as a follow-up step, such dubious reports of Iran-al-Qaeda connections serve a political and propaganda purposes, just as similar accusations against Saddam played a role in paving the road for the US's invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Misperceptions of the "enemy" have always played a part in instigating wars, and by the look of it, the lame-duck president in the White House is hardly disinclined to resort to them for the sake of another legacy. Hawkish manipulation of US public opinion can be found aplenty these days and, despite reasoned talks for US-Iran dialogue by former US president Jimmy Carter, and a number of other influential US politicians, there remains another threat to world peace in the few remaining months of Bush's presidency.

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. He is a professor of international relations, Bentley College.

(Copyright 2008 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved.)

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