The myth of the EU olive branch
The myth of the EU olive branch
By Kaveh L Afrasiabi
The crisis over Iran's nuclear program unfolding before our eyes is by all accounts one of the most serious challenges facing the 1979 post-revolutionary system in Iran. This crisis is potentially capable of re-isolating Iran in the international community and, thus, exacerbating internal and regional tensions and, even worse, igniting the flares of yet another military confrontation in the turbulent Middle East.
As Tehran rather heroically defies Western will and resumes the initial stages of the nuclear fuel cycle, regardless of strong condemnation by Europe, as well as Russia, the United States and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the country also inevitably braces for the harsh winds of the ramified hurricane blowing in its direction. This is the threat of economic sanctions, capital scare and flight, and the inevitable attrition of foreign trade, at least with Europe, Iran's number one trade partner.
Economically, none of this bodes well for the high-unemployment economy and the agenda of President Mahmud Ahmadinejad, who has made job creation his top priority. Sadly, the stark coincidence of Ahmadinejad's ascendency and the nuclear crisis simply means that the new president will have no choice but to focus on foreign policy, an area completely alien to him since the former mayor of Tehran has no background and no experience in foreign affairs.
Undoubtedly, the Iranian people will stand up to any unreasonable external pressure or threat, as they have repeatedly in the past, but the price for the young and aspiring generation, yearning for steady progress without another setback, as was the case with the generation of the 1980s Iran-Iraq war, may prove to be too much.
Certainly, it is still possible to prevent the degeneration of this crisis into a major one with long-lasting implications, and hopes for a compromised solution have not yet expired.
As the IAEA chief, Mohammad ElBaradei, said on Thursday, there is "still a window of opportunity", despite the IAEA resolution that mandates a September 3 report by ElBaradei on Iran, ie, whether Iran has complied with the IAEA's request for "full suspension of all enrichment-related activities".
The resolution fell considerably short of the US-EU expectation as a direct result of the input by Non-Aligned Movement countries resisting pressure to condemn Iran and to threaten serious reprisals, a half-victory for Iran.
This resolution, while recalling that all nuclear material is accounted for, maintains that the agency is not yet in a position to declare that there are no undeclared nuclear material or activities. And this is echoed by ElBaradei's subsequent statement that the agency cannot yet account for "the whole country". All this brings to mind the sour memories of Iraq, when the UN Security Council and UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, who has rushed to endorse the IAEA's latest resolution on Iran, called on Saddam Hussein to be "proactive" and prove that he did not have nuclear weapons. Thus, the Iranians are now asked to somehow prove that there are no undeclared activities, a harsh demand bound to backfire and cement the Iranian objections to the agency's resolution.
However, as a sign of compromise, at the Wednesday session of the IAEA in Vienna, Iranian representatives assured the agency's governing board that that they would continue to have the activities at the enrichment factories suspended, and that their conversion activities will continue to be under full IAEA verification.
Meanwhile, Ahmadinejad has expressed his government's desire to continue dialogue with Europe and, in his recent telephone conversation with Annan, promised to unveil his own counter-proposal. It remains to be seen what this proposal contains, and one can anticipate it containing a central focus on Iran's "inalienable right" to nuclear technology, which encompasses the right to fabricate nuclear fuel, as admitted to by ElBaradei, whose statement, on August 9, is worth quoting at length:
The flash point, or the main point of contention in that proposal, as I understand, is the right of Iran to maintain fuel cycle activities. This is particularly the enrichment and reprocessing activities. This is an issue which goes much beyond Iran. As you again recall that I have been calling attention to the danger of disseminating fuel cycle activities around the world, because that brings us very close to the capability to develop nuclear weapons and I have been asking for a new framework for managing nuclear energy by which countries would have the right to have nuclear energy to generate electricity and other applications, but not necessarily to move forward on a national basis to have fuel cycle activities. I have been discussing and consulting with many member states to develop what we call assurance of supply scheme by which countries will have reactor technology and the fuel they need and not necessarily sit on enrichment facilities or reprocessing facilities. That could be, may be organized on a region basis or multilateral basis. However, this continues to be the sticking point in the negotiation, but the European offer is made on the assumption that this is an offer to be responded to by Iran.ElBaradei's candid statements, implicitly criticizing the EU-3, Germany, France and Britain, for their rather cavalier attitude in their latest proposal to Iran, cannot be taken lightly, especially given the uniform anti-Iran chorus of the Western press blaming Iran for rejecting the "marvelous" European incentives, including the nuclear ones.
Sadly, there has been little objective reporting, paper or electronic, that has scrutinized the European proposal without the lens of bias. The main newspapers in Europe and the US have sounded in unison with the official interpretation that the "bad" Iranians unreasonably turned down the decent offers of the "good Europeans". But what of the legal basis for Europe's request from Iran to deny to itself a right they themselves enjoy to the fullest? And what is one to make of the broadly vague and indeterminate promises of nuclear and security cooperation?
Per the terms of last year's Paris Agreement, the EU-3 were supposed to provide Iran with "firm commitments" on the various security, economic and technological fronts, and, yet, their "Framework for Cooperation" with Iran is thick on generalities and thin on specifics, falling considerably short of the Iranian expectation.
But, on the other hand, no amount of economic and other incentives could possibly convince Iran to forfeit its right to produce nuclear fuel and, instead, rely on external sources. Anticipating problems with the latter scenario, the European proposal actually contains a rather extensive discussion of the procedure for Iran to follow in the event the promised foreign sources renege and fail to deliver the fuel needed by Iran's reactors. From Iran's vantage point, this of course raises serious concern about the reliability of the present promises by politicians who may be out of office soon, given the precarious state of the European Union right now.
Iran signed the Paris Agreement, viewed as temporary, calling for the suspension of "all uranium-enrichment activities" pending a long-term agreement. Several months later, EU leaders have now presented a proposal to Iran that seeks to make permanent a temporary and confidence-building measure, without one iota of international law behind their request, except their stated "suspicion" of Iran's intentions to build nuclear weapons.
And it is precisely here that Europe is at its weakest and Iran at its strongest position in the current argument, in light of Iran's offer of concrete steps for objective guarantee of the peacefulness of its nuclear activities, involving the expanded role of IAEA inspectors, use of surveillance cameras, etc. Yet, the European negotiators have so far shown no interest whatsoever in pursuing this track. To open a caveat here, at a recent German-Iran roundtable at Berlin's think-tank, Stifflung Fur Wissenschaft und Politik, the top German negotiator even admitted that the EU-3 did not even bother to accept officially Iran's proposal in March. This attitude caused this author to react by saying that if they really respected Iranian negotiators they would have received the proposal and studied it seriously, instead of giving it cursory attention.
The Iranian reaction, that the EU-3 proposal is "insulting", can perhaps be better understood in the context of this background history, where the Iranian negotiators had to endure such blatant manifestations of disrespectful behavior, as if the world has stood still in the late 19th century, eg notice the tone of the proposal's item (33): "Effective long-term cooperation between Iran and the international community in the civil nuclear field along the lines set out in this document will, however, require the continued building of confidence over a significant period." Seeing how "confidence-building" has been used and misused to connote an Iranian "waiting for Godot", this cannot but be interpreted as a European merry-go-round on their nuclear promises to Iran.
Yet another flaw of the European proposal is that instead of giving security assurance, it in fact exacerbates the Iranian anxiety by letting the door open for nuclear attack in response to a conventional attack. The proposal, item 4(a) reads: "The United Kingdom and the French republic would reaffirm to Iran that they will not use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear weapon states parties to the treaty on the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons except in the case of an invasion or any attack on them, their dependent territories, their armed forces or other troops, their allies or on a state toward which they have a security commitment."
Indeed, had the authors of this proposal bothered to put themselves in the position of the recipient of this proposal they would have most likely reconsidered such brazen, aggressive statements meant to steer Iran away from nuclear weapons. Some reassurance. Whatever happened to a categorical rejection of use of nuclear weapons in conventional warfare?
But as ElBaradei presciently stated, this crisis could be a "lose-lose" proposition for both sides if reason and spirit of compromise do not prevail, and one can only hope that the opposite occurs and this turns out to be a prelude for a "win-win" situation. But for this to happen, it will take enormous energy and diplomatic dexterity from all sides, and an important prerequisite is that Iran's strides of the past two years be fully recognized:
But the Iranian initiatives have been either ignored or downgraded in importance by the Western media, which have for the most part obediently followed the official lines of the governments - in London, Paris, Berlin and Washington. It is now amply obvious that with the jolt of Iran's resumption of uranium-processing activities, policy-makers in these capitals can no longer afford to ignore Iran's point of view. In the next round of negotiations in "hot August", the European-hoped-for compromise can potentially be achieved only through a flexible mutual approach by both sides, and on the European side this may mean a wholesale change of attitude toward Iran. Kaveh L Afrasiabi, PhD, is the author of After Khomeini: New Directions in Iran's Foreign Policy (Westview Press) and co-authored "Negotiating Iran's Nuclear Populism", The Brown Journal of World Affairs, Volume X11, issue 2, Summer 2005, with Mustafa Kibaroglu. |
URL: http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/GH13Ak01.html
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