High Stakes for Upcoming Nuclear Negotiations With Iran
Negotiations between Iran and the P5+1 – the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) plus Germany – will resume in Istanbul, Turkey, on Jan. 21. Although Turkey, which together with Brazil signed an agreement with Iran last May to store a significant portion of Iran’s stockpile of low-enriched uranium (LEU) on its soil to be safeguarded there by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), will host the meeting, it will not be a partner to the negotiations.
In an interview with the BBC in December Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said, “They [Iranians] can enrich uranium at some future date once they have demonstrated that they can do so in a responsible manner in accordance with international obligations,” implying that the United States has finally accepted the inevitability of Iran enriching uranium on its oil. But the main goal of the U.S., namely, the suspension and eventual elimination of Iran’s uranium enrichment program, does not seem to have changed. Thus, insisting on this goal and continuing to pursue it will only doom the upcoming negotiations.
The negotiations are to be resumed at an unusually opportune time. Domestically, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s government is under tremendous pressure. Economically, its performance has been dismal. Iran’s annual rate of economic growth is so embarrassingly low – less than 1 percent – that it has been treated as a state secret. With the elimination of government subsidies for major commodities, ranging from gasoline, water, electricity, and fuel to wheat and rice, the price of practically everything has been skyrocketing. Most analysts predict that the huge inflationary pressure may lead to political unrest by this summer. The sanctions imposed by the UNSC and by the U.S. and its allies have also been biting.
Corruption has been rampant, and even Ahmadinejad’s first vice president (Iran has eight), Mohammad Reza Rahimi, has been implicated in a major corruption case. In addition to the opposition Green Movement, many in the conservative/hard-line camp have been criticizing Ahmadinejad, leading him to fire many of his advisers and attack his opponents.
Politically, repression of the opposition has continued unabated. Many activists, including university students, attorneys who defend political prisoners, defenders of human rights, and journalists have been detained and given long jail sentences after show trials. At the same time, the behind-the-scenes power struggle between Ahmadinejad and Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has continued and has been heating up.
Under such conditions, Ahmadinejad and his inner circle appear to be eager to reach a compromise with the United States over Iran’s uranium enrichment program. After getting reelected in what many consider a fraudulent election in June 2009 that gave rise to the opposition Green Movement and took the nation into a deep crisis from which it has yet to recover, Ahmadinejad sees the possible agreement as a way of gaining some credibility with a segment of the population and lessening the impact of the economic sanctions imposed on Iran.
It was Ahmadinejad’s close aide and Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili who negotiated the preliminary agreement in October 2009 with the IAEA, the U.S., and France for swapping a major portion of Iran’s LEU with fuel for Tehran’s research reactor, which provides medical isotopes for 850,000 patients annually. Although the agreement was first blocked by Ayatollah Khamenei, it eventually resulted in the tripartite agreement with Turkey and Brazil, which the U.S. rejected.
But the appointment of Ali Akbar Salehi, head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI), as the interim foreign minister is a clear signal by Ahmadinejad that he wants to reach an agreement with the United States and its allies. Although he fired former Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki as part of his power struggle with Khamenei, and even though Ahmadinejad and Jalili are close, the appointment of Salehi is very telling. Credible reports in August 2009 indicated that Jalili was Ahmadinejad’s first choice as the foreign minister for his second administration, but his appointment was blocked by Khamenei.
Salehi, the moderate, MIT-educated head of the AEOI, knows every detail of Iran’s nuclear program. He has stayed out of the political chaos that has engulfed Iran for the past several years. At the same time, there was no indication that Salehi was politically close to the hardliners and Ahmadinejad or that he has any political ambitions of his own. An academic source in Tehran told me that Salehi has said privately that he accepted the appointment because he wants to get Iran out of the current impasse with the West. Therefore, Salehi can negotiate with the P5+1 from a position of knowledge and authority.
Internationally, the conditions are ripe for reaching an agreement with Iran. Stuxnet, the computer virus presumably designed jointly by Israel and the U.S., has inflicted serious damage on Iran’s uranium enrichment facility in Natanz, putting out of commission at least one-fifth, and possibly a much larger fraction, of Iran’s centrifuges. The damage has been so severe that it prompted Meir Dagan, who recently ended his tenure as the chief of Israel’s Mossad, to declare that Iran will not be able to make a nuclear bomb before 2015, even though there has been no evidence that Iran has a secret nuclear weapons program to begin with. This is a stunning admission by the head of the intelligence agency of a state that has been making dire predictions over the past 25 years about Iran acquiring nuclear weapons. Thus, even the bogus urgency with which Iran’s nuclear program has always been debated has dissipated.
If by imposing sanctions on Iran and pressuring others to impose their own set of sanctions the U.S. hopes that the consensus within Iran regarding its nuclear program will develop fissures, it could not be more wrong. All of Iran’s political factions, from the hardliners to pragmatic conservatives to the leaders of the opposition Green Movement agree on Iran’s fundamental right to enrich uranium in the framework of Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and Iran’s Safeguards Agreement with the IAEA.
When the Geneva agreement for a fuel swap was reached in October 2009, Mir Hossein Mousavi, the main opposition leader, called the agreement “astonishing.” In other words, Mousavi was opposed to even the fuel swap, let alone giving up Iran’s rights under the NPT. In fact, it was during Mousavi’s premiership in the 1980s that Iran’s nuclear program was restarted, and he was a leading proponent of it. The difference between the opposition Green Movement and Ahmadinejad’s approach to foreign policy, and in particular Iran’s nuclear program, is that the former advocates a rational policy devoid of rhetoric and bombastic proclamations of the type used by Ahmadinejad, but based on two principles: protecting Iran’s true national interests through a constructive policy based on dialogue, and taking away any excuse from the warmongers and the Israel lobby in the U.S. for advocating military attacks and tough economic sanctions against Iran.
Writing on the foreign policy that the opposition Green Movement must advocate, Rajabali Mazrooei, an important reformist figure, put it the following way: “A principle of the policy must be Iran’s right to develop and have access to the technology for peaceful use of nuclear energy, within the framework of international laws and treaties. The right to the technology for nuclear energy must not supersede other national rights, and in particular the fundamental rights of the citizens. The Green Movement must oppose any military attacks on Iran’s territory.”
It is also clear that Iran must also make major concessions in order to make an agreement possible. Chief among them is ratifying and implementing the provisions of the Additional Protocol of the Safeguards Agreement, which would give the IAEA the authority for intrusive inspections and monitoring of Iran’s nuclear program. Iran did implement the Protocol, on a volunteer basis, from October 2003 to February 2006. The agreement for swapping Iran’s LEU with fuel for reactors can also be used as a basis for future swaps. Thus, the basis for a comprehensive agreement already exists. If such an agreement is reached, not only will the world benefit, but so will the Iranian people.
Iran’s democratic movement is strongly against any sanctions or military threats. The West should negotiate with Iran in good faith, stop making threats against it, and recognize its rights under the NPT. The West must remind the Ahmadinejad administration that, just as it correctly proclaims Iran’s rights under the NPT, it must also abide by its obligations under the international human rights agreements it has signed. Iranian hardliners have proven to be vulnerable to international pressure when it comes to their violations of human rights.
Only when Iran is not under the threat of foreign powers, and its rulers are held accountable by the international community for their mistreatment of the Iranian people, will it be able to realize its immense potential for becoming a model of democracy in the Middle East. To achieve this, the West should not do anything to divert attention from the catastrophic failures of the Ahmadinejad government.
Read more by Muhammad Sahimi
- Israel’s ‘Dove’ and Hawk in its War against Iran – April 21st, 2013
- David Albright and Company Call for Intensifying War on the Iranian People – January 18th, 2013
- AP, George Jahn, and the Fake Diagram for Iran’s Bomb – November 29th, 2012
- Sanctions Will Kill Tens of Thousands of Iranians – August 8th, 2012
- Don’t Remove the MEK From the Terrorist List – July 5th, 2011
epppie
January 18th, 2011 at 10:14 pm
What an amazing article this truly is. The writer claims to oppose sanctions and threats of war and actual attacks on Iran, after having spent most of the article singing hallelujah to the claimed fact that sanctions and threats have nearly brought Iran to its knees (or, in the language of the writer, interestingly similar to the language of US government persecutors of Iran, they have 'created an optimal environment for diplomacy'). Meanwhile the writer berates the government of Iran for economic conditions largely caused by the same sanctions he praises, while pretending to oppose.
Ever notice how, when you listen to an Iranian 'green' speak, it's a lot like listening to an Obamian liberal? I mean, how lovely it all sounds, with all the talk of 'democracy' and peace and 'freedom'; but what they are really saying is that they just can't wait to bow down to the Hegemon.
UNF
January 20th, 2011 at 12:53 am
Yes, it reads as if written by a political schizophrenic who has roughly sausage-skinned the press releases from two opposing camps into one article.
Of course, the leanings of this loon are fairly clear, as only a morally bankrupt Bushist thug could describe the systematic blackmail, coercion and naked military threats of Imperialist U$A on the Iran issue as 'diplomacy' ~ obviously of the very same type that so dexterously managed to shoehorn the last warcriminal outburst of SandMenschen slaughtering into ugly reality.
While his breathless enthusiasm over the supposedly tottering and conflicted Iranian government is an amusing example of wishful thinking, he fails to provide any empirical reason why Iran should make any compromise on its NPT rights or accept NATO spies in IAEA garb mapping out its military installations and personnel for efficient elimination.
Naturally, the only possible coherent reason, which this passive-aggressive peacenik studiously avoids spelling out, would be to avoid an imminent unprovoked military aggression from U$A. However, Iran, while prudently preparing its defense forces to deter and counter any deranged enemy action, is daily exposing this illegal threat, and the ludicrous pretext behind which it lurks [CIA-planted laptop forgeries], to be as hollow as Bush's skullbone ~ and doing so by actual, honest and effective diplomacy, which triply shows up the contrasted U$An Mafiosi.
The Yanki-bully's bluff has been called on several levels – put up [some true evidence] or shut up – and this most instructive lesson is not lost on those who aspire to join the FreeWorld. [i.e. the one free from bowing to 'western' diktat.]
And after having had his snout so neatly serrated by the Resistance in Iraq, while still bleeding from the ass in Afghanistan, the Imperial Swine is now rather more cautious to avoid being gutted alive in another neighborhood truffle-trap.
All of which leads me to believe the full-frontal Iran war so heartily lusted after by our Likudnik 'Human Rights'-apostles is an 'option' that was effectively removed by the Pentadults from Bush's playpen table around 2006, as the Iranian government is perfectly well aware.
All the hot air since then on the subject has been pure bluff, now exposed as the mendacious effrontery so typical from desperate, decaying U$A.
Unity + Victory to the Resistance!
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