DUBAI — The overall security situation in the Middle East has become so complex in recent years that it is difficult to pinpoint the most dangerous single situation, country or political relationship. The candidates are plentiful, including Israeli-Palestinian ties, wider Arab-Israeli relations, the American-led pressures on Syria, trends within Lebanon, conditions inside Iraq, terrorism everywhere, Iran under its newly elected hard-line president, stability in Saudi Arabia, and potential regional tensions emanating from Kurdish northern Iraq.
My sense, however, after participating in two conferences on security in the Gulf region in Doha and Dubai in the past week, is that the bilateral relationship between the United States and Iran is probably the single most dangerous dynamic in the region. Conversely, forging stable, normal and peaceful American-Iranian ties may be the most important immediate contribution to long-term security, stability and prosperity in the Gulf region and the Middle East as a whole.
The flashpoint now in American-Iranian ties is the dispute over Iran’s nuclear aims and capabilities, which demands greater diplomatic efforts by all concerned. Fortunately, the three European powers of France, Britain and Germany are deeply engaged in negotiating an arrangement that would allow Iran to complete its plans for a nuclear power industry while also assuaging Western fears that Iran would clandestinely divert some of the fuel from its power plants to create nuclear weapons.
I’ve had the pleasure in the past week to discuss this matter with some of the key European and Iranian officials who have been actively negotiating this matter, and there are reasons to be hopeful that the issue is resolvable. We now have a pretty good idea of the core impediments and concerns on both sides, which include both technical and political issues, and the negotiators are steadily generating new compromise proposals to meet those concerns. The United States, the 800 pound gorilla in the room that is so central to this matter but is only indirectly involved in the discussions, seems to have recognized the need to adopt a more patient and less bellicose attitude toward Iran, in public at least, so that the ongoing discussions might have a chance to succeed.
The technical issues are complex enough on their own, but are resolvable if the political issues are addressed simultaneously, and these boil down essentially to a question of mutual trust. The U.S. and the West in general do not trust Iran’s declared aim of only generating electricity from its nuclear plants, given that Iran over a period of 18 years had not declared all the components of its nuclear facilities and procurements. Combined with Western accusations of Iranian involvement in terrorism during that period, this makes it impossible for the West to accept Iran’s pledges that all its facilities will be put under permanent inspection by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
Iran for its part is supremely bitter about the duplicity that it suffered at the hands of the West, when its 1975 contracts to purchase a nuclear power plant from Germany and the relevant fuel from France were not honored — due to U.S. pressure, it says — after the Iranian revolution that overthrew the Shah in 1979. Iranians have many good reasons to feel vulnerable, and therefore to demand confidence-building measures from the West, in return for their moves to build trust. Tehran is surrounded by American troops and NATO bases in all directions, with large contingents in Afghanistan and Iraq. It feels the world left it to suffer on its own when Iraq attacked it in 1980 and also used chemical weapons against its troops.
It feels that its peaceful intentions are manifested in its signing the nuclear non-proliferation treaty (NPT) and allowing the IAEA to undertake 12,000 person-days of inspections in the past ten years, including permanent inspectors at its Isfahan plant. Tehran sees only further hypocrisy and neo-colonial double standards in the Western demand that it should compromise and show transparency now, after the West did not honor contracts and placed it under assorted embargoes for the past 20 years.
These issues of trust underpin the complex technical issues. The negotiators and other officials on both sides continue to craft possible compromise solutions that bring their positions closer together, now also with Russian suggestions and a role in providing and reprocessing fuel. These compromise possibilities include third party states providing and reprocessing fuel, objective guarantees on IAEA inspections, allowing Iran to have a small pilot plant that includes a full fuel cycle under strict IAEA supervision, and timelines of a decade or more during which Iran would momentarily forego some of its rights under the NPT, mutual trust would be reestablished, and some of the strict restrictions on Iran’s nuclear fuel cycle would be eased.
It is unlikely that a breakthrough will happen soon under the policies of the hard-line new Iranian team under recently elected President Ahmadinejad. It could occur in the coming year, though, due to mounting international pressure, the ongoing political reconfiguration inside Iran, and a more urgent American need to come to terms with Iran in order to allow the U.S. to withdraw from Iraq and leave behind a stable country.
Most of the core issues at play are political, not technical. They are about American policies in the Middle East as a whole, and Iran’s sense of dignity and sovereignty. They are also about mutual trust and mistrust, emanating from actual policies by both sides rather than any imagined sense of the other’s sinister aims. A healthy, non-belligerent Iranian-American bilateral relationship is crucial for resolving or tempering many other conflicts and tensions in the Middle East, as well as for global stability and non-proliferation.
Washington seems to understand this better these days, to its credit, as the Europeans and Russians prudently press ahead with new ideas on the technical negotiations with Iran. Iran has much to gain from a successful negotiation, not least of which would be its natural role as the major power in the Gulf region, but a peace-loving power that would not strike the kinds of concerns that it does now among its Arab neighbors or foreign lands further afield.
Rami G. Khouri is editor-at-large of the Beirut-based Daily Star newspaper, published throughout the Middle East with the International Herald Tribune.
Copyright ©2005 Rami G. Khouri
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Released: 07 December 2005
Word Count: 1,019
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