A
Win, Win, Win Ending For Tehran
By Kaveh L Afrasiabi
11 April, 2007
Asia
Times Online
Even
as Iran basks in worldwide praise for its handling of the crisis over
the 15 British sailors and marines it seized and then released after
two weeks, President Mahmud Ahmadinejad has ensured that the focus stays
on his country by announcing that Iran has the ability to produce enriched
uranium at "industrial scale".
This presses the point that,
technologically speaking, Iran has reached a point of no return and
henceforth the best the West can hope for is to negotiate over the "objective
guarantees" regarding the peaceful use of Iran's nuclear technology.
In a speech at Natanz, Iran's
main nuclear site, Ahmadinejad said on Monday that 3,000 centrifuges
had been installed in an underground facility, allowing Iran "to
produce nuclear fuel on an industrial scale".
Earlier, The Times of London
wrote, "For the first time in his 20- month presidency, Ahmadinejad
made a magnanimous gesture to the West," adding that Iran's president
had achieved a "huge publicity coup" by his decision to free
the 15 captives.
A German leftist daily, Der
Tageszeit, has also written about Iran's "PR coup", suggesting
that British Prime Minister Tony Blair could learn from Ahmadinejad.
Overnight, from constant
vilification, the British and other European media have shifted gears
to praise Iran's "gesture of magnanimity" hailing the "triumph
of diplomacy over force" in causing an abrupt end to the two-week-long
conflict between Iran and Britain.
While we are too close to
this event to draw more than tentative conclusions, with crucial facts
about the behind-the-scenes negotiations between Tehran and London or
the decision-making process inside Iran that culminated in its act of
clemency still to be revealed, this much is clear: from the outset,
this was a crisis of opportunity for Iran, and the trick was not to
get carried away with it, but rather cash in on the immediate gains
for the sake of long-term goals and objectives.
Ahmadinejad's position
stronger
Without doubt, both domestically
and externally, Ahmadinejad's government has been strengthened as a
direct result of this crisis. To many experts, both inside and outside
Iran, the whole episode showed Iran's statecraft at its best, combining
determination, resolve, stamina and deft diplomacy, as a result of which
Iran has managed to get more mileage out of this crisis than could have
been anticipated when the British sailors were seized by Iran's Revolutionary
Guards on March 23.
Tantamount to a new Iranian
"charm offensive", Ahmadinejad's maneuvers are bound to have
significant ripple effects on nearly all facets of Iran's foreign policy,
strengthening its hands in the nuclear standoff, in inter-state relations
in the Persian Gulf, and beyond.
By standing up to a Western
power, Iran has added new potency to its regional clout at a time when
nearly all its Persian Gulf neighbors sheepishly toe the US line. The
symbolic importance of Iran's taking on the British forces goes beyond
the question of who was right or wrong and is empowering Iranians and
their friends in the region.
No matter how Blair seeks
to put a positive face on the "firm and resolute" British
diplomacy, the basic fact is that his government was badly bruised by
an Iranian initiative that set back the Western hegemonic policies in
the Persian Gulf region.
Understandably, certain elements
of the US and European media are putting the opposite spin on "the
lessons", one being how this crisis "tarnished Iran's image".
Such self-serving analyses are blind, however, to how this is played
out in the Arab, Muslim and Third World streets, adopting instead a
Eurocentric interpretation.
As expected, the US media
have been rather tongue-in-cheek, to put it mildly, about the ramifications
of Iran's behavior. A correspondent for ABC (American Broadcasting Co)
News reporting on the release of British service personnel boldly stated,
without bothering to elaborate, that this "deepens suspicions of
Iran's nuclear intentions".
Another US network, on the
other hand, ran a report on how upset the US government has been with
the British conduct in Persian Gulf, questioning why Britain did not
engage the Iranians, and so on. It failed to mention that the British
may have acted wisely by not playing America's game.
At the same time, the US
is keen on taking some credit for the diplomatic breakthrough, with
some White House officials telling the New York Sun that the highest
US officials in the administration of President George W Bush chose
to free an apprehended Iranian diplomat in Baghdad.
Promoting the idea of an
indirect, or rather "soft", quid pro quo, the paper also claims
that Iran's request for a visit to the other Iranians in US custody
in Iraq has been part of the deal. If so, that ought to set a positive
tone for the US-Iran meeting at the Iraq summit scheduled in Istanbul
for this month.
The generally negative inputs
by the US media and government are hardly surprising: the United States'
coercive approach toward Iran is now put on the defensive, seeing how
the British proved that diplomacy can work with Iran, and the US media
and politicians are plainly incapable of giving the devil its due, some
simply accusing Iran of engaging in "theatrics" with the sailors.
Clearly, the US is now in
the danger of appearing as the odd man out, with the likely improvement
of the Iran-European Union climate as a direct result of the happy conclusion
of this crisis. Not only that, Washington may soon discover that its
closest ally in Europe, Britain, is now beholden to the Iranians and
can no longer be counted on to lead the march against Tehran in Europe.
From Iran's strategic perspective, this may be the most important result
of the sailors crisis.
Coinciding with the arrival
of sailors in London was the ominous news that four British soldiers
had been slain in the southern Iraqi city of Basra, reminding the British
public of the exorbitant price it is paying for bandwagoning with the
US Middle East policy and the need for a revised, more balanced approach
that is more European than American. In this regard, Blair's open support
for Israel's disproportionate military response to Hezbollah's raid
last summer still haunts him.
Henceforth, Iran's diplomatic
machinery is likely to telescope the graceful exit from the sailors
crisis to a more nuanced, carefully constructed dialogue with the EU,
to the detriment of US policy that continues to show signs of a built-in
schizophrenia, pushing the arches of conciliation toward Iran simultaneously.
Foreign Minister Manuchehr
Mottaki is a major beneficiary of the crisis too. His ministry has been
on the sidelines of the nuclear talks, but this may change in light
of Mottaki's effective role, equal to that of secretary of the Supreme
National Security Council Ali Larijani (and Iran's chief nuclear negotiator),
in resolving the dispute with London.
On a related note, Turkey
gained a few points too by using its rapport with Iran for a speedy
resolution, and this should be a timely plus in its current bid to join
the EU. Syria also, it turns out, played a constructive role, which
serves to undermine the current US efforts to drive a wedge between
Tehran and Damascus.
Iran and the UN Security
Council
Another potential windfall
of this crisis for Iran may turn out to be with respect the United Nations
sanctions diplomacy vis-a-vis Iran. In his press conference announcing
the release of British sailors, President Ahmadinejad made a point of
trying to put the Security Council on the defensive. His denunciation
did not make it into the US and British coverage, for the most part,
and is worth quoting at length:
Today, no member state can complain against the US and United Kingdom
to the Security Council and expect attention to their complaint ...
the structure of Security Council should be reformed ... according to
the principle of justice, and that is a necessary requirement. Until
then, every state should expect that the rights of their country and
their people will be denied by certain powers at the Security Council
... The Security Council, although it did not satisfy all of [the] British
demands due to the resistance of some independent states, yet without
examining the facts and the key documents passed a resolution. People
of the world ask: Why? The question is, where is the Security Council
going with this trend?
That is, indeed, an apt question that must be probed by the UN community
as to whether or not the unbalanced influence of big powers vividly
seen in the Security Council's above-mentioned instant action may have
gone too far in undermining the very viability of the world organization.
Over the long run, should
the present unhappy trend continue, the developing nations may have
no choice but to set up a parallel global organization that would be
immune from the rather pathetic state of affairs at the Security Council
today.
A fair and impartial Security
Council would not have readily dismissed Iran's complaint that there
had been an intrusion into its territorial waters by the armed forces
of a foreign country. By adopting the British version of facts, subsequently
revised by the British Foreign Office itself, reflected in Foreign Secretary
Margaret Beckett's "regret" in her interview with Iranian
television last week, the Security Council made a mockery of itself
and its pretension to rule of international law.
It is noteworthy that several
of the British sailors, while in Iran's custody, freely admitted that
they were trespassing in Iranian waters, and their admission would have
counted in any court of law, irrespective of the unpleasantness of the
video footage. Had this case been examined in an international legal
forum, the sailors' admission would have weighed heavily in a final
verdict.
But in today's Western-dominated
hierarchical global system, very rarely do the world's underdogs win
their day when contesting the world's powers that be, and this crisis
represents an exception that is bound to make the Western powers redouble
their efforts to make sure it does not happen again.
Still, no matter how the
anti-Iran spin doctors in the Western media twist the lessons of this
crisis in their favor, the fact remains that the UN Security Council
has been delivered a black eye over its rush to judgment against Iran,
and this is bound to backfire on the US-UK-led campaign at the council
for the next round of UN action against Iran.
On the contrary, with the
fissures of a new US-EU split on Iran somewhat inevitable as a result
of the successful conclusion of the sailors crisis, and London facing
great new constraints on its hitherto unreconstructed bandwagoning with
the US, chances are that the wind has been taken out of the UN's sails
in regard to sanctions on Iran. This depends, of course, on Iran's ability
to demonstrate the necessary acumen in terms of new flexibility in nuclear
talks with the Europeans in the coming days and weeks.
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.
Copyright 2007 Asia Times
Online Ltd.
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