Bush
Ensured Iran Offer
Would Be Rejected
By Gareth Porter
23 August, 2
The Inter Press Service
Even before Iran gave its formal
counter-offer to ambassadors of the P5+1 countries (the U.S., Britain,
France, Germany, Russia and China) Tuesday, the George W. Bush administration
had already begun the process of organising sanctions against Iran.
Washington had already held
a conference call on sanctions Sunday with French, German and British
officials, the Washington Post reported.
Thus ends what appeared on
the surface to be a genuine multilateral initiative for negotiations
with Iran on the terms under which it would give up its nuclear programme.
But the history of that P5+1 proposal shows that the Bush administration
was determined from the beginning that it would fail, so that could
bring to a halt a multilateral diplomacy on Iran's nuclear programme
that the hard-liners in the administration had always found a hindrance
to their policy.
Britain, France and Germany,
which had begun negotiations with Tehran on the nuclear issue in October
2003, had concluded very early on that Iran's security concerns would
have to be central to any agreement. It is has been generally forgotten
that the Nov. 14, 2004 Paris Agreement between the EU and Iran included
an assurance by the three European states that the "long-term agreement"
they pledged to reach would "provide...firm commitments on security
issues."
The European three had tried
in vain to get the Bush administration to support their diplomatic efforts
with Tehran by authorising the inclusion of security guarantees in a
proposal they were working on last summer. In a joint press conference
with U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in July 2005, French Foreign
Minister Philippe Douste-Blazy referred to the need to "make sure...that
we discuss with [the Iranians] the security of their country. And for
this, we shall need the United States..."
The European three and the
Bush administration agreed that the P5+1 proposal would demand that
Iran make three concessions to avoid Security Council sanctions and
to begin negotiations on an agreement with positive incentives: the
indefinite suspension of its enrichment programme, agreement to resolve
all the outstanding concerns of the International Atomic Energy Agency
(IAEA), and resumption of full implementation of the Additional Protocol,
which calls for very tight monitoring of all suspected nuclear sites
by the IAEA.
That meant that Tehran would
have to give up its major bargaining chips before the negotiations even
began. The Europeans wanted security guarantees from Washington to be
part of the deal. Douste-Blazy said on May 8 if Iran cooperated, it
could be rewarded with what he called an "ambitious package"
in several economic domains as well as in "the security domain."
The European 3 draft proposal,
which was leaked to ABC News and posted on its website, included a formula
that fell short of an explicit guarantee. However, it did offer "support
for an inter-governmental forum, including countries of the region and
other interested countries, to promote dialogue and cooperation on security
issues in the Persian Gulf, with the aim of establishing regional security
arrangements and a cooperative relationship on regional security arrangements
including guarantees for territorial integrity and political sovereignty."
That convoluted language
suggested there was a way for Iran's security to be guaranteed by the
United States. But the problem was that it was still subject to a U.S.
veto. In any case, as Steven R. Weisman of the New York Times reported
on May 19, the Bush administration rejected any reference to a regional
security framework in which Iran could participate.
Rice denied on Fox News May
21 that the United States was being "asked about security guarantees",
but that was deliberately misleading. As a European diplomat explained
to Reuters on May 20, the only reason the Europeans had not used the
term "security guarantees" in their draft was that "Washington
is against giving Iran assurances that it will not be attacked."
In light of these news reports,
the public comment by Iran's U.N. Ambassador Javad Zarif May 27 is particularly
revealing. Zarif declared that the incentive package "needs to
deal with issues that are fundamental to the resolution" of the
problem. "The solution has to take into consideration Iranian concerns."
Zarif seems to have been
saying that Iran wanted to get something of comparable importance for
giving up its bargaining chips in advance and discussing the renunciation
of enrichment altogether. That statement, which departed from Iran's
usual emphasis on its right to nuclear technology under the Non-Proliferation
Treaty, suggested that Tehran was at least open to the possibility of
a "grand bargain" with Washington such as the one it had outlined
in a secret proposal to the Bush administration in April 2003.
The partners of the United
States in the P5+1 made one more effort to convince Rice to reconsider
the U.S. position at their final meeting in Vienna Jun. 1 to reach agreement
on a proposal. As Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov revealed in
a talk with Russian media the following day, the issue of security guarantees
for Iran was raised by the negotiating partners of the U.S. at that
meeting.
But the Bush administration
again rebuffed the idea of offering positive security incentives to
Iran. In the final text of the proposal, the European scheme for a regional
security system was reduced to an anodyne reference to a "conference
to promote dialogue and cooperation on regional security issues".
The Europeans, Russians and
Chinese knew this outcome doomed the entire exercise to failure. In
the end, only the United States could offer the incentives needed to
make a bargain attractive to Iran. A European official who had been
involved in the discussions was quoted in a Jun. 1 Reuters story as
saying, "We have neither big enough carrots nor big enough sticks
to persuade the Iranians, if they are open to persuasion at all."
Despite the desire of other
members of the P5+1 for a genuine diplomatic offer to Iran that could
possibly lead to an agreement on its nuclear programme, the Bush administration's
intention was just the opposite.
Bush's objective was to free
the administration of the constraint of multilateral diplomacy. The
administration evidently reckoned that, once the Iranians had rejected
the formal offer from the P5+1, it would be free to take whatever actions
it might choose, including a military strike against Iran. Thus the
Jun. 5 proposal, with its implicit contempt for Iran's security interests,
reflected the degree to which the administration has anchored its policy
toward Iran in its option to use force.
As Washington now seeks to
the clear the way for the next phase of its confrontation with Iran,
Bush is framing the issue as one of Iranian defiance of the Security
Council rather than U.S. refusal to deal seriously with a central issue
in the negotiations. "There must consequences if people thumb their
noses at the United Nations Security Council," Bush said Monday.
If the European three, Russia
and China, allow Bush to get away with that highly distorted version
of what happened, the world will have taken another step closer to general
war in the Middle East.
Copyright © 2006 IPS-Inter
Press Service