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Posts Tagged ‘Diplomacy’

Peace Brokers or Megalomaniacs

Posted in IAEA, Iran, Switzerland, USA, WikiLeaks, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on December 16, 2010 | Leave a Comment »

Highly ineffectual, well, disingenuous, efforts by U.S. President Barack Obama and his administration of engaging Iran even before its disputed presidential election of June 2009 have been seen for some time with growing concern. Iranians were in fact well advised not to pay too much attention. The recent, long-awaited, talks between UN Security Council member states plus Germany (P+1) and an Iranian delegation in Geneva have failed mainly because of that. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s body language in Bahrain a few days before the Geneva talks, where she happened to ‘meet’ her (meanwhile sacked) counterpart Manouchehr Mottaki from Iran on the occasion of the 2010 International for Strategic Studies Manama Security Dialogue tells indeed volumes about the kaput relationship between the two countries. Of course, Clinton put the blame on Mottaki afterwards.

But has it been different ever since former President G. W. Bush spoke about an axis of evil in his State of the Union address in 2002?  In 2003 it is said that the former Swiss Ambassador in Tehran, Tim Guldimann, had tried to broker what has became infamous in the meantime, a sort of grand bargain between the U.S and Tehran. The so-called Guldimann Memorandum, or “roadmap”, has widely been denounced as fake later-on, in particular by right-wing pundits. And no wonder that apologists, such as Flynt Leverett and his wife Hillary Mann Leverett, like to lament about the missed chance for a general rapprochement between the two enemy parties.

Well, they might even be right in a way. There were, and probably are currently, Swiss diplomatic initiatives which the public has not been aware of unless having been leaked by WikiLeaks this week.  DER SPIEGEL had reported on Monday that the U.S. American Embassy in Bern had increasingly been bothered by Swiss Foreign Minister Micheline Anne-Marie Calmy-Rey’s “activism” as regards a great number of sensitive international issues, the tiny and proud-of-being-neutral Alpine country, which appears as sort of a hole in the map of the European Union, has been considered unlikely to deal with: Libya, Iran, Guantanamo, Polanski, to list only a few.

One respective document, a cable of 8 October 2009, has been posted on WikiLeaks Cable Viewer page only on Tuesday.  More explosive cables may be found here. Accordingly, beginning in the end of 2006, there was another obtrusive diplomatic initiative by the Swiss. Swiss Foreign Ministry State Secretary Michael Ambühl briefed the U.S. Ambassador in Bern after a three-day trip to Tehran in March 2007.  The visit had obviously been encouraged by former Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency Mohamed ElBaradei and has clearly been met with suspicion in Bern’s Embassy. The initiative had apparently been rebuffed by Iran’s former chief nuclear negotiator Ali Larijani. Embassy comments in the cable:

“5.(C) Given ElBaradei’s putative role in the Ambuehl visit to Tehran, we gather that the Swiss initiative echoes ElBaradei’s views, and may have been previously conveyed to Tehran by ElBaradei. While Swiss side efforts give us cause for concern, the fact that Larijani appears to have rebuffed the Swiss could be helpful in convincing fence straddlers in the international community that the Iranians are intransigent.”

Ambühl’s suggested paper reads as follows:

“——————- Text of Swiss Paper ——————-

7.(SBU) Following is the text of the Swiss non-paper passed to Larijani:

Guiding Principles and Mechanism to Relaunch the Negotiations

Step 1: Informal Talks

The parties will hold informal talks in order to agree on the following guiding principles which will serve as a basis to relaunch negotiations:

1. In order to create the necessary confidence:

– Iran will suspend all its enrichment-related activities as required by the UNSC and the IAEA and to be verified by the latter;

– The P5 plus 1 will simultaneously suspend the implementation of the UNSC sanctions and will ensure that the Iranian nuclear issue will not be considered by the UNSC, but that the file will be returned to the IAEA.

The parties will agree on the date of the entry into force of this double suspension, which will last until the end of negotiations in step 2, but no longer than six months unless otherwise agreed.

2. Iran will adopt a policy of maximum transparency in its cooperation with the IAEA. To this end, Iran will present a timetable to the IAEA with a view to resolving all remaining outstanding issues.

3. The P5 plus 1 recognize and affirm Iran’s right to peaceful use of nuclear energy under Article IV of the NPT and in accordance with Articles II and III of the NPT. The modalities ensuring Iran’s access to nuclear energy for peaceful purposes, as well as the timing and modalities of the exercise of certain aspects of this right, namely the sensitive part of the fuel cycle, will be agreed in the negotiations under step 2, in conjunction with the confidence-building measures that need to be undertaken in Iran.

Step 2: Negotiations

As soon as the commitments regarding the double suspension and the time-table are implemented, step 2 begins.

The parties will enter into negotiations in good faith with the aim of achieving a comprehensive settlement (“package”) including nuclear issues and non-nuclear areas, such as economic cooperation, international security, and political dialogue, with a view to streamlining and strengthening cooperation between the P5 plus 1 and Iran.

The three guiding principles and the mechanism for relaunching the negotiations will be incorporated in a joint declaration signed by the P5 plus 1 and Iran.

End text of Swiss paper.”

Neither Ambühl’s trip to Tehran nor his suggested non-paper had been welcomed in Washington in March 2007, when several aircraft carriers had already been deployed to the Persian Gulf and the world in fact expected another war in the Middle East. That was effectively cancelled only eight months later when the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate on Iran came to the conclusion that there was no imminent threat of Iran possessing a nuclear weapon. Still there is no.

 

Last modified December 16, 2010.

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Bullying Iran

Posted in IAEA, Iran, NPT, USA, tagged , , , , , , , on April 11, 2010 | Leave a Comment »

See update below.

When recently presenting the United States’ new nuclear strategy, largely narrowing the potential use of nuclear weapons, two exceptions were explicitly named by President Obama: ‘outliers’ North Korea and Iran. The former had left the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty in 2003, the latter is assumed, at least by western powers, to be in violation of its safeguards obligations. Naming the two countries reiterates G. W. Bush’s infamous 2002 assignment to an ‘axis of evil’ [1]. Apart from “most immediate and extreme dangers”, i.e., nuclear terrorism,

“[T]oday’s other pressing threat is nuclear proliferation. Additional countries – especially those at odds with the United States, its allies and partners, and the broader international community – may acquire nuclear weapons. In pursuit of their nuclear ambitions, North Korea and Iran have violated non-proliferation obligations, defied directives of the United Nations Security Council, pursued missile delivery capabilities, and resisted international efforts to resolve through diplomatic means the crises they have created. Their provocative behavior has increased instability in their regions and could generate pressures in neighboring countries for considering nuclear deterrent options of their own. Continued non-compliance with non-proliferation norms by these and other countries would seriously weaken the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), with adverse security implications for the United States and the international community.” (Emphasis added.)

Among the key conclusions of Obama’s Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) are therefore:

“The United States will continue to strengthen conventional capabilities and reduce the role of nuclear weapons in deterring non-nuclear attacks, with the objective of making deterrence of nuclear attack on the United States or our allies and partners the sole purpose of U.S. nuclear weapons.

“The United States would only consider the use of nuclear weapons in extreme circumstances to defend the vital interests of the United States or its allies and partners.

“The United States will not use or threaten to use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear weapon states that are part to the NPT and in compliance with their nuclear proliferation obligations.”

So, Obama’s targets are named [2].

The long-awaited revision of the highly controversial 2007 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) which had attested Iran of having halted a military nuclear program in 2003 and not resumed by mid-2007 (‘with confidence’) is overdue, probably due to a staffing issue. Or, due to lack of hard evidence that Iran has in fact resumed the program. Or both? Anyway, the next NIE won’t have de-classified parts, just to prevent bothersome lengthy discussions.

Iran has not been invited to next week’s Nuclear Security Summit in Washington when leaders of 46 nations will discuss pertinent issues of nuclear terrorisms and nuclear non-proliferation [3]. It may be speculated that Obama might use the conference to reveal new, so far unknown, details of Iran’s nuclear program, as he did on last September’s G20 summit in Pittsburg when he revealed the existence of a then allegedly unknown new enrichment site near Qum. Tougher sanctions on Iran are also on Obama’s agenda.

Bullying Iran might finally lead to the country’s pull-out of the NPT. Then, eventually, the new NPR would make sense, indeed.

 

Notes

[1] While Iraq has been removed from the list since March 2003 when Operation Iraqi Freedom, recently renamed as New Dawn, commenced, also North Korea has temporarily been relieved in a surprising move by former President G.W. Bush.

[2] In the meantime, Tehran has announced an official complaint to the U.N. over Obama’s nuclear ‘threat’.

[3] Iran’s own conference on nuclear disarmament next Saturday, April 17, promises to become another ridiculous charade. Yesterday’s unveiling of a new generation of enrichment centrifuges at Natanz won’t lead to confidence building either.

 

Update April 14, 2010: Iran’s ambassor to the UN Mohammad Khazaee’s letter to the Security Council has been published and can be found here.

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Calculated Talk

Posted in Iran, USA, tagged , , , , , on March 30, 2010 | 1 Comment »

Washington’s most provocative, well, mouthpiece of the Iranian regime, Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett, had an impressive performance last night in Charlie Rose’s show (who has interviewed the Iranian president Ahmadinejad four three times) at PBS. Flynt Leverett directs the Iran Project at the New America Foundation. He is also a Professor at Pennsylvania State University’s School of International Affairs. His wife Hillary Mann Leverett is presently CEO of STRATEGA, a political risk consultancy. They are right now running the blog The Race for Iran.

Both have a certain reputation, as their host started the talk, which may mainly be based on the fact that, since June 2009, they have vehemently denied that there is hard evidence for electoral fraud after last year’s presidential election (which doesn’t mean, of course, that there is evidence that there wasn’t fraud). Both argue that it was eminently plausible that Ahmadinejad won the election. They’ve got the impression (they had just visited Iran, in particular their friend Mohammad Marandi at Tehran University’s Institute of North American Studies, a couple of weeks ago) that a majority of the population, represented by working class people, lower middle class, the population in rural areas, strongly supports Ahmadinejad, admittedly a populist who has visited every corner of Iran several times but who, they concede on the other hand, is also an extremely polarizing figure. They mainly base their arguments on polls done by three Western organizations before and after the election and one conducted by the University of Tehran (which might be completely irrelevant in a dictatorship for obvious reasons).

As expected, the Leveretts made crystal clear what they believe are eminent American interests regarding the theocratic dictatorship: forget about human rights denial, torture, even killings; or oppression but rather engage with the murderous regime, as Nixon did with China. According to Leverett, there have been “tectonic shifts” in the region over the last ten years, which add up to a situation where the strategic standing and influence of the United States in this critical part of the world is in decline while the Islamic Republic of Iran is able to take advantage. The United States can simply not achieve any of their high priority objectives in the region, i.e., the Arab-Israeli peace making, stabilizing Iraq and Afghanistan and assuring the energy security, without positive and productive relationship with the Islamic Republic of Iran.  

It is becoming common sense nowadays to believe that Ahmadinejad’s threat of Israel being wiped-off the map was a wrong translation (Iranian news agencies have in fact translated his words exactly this way). What Flynt Leverett is doing here, though, is to give this 2005 agitated speech of a populist in front of a crowd an unjustified analytical touch. So, according to Leverett, the Jewish state is doomed basically because of demographics: in a two-state solution “the Palestinian population grows faster than the Jewish population and so over time you’ll basically get a one-state solution and Israel disappears from the pages of history.” One is inclined to hear this twice.  

Ahmadinejad’s denial of the Holocaust, we learn, does in fact hurt Jewish-American Hillary Mann Leverett (but this is, according to her account as a former student in Cairo nothing when comparing it with the rhetoric and acts of former Egyptian president Anwar al Sadat before he made a shift towards a strategic relationship with Israel and the U.S. which finally won him a Nobel Peace Prize) but as her husband tells us, this rhetoric “serves his (Ahmadinejad’s) interest politically not just in Iran but in regionally by being seen as standing up to Israel, by being seen as the great supporter of Hizbollah and Hamas.” Likewise his denial of the Holocaust, so the Leveretts, is calculated talk carefully weighing blank horror in the West against enthusiastic support not only at home but in the Sunni-Arab streets of Saudi Arabia or Egypt.

At least, Flynt Leverett believes in the Holocaust, has read the literature, has visited concentration camps in Europe; has spoken to survivors. It is not hard to find educated Iranians who understand full well what the Holocaust was and what it represented in the history of European Jewry. Alas, “Ahmadinejad is a politician who is making a certain calculation. It is not serving him well in the West; I think he is making a calculation that it does serve some of his interests in other quarters.”

 

Last update March 31, 2010

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Something to Work With

Posted in Iran, NPT, USA, tagged , , , , on September 11, 2009 | Leave a Comment »

Iran’s long-awaited diplomatic proposal (not really a package) to the P5+1 world powers, the US, the UK, France, Germany, Russia, China, has disappointed many. The harshest reactions were coming from the US. American lawmakers may even want to use the five pages as further argument for new and ‘crippling’ sanctions.

The response may be premature. After a difficult situation following the disputed presidential election with unprecedented power struggles within the ruling establishment, which still seem not to be settled, the proposal may be considered a first and quite constructive contribution in preparation of new talks with Iran.

After all, it had to be expected that the issue of Iran enriching uranium (for merely peaceful purposes only, as Tehran continues to pretend) is not mentioned in the document. Rather, a fundamental reform of the UN, its Security Council and the IAEA is claimed. The latter might in fact be overdue. However painful, Tehran might be right when demanding, under para 2.6, “Promoting the universality of NPT (the nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty Iran is a signatory of) mobilizing global resolve and putting into action real and fundamental programmes toward complete disarmament and preventing development and proliferation of nuclear, chemical and microbial weapons.” Desirably, international double standards as regards existing and/or presumed military nuclear programs (Tehran does not explicitly mention Israel in the document, a non-signatory of the NPT possessing a stockpile of possibly 300-400 nuclear weapons) have in fact to come to an end.

That Iran raises security issues first shows that the country takes threats of new sanctions, regime change and, first and foremost, possible attacks of its nuclear facilities serious. Irrespective of a perceived lack of legitimacy of the current cabinet under President Ahmadinejad, the country, as other sovereign states, just demands respect.

That Iran raises eventually economic issues shows its present vulnerability.

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Obama’s Peace Letter to Iran

Posted in Iran, USA, tagged , , , , , , , , on January 30, 2009 | 1 Comment »

To whom should he send it? The main question is not what is said in the letter but whether Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei will convey it to the people of Iran. Obviously, Obama wants to address them in the first place. Although he seem to make clear that regime change is no longer an option, the Iranians should compare their “relatively low standard of living with that of some more prosperous neighbors and contemplate the benefits of losing its pariah status in the west,” as the Guardian wrote yesterday.

But is that the way to win more sympathy for the US (plenty of which is already there)? “Although the tone is conciliatory, it also calls on Iran to end what the US calls state sponsorship of terrorism.” The Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad demands, in the meantime, an apology to the Iranian people for “the crimes they (the US) have committed against us” referring to the CIA coup d’état in 1953 (“Operation Ajax”) when the democratically elected prime minister Mohammad Mosaddeq (the first and last of its kind) had been toppled and the Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi re-instituted.  

He also mentioned the 1988 shooting down of the Iranian passenger Airbus A300 by the US Navy’s guided missile cruiser USS Vincennes over the Persian Gulf. Two-hundred and ninety Iranian passengers died. In contrast to the former (Madeleine Albright in fact apologized for Operation Ajax in 2000), the US never apologized for the latter (although, in 1996, both countries reached “an agreement in full and final settlement of all disputes, differences, claims, counterclaims” relating to the incident at the International Court of Justice. As part of the settlement, the US agreed to pay $61.8 million in compensation for the Iranians killed).

 

It is hoped that Iran is about to apologize as well, for example for its 444 days siege of the US embassy in Tehran which lasted from the 4th of November 1979 to January 20, 1981, the very day of the swearing-in of incoming President Ronald Reagan. It would really help normalizing the relationship between the arch-enemies. The expected festivities (I am afraid, well-organized mass demonstrations) on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of the Islamic Revolution (in February) and later the upcoming presidential election campaign in Iran might prevent mutual gestures of good-will. But we’ll see. 

 

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