Hard choices for Iran in 2010


By Kaveh L Afrasiabi
Asia Times
Dec 24, 2009


What will 2010 bring to the stalemated United States-Iran relations? Continuing stalemate, a worsening relationship marked with greater sanctions and punitive measures slated for the Islamic Republic of Iran or, on the other hand, a gradual improvement and perhaps even some breakthrough on the nuclear front occupying the center stage in the current diplomacy between the two nations?

Undoubtedly, these are important questions not only for the US and Iran, but also for Iran's troubled neighbors, above all Iraq and Afghanistan, the entire Middle East region and, indeed, the international community, all of which have a vested interest in issues of war and peace raised by Iran's nuclear standoff.

As we approach 2010, in light of the United Nations Security Council's decision to address the Iran nuclear issue in mid-January because of Tehran's rejection of various council resolutions demanding a suspension of its uranium-enrichment program, the prospect of tougher UN sanctions as well as other unilateral and multilateral (ie, European Union) sanctions now weighs heavy on the horizon.

In this scenario, Russia and China would go along with more UN sanctions, just as they have in the past; more recently, they have also backed an International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) resolution that censured Iran over its second enrichment facility near Qom. What will the new UN sanctions consist of?

No one at the UN secretariat in New York seems sure about the answer, and one source tells this author that it will definitely fall short of what hawkish US politicians and media pundits are pushing for, namely, sanctioning Iran's petroleum product imports.
According to the UN source, who wishes to remain anonymous, the concern is that if there are "too many teeth" in UN sanctions that would "hurt average Iranians", it "may backfire".

This is a realistic concern, particularly since Iran has the solid backing of many UN member states that are involved in the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM). A NAM official in New York, also wishing to remain anonymous, tells this author that the 118-member NAM has "supported Iran in blind faith" by accepting Iran's declarations about its peaceful program and since Tehran is taking over the leadership of NAM in 2012, it is vitally important for it to keep its promises to the NAM community.

"If Tehran goes nuclear despite its pledges to NAM, then the whole movement will lose face in the international community," said the source.

Therefore, Tehran's politicians should be careful to avoid any future headache in terms of their standing in the NAM movement. With India having for all purposes shed its NAM identity, member countries now look to Iran and a few other countries for global leadership. After all, didn't the late French philosopher, Michel Faucault, once describe the Iranian revolution as a "great refusal" that aimed to remove the shackle "that bears heavy on all of us"?

The connection between Iran and NAM on the one hand and the nuclear standoff on the other raises important questions about Iran's foreign policy orientation that is geared less toward a regional role and more and more toward a global role, so much so that according to a veteran Iranian diplomat, speaking on the condition of anonymity, "Iran actually has no regional strategy, only a global strategy." Astonishing as this may sound, there is a grain of truth about it, reflected in the small but profound fact that nowadays President Mahmud Ahmadinejad is seen spending more time touring Latin American capitals than those in Iran's vicinity.

The Iranian diplomat relayed the story of how the late ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini rejected the request by his commanders to allow Iran's use of chemical weapons in retaliation against the Iraqis who were using them on the Iran-Iraq war fronts, insisting that Iran operated by higher standards, even if the price was high.

So why is Iran concentrating its efforts globally when it should be - logically speaking, based on its net contribution to the global economy - thinking regionally? The Iranian diplomat said it's due to the dynamism of Iran's historical revolution and the fact that Tehran has a long history of empire-building. However, the Iranian diplomat was quick to elaborate that Iran's intention was not join the "world empires" but rather to "transform the world toward a more just order". In other words, it is an inherent logic of the post-revolutionary state to resist the unjust global hierarchy and join other nations seeking to restructure it along "equitable lines". Those lines cover economic, political, military and geostrategic considerations, including nuclear arms races and disarmament.

Concerning the latter, and contrary to all the Western and Israeli hype about Iran's "nuclear ambitions", which often cite proliferation pressures in Iran's neighborhood, a problem with such analyses is that they assume that Iran by definition has a regional strategy or that it feels pressured by Pakistan and Israel's nuclear-weapons moves.

For sure, the fact that two new nation-states, Pakistan and Israel, have bombs, while the ancient Iran does not, does not sit well with some Iranians, who argue that Iran requires a nuclear shield to defend against American and other Western threats posed by their military presence in Iran's vicinity.

However, these arguments are not very compelling since (a) Iran feels very little pressure by Pakistani proliferation that is entirely consumed by fear of India and (b) Israel is "out of area" and focused on its Arab enemies, not Iran, as a result of which an Iranian attempt to acquire nuclear weapons would only engulf Iran deeper in the Arab-Israeli conflict, to the detriment of Iran's national interests.

But, for a political system that has a generic globalist prism, the real importance of Iran's "nuclear ambition" rests on the multiple effects it has on the global nuclear arms race and the hitherto-absent disarmament, and this is precisely where a "quasi-nuclear" Iranian power can make genuine contributions to both the non-aligned movement in specific and global politics in general, by frustrating all the hype and expectations about a "nuclear-armed Iran", simply by using the leverage of this threat to highlight the importance of a concerted global effort toward disarmament.

This would be tantamount to a delicate balancing act whereby Iran would no longer act as a nation-state but a global leader at the front row of the Non-Aligned Movement, pressuring the nuclear-weapons states to take serious and drastic steps toward disarmament or face the prospect of more nuclear weapons states.

In fulfilling this enormously difficult role, Iran would have to consistently fall short of giving the West what it desperately needs, a full, 100% guarantee about Iran's peaceful intentions. Yet, to provide this firm guarantee is tantamount to depriving Iran, as well as NAM, of key leverage in the area of total global disarmament. Rather, the trick is to thread the "politics of borderlines" that would enable Iran to have a strong voice in the disarmament debates, both individually and as a NAM spokesman, in international forums, since Iran's status has now been elevated to "nuclear capableâ€