Iran: Nervous Nuclearisation

WASHINGTON: Iran may have slipped up in its secret effort to acquire nuclear weapon capabilities. TheInternational Atomic Energy Agency alleges that Iran failed to follow proper procedures when it imported andperhaps processed uranium from China. The U.S. hopes that the ensuing crisis atmosphere will become unbearablefor the Iranian government. Yet crisis and pressure do not a strategy make. If the aim is to persuade Iran toabandon interest in acquiring nuclear weapons, Washington will need a strategy to convince Iraniannationalists that their country will gain security, respect, and a prominent role in post-war politics in thePersian Gulf.

Washington long has suspected that Iran's ostensibly civilian nuclear program really is a cover for bombmaking. The recent public discovery of a major uranium-enrichment plant in Natanz has led to allegations thatIran must secretly have done pilot-scale testing of relevant equipment at a different, unknown facility. (See"Iran's Secret Quest for the Bomb") This would violate technical notification rules under theNuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. The U.S. is pushing the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna to presscharges against Iran later this month.

The answer to the Iranian nuclear challenge is in Iraq, not Vienna. The 125,000 troops in Iraq andPresident Bush's tough-minded leadership have made Iran's leaders nervous enough to look for accommodationswith Washington. But the list of American demands is long. The Iranian government worries that even if itbegins to meet these demands the Bush Administration will try to overthrow it eventually anyway. So, "whydeal?", Iranians ask.

This is where the Iraq answer comes in. Now that the Saddam regime is gone, President Bush should seize theopportunity to convince Iran that it doesn't need nuclear weapons. Iraq was the gravest threat to Iran,followed by the U.S. and Israel. The U.S. helped Iran immensely by removing the Iraq threat and theanti-Iranian Taliban from power in Afghanistan. The administration should convince the Iranians that we canwork with them -that Iran will not be a target of Israeli or U.S. military attack if it does not acquireweapons of mass destruction and threaten Israel's existence.

Iranian Defense Minister Ali Shamkhani seemed to recognize this logic in a February 2002 statement:"The existence of nuclear weapons will turn us into a threat to others that could be exploited in adangerous way to harm our relations with the countries of the region." 1 The U.S. pronouncements willreinforce this intimidating idea, but the US also need to convince Iranians of the positive flip side of nothaving those weapons. This can be done through well-coordinated steps at both regional and bilateral level.Over the long run, the only way to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons is to persuade Iraniannationalists -hardliners and democrats alike -that Iran does not need these weapons either for security orprestige. A regional security conference could help on both counts.

Right now the U.S. keeps Iran on the margins of its own region -the Persian Gulf -because Tehran's radicalssupport some regional terrorist organizations, undermine Israeli-Palestinian dialogue, and seek to acquirenuclear weapons. As a first step, the U.S., Iran, and other Persian Gulf states should be convened in aregional dialogue on the post-war future of the Persian Gulf region. Recognizing Iran's respect for the UnitedNations and its refusal to kowtow to Washington, the U.S. should quietly encourage Kofi Annan to call for sucha dialogue. (The U.S. says it welcomes a UN role in the region; the dialogue suggested here is appropriate).The dialogue should aim to initiate a diplomatic process for devising principles, rules andconfidence-building measures to structure security relations among Iraq, Iran, all the smaller regionalstates, and the U.S.

Still, Iran's fluid nationalist politics are as difficult to handle as nitroglycerine. The U.S. mustsqueeze Iran (and its suppliers) enough to block Iran's acquisition of nuclear weapon capabilities withoutshaking so hard that Iranian nationalists explode and say, essentially, "yes, we withdraw from the NPT,and you cannot stop us." Once that happens, Iranian nationalism will attach to the bomb, and the chancesof persuading Iranians to give it up will become nil. Many Iranian democrats, it should be remembered, are asattracted to the bomb as the ayatollahs are.

Unfortunately, Washington's policies inflame Iranian nationalism. Nothing fuels nationalism like resistanceto public diktat by arrogant, perhaps hypocritical outsiders. As the pre-revolutionary finance minister,Jahangir Amuzegar, noted recently, many Iranians took the "axis of evil" harangue "as a deepinsult to their national dignity... Any U.S. strategy that even remotely raises the specter of foreigninterference in Iran is doomed to fail." 2 Many moderate Iranian nationalists who oppose the hard lineclerics would argue that if Israel, the arch-enemy of Iran, can have a large nuclear arsenal, other neighborswill want to have it too. De-nuclearizing the whole region is the best way to prevent an Iranian quest for thebomb, they say.

In other words, Israel's nuclear and chemical weapons have to be brought into the picture, too. Secretaryof State Colin Powell recently said, "It has always been a United States goal that conditions could becreated in this part of the world where no nation would have a need for any weapons of mass destruction."This is necessarily a fairly long-term project but the US should start begin addressing the issue.

Iranians also need to see that they will gain from ending activities that now isolate them internationally.The hardliners who now control nuclear policy oppose direct negotiations with the U.S. and integration intothe global economy. The conservative bazaar interests and rich religious "foundations" don't wanteconomic competition. They largely prevent reformers from engaging with the U.S. A cunning U.S. policy - asopposed to an ineffective but moralistically pure one -would make an offer that no Iranian faction can refuse.Giving hardliners no realistic choice but to do business with the U.S. would unfreeze official relations withIran and give reformers operating space.

The simplest first step would be for the U.S. to drop its objection to Iran's joining the World TradeOrganization. Prospective WTO membership would give progressives a lever to push reforms necessary to satisfyWTO terms and integrate Iran more deeply into the international political economy.

Going further, the U.S. should unilaterally lift economic sanctions that impede development of oil andnatural gas flows to Pakistan and India. Iran can be a wellhead source and/or a cost-effective pipeline routeto bring natural gas through Pakistan to energy-starved India. The gravest challenge is to overcome Indo-Pakenmity and India's concerns about security of supply transiting through Pakistan. The U.S. could promote vitaleconomic and security objectives in the Indo-Pak relationship by facilitating with Iran the development of anatural gas pipeline from or through Iran to India

Because of the cross-hatched organization of power and authority in Iran, Washington should convey to thehead of each important political institution that the U.S. is determined not to be the obstacle to Iran'sintegration into world civilization. Each of these overtures should be communicated directly to the SupremeLeader Ayatollah Khamene'i, the chairman of the Expediency Council, Rafsanjani, President Khatami, and thespeaker of the Majlis. The strategy is to give hardliners an unrefusable opportunity to satisfy the Iranianpublic's desire for relations with the U.S.

The U.S. and its friends should use every possible means to block nuclear weapon-related supplies cominginto Iran. But ultimately the solution to the proliferation problem likes in persuading Iranians - reformersand hardliners alike -that they do not need nuclear weapons and will be better off without them.

References:
1 Oliver Burkeman, The Guardian, Feb. 6, 2002.
2 Jahangir Amuzegar, "Iran's Crumbling Revolution," Foreign Affairs, January/February 2003,p. 46

George Perkovich is vice president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment forInternational Peace, and author of India's Nuclear Bomb and other studies on nuclearproliferation in Iran, Pakistan, and India. Rights:© Copyright 2003 Yale Center for the Study ofGlobalization, where this appeared first.