June 7, 2012 8:32 pm
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The madness of attacking an unknown enemy
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By Philip Stephens
©Ingram PinnForget for a moment well-rehearsed arguments about enrichment, the non-proliferation treaty, UN sanctions and military strikes, the stand-off with Iran over its nuclear ambitions needs a wider focus. The present regime in Tehran believes it will be safer with the bomb. Unless negotiations can change that calculus they are doomed to failure.
Recent months have seen two rounds of talks between Iran and representatives of the self-styled world powers – the US, China, France, Britain, Germany, Russia and the European Union. After an initial glimmer of optimism, a more familiar gloom has descended. Few hold out great hopes for the third meeting later this month in Moscow.
What is surprising perhaps is that anyone should be surprised by the lack of progress. For all the diplomatic ingenuity invested, locating trade-offs between suspension of uranium enrichment and an easing of sanctions, the big question has gone unaddressed.
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This is the one about security – for Iran, its neighbours and the international community. A nuclear deal is possible only as part of a grand bargain between Iran and the US.
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Two encounters this year stick in my mind. One was a conversation with a senior figure in the intelligence community. After the ritual review of the Iranian programme – spinning centrifuges, Stuxnet sabotage and pre-emptive Israeli strikes and the like – the talk turned to Tehran’s motives.
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Most western governments are as certain as they can be that Iran wants to become what is known as a nuclear threshold state. They are unpersuaded it has taken a decision actually to build a bomb. The most important thing to understand, my interlocutor said, was its motive. All the available intelligence evidence suggests that Ali Khamenei, Iran’s Supreme Leader, remains convinced that the US is set on regime change.
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As long as the Ayatollah holds to this view the incentives on the Iranian side are stacked in favour of pressing ahead with the nuclear programme. The lesson Tehran takes from North Korea is that joining the nuclear club is the best safeguard against US attack. Diplomacy can succeed only if the west persuades Tehran that, to the contrary, the bigger threat is pursuit of a weapon.
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The second exchange came at this year’s Brussels Forum, hosted by the German Marshall Fund of the United States. At the time, Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu, who has taken the Iranian crisis as another excuse to grab more occupied Palestinian land, was beating even more loudly than usual on the drums of war. Nicholas Burns, a former senior official at the US State Department, offered the Forum an eloquent riposte.
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What was needed, he said, was protracted engagement with Tehran. Mr Burns, who handled Iran policy for the Bush administration, is no dove. He made the simple but supremely wise point that, before going to war, nations should at least know their enemy. Thus far the US had not properly tried diplomacy. Sure there had been desultory contacts over the years, usually in places such as Vienna or Geneva. But the US “has not had a single, sustained conversation with the Iranian leadership since the Jimmy Carter’s Administration.”
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Mr Burns’s conclusion? The US should put serious time and effort into negotiation. If it did eventually come to war, Washington should at very least be able to say, hand on heart, that it had explored all the alternatives. “The fact that we might go to war with a country that we do not know, we don’t understand its leadership, we have no idea what their bottom line might be – if a deal is even possible – is very disturbing.”
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Put these two perspectives together – one European, the other American - and they carry an inexorable logic. For diplomacy to succeed, talks must be sufficiently open and enduring to persuade the Iranian regime that it is safer without a bomb, and to assure the US and international community that Tehran is not just playing for time. A meeting focused narrowly on the nuts and bolts of a nuclear deal will not defuse decades of hostility and mistrust.
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What the west would want from such a bargain should be clear enough. The list would start with an Iran eschewing all but peaceful nuclear development and willing to accept international surveillance of such activities; a withdrawal of Iranian support for terrorist groups in Palestine and Lebanon; a willingness to help stabilise Iraq and Afghanistan; and recognition of Israel’s right to peaceful existence.
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A glimpse of what Tehran would put on the table can be found in a fascinating insider’s account published by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Hossein Mousavian, one of Tehran’s nuclear negotiating team before he fell out with the present leadership, gives a summary of Iranian goals.
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Beyond the lifting of sanctions and right of access of the nuclear cycle for peaceful means, they include the removal of the threat of regime change, the withdrawal of US military forces from the region, a privileged position for Iran in Iraq and Afghanistan, a weakening of Israel, and the establishment, with Iran presumably at its centre, of a new regional security architecture.
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Such demands reach way beyond what the US - and, for that matter, the Arab states or Israel – would, or should, be prepared to concede. But it is the nature of things that negotiations start with the setting out of maximalist positions. It is also an ineluctable fact that, with or without a bomb, Iran will remain a powerful actor in the Middle East.
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There is time for such a serious negotiation - as long as Barack Obama has the wisdom and courage to say no to Mr Netanyahu. The best intelligence says Tehran has not restarted the weapons programme it halted in 2003, and is still years off acquiring a bomb. To attack Iran without knowing what it wants or intends would make Mr Bush’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan seem like models of responsible statecraft.
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Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2012.
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