By Tony Karon
Iran diplomacy in Washington these days consists principally of coaxing the likes of Russia and China to support new sanctions – and persuading gullible journalists that Moscow and Beijing are “on board”.
On Friday, the US president Barack Obama told CBS television that Iran is trying to get the “capacity to develop nuclear weapons”, and that he and his allies “are going to ratchet up the pressure ... with a unified international community”. Nobody sets much store by such talk, of course, because President George W Bush had been saying the same thing since 2006 with little effect.
Sure, Russia and China have agreed to finally discuss a Security Council resolution to increase sanctions first imposed three years ago over Iran’s failure to comply with all the transparency requirements of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). But Moscow and Beijing have also made clear that they don’t believe Iran is building nuclear weapons. Nor does the US, for that matter. The CIA’s assessment is that no such decision has yet been taken, and that Iran’s current nuclear efforts will simply give it the option to build nuclear weapons.
As a result, Russia and China have also made clear that they will block any new sanctions that inflict significant pain on the Islamic Republic, aware that the stand-off can only be resolved by dialogue, and that sanctions are unlikely to help.
The international community is certainly united in the belief that Iran should not be allowed to build nuclear weapons, but “the capacity to develop nuclear weapons” is a different matter. Any state with a full fuel-cycle civilian nuclear energy programme has the “capacity” to develop nuclear weapons, and such a programme is Iran’s right as a signatory to the NPT. Until now, the position of the US, France, Britain and Israel has been that Iran can’t be allowed to enrich uranium for energy purposes, because enrichment gives it the means to create weapons-grade materiel. But for the rest of the international community, the issue is simply ensuring that Iran’s enrichment programme complies with NPT safeguards against weaponisation.
Now the position of the US has proven to be untenable. “The Iranians are determined to have a nuclear programme,” the former US secretary of state Colin Powell said last week. “Notice I did not say a nuclear weapon. Notwithstanding the last six or seven years of efforts on our part to keep them from having that nuclear programme, they have it. I don’t yet see a set of sanctions coming along that would be so detrimental to the Iranians that they are going to stop that programme. So I think ultimately the solution has to be a negotiated one.”
...
US leaders often claim that they’re acting against Iran on behalf of the whole Middle East region, implying that their strategy has the backing of Arab governments. Washington hawks insist that the Arabs would applaud if the US bombed Iran, utilising the silence of the Arab regimes to speak as if on their behalf. That underscores the importance of the Arab voices that have begun challenging the idea that a confrontation with Iran could produce any positive outcome.
Read the entire article here:
http://www.middle-east-online.com/english/?id=38225
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