A chink may have been revealed in Iran’s nuclear armor. There appears to have been a concession by Tehran — that it would allow United Nations inspectors to resume snap inspections of its nuclear facilities if the UN Security Council does not get involved in the country’s nuclear program. This could be what the world has been anxiously waiting for.
The concession would make sense, as Iran seeks to avoid a full-blown Security Council debate over sanctions as well as to avert a showdown with the United States which, not unexpectedly, rejected the latest offer. While publicly committed to the diplomatic track, the United States has consistently refused to take the military option off the table and, if anything, has sharpened its tone in recent weeks. Nobody is talking seriously about a full-scale invasion of Iran like that of Iraq but in a recent speech, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice raised echoes of the Bush administration’s readiness to go-it-alone if necessary — the same attitude and willingness that put it at odds with so many of its allies at the time of the war in Iraq. As Washington presses its drive to thwart Iran’s nuclear ambitions, it is turning increasingly to the same rhetoric used in the run-up to the Iraq war. US officials appear in much the same position as they were in 2002 as they searched for a “coalition of the willing.”
It looks like Iraq all over again, but paradoxically Bush wants nothing more right now than for the Americans to forget about Iraq. With an Iranian nuclear threat being played up by the Bush administration, the American public, the administration hopes, will turn its focus away from Iraq to dealing with Iran. White House officials are hoping that this strategy of focusing on Iran as the most imminent threat, will revive Bush’s flagging popularity and place in history which, over the weekend took another bash, when, across the United States, three years after Bush famously asserted that the Iraqi mission was complete and in a month of high US war casualties, angry anti-war demonstrators marched.
Only war — short of a cataclysmic event on the scale of 9/11 — would rally the US around its leader. Iran provides the rallying cry, particularly when it is played up as the next bogeyman in the Middle East. The fear mongering of a mushroom cloud hanging over a US city is very valid in the American psyche. Beyond the Iraqi quagmire, Iran also provides the justification for cutting off financial aid to Hamas, billed by Washington as Iran’s proxy, as well as pressuring Lebanon’s Hezbollah to disarm and heaping pressure on Syria to fall in line, both parties being seen by the US as Iranian-supported.
So Iran is the glue that ties much of America’s Middle East policy together. Without Iran as the glue, US policy machinery will not function smoothly. Tehran’s compromise, coming as it does almost simultaneously with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad again vowing never to give up Iran’s nuclear program, might not be the concession the world seeks, but it is a start which should be seriously considered for the world’s sake.
