ARDABIL, Northwest Iran, 25 August 2006 — Speaking during a tour of nine towns and cities in Ardabil province, northwest Iran, last week, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad returned again and again to a favorite theme: Iran, he said, would not surrender its legal rights to develop civilian nuclear technology at its own pace and in its own way for the benefit of an energy-hungry population.
“Iranians have mastered the complete cycle of uranium enrichment by themselves. But we will use it for peaceful purposes, for nuclear power,’ Ahmadinejad told a rally in Meshkinshahr. ‘This is our right under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation treaty and no one can take it away from us.
Everywhere the president went large crowds enthusiastically endorsed his stance and, to nobody’s real surprise, Iran, on Aug. 22, formally rejected the West’s nuclear incentives package aimed at halting Tehran’s uranium enrichment activities.
And, in what was being seen as a bid to split the UN Security Council, the response came with detailed counterproposals, including a call for future talks under a “new formula”.
The Bush administration, backed by a United Nations Security Council resolution requiring Iran to suspend uranium enrichment — a process that can be used to produce nuclear weapons — by Aug. 31 or face the prospect of economic sanctions, remains equally adamant that Iran must give way. It is convinced that Tehran is secretly seeking the capability to build nuclear weapons. And it continues to demand that Iran suspend all uranium enrichment and reprocessing by the end of the month or face swingeing sanctions.
In public at least, US officials suggest that Iran can be pressed into changing tack. Privately, diplomats in Washington and London listen to Ahmadinejad’s defiant words and wonder whether bombing raids and air strikes against Iran’s nuclear facilities will ultimately be the only ways to neutralize the perceived threat. This is a course of action that is increasingly hinted at by Israeli leaders such as Benjamin Netanyahu, the former prime minister.
Doubts about how effective Western diplomatic arm-twisting can be are well-founded. Unless the US and its European partners are prepared to resume unconditional negotiations, Iran will continue and even expand its nuclear research programs, says Ali Larijani, the country’s chief nuclear negotiator.
But the effectiveness of the more extreme option — military action — is also open to serious question.
Washington’s assessment of the situation inside Iran is handicapped by the fact that it has had no diplomatic, governmental or commercial presence here since 1980, in the aftermath of the Iranian Revolution. Friendly countries such as Britain, which do have diplomatic relations with Iran, share some information. And the US talks to exile and separatist groups. But overall, the Bush administration is flying blind.
If the US understood more about modern Iran, it would know, for example, that the nuclear issue has been successfully used by Ahmadinejad to rally nationalist sentiment behind his leadership.
Iranians have many reasons to be critical of their rulers; economic problems are the main point of contention. Many city-dwellers resent the government’s social conservatism and the power of the clergy.
But if asked whether the country should bow to the Americans on this symbolic developmental issue, the vast majority gives the same answer: No. Bombs will not change that feeling. On the contrary, they will only strengthen it.
The American idea that Iran can be “isolated” from the international community, and bombed into lonely submission, is equally ill-informed. Ahmadinejad’s government is assiduously cultivating improved security and commercial relations with great powers such as Russia and China as well Central Asian neighbors.
Manouchehr Mottaki, Iran’s foreign minister has also been busy reassuring Arab states, historically suspicious of Persia, of Tehran’s friendly intent. Last week, he took that message to Saudi Arabia. And thanks to the Americans, Iran’s relations with Iraq have never been better.
Iran’s large oil and gas reserves, and its strategic and geographical importance at the junction between Europe, Asia and the Middle East, are two other reasons why it can never be truly “isolated”. Another is the support shown Tehran over its nuclear stance by the 56-country Islamic Conference Organization at a recent meeting in Baku, Azerbaijan.
Any US military action against Iran would thus bring enormous global protests and an anti-American backlash. And it would almost certainly be a violation of international law and the UN Charter, although Washington would try to justify it as pre-emptive self- defense.
Denying Iran nuclear energy by destroying its facilities would also breach the nonproliferation treaty that the US as a signatory is legally committed to upholding. American neoconservatives reject the concept of international law. But the rest of the world does not — and that could seriously undermine the support of even Washington’s closest allies.
The idea that limited air strikes against nuclear plants and military targets would be the end of the matter is equally ill-conceived. Iran could not stop such an attack. But it could retaliate in numerous, painful military and nonmilitary ways.
Equally preposterous, for those who unlike the Americans have direct experience of life inside modern-day Iran, is the idea that somehow US military pressure would inspire an uprising against the current government. An American attack would produce an immediate, unifying upsurge of nationalist anger.
But perhaps Washington’s biggest self-deception of all stems from a sort of inherited neocolonial arrogance. Just as British 19th century diplomats mocked the “incomprehensible Orientals” of Persia, modern Western politicians often refer to the “mad mullahs” of Iran.
This is to seriously underestimate the opposition. Just as Hezbollah surprised the might of Israel in Lebanon last month, Ahmadinejad’s Iran could prove more than a match for America in ways Washington has not yet imagined. Far more sensible, and far safer, therefore, to take the advice of numerous retired US generals and diplomats and follow plain common sense.
And as Winston Churchill famously remarked, that means jaw-jaw, not war-war.
