by Dore Gold
At the close of the
last round of talks in Kazakhstan between Iran and the P5+1 (the U.S.,
Russia, China, France, U.K., and Germany) that ended a week ago, the
head Iranian negotiator, Saeed Jalili, tried to implicitly drag Israel
into the considerations that had made the nuclear negotiations so
difficult.
The headlines in the
major newspapers in the West left little doubt that the talks had
completely failed. Thus the LA Times announced "Iranian Talks
Unproductive." The Washington Post ran a headline stating that the Iran
talks had ended in a "muddle." The Voice of America led with the
harshest verdict stating that the "Iran Nuclear Talks Collapse."
The fact of the matter
was that the parties to the Kazakhstan talks did not even set a date for
the next round. What was needed was an explanation of what happened.
Jalili tried to put a good face on a bad situation. He said that he
believed that delegations from the P5+1 wanted the talks to succeed, but
there was one country which was pressuring the negotiators representing
the West and was the hidden reason for their hardened position. He did
not say who he had in mind but it was clear that he was suggesting that
Israel was somehow pulling the strings and influencing the nuclear
negotiations.
Jalili was not alone in
trying to force the argument that Israel was somehow a factor in the
West's diplomatic stalemate with Iran. They wanted people to believe
that Israel was not only the problem but also part of the solution.
Former Iranian diplomat Seyed Hossein Mousavian, who was part of the
Iranian nuclear negotiating team under then-President Mohammad Khatami,
has an office at Princeton University, and has become a sought-after
commentator in the international media every time there is a new
negotiating round between Iran and the West.
Last year, the
prestigious Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, whose
headquarters are in Washington, published Mousavian's 500-page memoir,
entitled The Iranian Nuclear Crisis. Like the Iranian government, from
which he fled, Mousavian insists that any solution to the crisis include
recognition by the P5+1 of Iran's right to enrich uranium — a right
that does not appear in the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. But then
he adds another element to the solution of the Iranian nuclear dispute:
the establishment of a weapons of mass destruction-free zone in the
Middle East, which will include Israel.
While this idea was not
popularly accepted it gained currency in certain circles. For example,
Shibley Telhami, who is a fellow at the Saban Center in Washington, also
picked up this theme. He proposed in a January 2012 article in The New
York Times that to make Iran more flexible in nuclear negotiations, the
West should push for a nuclear free zone in the Middle East that would
put the spotlight on Israel.
To its credit, the
Obama administration made a realistic assessment of the situation in the
Arab world today and decided not to convene last fall a conference on a
Middle East zone free of weapons of mass destruction, which had been
proposed in 2010. In a statement on Nov. 23, 2012, Victoria Nuland, the
State Department spokeswoman, specifically cited "present conditions in
the Middle East," which was a clear reference to the Arab Spring, as one
of the reasons why this situation was not ripe to pursue this line of
policy.
But there is something
far more fundamental missing in these proposals to use a nuclear free
zone in the Middle East as a means to draw Iran into a compromise. The
whole idea that Iran's determination to get nuclear weapons has
something to do with Israel is completely wrong. The Islamic republic
renewed Iran's nuclear program in the 1980s as a result of its bitter
experiences during the Iraq-Iran War (1980-1988) when the Iranian army
was repeatedly attacked by Saddam Hussein's forces who used chemical
weapons. Israel was not a factor in its considerations.
But after the Iraq-Iran
war, Tehran acquired new motivation to seek nuclear weapons: its
determination to become the hegemonic power in the Middle East after the
defeat of Iraq. A few years after he assumed the position of supreme
leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei gave a revealing interview
published on July 7, 1991 in the Iranian daily Ressalat, in which he
asked a rhetorical question: "Do we look to preserve the integrity of
our land, or do we look to expansion?" He then answered himself, saying:
"We must definitely look to expansion." Khamenei is the
commander-in-chief of the Iranian armed forces and hence his definitions
of Iranian national strategy are essential to follow.
Iran's quest for
regional hegemony is still sustained to this day. Khamenei's senior
adviser on military affairs, Major-General Yahya Rahim Safavi, who was
the previous commander of the Revolutionary Guards, described Iran in
2013 as "the regional superpower" in the Middle East. He asserted in the
same interview that a "new global power is emerging in the Muslim
world." Safavi's successor as commander of the Revolutionary Guards,
General Mohammad Ali Jafari, was even more blunt in 2008: "Our Imam did
not limit the movement of the Islamic Revolution to this country, but
drew greater horizons." Khamenei's operational instrument for realizing
these goals in the Quds Force of the Revolutionary Guards, under the
command of Maj. Gen. Qassem Suleimani.
Iran's expansionist
agenda is evident in his statements as well. During 2012 in a speech
about Lebanon and Iraq, Suleimani asserted: "These regions are one way
or another subject to the control of the Islamic republic of Iran and
its ideas." Ali Akbar Nateq-Nouri, a former speaker of the Iranian
parliament, who works as an adviser to Khamenei, described Bahrain in
2009 as Iran's 14th province. In early 2013, an Iranian cleric close to
Khamenei described Syria as Iran's 35th province. Thousands of Iranian
Revolutionary Guards are deployed on the ground in Syria to prevent the
regime of Bashar al-Assad from falling and Syria leaving Iran's sphere
of influence.
In short, Iran's quest
for nuclear weapons is not for defensive purposes, but to help it
realize its regional ambitions in the Middle East. Despite the efforts
of Jalili, Mousavi, and a number of Western academics to divert
international focus away from Iran exclusively, the fact is that the
idea of bringing Israel into the disarmament equation does not alter by
one iota Iran's principle motivation to cross the nuclear finishing line
and become a nuclear weapons state.
But if there is a country
affecting the present dialogue between Iran and the West, it is not to
be found in the Middle East. North Korea kicked out the inspectors of
the International Atomic Energy Agency, produced weapons-grade
plutonium, conducted three tests of its atomic weapons, and all the
world could do was to increase sanctions. Today North Korea is
threatening to use its nuclear weapons against the U.S. Any diplomat
negotiating with Iran will have to take into account that Tehran could
easily follow the North Korean precedent and withdraw from any future
agreement, assuming, by the North Korean example, that it can get away
with it. The West should harden its positions in negotiations as a
result, but it is very possible that Iran and it supporters among
certain Western elites will seek a new scapegoat for why the nuclear
talks, under present conditions, are likely to fail.
Dore Gold
Source: http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=3975
Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.
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