by Seyed Hossein Mousavian; Reviewed by Patrick Clawson
Few issues in recent years have seen as intensive high-level, international negotiations as Iran's nuclear program. Unfortunately, the account by Mousavian, an Iranian policymaker and scholar, will probably become the definitive book about that effort. A more important work, but one unlikely to get as much attention, is from a team led by Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, which examines in detail how Iran's nuclear program fits within the broader challenge to U.S. interests from the Islamic Republic.
Mousavian's account gains credibility from his previous
position as spokesman for Iran's nuclear negotiating team as well as
through the vigorous promotion of his views on U.S. television and at
lectures in elite venues. His personal story is intriguing: An important
official on Iran's Supreme National Security Council, he was, in
effect, jailed for his opposition to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and
is now a fellow at Princeton, though clearly still deeply supportive of
the Islamic Republic. But the reason his book will become the standard
reference is not necessarily due to his pedigree: It is the care with
which it was prepared, with 1,113 footnotes to all the right sources. On
question after question, Mousavian recounts the facts in detail,
providing the references to check up and follow further.
But for all that Mousavian gets the details right, he
casts the nuclear impasse in a profoundly misleading way. The
fundamental problem has always been that Iran has not lived up to its
obligations under the international agreements to which it is a party.
At its heart, the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) is a trade-off:
Countries have the right to dangerous nuclear technology if they accept
the responsibility to be fully transparent about what they are doing.
The irony is that had Iran, an NPT signatory, followed through on the
requirements of the treaty, Washington may have been profoundly unhappy
about Iran's nuclear progress but could have done little to mobilize
international pressure. On this, as so many other issues, the Islamic
Republic's leaders have systematically miscalculated where Iran's
national interests lie. Their attitude, shared by Mousavian, is the
profound arrogance of asserting rights but refusing responsibilities.
In Mousavian's account, Iran never did anything worse
than miss some tactical opportunities. And in his telling, that only
happened after he left the job. Mousavian makes a persuasive case that
Iran was better served by his policy, which was to blow smoke in the
West's eyes rather than to spit into them. The prolonged negotiations he
describes persuaded Europe that Iran should be offered incentives and
not penalized so as to entice it into further negotiations and temporary
concessions. His team understood the importance of looking reasonable,
whereas Supreme Leader Ali Khamene'i's priority seems to be what the
ayatollah called resistance to "global arrogance."[1]
In contrast to Iran's excellent track record, Mousavian
presents the West—especially the United States—as continuously taking
unreasonable positions and missing chances to improve relations. But not
surprisingly, there is a telling omission: The George W. Bush
administration is often castigated for spurning an alleged May 2003
Iranian "grand bargain" to open talks with Washington about all the
issues separating the two sides. Mousavian makes no mention of it
whatsoever.
While Mousavian recognizes that many issues besides the
nuclear program separate Washington and Tehran, the Council on Foreign
Relations' (CFR) Iran: The Nuclear Challenge edited by Blackwill
simply ignores that strategic context. While it could be argued that the
CFR report is intentionally only about the nuclear issue, the obvious
response is that Iran's pursuit of nuclear capabilities is not isolated
from its other activities, nor are vital U.S. interests about Iran
confined to its nuclear program: Most U.S. sanctions on Iran can be
justified as reactions to its state support of terrorism, not just its
nuclear program.
This narrow focus on Iran's nuclear program is all the
more striking given the main theme in Blackwill's insightful concluding
essay: Consider carefully and do not jump to conclusions. He warns
against unanticipated consequences, artificial analogies, false
certainty, and short-term thinking that ignores longer term
repercussions. He suggests eleven pertinent questions to focus thinking
about a potential preemptive attack, bringing great depth of knowledge
to the subject. Regrettably, he hardly mentions how actions on the
nuclear issue could affect broader U.S. interests regarding Iran. In
particular, his essay is infused with the implicit view that the Islamic
Republic is a given, not an unnatural system whose days may be
numbered. If one concludes that the Islamic Republic will, at some point
in time, disappear, then U.S. policy thinking ought to be much more
about timing: Delaying the nuclear program becomes a potential route to
successful resolution of the problems between the two states, depending
on what nuclear policy a successor regime might pursue.
The six other authors in the CFR volume offer much
insight about sanctions, negotiations, military options, regime change,
the implications of a nuclear-armed Iran as well as what is known about
the Iranian nuclear program. But their lens is so centered on the
nuclear issue that everything else is essentially left out of the
picture. For instance, Elliott Abrams' essay on regime change, while
presenting a thoughtful evaluation of current U.S. programs and
practical suggestions for alternatives, devotes exactly one sentence to
the nonnuclear advantages for U.S. strategic interests were the Islamic
Republic to fall. Surely the end of the mullahcracy would have vast
repercussions on world Islamist movements and on the Middle East. To
take one point that preoccupies U.S. Persian Gulf allies: Were
Washington to form a close working relationship with a friendly Tehran,
might that make relations with the gulf monarchies less important to
U.S. administrations? Under those circumstances, Washington might choose
to be more supportive of the forces calling for democratic reform in
those countries, a prospect the ruling families find profoundly
unsettling.
In comparison to the tight focus of the CFR volume, the great strength of U.S. and Iranian Strategic Competition
is that Cordesman, et al., capture the full character of U.S.-Iran
relations. They demonstrate that the United States and Iran are in a
low-level war, or in "strategic competition," a phrase often used in
national security circles. That war has many fronts, which the authors
cover in great (sometimes excessive) detail. Separate chapters,
generally coauthored by Cordesman and one or more collaborators, cover
the nature of the strategic competition in general, as well as sanctions
and energy, the gulf military balance, and competition between
Washington and Tehran in various parts of the world including Iraq, the
Levant, Turkey, the Caucasus, "Af–Pak," Europe, Russia, China, Latin
America, and Africa. The concluding chapter, on policy implications,
stresses that the U.S. administrations must compete with the Iranians in
a wide array of geographic arenas and with many policy instruments.
That is, in effect, something Washington is now doing but not always
with a conscious understanding of how all these disparate efforts should
fit together.
Cordesman is led to the pessimistic conclusion that the
mullahs' pursuit of nuclear weapons is part of a concerted strategy
around which the entire military and national security strategy is
built. Restrictions on Tehran's enrichment activities, he argues, are
not likely to impede Iran's nuclear progress much because it has
developed such a varied and robust set of nuclear weapons-related
programs (including delivery options) that it could break down the
remaining work into compartmentalized programs. Each is readily
concealed and could be presented to a credulous international community
as peaceful in intent. He concludes that if one studies the full range
of strategic competition between Washington and Tehran, the current
P5+1-Iran negotiations—even if fully successful—would make only a small
difference in the mullahs' challenge to U.S. policymakers and not much
of a difference to its nuclear pursuits.
Cordesman's message is not likely to have the resonance
of Mousavian's. Too many in the West seem inclined to assume that Iran
is being reasonable in the current nuclear impasse and that more
understanding of the developing world is needed. Unfortunately, if
history is any guide, few international problems can be solved through
the greater display of empathy, especially toward rogue regimes.
Seyed Hossein Mousavian; Reviewed by Patrick Clawson, director for research at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
Source: http://www.meforum.org/3495/the-iranian-nuclear-crisis-a-memoir
Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.
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