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Experts Assess Baghdad Talks at NIAC Panel
As nuclear negotiations between Iran, the U.S., and the other permanent members of the UN Security Council concluded in Baghdad on Thursday, top experts and former U.S. officials convened at a panel hosted by the National Iranian American Council to assess the outcomes.
Washington, DC – As nuclear negotiations between
Iran, the U.S., and the other permanent members of the UN Security Council concluded
in Baghdad on Thursday, top experts and former U.S. officials convened at a panel
hosted by the National Iranian American Council to assess the outcomes.
“Iran and the United States, with over 30
years have frozen relations, do not know how to do business. So, there is a
history here that has to be overcome,” said former State Department spokesman PJ
Crowley. He emphasized the positive—that
a diplomatic process had finally been established, with a next round of
negations agreed to take place in Moscow in June.
But Bijan Khajehpour, managing partner of
Atieh International, said that the lack of deliverable results in Baghdad was
due to “trust deficit” between the parties and a “mismatch between expectations
from Tehran and what was feasible here from Washington and also in the EU,”
regarding the easing of sanctions.
Sanctions
George Perkovich, director of nuclear
nonproliferation at the Carnegie Institute for Peace, warned that, without a
U.S. or European willingness to ease sanctions—particularly with stringent oil
export sanctions set to go online in July—there was little hope for a deal and
the conflict could escalate.
“One thing we know from looking at Iranian
decision making and actions since 2005 is, when there is a big disappointment
or the next turn of the ratchet, they increase the activity that we are most
concerned about,” he said.
“So here they’ve paused and, in various ways
that are relatively unprecedented for the last seven years, suggested that they
want to negotiate. If, in response to that, what they get is the implementation
of new sanctions, then I think the reaction to that would be an increase in
capability that would be further to alarm.”
The pending oil sanctions are expected to
again be a major topic of negotiations in Moscow. Khajehpour said that the sanctions were
already mostly in effect due to U.S. pressure on banks and other institutions
to isolate Iran. He suggested that the
U.S. could turn such pressure down to ease sanctions in an informal manner.
However, Khajehpour said that the declining trajectory
of Iran’s oil production—not only due to sanctions but other factors over the
past decade—was motivating Iran to consider redefining its relationship with
the U.S. and the international community.
He said that confidence-building measures focused on this reality—such
as providing Iran with carbon capturing technology—or aimed at addressing areas
such as environment and health care where Iran has been blocked from accessing
technology, could help fill the trust deficit.
Domestic
Politics
Aaron David Miller, a long-time top State
Department advisor on the Middle East now based at the Woodrow Wilson Center,
suggested domestic political factors were the ultimate drivers of the
diplomatic process. “I would argue that
failure – however grim and catastrophic it may appear – is not the most
important concern right now of either the President of the United States or the
Supreme leader. It is each, in their own way, regime preservation and survival.
For the President of the United States, there is one major priority between now
and November and that is clear to everyone.”
The panelists discussed how the U.S. political
situation affected the Administration’s ability to ease sanctions at this stage,
with Perkovich suggesting that Congress was the major stumbling block in
Baghdad and going forward.
“Let yourself imagine some success, some
traction with Iranians. What can the US
deliver? And how much of the deliverable requires cooperation from the US
Congress?” He said that this was a major
concern of the Iranians. “That to me is a much bigger and more difficult
question than what the President is willing to say ‘Yes’ to.”
Crowley suggested major steps would not be
possible until presidential elections in the U.S. and Iran had concluded in the
summer of 2013. “The question will be:
Will the White House in a second term become a little more creative than it is
now—a little less process-oriented and…take some real risks in the hopes of
some returns that could represent an enormous legacy for the President?”
Commenting on recent Congressional action pressing
for harsher measures against Iran, Perkovich said they were “certainly not
helpful,” while Khajehpour said such acts were indeed harmful to the diplomatic
process. Crowley argued that
Congressional pressure “can be useful, but there is an inflection point.” He
said that “building flexibility into these instruments is vitally important,”
and without flexibility, they “will in fact become an obstacle course.”
Diplomatic
End Goals
Miller wondered where the diplomatic process
could satisfactorily end given that “ultimately, there is only one country that
can stop Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon, and that’s the Iranians
themselves.”
He argued, “if the Shah had not been
displaced in 1979, Iran would likely be a nuclear power already. So we are not talking about the mullacracy’s
need for nuclear weapons as hedging against regime change and prospective
cover, [or] as a prestige weapon to mask or validate regional ambition. It’s an
Iranian need which grows from its own self image in a hostile world.”
But Khajehpour cautioned against defining
the regime in binary terms. “It’s not a monolithic decision-making structure
and you will find a full range within the Iranian stake holders—from those who wish
to have the nuclear deterrent to those who say [Iran] shouldn’t even have any
nuclear program because of all the costs – whether it is economic, strategic or
security-wise.”
He a rgued that “key stake holders in Iran
didn’t want to get this far in the nuclear program, but once you put pressure
on them, they react.”
Khajehpour called for engagement and easing
of sanctions to change Iran’s behavior, saying the pressure-focused approach to
Iran “has compelled Iran to do things that were not in the Iranian strategy to
start with.”
For example, he noted that “in 2005, Iran was
begging the Europeans to have 174 centrifuges, a research and development
facility to be able to say to say to their own public that ‘we have an
enrichment program.’ The European reaction? ‘You can’t even have one centrifuge.’
Today, Iran operates more than 10,000 centrifuges.”
Perkovich noted that Iran already has
nuclear know-how that cannot be eliminated militarily and said Iran would not
surrender the right to civilian nuclear enrichment. He argued that the only workable end-goal was
an inspections-based solution in which Iran did retain what could be considered
a latent nuclear weapons capability, but with at least a two-year breakout
window.
He maintained there must be an effort to
“define in concrete terms what it means to not acquire nuclear weapons,” in
greater specificity.
“They will have to satisfy the International
Atomic Energy Agency [and] intrusive inspections, but at the end of the day, we
have to understand that where that gets you is Iran within two years of nuke.”
He also said such a solution is the most
desirable because it would ensure accountability on both sides. “They have to keep leverage or they will say ‘these
guys will screw us in the end.’ We
should want them to have leverage because if we’re asking them for something
that, if they accepted, they would get no leverage, we know they would
cheat. This is what we’ve done with
North Korea…with the Iranians we ought to be smarter.”
He concluded, “The sweet spot has to be
leverage for both sides—a big enough margin of time, enough transparency that
Israel and others will say, ‘ok, we’ll see [the development of a nuclear
weapon] coming.’”
Miller similarly pointed out that there
needed to be a “balance of interest” and ownership for all parties in the
process in order for it to work. “No one has washed a rental car,” he remarked.
Military
Strikes and the Nuclear Fatwa
Miller surmised that an Israeli strike—which
he said would be a war of choice—in the near term was unlikely. “You can’t even
argue it is preventative because the standards by which to measure success are
impossible and the consequences…are potentially catastrophic and completely unpredictable.
“The Israelis—many Israelis…believe this is
a war of necessity, but nobody else believes it,” he said. “There will be no Israeli attack this
year. Iran doesn’t have enough fissile
material to produce a weapon, it hasn’t weaponized, it hasn’t tested a weapon,
it doesn’t have a weapon.”
He suggested that the U.S. invasion of Iraq
provided a cautionary tale regarding the need for a “proper and compelling
explanation” for war. “The Israelis do
not have one and will not be able to have one any time soon.”
Crowley spoke in stark terms against
military action. “If prevention is now
the policy of the United States, than a prospective strike on Iran—either by
Israel or the United States, in my judgment, makes an Iranian nuclear weapon
inevitable,” he stated. “If the
Ayatollah has said it is haram to
have a nuclear weapon, as a religious leader, he needs a reason to change that
calculation. And a strike gives him an
opportunity to make that kind of shift.”
“It
has a very high value,” Khajehpour said of the fatwa against nuclear weapons. “Don’t forget, Ayatollah Khamenei is a
political authority, he is a religious authority in the Iranian context, and he
is also the Supreme Commander of the Army.”
The fatwa against weapons of mass destruction had been tested previously
during the Iraq-Iran war, Khajehpour said, and prevented Iran retaliating in
kind to Iraqi chemical weapon attacks.
“It would be extremely difficult for
Ayatollah Khomeini, even in a military confrontation, to go back on this fatwa,”
Khajehpour said. “It would make him lose
credibility within the religious context, within the political context.”
But, he warned, “we have to obviously watch
the dynamics of domestics composition of power in Iran, and what can happen is
that, because of actions outside of Iran, the internal composition changes. If the international community does something
that empowers the more hardline forces in Iran, the calculations will change,
the arguments will change.”
Human
Rights
On the topic of human rights, NIAC President
Trita Parsi questioned Crowley about the apparent lack of a human rights agenda
in the current talks. “Many of those opposed
to the regime are concerned that the negotiation process is going to end up in
a situation in which the United States will develop a stake in the survival of
the current regime,” Parsi said. “And
seeing that there has been a relative silence on the human rights issue feeds
that fear.”
Crowley said “the nuclear issue is a
manifestation of something larger, and you solve all of the issues, around the
nuclear issue, by beginning to attack the issues surrounding Iran’s insecurity.
That can only come with a larger, longer conversation.”
Crowley was clear, “Will [the U.S.] ever be
invested in this regime? No. But I think there’s a recognition that if
this regime is in political peril its because of its relationship with its own
people.”
Khajehpour argued that Iran’s domestic
actors were indeed limited by the “securitization of politics” that escalated
in the early 2000s in reaction to heightened confrontation with the U.S. “Part of the problem inside of Iran, part of
the human rights situation, the approach of the regime toward society, dissent,
et cetra, is related to the sense of insecurity and to the what we call the
securitization of politics,” he said.
For there to be progress on human rights, he said, it is a matter of ratcheting
down tensions and “freeing up space so that domestic forces can push for
different debate and different interaction in Iran.”
Read more at National Iranian American Council
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