Tomorrow in Geneva, a moderately senior American diplomat will sit down with the other four permanent members of the Security Council and Germany, for the first direct talks between the US and Iran in seven years — the first since their quietly productive encounters after 9/ll and the invasion of Afghanistan.
The elaborate pretence underlying tomorrow’s confrontation — which is what everyone knows it will be — is that this is an “opportunity” for Iran, in Hillary Clinton’s words, to come clean about its nuclear programme and renounce nuclear weapons. This, she said, not the three sets of missile tests that Iran conducted at the weekend, is the “test that counts”. If Iran obliges, President Obama has promised the Islamic republic “a clear path” away from pariah status, and repeated that “that offer stands”.
This emphasis on conciliation is, to put it mildly, odd given that it came at a press conference expressly called to read the riot act to a regime that had been caught for the third time illicitly constructing a nuclear facility that Mr Obama baldly defined as “inconsistent with a peaceful programme”.
It was left to President Sarkozy to tell it like it is: that confidence in Iran’s rulers is zero; that the menace they pose is global; and that “we cannot let the Iranian leaders play for time while the centrifuges are spinning”. But after years of playing Europe like a harp, Iran is not listening to Paris; the regime has ears only for the Great Satan. And the GS, Obama version, is approaching Iran as tentatively as if the Islamic republic held all the thunderbolts.
This would be bad psychology at any juncture and is inexplicable when Iran’s dreadful duo, the Supreme Guide Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and his protégé, President Ahmadinejad, are on the back foot and, for all their ferocious retribution against the swelling multitude of their critics, perceptibly wobbling.
The regime’s prestige at home and abroad has been taking a terrible beating. Its agents no longer look like kingmakers in Iraq — although if the Obama Administration fails to nurture the successes made possible by the surge there, that country could yet fall under the sway of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards. The kudos that Tehran gained in much of the Arab world for its “triumphant” backing of Hezbollah’s war against Israel has been dissipated by its strenuous, but at present thwarted, efforts to undermine Lebanese democracy. Iran’s nuclear and missile programmes are considered a serious threat, not just by Israel but, increasingly, by its Arab neighbours.
Capping it all, the Islamic republic founded by Ayatollah Khomeini stands exposed as a fraud, a corrupt and militarised theocratic travesty of its original pretensions to be a model of Islamic governance. Since the wholesale vote-trashing of the June elections, Iran’s ruling clique stands accused by millions of Khomeini’s faithful followers of stealing their votes, betraying their trust and torturing and killing their fellow citizens for voicing their objections.
Mr Ahmadinejad is trapped between the hammer of the hardliners on whom he now absolutely depends, and the anvil of popular contempt and anger. Almost the only public “celebration” that the regime felt it could not cancel, the annual pro-Palestinian “al-Quds Day” rally on September 18, brought massed protests to the streets, and forced an Ahmadinejad TV interview off the air when microphones picked up chants of “Ahmadi, resign”.
Ayatollah Khamenei squats immovably on the wreckage of the regime’s credibility; but by preferring power to justice, he has forfeited the mantle of Supreme Guide. Domestic rancour and resolute international pressure, intelligently exerted, are a potentially potent brew.
There are three points of pressure: the first is to exploit the regime’s collapsed credibility. Iran’s nuclear programme has long been a matter of intense national pride; but that is not the same as support for the bomb. Iranians broadly believed it when the mullahs assured them that Western claims of a secret plan to acquire nuclear weapons were lies. Millions now believe nothing that they are told by the regime.
Through its Paris spokesman, the opposition “green movement” has declared that it opposes an Iran with nuclear arms and shares the world’s concerns. Such news races through Iran. The more evidence that can be put in the public domain, the better; and the International Atomic Energy Agency has plenty that it is sitting on.
The second pressure point is to take Iran’s professed desire for comprehensive talks literally and put everything on the table: the regime’s terrible human rights record as well as its nuclear cheating. Mr Obama’s instinct has been to be awfully restrained about the first, so as not to prejudice progress on the second.
He has it precisely backwards. The worst message to project to Iranians is that if their rulers will only make some gesture such as suspending uranium enrichment, they can go on beating political prisoners and hanging homosexuals from cranes for all that the rest of the world cares. As with North Korea, the danger inherent in Iran’s quest for nuclear weapons stems in good part from the character of regime. Political change may be the necessary precondition of nuclear co-operation. Iran’s agents of change have declared themselves, and it cannot be counterproductive to give them resolute support. Iranians, the White House should remember, are not anti-American, even after 30 years of Islamist brainwashing. But if the Goddess of Liberty deserts them now ...
The third secret of success is US firmness on other fronts. Recent history is instructive. In 2001, awed by the swift ousting of the Taleban in Afghanistan and aware that the US had Iraq in its sights, Iran dispatched senior Revolutionary Guard officers to negotiations that extended even to its funding of Hezbollah and Hamas.
In 2003, still more awed by the US campaign in Iraq, it stopped enriching uranium and suspended its weaponisation programme. Once the US appeared bogged down in Iraq and the Taleban started to come back, Iran got back down to nuclear work.
Any regime will co-operate if its interests are on the line. Sanctions will help, particularly if they hit the elite’s wealth and the Revolutionary Guards’ business empires, but not imported petrol bought by the poor. The military option should not be publicly swept from the table — as happens almost daily in Washington. But it is equally vital that Mr Obama orders reinforcements to Afghanistan, and bolsters confidence in its staying power in Iraq.
The cliché is that the West has no stomach for a fight. The threat from Iran cannot be mastered unless that cliché loses its currency.
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Rosemary Righter has worked for the Far Eastern Economic Review and Newsweek in Asia, as development and diplomatic correspondent of The Sunday Times and as chief leader writer at The Times, where she is now an associate editor. She has written four books, including a history of the United Nations
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Explore Newcastle Gateshead with the award-winning childrens author David Almond
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