Hardliner Blues

There are an awful lot of people who are beyond skeptical as to any hope that Iran will truly de-escalate, disarm and de-nuclearize its growing military capacity. The skeptics point simply to Iran’s massive sophisticated centrifuge capacity, born of the technology sharing from Pakistan’s Dr. A.Q. Kahn who also gave North Korea a solid taste of that Islamic bomb, which has churned out high quality, weapons-grade-enriched fissionable material, a quality level well-above what a “peaceful” nuclear power plant requires.

These skeptics remind the world that “we’ve seen these promises before” with clearly failed results. Like the United States and Israel, Iran has its share of hardliners who cannot fathom why Western powers, Israel, Russia, China and a few in Asia can have nuclear weapons and they cannot. Who gives the incumbents, these ultra-nationalists demand, the right to be the only holders of nuclear weapons? Who has the right to admit or deny membership in that nuclear club? Particularly when too many of those who have nuclear weapons today defied world opinion to get there? Still, Iran’s official line has always been that there is nothing “military” in its nuclear program, a position recently repeated in Davos, Switzerland by Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani (right above).

The annual January gathering of the uber-powerful (the World Economic Forum) in Davos has been a presentation venue for Iran’s statements of “peaceful intentions” before. “In 2004, [then-President Mohammad] Khatami said [at Davos], ‘Anywhere that we sense and feel that the other side respects us and does not force anything upon us, we are prepared to talk.’ He, too, ruled out a bomb…  Then, as now, Iran agreed to halt some enrichment of uranium and submit to United Nations inspections, as part of an effort to negotiate a nuclear deal. Then, as now, the Iranian leaders used Davos, the annual gathering of world leaders and captains of industry, as an opportunity to lure foreign investors back to their country.

“But less than a month after Mr. Khatami’s star turn in the Swiss Alps, Iran held parliamentary elections marred by the government’s disqualification of thousands of reformist candidates. For Mr. Khatami, whose landslide election in 1997 had stirred hopes for change, it was the final blow to his own reformist credentials. By the following summer, the nuclear diplomacy had collapsed and Iran switched its centrifuges back on.” New York Times, January 24^th. Iran is not a democracy, and candidates are allowed to run and their platforms are thoroughly controlled by the reigning Ayatollahs, who can turn policy decisions on and off like a wall-switch.

But in those intervening years between Khatami and Rouhani, Iran’s economy has imploded. From not being able to insure its oil tankers as they delivered their cargo to the few remaining buyers, to denial of access to the global financial institutions, to currency collapse and deep shortfalls in medical and foodstuff basics, general daily misery has been the lot of the vast majority of Iranians. Many Iranians have thus sometimes openly but usually clandestinely questioned their willingness to live under this repressive theocracy that doesn’t seem to care that the sanctions imposed by most of the rest of the world were crushing the hopes and lifestyles of the Iranian people.

The big question is whether this fear of a potential popular uprising – a possible Persian copy of the Arab Spring – was sufficient for Iran’s leadership to do what it could to alleviate the power of those sanctions, even if it meant reducing or eliminating the hallmarks of military capacity from its nuclear program. Hardline Revolutionary Guards and senior clergy strongly oppose any attempt from the outside world to regulate, contract or eliminate that nuclear weapons potential. But if the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei (pictured left above, who has built his reputation as a hardliner), feels a threat to his system of government, will the latest moves by reformist President Rouhani be allowed to be implemented and sustained?

There are other differences between Khatami’s failed efforts a decade ago and Rouhani’s approach: “Mr. Rouhani, unlike Mr. Khatami, has shown little appetite for opening up Iranian society or challenging the authority of its clerical institutions. If he runs afoul of Ayatollah Khamenei, some experts say, it will be less because of what he said at Davos than because of his enthusiastic embrace of other first-world pursuits, like Twitter and Facebook, though he said in Davos that his frequent posts are ghostwritten.

“‘Davos is fully approved by the theocracy,’ said Suzanne Maloney, a senior fellow and an Iran expert at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution. ‘It’s the other elements of the strategy, like social media, that are problematic at home.’” NY Times.

Under a recent first stage, six month, compromise with six concerned nuclear powers (specifically: France, Germany, Russia, United Kingdom, United States, known as the P5+1 – the permanent five members of the UN Security Council plus Germany), Iran has frozen its current enrichment efforts and allowed U.N. inspectors into its nuclear facilities. A few sanctions have been eased with a promise of increasing latitude if Iran continues to play ball with those negotiators. But how far can Rouhani, who told the Davos body of his continued pledge of “constructive engagement” in these nuclear talks, actually go to achieve the elimination of all of these impairing sanctions?

“Mr. Rouhani faces a … treacherous path. To close a nuclear deal, he will have to make concessions that would engender fierce resistance from the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps and other conservative factions. His growing international celebrity — and that of his foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, who was also at Davos — could bring him into conflict with Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei… ‘Rouhani knows Khatami’s history,’ said Abbas Milani, an Iranian scholar at Stanford University. ‘He knows Khamenei’s delicate position. He reads the attacks on him and Zarif in Iran. So he is trying to walk this rather sensitive line to see if he can open doors.’” NY Times.

While I believe that the efforts from both Zarif and Rouhani are sincere, one would have to be incredibly naïve to believe that they can deliver results that the rest of the world can depend on if they do not get that elusive and continued blessing from Khamenei. Still, the alternative path of sanctions that seem to be heading towards some form of military confrontation absent total dismantling of Tehran’s nuclear enrichment program – a policy embraced by Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu and a strong contingent in our own Congress – is an extreme choice that, regardless of the odds that current talks can generate an acceptable result, should not at least be preceded by appropriate diplomatic efforts.

Attacks on Iran to take out that nuclear capacity would result in retaliation that could result in mining of the Strait of Hormuz (effectively cutting off Europe’s major supply of oil sending the price at the pump through the roof, even in the United States) and the awakening of Iran’s sleeper cells (perhaps with its terrorist lackey, Hezbollah) to wreak havoc at Western targets of opportunity wherever they may be. There are no easy or clear paths to the general goal of finding that balance point. Instability results if the talks fail and particularly if a military confrontation occurs with potentially disastrous effects on the global economy, which is already showing signs of slowing down.

I'm Peter Dekom and I think we are bound to try and negotiate this solution before we takes steps that could bring back that great big recession that we are very slowly putting behind us.