Nukes and Talks
It’s not nukes, as such, that pose a problem. Britain has them, so does France; and if Israel does, it doesn’t worry us. Our feelings about Soviet nukes changed for the better when they became Russian. We don’t like Chinese, Pakistani or North Korean ones, but Indian ones shouldn’t be an impediment to helping their civilian nuclear energy industry. Hypothetical (?) Iranian nukes are the object of intense concern.
It’s not nukes, as such, that pose a problem. Britain has them, so does France; and if Israel does, it doesn’t worry us. Our feelings about Soviet nukes changed for the better when they became Russian. We don’t like Chinese, Pakistani or North Korean ones, but Indian ones shouldn’t be an impediment to helping their civilian nuclear energy industry. Hypothetical (?) Iranian nukes are the object of intense concern.
European-led talks on the subject were a fraud, a sham and worse than a waste of time -the Iranians admit the U.S. was right about using the negotiations to buy time for additional progress toward nuclear capability. There is little chance of a better outcome at the UN and very little hope of a unilateral Iranian decision to disarm a la Libya. All the gaming scenarios appear to end with Iran acquiring nuclear capability and, at best, using it for blackmail. Serious discussion about Iran has, therefore, focused on the requirements for regime change and/or military action to set back or eliminate the mullahs’ program.
But every country is more than the sum of its most problematic parts, and the U.S. has multiple interests with every country including Iran. Hence the regular stipulation by Presidents and Secretaries of State that America’s problem is not with the Iranian people, but with their government and specifically with their government’s determination to acquire nuclear weapons with which they have already threatened two member states of the United Nations – one of which being us.
In that context, the American invitation to Iran to discuss our legitimate interests in Iraq – and Iran’s acceptance – raises interesting diplomatic possibilities, particularly the possibility that we both have legitimate interests.
Iran, after all, was attacked by Iraq in September 1980 and subjected to missile attacks against its cities. Iran, therefore, has a strong and legitimate interest in ensuring that Iraq does not reacquire the means for cross-border warfare. Iran has an interest in the Shi’ite population of southern Iraq – the ones President George H.W. Bush encouraged to revolt against Saddam in 1991 and then abandoned, costing tens of thousands of Shi’ite lives and engendering justified suspicion and enmity toward the U.S. that hindered the liberation of Iraq 12 years later. It has non-legitimate interests as well, and these need to be taken into account.
The U.S., with a disciplined approach, might show that a stable Iraq need not be a bad thing for Iran if it proves that a country of disparate ethnic and religious groups can be governed from a consensual center. Iran has more than 60 million people, only about half of whom are Persian. Acknowledging this has nothing to do with propping up the mullacracy – JINSA absolutely believes in democratic regime change, but we do believe that Iran should be a unitary state, not fractured into unstable duchies. All of it should be consensual and then democratic.
Given American problems in Iraq and with Iran, it will require creative diplomacy to move both off dead (no pun intended) center, but it might be a start.