OFFICIALS FROM the US, Russia, China, Britain, France and Germany will sit down at a table with Saeed Jalili, Iran’s nuclear negotiator, in Geneva tomorrow and Friday, for their first talks since July 2008.
The very composition of the group – known as the P5 +1 because it is comprised of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany – is a reminder that nuclear powers rule the world, and an explanation of Iran’s apparent determination to obtain nuclear weapons.
The meeting marks the first direct contact between the Obama administration and the Islamic Republic. It was supposed to translate Mr Obama’s desire to engage, rather than ostracise, Iran. Events of the past six days have turned the gathering into the culmination of what Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen called a “faux Cuban missile crisis”. The leaders of the US, Britain and France expressed shock and horror at the existence of a uranium enrichment plant they had known about for years, and only revealed because Tehran beat them to it by sending a letter to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the UN’s nuclear watchdog.
The US has demanded rapid access for the IAEA to the enrichment plant. Ali Akbar Salehi, the head of the Iranian nuclear programme (which the Islamic Republic insists is entirely peaceful) said the IAEA would be invited to visit.
But the Iranians are past masters at tactical evasion. If there were any incriminating evidence at the enrichment facility at Fordo village near Qom, about 185km south of Tehran, it was doubtless spirited away before Iran wrote to the IAEA. And if Iran allows inspectors to visit, but refuses to provide blueprints or access to Iranian scientists, as the US has also demanded, unity within the fragile coalition could splinter.
The participants in tomorrow’s negotiations have not even agreed on the topic. Iran says it won’t discuss its nuclear programme, and its “right” to enrich uranium is non-negotiable. But the US and Europeans will be satisfied by nothing less than an end to Iranian enrichment. Uranium enriched to about 5 per cent is used for fuel in civilian power reactors. Highly enriched uranium (about 90 per cent) is the key ingredient for nuclear warheads. US intelligence estimates that Iran could produce a deliverable nuclear weapon between 2010 and 2015.
A predictable scenario is likely to be played out over the next few months. The US and Europe have given Iran until December to “co-operate fully with the IAEA and to demonstrate its peaceful intentions,” says Mr Obama. If Iran fails to satisfy them, the West threatens more stringent economic sanctions.
Three sets of UN Security Council sanctions are already in place, in addition to those the US has enforced unilaterally since the 1979 revolution. In 2006, 2007 and 2009, the council voted to restrict Iran’s access to nuclear material and equipment, and targeted the assets of officials in the Iranian nuclear programme.
Washington wants to extend the sanctions to the petroleum industry and trade in general. US secretary of state Hillary Clinton has spoken of “crippling sanctions”. But the Europeans oppose extending sanctions to petrol. (Iran imports 40 per cent of its petrol because it lacks the capacity to refine it.) Russia seems to be backtracking on pro-sanctions statements by President Dmitri Medvedev last week, and China has close to US$100 billion invested in Iranian oil and gas.
Iraq is an unfortunate precedent. US credibility has not recovered from false US intelligence claims that Iraq was developing weapons of mass destruction. And the “crippling sanctions” the US obtained against Baghdad in the 1990s are believed to have killed more than half a million children.
Tough talk by the US and Europe may be exactly what Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad wants. On the eve of his speech to the UN General Assembly last week, Mr Ahmadinejad reportedly told guests at an Iranian dinner that he would “warmly welcome” further sanctions because they would make his country self-sufficient.
And the media ignored Mr Ahmadinejad’s lengthy references to the return of Imam Mehdi, the missing 12th imam of Shia Islam, in his UN speech. As a fundamentalist Shia, the Iranian leader wants to hasten Mehdi’s return and the Armageddon-like battle he believes will end the world and usher in eternal peace and justice.