"
...These included the prospect of trade agreements with the European Union; Iran's acceptance into the World Trade Organisation; the easing of American sanctions; the sale to Iran of a light-water reactor and guarantees of nuclear fuel; EU help to modernise Iran's oil and gas industries; support for a WMD-free zone in the Middle East; and the possibility of Iran being allowed to enrich uranium after all if it could show that this was for exclusively peaceful purposes..."
IRAN
Only engageFrom The Economist print edition
Jul 19th 2007
SourceThe case for a “grand bargain”IF A military attack looks too dangerous and sanctions will not bring Iran to its knees, must the world accept that the Islamic Republic will soon have a bomb? Maybe. Plenty of governments in the Middle East are already working out how best to prepare for life alongside a nuclear-armed Iran. But what if sanctions and the threat of force were combined with more positive incentives for Iran, such as security guarantees and normal relations with the United States? Might not a beleaguered regime that was offered some such “grand bargain” see it as an honourable way to give up its nuclear plans?
That is the thinking of those who say the mistake of the Bush administration has been to confront Iran instead of engaging it. Four years ago Iran gave tantalising signs of wanting to end the long confrontation. The superpower's rapid disposal of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan after September 11th 2001 and its preparations to invade Iraq had made it look like a formidable enemy. In 2003 Iran is reported quietly to have offered to open broad negotiations with America on all outstanding issues, including nuclear weapons and Israel. But for various reasons—mainly, say some, the hubris of America's own neoconservatives—this opportunity was missed. And by the time America had run into serious trouble inside Iraq two years later, Iran's mood had changed.
Since President Ahmadinejad's election, Iran has come to be less scared of America. The superpower's overstretched armies in Afghanistan and Iraq now look more like hostages than menacing invaders. Although the Bush administration already blames Iran for many of its woes in Iraq, it knows the Iranians would and could inflict even more damage on American forces there if America were to bomb Iran. Other American reverses elsewhere in the region have no doubt added to Iran's self-confidence. The regime portrays Israel's war against Hizbullah in Lebanon last summer—and Hamas's success last month in wresting the Gaza Strip from Fatah—as a victory for its own proxies and a defeat for America's.
Here, though, is a puzzle. If an Iran brimming with self-confidence is no longer afraid of America, why did it decide to take part at the end of May in the first formal high-level talks it has held with the United States since the American embassy hostages left Tehran in January 1981? To judge from the defensiveness on display at Tehran's Friday prayers before the meeting, this about-turn was a highly sensitive one, controversial with the regime's hardliners and difficult to explain to its supporters after all the years spitting defiance at the Great Satan.
The explanation favoured by Western diplomats is that the Iranians feel more vulnerable than they admit. Though buoyed up after last summer's Lebanon war, the regime's fortunes have since declined. There was that blow to President Ahmadinejad's supporters in last December's municipal elections. President Bush, contrary to expectations, reinforced American forces in Iraq and the Persian Gulf instead of reducing them. American forces in Iraq have arrested five Revolutionary Guards there (the Iranians say they were diplomats). Russia and China surprised Iran by withdrawing their protection in the Security Council and agreeing to sanctions.
In short, say Western diplomats, the pressure is working. Yet it may be working in both directions: the Bush administration, after all, has simultaneously performed a U-turn of its own by talking to Iran after a long period of refusing contact. At present both sides are saving face by stressing that Iraq is the only subject on the table. America's official line is that there will be no widening of the discussion unless Iran suspends uranium enrichment and complies with the Security Council's other demands. However, many loud voices in Washington, DC, and a few softer ones in Tehran, see this as an opportunity to move to a broader negotiation that could culminate in an historic reconciliation between the old enemies.
Could it happen? America and Iran have some common interests. Both claim to want a stable and united Iraq and both support its present government. Neither wants the Taliban back in charge of Afghanistan (though Iran is reported to be arming some Taliban fighters). As Shias, the Iranians are as hostile as America is to al-Qaeda, whose jihadists in Iraq have murdered thousands of Shias and bombed their holiest shrines. But on the other side of the ledger are areas where the interests of the two countries collide.
A quarter-century of bad bloodAmerica and Iran support opposite sides in the stand-off in Lebanon. Iran says it wants to destroy Israel, or at least see it disappear. America accuses Iran of seeking an atomic bomb which Mr Bush says he cannot accept. And on top of all this there has been a quarter of a century of bad blood. To Americans, Iranians are the fanatical revolutionaries who kept America's embassy in Tehran hostage for 444 days. To Iranians, Americans are the scheming imperialists who deposed their elected prime minister in 1953 and re-installed a repressive shah.
Reaching a grand bargain in these circumstances is difficult but not impossible. Oddly, America's misadventure in Iraq could turn out to be the catalyst. In the 1970s America reached out to China partly to cover its withdrawal from an unsuccessful war in Vietnam. What, though, if a grand bargain remains elusive? Then the two countries may opt for a partial agreement, or let their confrontation continue at the same level, or see it deteriorate and become even more dangerous.
There are two other outcomes, both of them devoutly wished for by some Americans, that seem unlikely to transpire. One is that the right mixture of external political and economic pressures will force Iran's regime simply to capitulate and agree to the world's demands, at least on the nuclear front. The other is that the regime's internal economic failures and declining popularity will cause it to be overthrown in a popular uprising.
What makes a simple capitulation unlikely is not Iran's external strength but its domestic weakness. The last risk a prickly and unpopular revolutionary regime is willing to run is a public humiliation. To make Iran abandon its nuclear aspirations will therefore require not only pressure but also a means of helping the leadership save face and point to some sort of success. That is especially true if Mr Chubin at the Geneva Centre for Security Policy is right that the regime's main motivation for its nuclear programme is to shore up its internal legitimacy.
The Bush administration seems at last to have understood this. That is why it signed up to the incentives offered to Iran in June last year by the other members of the Security Council, plus Germany, in return for its nuclear compliance. These included the prospect of trade agreements with the European Union; Iran's acceptance into the World Trade Organisation; the easing of American sanctions; the sale to Iran of a light-water reactor and guarantees of nuclear fuel; EU help to modernise Iran's oil and gas industries; support for a WMD-free zone in the Middle East; and the possibility of Iran being allowed to enrich uranium after all if it could show that this was for exclusively peaceful purposes. Iran turned this offer down. But it remains on the table and could be improved.
If a straight capitulation is unlikely, so is an uprising against the regime. Iran, it is true, has a proven capacity to surprise. The shah was toppled only months after the then President Jimmy Carter described Iran as “an island of stability” in a volatile region. But although Iranians grumble endlessly about their government and its failures, there is precious little evidence of a popular counter-revolution in the making. Most of the regime's internal critics seem to pin their hopes on gradual change emerging as it did in the Soviet Union, from inside the system. The Soviet system, however, was based on a secular ideology. When such doctrines fail, they can be junked relatively easily. But how does a system that claims to be rooted in the eternal verities of revealed religion modernise itself from within?