The Iraq maelstrom won't save Iran

Jonathan Steele Guardian News Service London

The cloud is still no larger than George W. Bush's hand but the storm of concern which the U.S. is orchestrating over Iran is beginning to show uncomfortable similarities with the row over Saddam Hussein's Iraq.

A deadline has been set for Iran to make a full declaration of its nuclear energy program by the end of this month. There is a demand for international inspectors to examine any site to check for a possible hidden weapons project. Punitive measures are threatened in the case of non-compliance.

Many British and American critics of the last war take comfort in the view that the mess the United States and Britain have got into in post-war Iraq has the benefit that Bush and Blair will not repeat their adventure. That, increasingly, looks complacent.

Blair's speech this week showed that he stands by his view that preventing the spread of weapons of mass destruction is top of his foreign policy priorities. It was not to be expected that the prime minister would publicly admit he got Iraq wrong. Had he done so, it would be a resigning matter.

But if he had private regrets he might at least have shifted the focus of British policy to different challenges, like his rhetoric about world poverty. But no. He told the conference that dealing with WMD proliferation headed the agenda for the 21st century.

On the BBC's Today program, he claimed a new success for the war on Iraq. It had helped to get Iran to cooperate with the International Atomic Energy Agency, he said. For Bush, too, dealing with WMD proliferation is still a high priority in spite of the fiasco of the failed search in Iraq. While North Korea has long been in the frame, the new element is Washington's heavy focus on Iran.

Power, it is often said, lies in the ability to set the agenda, and it is remarkable how Washington has managed to switch the world's spotlight to Iran.

The White House is already hinting at using force. Warning Iranians that "development of a nuclear weapon is not in their interests", Bush said in late July that "all options remain on the table".

The Los Angeles Times reported that the Central Intelligence Agency has briefed friendly foreign intelligence services on a contingency plan for air and missile strikes on Iranian nuclear installations.

Much of the pressure is coming from the Israeli prime minister, Ariel Sharon, and the same neo-conservative friends of his in Washington. They recently formed a "Coalition for democracy in Iran", which advocates the overthrow of Iran's regime.

It includes well-known hawks like Michael Ledeen and Morris Amitay, a former executive director of the American-Israeli Public Affairs Committee. According to the Washington Post, Sharon recently told Bush that Israel might strike Iran's nuclear facilities, just as it destroyed Saddam Hussein's nuclear reactor in 1981.

Whether Sharon only meant his warning as a device to get the U.S. to take the issue seriously and strike first is not clear. Few would deny that global nuclear proliferation is a serious danger.

But as Ken Coates of the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation points out in a new pamphlet, the Bush administration's talk of "counter-proliferation" is diametrically opposed to the old language of non-proliferation.

The original idea was that all nuclear-weapons states would move towards disarmamament, a pledge that the U.S., Britain and the other three declared bomb-owners made in 1995. Now we have a kind of class distinction.

The U.S. continues to develop new forms of nuclear weapons. U.S.-friendly states that refused to sign the non-proliferation treaty (NPT) but have nuclear weapons -- like India, Israel and Pakistan -- are treated with kid gloves. An NPT-signer such as Iran, against whom Washington bears ancient grudges, is threatened with punishment, and possible force.

Iran is not North Korea. It has no bomb and has consistently said it has no plans for one. It has a nuclear power program and plans for full-cycle fuel enrichment, but one reason for its drive towards self-sufficiency is that its world trade already suffers from U.S. sanctions, as well as U.S. pressure on Russia and other European states to restrict their own exports to Iran.

All Iranians, not just the regime's supporters, resent international pressure on their country to renounce nuclear power. As one of the first countries in their region which industrialized, they feel they have a "right to technology".

If Iran is secretly trying to develop a bomb, only a few politicians are behind it. "Iran has no military lobby for the bomb like Pakistan, nor a civilian-scientific one like India," according to Shahram Chubin, one of the most clear-headed analysts of Iran's national security policy, now a Swiss citizen.

Marginalizing Iran, refusing to consult it where its interests are involved, and demonizing it would strengthen those in Iran who argue that nuclear weapons confer status and influence, he wrote some months ago. The war in Iraq and the stepped-up U.S. campaign against Iran have only reinforced his case.

The time has surely come for a "grand bargain" with Iran, a dialog in which everything is put on the table, including a lifting of sanctions, the renunciation of the use or threat of force, and the restoration of diplomatic relations with the U.S. in return for nuclear transparency.

Sadly, the recent trend has been the other way. On Monday the European Union issued its toughest statement on Iran, echoing Washington's hard line. The French went along happily -- no sign of Chiraquian revolt on this one.

The EU warned that even if Iran signed the International Atomic Energy Agency's additional protocol to allow for snap visits by outside inspectors, this would only be a "first step" towards "restoring international trust".

In the case of Iraq, the Clinton administration and Britain made a serious mistake in 1998 by making clear sanctions would not be lifted in return for Saddam Hussein's compliance with inspections. Now the mistake is being repeated with Iran, giving it no clear incentive to cooperate, and making people in Tehran ask what the next demand will be.

Until this summer, the EU took a different line from Washington. Instead of "containment", it argued for more dialog and trade with Iran. Unless the EU quickly breaks with Bush and resumes the path of incentives rather than threats, Iran is more likely to be pushed into wanting a bomb than renouncing it.