Preventing Iran from going the Iraq way

Vladimir Radyuhn
The Hindu, 16 October

The prime goal of Vladimir Putin’s visit to Iran, the first by a Russian President in over 60 years, is to deny the U.S. any pretext for attacking Iran. For that, he needs to get Iran to cooperate with the IAEA.

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s visit to Tehran this week will serve to reduce the danger of a U.S. attack on Iran and consolidate the strategic relationship between Russia and Iran. He is the first Russian leader to visit Iran in more than 60 years, since Joseph Stalin travelled to Tehran for a wartime conference with his anti-Hitler coalition allies in 1943. Mr. Putin is also in Tehran for an international event — the Second Summit of the Caspian Sea Litto ral States, but he will stay there after the summit for an official “working visit.”

Iranian leaders had extended invitations to Mr. Putin’s predecessors, Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin, but both declined. The invitation to Mr. Putin was also pending for several years but he refused to go to Iran as at one point Moscow suspected Tehran of misusing its diplomatic support. In particular, the Kremlin was enraged last year when Tehran first accepted Moscow’s proposal to enrich uranium on Russian territory but suddenly backed out after Russia went public with the deal. The Kremlin accused it of “abusing our constructive relations and doing nothing to convince our colleagues of the consistency of Tehran’s policies.” Nevertheless, Russia honoured its 2005 contract to deliver $700-million sophisticated Tor M1 air defence systems to Iran but put on hold plans to operationalise the nuclear reactor it has built at the Bushehr power project.

The reason the Russian leader has decided to go to Tehran is that the threat of a U.S. attack on Iran has grown all too big. The Pentagon has deployed the largest force in the region since the 2003 war, with half of the U.S. Navy’s warships positioned within striking distance of Iran. Washington sanctioned an Israeli strike on Syria last month targeting an alleged construction site of a nuclear reactor in what was claimed to be a “dry run” for an attack on Iran.

Mr. Putin’s visit should also be seen in the context of Russia’s assertive foreign policy that crystallised after its economy bounced back from the crisis of the 1990s. This policy was best articulated by Mr. Putin in his February speech in Munich, Germany, where he vowed to challenge Washington’s policy of international diktat and unrestrained use of force.

Russia recently issued several stern warnings to the U.S. and its allies against using force in Iran. It told French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner, who visited Moscow last month after telling the world to prepare for a “war” against Iran, that the West should stop threatening Tehran with war and let the United Nations nuclear watchdog handle the problem of its nuclear programme. Last week Mr. Putin told his French counterpart Nicolas Sarkozy, an ardent supporter of the U.S. on Iran, that there was no evidence to support Washington’s “guilty” verdict. “We don’t have information showing that Iran is striving to produce nuclear weapons. That is why we are proceeding on the basis that Iran does not have such plans,” Mr. Putin said at a joint press conference with Mr. Sarkozy in Moscow.

Mr. Putin’s emphasis on the absence of “objective information” on Iran seeking nuclear capability served as a reminder of what happened in Iraq, when the U.S. launched a war accusing Saddam Hussein of possessing weapons of mass destruction, a claim that subsequently proved hollow.

U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Secretary of Defence Robert Gates, who visited Moscow on the heels of Mr. Sarkozy’s trip, were bluntly told to drop their “unilateral” approach and “periodic calls to use military force against Iran,” as “these undermine and impede our collective effort.”

But the momentum for war is building up. Two weeks ago, the Senate passed a resolution urging the administration to place Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps on the U.S. blacklist as a “terrorist organisation.” Democratic Senator Jim Webb of Virginia, who voted against it, accused the White House of pushing through the resolution as “a back-door method of gaining congressional validation for military action.” “It is for all practical purposes mandating the military option,” he said.

U.S. investigative journalist Seymour M. Hersh last week wrote in a well-documented piece in the New Yorker that the Revolutionary Guard facilities, which the White House claims were the source of attacks on Americans in Iraq, would be the focus of “surgical” U.S. strikes under a new plan drawn up by the Joint Chiefs of Staff on the initiative of Vice-President Dick Cheney. “President Bush and members of his Administration have redefined the war in Iraq, to an increasing degree, as a strategic battle between the United States and Iran,” the veteran journalist concluded.

President George W. Bush’s former ambassador to the U.N., John Bolton, told a Tory conference in Britain last month that efforts to negotiate with Iran had failed and he saw no alternative to a pre-emptive strike on its suspected nuclear facilities.

Mr. Putin’s prime goal in going to Tehran is to try and deny the U.S. any pretext for attacking Iran. For that he needs to get Iran to fully cooperate with the International Atomic Energy Agency. “We agree that all of Iran’s programmes [should] be made absolutely transparent,” he said last week.

Mr. Putin will tell Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad that Russia accepts Iran’s right to use nuclear energy but wants it to open up its nuclear programme to international inspectors to prove that it is peaceful, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said. The Russian leader will offer Iran a range of incentives including completing the construction of the Bushehr nuclear station. Mr. Putin is taking along with him Sergei Kiriyenko, Russia’s Rosatom atomic energy agency chief, and Iranian officials have hinted at the possibility of new nuclear energy agreements being signed during the visit.

Mr. Putin will set out broad vistas for bilateral and multilateral cooperation that would be scuttled if Iran comes under attack and the situation in the region gets out of hand.

Shared interests

Russia and Iran share many strategic interests in Central Asia, the Caspian and the Caucasus. The two countries jointly worked to end the civil war in Tajikistan in the 1990s and the Taliban rule in Afghanistan. In contrast to many other Muslim nations, Iran always treated Chechnya as Russia’s internal matter and played an instrumental role in the Organisation of Islamic Conference to keep it from openly supporting Chechen rebels. Both Russia and Iran have a stake in maintaining peace and stability in Central Asia and the Caucasus, and are concerned over the growing U.S. presence in the region. Russia is Iran’s main arms and technology supplier. Russian natural gas monopoly Gazprom is developing the South Pars field in Iran, and is ready to help build the Iran-Pakistan-India gas pipeline. The Russian Railways company is involved in a multinational project to build a 350-km line for the North-South Transport Corridor linking the town of Astara on Azerbaijan’s border with Kazvin on Iranian territory.

Russia and Iran, the world’s largest and second-largest holders of natural gas reserves, both support the idea of creating a gas OPEC. Iran has an observer status in the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation and is likely to be a member of an energy club Russia is planning for the SCO.

At the Second Caspian Summit, the leaders of the littoral states — Russia, Iran, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan — will sign a declaration identifying the areas of agreement for a proposed convention on the legal status of the Caspian Sea. Even though the Caspian nations have made little headway on the sticking point of sharing the Caspian seabed and its resources since their first summit in 2002, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov expressed the hope that the summit would lay down guidelines for resolving the outstanding issues. Iran, whose coastline is a mere 13 per cent of the Caspian shore, advocates an equitable 20-per cent division of the seabed, while the other littoral states favour a division along a medial line based on the length of their sovereign coastlines.

The summit is expected to confirm the close positions Russia and Iran have taken against the presence of outside powers in the region and against the construction of underwater pipelines across the Caspian. For Russia, solidarity with Iran on these issues, on which they are opposed by Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan, is far more important than differences with Tehran over the delimitation of the Caspian.

Iran likewise is in no hurry to press for a final settlement. “Turning the Caspian Sea into a zone of friendship and peace is more important than delimitation of its basin,” Mr. Ahmadinejad told the Russian media ahead of Mr. Putin’s visit. Both Russia and Iran are more concerned with preventing the U.S. from straddling the Caspian and the energy flows from the region. “We should not permit the Caspian question to turn into a challenge and a reason for anxiety of the Caspian states,” the Iranian leader said.

Whatever the outcome of the summit and Mr. Putin’s bilateral visit, the very fact that they are taking place will cause a dent in the U.S. policy of political isolation of and economic sanctions on Iran.