Iran Weekly Wire Podcast

You’re listening to Iran’s Weekly Wire. I’m Roland Elliott Brown.

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Is Iran going to develop a nuclear weapon?

It is a question that has raised fears of US or Israeli airstrikes on Iranian nuclear facilities.

It has given fright not only to the United States and Israel, but also to Iran’s Sunni Muslim rivals.

It has also brought Iran and the United States, which have been enemies for the past 36 years, ever closer through negotiations.

The negotiations boil down to how long it would take Iran to make nuclear weapons, and making sure it can’t make them without being detected.

The US wants to stop Iran building a nuclear weapon without the world knowing about it. Iran says its nuclear program is for peaceful use only.

At the end of this month, on March 31, negotiations will hit another deadline.

Now, deadlines have come and gone in the past, and negotiations have been postponed twice.

But there is an acute and growing sense that the US and Iran will strike some kind of a deal.

This week, for our Nowruz special, I spoke to a range of Iran specialists about what’s a deal would mean for Iran, its neighbors, and the United States.

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The first person I talked to was Nazila Fathi. She’s is a journalist who reported from Iran for The New York Times and other publications for nearly 20 years.  She left Iran in 2009. I started by asking her how likely a deal looked now.

I think that the United States and many other Western countries that are engaged in talks with Iran have realized that the Islamic Republic of Iran is not going anywhere. And there is no other way than to have a deal with Iran. I’m personally hopeful there will be a deal Everybody’s energy is just focused to finding an end to this standoff.

To many specialists concerned with Iranian affairs, the standoff is inseparable from Iran’s aggressive foreign policy, and its human rights record, which is one of the worst in the world.  

For them, the question is, will a deal make Iran behave better?

It’s a question that divides the optimists from the pessimists.

Mahnaz Afkhami was Minister of Women’s affairs in Iran when the Shah was in power. She fled Iran in 1979, and is now a scholar and human rights activist living in Maryland. For her, the negotiations bring hope.

It’s wonderful and I hope that it will succeed. I think it will give opportunities for more communication and more interaction between the two peoples It will be a triumph of reason if it works out. Perhaps the position of Iran overall will be closer to the general normative conversations at the international level.

In other words, Iran wants proper diplomatic relations to represent its interests.  But for many, Iran is treated as a pariah state for good reasons, and they see no compelling grounds for change.  Danielle Pletka  is vice-president for foreign and defense policy studies American Enterprise Institute, a think-tank based in Washington DC.

This is a shot in the arm for terrorist iran, to human rights abusing Iran, to terrorist supporting Iran, to interfering Iran. It’s great for everybody in Iran...not of course for people who wish that they lived in a free country, but they’re an afterthought for the American government at this point.

So should the American government even be holding these talks? Azar Nafisi is the author of Reading Lolita in Tehran.

I believe that democracy means that you always begin with negotiations, even with people you consider your enemy. The more accountable the Iranian regime is to the world, the more, hopefully, accountable it will become towards its own people if it is done right.

Doing this right is a big if!  The middle east is convulsed by conflict and it’s anyone’s call whether this deal will make things better or worse. Geneive Abdo is a Middle East specialist at the Stimson Center, a global security think tank in Washington DC, sees Obama’s failure in the Middle East as a key factor motivating the talks.  

President Obama has invested a lot of political capital on this issue and he needs--it’s sort of become a cliche to say it--but he needs a foreign Policy success in the Middle East before he leaves office because everything else has been such a disaster.

Obama isn’t the only politician who needs a public success.  Here’s Geneive Abdo again.

Ayatollah Khamenei definitely wants sanctions to be lifted, which is why he has instructed President Rouhani to deal with the nuclear issue. So I think that both sides want a deal. I don’t think that whatever deal will be agreed upon will fundamentally change anything.

If that’s true, why the huge effort to secure a deal at all?  Reza Marashi of the National Iranian-American Council, spoke to me from Switzerland, where the talks are going on. He thinks both sides are strongly motivated by the risks of failure:

I’m one of the people that you could call cautiously optimistic. And I’m cautiously optimistic for two reasons: One more generally, I think that if this process fails, things could get really ugly really fast, and it could very well spiral into a military conflict that both sides would independently seek to avoid. I’m also cautiously optimistic because i’ve attended nearly every round of negotiations since President Rouhani was elected to office, and I’ve seen the progression, I’ve seen the two sides move closer together to compromise, and I’ve seen them very openly come out and say they’re close, and even though they have remaining gaps, a deal is more plausible than it ever has been in recent memory all it takes now is the ability to absorb and sell compromise

But compromise might not be possible at all.  Earlier this month the US Congress tried to derail negotiations.  47 Republicans signed a letter to Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei claiming that President Obama didn’t have the political backing to sustain a deal.  I asked Reza Marashi about Congress’s opposition to the deal.

Well I think it’s not a secret to anyone that the American Congress can be sold to the highest bidder, and that’s for foreign or domestic policy, and it just so happens that on Iran-related issues there are very powerful interest groups that have opposed to the diplomatic process from the outset.  But beyond that beyond the congressional dynamic, and the White House and sanctions and all that, we have to remember that over three decades of an institutionalized enmity cannot be undone overnight. Iran has been a politically toxic issue in the United States since the revolution. Some of that is entirely justified because of reasons like the hostage crisis.

Iran’s history of challenging America to garner political support at home is the cause of the almost visceral opposition to this attempt at understanding and compromise.  There’s simply no trust. Michael Ledeen is an Iran specialist, and a scholar at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. He supports regime change in Iran, not negotiations.  

What I want to know is not about the interim agreement or agreement now. I want to know if Iran is willing to stop being the world’s leading sponsor of terrorism, stop oppressing its own people, and stop killing Americans. Those are the main questions for me.

Obama’s motives for reaching out to Iran are a mystery to him

He has for a very long time wanted to make a strategic alliance with Khamenei and the regime. Maybe the most interesting unanswered question in this whole matter is why? It strikes me as very odd that an American politician should want to have an alliance with this evil regime in Tehran as the main footnote to his presidency. It’s very unusual, and I don’t think we know why yet. There were probably some events in his life or some friends that he made, or some professor he had, perhaps, who has really shaped Obama’s worldview on the subject of Iran, but it’s very unusual.

Iran’s neighbours have also come out against a deal. Geneive Abdo also points out that Iran’s neighbors are not going to be happy about a deal, since they see it as empowering Iran in their region.

I do think that if there is a deal, this is going to empower Iran in the region, which I don’t think is necessarily a positive thing for Arab societies, and that’s why there is so much opposition within Sunni societies. I travel in the region quite frequently, and as people have been saying for the last two years in Lebanon, in Bahrain, in many Arab countries, they don’t want to see an increase in Iranian influence. And that’s what they fear with a deal, that it will empower Iran, and I think that’s likely to be the case.                                   

One argument for the deal is that Iran is a relatively stable regional power in a region that desperately needs stability.  Bringing Iran back into the international community will help bring peace to the middle east.  Or so the argument goes.  

Reuel Marc Gerecht, is a former CIA Middle East specialist. He’s now a senior fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.  He thinks the deal will actually lead to nuclear proliferation in the region:

I think it’s going to be a mess. There’s no way that the deal will last. First and foremost for the people in the region, particularly those who are Sunni and Arab, this deal is just about their worst nightmare, so i think it’s inevitable that the Saudis are going to pull the Pakistani option, so whether or not they receive a nuclear device from the Pakistanis--and I suspect they will--they will certainly let people believe that they have in fact received nuclear devices that can be delivered by F-16s. I think that’s a foregone conclusion. Now, proliferation elsewhere in the Middle East, I think that’s highly likely, and proliferation elsewhere, too, but it will take time beyond the Saudis because building nuclear weapons takes time. This has been a long-term project for Iran, this really has been their Manhattan Project, and so other folks in the region, with the exception of the Turks of course, are not nearly as talented as the Iranians are, developing nuclear weapons does take a bit of time, but I think it’s a foregone conclusion it’s going in that direction. The Saudis will lead it off.

According to Gerecht the deal will also fuel Iranian nuclear escalation, not just that of its arab neighbours.

We already know that there isn’t going to be any kind of rigorous, go anywhere, go anytime inspections regime. The Iranians have clearly said that any meaningful additional protocol, to quote Ali Velayati, is the equivalent of the Treaty of Turkmanchai in 1828. And if you’re familiar with Iranian history, that is about as low as you can get. Without that kind of an inspections regime, this deal is meaningless.

So I asked him what he thought the US should do. Here’s what he said:

You have two options with this. And it depends what you believe. You can try to ramp up the sanctions regime and crack the Iranian economy and see if that gives you a better deal. I’m sceptical, because you’re essentially talking about the regime giving up that which is the most important part of its identity militarily. That is, the nuclear weapons program is at the center of everything the regime has done. I don’t think they are ever going to give that up peacefully. Which brings you to the scenario that has been fairly evident for those who want to look at it: the only way you’re going to take out that program is to militarily destroy it.

Another war in the middle east has little support from anyone, even Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netenyahu is circumspect. So is this deal the least bad outcome?  Not according to Danielle Pletka.

452: The Obama Administration has tried to post this as a choice between a deal, even a bad deal, and war. And my question is, who exactly is going to be waging that war? It’s not the Obama Administration. It’s not the Israelis, either, as we’ve learned. I think that that is a completely ridiculous straw man. The choice is between a bad deal and a better deal. A better deal would take longer, a better deal might require more pressure on the Iranians, a better deal will also give them some time to continue moving forward.

It’s easy for westerners to forget that conservatives in Iran oppose the deal, too. They’re making a lot of noise in Iranian politics already. If negotiations are successful, they are likley to lash out to show they’re not afraid of Rouhani’s camp. Reza Marashi outlined the prospects for Iran’s internal politics:

I think for domestic policy it means two things. One, it means that President Rouhani’s coalition, his loose but broad-based coalition will be empowered as they head toward majles elections next year. That will enable him to keep the coalition together, and it could very well mean that the composition of the majles will change so that it will be more favorable to the moderates/pragmatists--call Rouhani whatever you will, that coalition of political officials in Iran. But I also think that human rights abuses and domestic repression more generally will have a short- to medium-term spike in the event a deal gets done, because hardliners in Iran will want to send a message to both their domestic and foreign audiences that making a deal is not coming from a position of weakness.

So the idea is, short-term repression may be followed by long-term liberal reform.  I put this to  Reuel Marc Gerecht, and he just laughed.

One, I would say Rouhani is not one of the more liberal elements of society. I think it’s going to aggravate what you might call their more aggressive tendencies. I think the Iranians have seen that they can get away with an enormous amount in the region, and that the American check on them no longer exists, at least until january 2017. So I expect their aggressiveness to continue and probably to get significantly worse. The notion of this deal sparking some kind of liberal reform movement really beggars credulity. The supreme leader successfully crushed the reformist movement under Mousavi and the Green Movement. He did it rather well. but the notion that someone like Rouhani is going to lead a reform movement, I would disagree with that strongly. What he’s going to do is make the revolutionary movement sustainable. He’s going to try to fortify it economically, and he will be more aggressive.

Even the hopeful camp admits that the regime in Tehran isn’t likely to get more liberal any time soon.  Nazila Fathi:

In the short run I don’t think we will see any kind of easing within the country. But in the long term, it’s going to boost the economy. We’ve seen this in Iran over the past 35 years.Every time the economy has improved, civil society has strengthened. And when civil society strengthens, people have been much more powerful to forward their claims and make demands from a much more powerful position than when the economy is under pressure.

If conservatives in Iran fear negotiations, it’s partly because talking to America is so potentially subversive for a regime built on enmity toward the US. Here’s how Azar Nafisi put it:

Up to now it has not just been the follies and obstinacy of the Americans that has stalled negotiations. It has also been the fact that for many within the Islamic regime this has been a very dangerous step, to have relations with the United States.

But Iran has been very careful to split nuclear negotiations off from all other issues, including its foreign policy, its support for terrorism, and its human rights situation.

While some of these may be of greater concern to the US government than others, Nafisi is also worried that the US is neglecting higher principles for the sake of a deal.

Negotiating over nukes with Iran might also mean silence on human rights or neglect of the democratic aspirations of the Iranian people. We have seen it happen in Myanmar, we have seen it happen with China, where there have been great relations with the United States, but that did not mean that the people inside those countries got a break.

I also spoke to Roya Boroumand. She’s the co-founder of the Abdorrahman Boroumand Foundation, which promotes human rights and democracy in Iran. She thinks the separation of the nuclear issue from all of Iran’s other problems is wrong, not just for moral reasons, but for practical ones.

She talked about what she called Iran’s “culture of impunity”, something she encounters all the time in her human rights work. She sees it as a major obstacle to nuclear deal:

Iran over several decades has developed or has had a culture of impunity.

Impunity at home and impunity outside the country are two faces of the same coin. If we want change and sustainable improvement in Iran and in Iran’s relations with other countries, we need a grand bargain, and this is a picture that has to be looked at as a whole, and I honestly think that as long as the human rights situation inside the country has not improved, and there is not a degree of accountability and understanding of rule of law and enforcement of rule of law, agreements won’t last.

She’s probably right.

But even if a deal doesn’t last, the US has, at the very least, given Iran something to lose.

Iran wants the respect of the international community, and if it builds a nuclear weapon now, it will never have it.

But the threat of Iran losing respect may not be enough to secure peace in the region.  

Indeed, the very idea makes its neighbors laugh.

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That’s all for Iran’s Weekly Wire. If you want to find out more about these issues, join us on Twitter and Facebook, or visit IranWire.com