After a year-long hiatus in diplomacy, Iran and the "Iran Six" nations are gearing up for another round of negotiations in Geneva next week. Expectations on both sides are low and the environment polluted by the recent flurry of anti-Iran activities, ranging from tough new sanctions to nuclear terrorism and sabotage in Iran, to the demonization of the Islamic Republic by US officials who have used the WikiLeaks releases to underscore Iran's isolation.
In a small dose of pre-talk diplomacy, both US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her Iranian counterpart, Manouchehr Mottaki, are attending a security conference in Bahrain, sponsored by a London think-tank, and the chances are that they will use the opportunity to get a better insight of each other's mindset going into the Geneva talks.
After this week's assassination of a top Iranian nuclear scientist and the injuring of another, which Tehran attributed to United States and Israeli agents, Iranian officials have understandably stiffened their posture and are in no mood to appear as unduly flexible. The big question is what are the realistic expectations of each side in Geneva talks?
Officially, the US is sticking to its long-standing demand of Iran's full cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and the complete cessation of uranium-enrichment activities. Iran's primary goal, on the other hand, is to generate interest in this past May's so-called Tehran Declaration, signed by Iran, Turkey and Brazil, whereby Iran consented to ship 1,200kg of its low-enriched uranium to Turkey for temporary safekeeping in exchange for the delivery of 120kg of nuclear fuel for its Tehran reactor which produces radioisotopes for treating cancer patients in Iran.
The "Iran Six" nations at the negotiating table with Iran in Switzerland will be the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council - the United States, Russia, China, France, Britain - and Germany. But others may also be present.
"There may be more parties at the [Geneva] talks," Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad stated recently, alluding first and foremost to Turkey and Brazil; this while both Iranian and Turkish politicians and media continue to hammer the question of why Iran's proposal of holding the talks in Turkey was turned down by the European Union's foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton?
Depending on last-minute diplomacy, Turkey may manage to slip through the doors and sit at the table - the ball is in Washington's court to take a second look at the specifics of the Tehran Declaration, which was readily dismissed as "defective" by US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton within hours of its signing.
Indeed, there are several decent arguments in favor of adopting the Tehran Declaration. First, any argument that Iran should dish out two or three times as much of its low-enriched uranium (LEU) does not make sense from the point of view of the Tehran reactor's need, ie, the 1200 kg covers a 10-year cycle of fuel (See New signs of Iran nuclear flexibility Asia Times Online, November 24, 2010), as confirmed by various nuclear experts.
Second, a "narrow-focus" on the fuel swap is not tantamount to ignoring a Western-favored "broad-based" negotiation. On the contrary, zeroing in on the details of the fuel swap could prove a timely catalyst for widening the themes up for discussion, by acting as confidence-builder and, perhaps, convincing Iran to show some flexibility on both transparency issues as well as the scope of its spinning centrifuges. For example, Iran may agree to adopt "dry spinning" without enriching for sometime, the so-called stand-by option.
Third, Iran's agreement to ship out a bulk of its LEU should be welcomed by the West, irrespective of their reservations that the volume is not big enough - a tangible first step should not be ignored for the sake of unrealistic expectations that are not justifiable from the prism of IAEA's technical cooperation standards.
The "Vienna Group", consisting of US, Russia, France and the IAEA, may need to reconvene if the generalities of the fuel swap deal are adopted in Geneva next week. Such a fuel-swap compromise would definitely represent a mini-victory for both sides and a major ice-breaker in terms of reducing tensions. It would also raise the ire of Israelis and their Washington lobbyists thirsting for another war.
Fourth, the June 2008 proposal by the "Iran Six" to Iran is still on the table, according to Ashton. This involves an array of economic, security, and nuclear assistance offers to Iran that could conceivably be further fine tuned in Geneva, such as by the US showing willingness to participate in the modernization of the Tehran reactor, which was initially built by the US before Argentina redesigned it years ago.
Needless to say, for the Obama administration to be able to seriously consider such concrete steps in light of the US's domestic contingencies, it must show that it has somehow reached a breakthrough in bracketing Iran's proliferation risk. A number of Iranian experts, such as professor Kayhan Barzegar, in an article in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, have suggested that Iran may well re-adopt the intrusive Additional Protocol of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, thus allowing the US and its allies to claim a significant concession from Iran.
If the Geneva talks fail and the US blocks Iran's request from the IAEA for cooperation on fuel delivery to its medical reactor, then we can safely expect a negative backlash in terms of Iran's cooperation with the atomic agency, which has been complaining of insufficient Iranian cooperation with its inspectors.
This is not a desirable outcome for the US, which claims to support Iranian people, who would be sure to turn against US President Barack Obama if humanitarian assistance to cancer patients were denied. And in any case, should any failure of talks be followed by military aggression against Iran, the fury of a united Iran striking back is all but a foregone conclusion.
