Iran: drifting to war?

by | Sep 19, 2007 | Middle East and North Africa

So let’s catch up with things on Iran since our last couple of posts (mine, David’s). In Europe on Sunday night, French foreign minister (and founder of Medecins sans Frontieres) Bernard Kouchner commented that:

“We have to prepare for the worst … the worst is war.”

That remark elicited a furious response from International Atomic Energy Agency head Mohamed ElBaradei, who said on Monday that:

“I would not talk about any use of force. There are rules on how to use force, and I would hope that everybody would have gotten the lesson after the Iraq situation, where 700,000 innocent civilians have lost their lives on the suspicion that a country has nuclear weapons.”

ElBaradei’s comments were buttressed by off the record briefing by UN officials, one of whom told the Guardian that

“There’s a strategic reason for doing these things. He really is alarmed. He sees this thing going out of control. The feeling around here is that this looks like the run-up to the Iraq war.”

So what’s going on here – and is the risk of war real? Here’s a quick rewind of how, as far as I can tell, things got to where they are and how things play out from here.

  • During August, ElBaradei (see excellent NY Times profile here) negotiated a secret agreement with Tehran, under which Iran would answer questions about its nuclear program in return for a series of concessions. His approach was essentially supported by China and Russia, but led to an immediate apoplectic reaction from the US, UK, France and Germany, who argued that ElBaradei had undermined the Security Council process and allowed Iran to buy itself more time to pursue its nuclear program – especially since the IAEA’s agreement with Iran included no stipulation that the latter had to suspend uranium enrichment.
  • But the EU-3 and the US realised that ElBaradei had won the key political advantage: momentum. According to the New York Times, a senior European official commented that “We told the Americans it would do no good to criticize ElBaradei, that it would only make him look even more like a hero.” Consequently, the Times went on, the US backed down: “Early in September, when the agency’s board gathered in Vienna and discussed the new plan, the American envoy, Gregory L. Schulte, stunned colleagues by praising Dr. ElBaradei. He told the board that the deal was “a potentially important development and a step in the right direction.”
  • Then, on Monday this week, Bernard Kouchner tried to regain the momentum by proposing a new gambit: a European sanctions regime. But there are obvious problems with his approach. While his tougher stance is strongly backed by the US and the UK, the sanctions option is hampered by the fact that no-one (least of all the US) really believes that sanctions work – all the more so when the sanctions are European-only. And there’s also a real risk that proposing a European sanctions regime is a tacit, but still clear, admission that the UN Security Council process is no longer the scene of the action.

And that leaves the question of where the Americans fit into all this. People in touch with the US government think they’ve seen a tipping point where the key American concern now has as much to do with the proxy war it thinks Iran is waging in Iraq, as with Iran’s nuclear ambitions. It’s not clear whether or not a decision has been made in Cheney’s office to push for war; publicly, the White House continues to endorse a diplomatic solution. But it feels like a moment of considerable risk. If the US does want war, then a fractured international approach can work strongly to its advantage: it can argue that the UN process has failed, that the French sanctions approach won’t deliver, and that ElBaradei is placing too much trust in Iranian interlocutors who’ve proved time and again to be unreliable.

So unless the European sanctions approach works, and if the US Security Council process becomes seen to have broken down, then the EU-3 may face a stark choice between throwing their lot in with the US, or backing the increasingly Blix-like figure of ElBaradei.

It remains to be seen how ElBaradei’s approach pans out. But one point in his favour: he appears to be the only international player making a concerted effort to see things from the Iranian side. Last year, I sat in on a House of Lords debate on Iran and listened to David Hannay – a former UK Ambassador the the UN, and member of Kofi Annan’s High Level Panel on threats, challenges and change – speak. A year and a half later, his concluding words still seem as relevant as they are ignored:

Finally, I make a plea as someone who began his diplomatic career 45 years ago in Tehran. We must really try to put ourselves in the shoes of the Iranians and to understand their thinking. It would be quite wrong to suppose that this is exclusively conditioned by religious extremism. Some of the things that President Ahmadinejad says could just as well have been said—indeed, they were said—by Prime Minister Mossadeq in the 1950s. Iran’s experience of being pushed around and manipulated by the great powers is a long and bitter one. We need to appeal to the pragmatic instincts, which exist in every Iranian whom I have ever known and to avoid playing to those memories of earlier defeats and humiliations. To coin a phrase, we need to show them respect, even when we disagree with them.

Mission (re)accomplished

by | Sep 17, 2007 | North America

It’s hard to underestimate how buoyed Republicans have been by Petraeus’s testimony last week. They’re pleased by his reports of progress in Iraq, of course, but mainly they’re happy to see domestic political opponents on the back foot.

Allow three pieces from the Weekly Standard to illustrate the point.

Fred Barnes is giddy at the ‘air of defeat’ that surrounds Democrats after the ‘wrenching ordeal’ of listening to Petraeus testify. Fred Kagan and Bill Kristol, godfathers to the surge, meanwhile, contrast the ‘serious men’ (Petraeus and Crocker) with their ‘children at play’ in the Congress and Senate.

But they’re just playing nice. It’s left to their colleague, David Gerlernter (who had the misfortune to open a parcel from the Unabomber) to really go for the jugular. Polls be damned, he believes Democrats are on the verge of losing any right to govern:

America’s political spectrum a decade or more in the future will be defined by two parties both born of today’s GOP after a natural and painless mitosis…

Americans traditionally like their two opposing parties to differ on domestic affairs but agree on basic foreign policy–not because things are nicer that way; rather because foreign-policy arguments are good for our enemies, bad for our friends, and hugely dangerous to ourselves–especially in an age when swarms of maniac, murderous jihadists blacken the Middle East like toxic locusts.

All this reminds me of the good old days. You remember. 2003. When the mission had been accomplished…

Mismatched risk perceptions – again

by | Sep 7, 2007 | Cooperation and coherence, Global system

At the time of last winter’s World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, and at meetings of the WEF Global Risk Network (of which I’m a member) over the following months, much was said about the mismatch in the risk perceptions of the investment community and the policy community.

Then, it seemed as though the financial and investment community was full of the joys of spring – and apparently oblivious to all the risks that people in the policy community and the global commentariat were becoming increasingly concerned about.  Risks like…

…how the US is badly bogged down in wars in Afghanistan and Iraq; an increasingly unstable Middle East and dangerous energy dependence; nuclear proliferation that has already occurred in North Korea and that is coming in Iran; the potential weakness of lame-duck political leaders in the US and other major democracies; record global trade imbalances and rising protectionist pressures; increased levels of public and private sector borrowing combined with record low saving in the US; falling home prices and middle class economic insecurity.

Yet, as former US Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers (whose words are quoted above, from the FT on 26 December 2006) observed:

The new year will begin with the greatest divergence for a generation between the general view of global risks as reflected by conventional wisdom and the risks as priced in financial markets. While the commentariat has been more alarmed about the state of the world than global markets for some years, the gap increased in 2006 as markets became more serene and everyone else grew more anxious.

Fast forward to today, and the tables have turned through 180 degrees. The current crisis in the markets has made minimal impact on commentariats and non-financial policymakers. Newspapers other than the FT are not covering it on the front page (or indeed outside the business section); it has yet to make any serious impression in foreign affairs ministries; there is no buzz about it in on the international summit circuit (e.g. the forthcoming APEC summit).

Yet in the business and financial press, people are going nuts. Yesterday, the FT devoted five full pages to the crisis. A letter to the editor from the global head of market economics at BNP Paribas – admittedly one of the firms worst hit by the sub-prime crisis – showed signs of panic:

When the patient is in seizure and the extremities are starting to turn blue it is not the time to worry about the patient’s longer-term dietary plans or about undesirable side-effects of the current treatment. Yet I fear that this is what central banks will do. The next set of steps had better be convincing and decisive, otherwise a much wider financial market implosion and economic recession will become very likely.

As with the ‘red’ and ‘blue’ sections of the US, the apparent inability of the financial community to communicate with or understand the wider policy community – and vice versa – is something that ought to cause worry on both sides.

And here’s another thought. If this is what happens when just one of the chickens cited by Lawrence Summers comes home to roost, what are the prospects if more than one comes fluttering in at once?