Never ending US-Iran saga

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Never ending US-Iran saga

By S P Seth

Iran’s 1979 revolution plunged the country into an internal power frenzy, with the country’s political Left decimated by the clerical political order

Long-time wrangling between the US, Europe and Iran was upped another notch with the adoption of a fourth set of sanctions against Iran over the question of nuclear enrichment. The arguments in this political clash are familiar by now. But they need to be rehashed to get a grip on the issue.

The western argument is that Iran is seeking to become a nuclear power, with its enrichment programme being refined to make weapons grade uranium. Although there is no clear evidence that Iran is working to make nuclear weapons, the logic of its enrichment technology, if and when reaching around 90 percent, will surely enable it to go in that direction, if it so wanted. Besides the technology, it will also need sufficient stocks of weapons grade uranium to create a viable nuclear weapons programme. Which, in turn, will require a credible delivery system.

Iran’s present enrichment capacity is reportedly around 20 percent, enough perhaps for producing radioisotopes. Even US intelligence estimates of its capability are rather modest, and not pointing in the direction of nuclear weapons. Iran, on the other hand, denies it is engaged in a nuclear weapons programme. Its nuclear programme, it argues, is for peaceful purposes. Its mercurial President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad keeps making conflicting statements, at one time even claiming that Iran has acquired 80 percent enrichment capability. This led the US to hose down Iranian claims, asserting that Iran does not have such advanced capability.

In the midst of all these claims and counter-claims, one needs to look at the broader context of US-Iran relations. US interests in Iran and other Middle Eastern countries were largely dictated by easy access to oil resources at dirt-cheap prices. And it jelled with the exigencies of the Cold War by keeping these resources under control of the US-led western camp.

Around the same time, the induction of Israel into the Middle Eastern cortex was creating problems. When Israel, along with the UK and France, attacked Egypt over the nationalisation of the Suez Canal, the US was not pleased. First, because it was apparently done without consulting Washington. Second, this was an attempt by two colonial powers (UK and France) to wrest control of the last vestiges of their dying empire in the Middle East.

The US was not keen on them playing that role any more, except as an adjunct to its own dominant role in a post-World War II world. Hence, Washington came out against their joint invasion of Egypt. The attack failed in the face of the perseverance of the Nasser-led Egyptian government. If the US was hoping to harness Egyptian and Arab goodwill from its criticism of the Anglo-French invasion, it did not materialise.

Iran too was going through similar phenomena. In 1951, its popular Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadeq nationalised the oil industry, forcing the Shah of Iran into exile in 1953. However, in a CIA-sponsored coup by the Iranian army, Mossadeq was removed, while the Shah returned to his throne to do the US bidding for about 25 years.

But the Shah’s luck ran out in 1979 when he was forced out of his country by a popular revolution led by Ayatollah Khomeini from his exile in France. The new Iranian regime and the US got embroiled in an ugly political clash, with Tehran accusing the US embassy of being a nest of spies and taking its staff hostage. Though the crisis was defused and the US diplomats eventually went home, the political and diplomatic rupture between the two countries was never healed.

The US never liked the new clerical regime in Iran, fearing that it would destabilise the region. The subsequent Iran-Iraq war (1980-88) was considered a welcome development to keep Iran occupied with its own survival. With US aid to Iraq’s dictator, Saddam Hussein, the war dragged on for eight years, with too many people killed on both sides. It was fought inclusively, ending with a ceasefire based on the status quo.

Iran’s 1979 revolution also plunged the country into an internal power frenzy, with the country’s political Left decimated by the clerical political order. They had somehow been led to believe that, having achieved his goal of overthrowing the Shah, Ayatollah Khomeini would retire to his religious seminary in the city of Qom to devote himself to his faith, and that the political mantle of governing the country might fall on them. But, as subsequent events showed, the Left paid a very heavy price in terms of purges and killings of their cadres and followers.

What is relevant to the current political situation in Iran is that both the present Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and Mir Hossein Mousavi (as president and prime minister respectively at the time) were responsible for the killings. Mousavi now wears the garb of a democrat, cheated of becoming the legitimate president of Iran. That might be true, but yesterday’s killers cannot suddenly be reborn as angels of sorts.

Mousavi’s post of prime minister was abolished when Ali Khamenei became the supreme leader. They had been political rivals when Khomeini was the presiding deity. And Mousavi was still not reconciled to being politically sidelined. And when the opportunity came, he took on Ali Khamenei’s favoured presidential candidate Ahmadinejad in the elections.

Mousavi lost the contest. There is no doubt that the election was tinkered with but to the point where Mousavi would have won is not clear. But he was the preferred candidate of the US and the EU. He was considered amenable to western influence.

The US hoped that Mousavi, if elected, would be more conciliatory on the nuclear issue and other regional US strategic interests than the Supreme Leader Khamenei and Ahmadinejad. Since both groups in the Iranian clerical establishment have the same antecedents, and are rank nationalists, their differences on the nuclear issue or any other issue would have been tactical and marginal. Mousavi would have been most unlikely to give up Iran’s right to enrich uranium.

However, in the present situation, with Ali Khamenei as supreme leader and Ahmadinejad as president, the slapping of another layer of sanctions is unlikely to bend Iran’s rulers. True, it will hurt Iran more. But they have managed it before and they will be able to do it in the future.

Even though the sanctions are unanimously approved by all the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, Russia and China, with their billions of dollars of trade deals and investments, managed to soften the tough western draft to largely continue their economic transactions. Eventually, the West might be the loser by missing out on large economic opportunities in an oil-rich country.

The writer is a senior journalist and academic based in Sydney, Australia

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