British foreign secretary William Hague told the House of Commons on December 1 that even as he was speaking, Iran’s charge d-affairs in London was being told that the Iranian embassy in London had to be closed and its personnel required to leave the country in 48 hours. Barely 48 hours earlier Iranian ‘students’ had ransacked the main building and a smaller diplomatic compound of the British embassy in Tehran, while lobbing petrol bombs, smashing windows, stealing classified documents and torching the Union Jack. The attack was reminiscent of the siege of the US embassy in 1979, when Iranian Revolutionary ‘students’ had entered the embassy and held 52 Americans as hostages for 444 days, triggering American economic sanctions, rage and hostility. Iranian Revolutionaries, in turn, have held bitter memories of the coup engineered in 1953 by the CIA and British Intelligence, to unseat the elected Prime Minister Mohammed Mosaddegh and thereafter train the Savak, the universally reviled secret police of the Shah.
There has been no love lost between the American led ‘international community’ and the Iranians since then. Adding to the complexities in the region are the traditional rivalries between the Shia clerics of Iran and its Sunni dominated neighbours, led by Saudi Arabia. While Iran’s monarchical Arab neighbours are pro-American and welcome the American military presence in the oil rich Gulf, Iran’s militant ‘Revolutionary Guard’ backs Arab radicals like the Hezbollah in Lebanon and Palestinian ‘rejectionist’ groups like Hamas, in Gaza. While Iran tries to destabilise the Sunni dominated governments in Bahrain and Yemen and in the Shia dominated Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia, the Saudis join the CIA in backing the radical Sunni ‘Jundullah’ organisation in Iran. Moreover, while Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has called for Israel to be “wiped off the map” and outrageously denied Hitler’s genocide of Jews, most Arab governments back efforts by the US and the ‘Middle East Quartet’ for a ‘two state’ peace agreement between Israel and its neighbours that guarantees Israel’s security.
Over the past decade, tensions have mounted between Iran, on the one hand and the US and its NATO allies on the other, over Iran’s nuclear enrichment programme, which, in the eyes of many, is clearly weapons oriented. The designs for the enrichment facilities were transferred clandestinely to Iran by Pakistan, with nuclear cooperation commencing in the 1980s. Following President George Bush’s reference to Iraq, Iran and North Korea as constituting an “Axis of Evil,” an evidently rattled Iran agreed to suspend its nuclear enrichment programme and to stringent IAEA inspections. This occurred almost immediately after the Americans invaded neighbouring Iraq. Ever since then, it has been a cat and mouse game between the Americans and Iranians, on the entire question of Iran’s nuclear enrichment programme. Iran recommenced its uranium enrichment in 2005 and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) declared that it was in violation of its obligations as signatory to the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT).
Things came to a boiling point in 2006, after Iran broke IAEA inspection seals in its Natanz uranium enrichment plant. The IAEA passed a resolution referring Iran’s actions to the UN Security Council. As a member of the IAEA, India backed the move to refer Iran to the UN Security Council as Iran was found to have violated its obligations under the NPT. While India itself has refused to sign the NPT, its consistent position has been that those who have signed the treaty are obliged to abide by its provisions. The UN Security Council thereafter imposed sanctions on Iran’s trade in sensitive nuclear materials and technology. A defiant Iran rejected the resolution and vowed to step up its uranium enrichment programme. Shortly thereafter, Iran rejected a proposal by the five permanent members of the UNSC, together with Germany, to have its uranium required for nuclear power or other peaceful purposes, securely enriched outside the country.
Most intelligence analysts agree that it would take Iran anywhere from three to eight years to build a nuclear weapon. In the meantime, key Iranian nuclear scientists have been assassinated in Tehran and a ‘Stuxnet’ computer virus mysteriously introduced into Iran’s nuclear facilities, resulting their being crippled for several months. The widespread belief is that these developments have evidently been engineered jointly and separately, by the US and Israel. Matters have now again come to a head, after a recent IAEA report alleges that a foreign scientist had helped Iran to develop and design a nuclear explosive device. The IAEA report alludes to information provided by unnamed foreign intelligence agencies (quite evidently from the US, the UK and Israel) and its credibility and accuracy have been widely questioned. It is also now evident that both Russia and China will oppose any move by the US and the UK to impose any further economic sanctions on Iran. The current tensions between the UK and Iran escalated, when the UK unilaterally announced new and stringent financial sanctions, it was imposing on Iran.
While the diplomatic impasse continues, Israel is getting increasingly restless, at what it perceives as growingly menacing Iranian nuclear and missile programmes. Iran has, in recent years, acquired long range missile capabilities, enabling it to strike at the heart of Israel. Intemperate Iranian statements about Israel have only added to regional tensions. The Israeli Air Force destroyed Iraq’s ‘Osirak’ nuclear reactor in 1981. While such an attack may have succeeded in Iraq, the Iranians have dispersed and dug in their nuclear facilities. There is no guarantee that such an Israeli air strike on Iran will succeed. But, if attacked, it is more than likely that the Iranians will respond by closing the Gulf of Hormuz, through which a substantial portion of international oil exports move. While Saudi Arabia and its Arab neighbours would be delighted if the Israelis succeed, they should have no doubt that they will also face Iranian retribution. A disruption of oil supplies could see oil prices skyrocketing to levels nearly $200 a barrel, sending India’s already strained economy, into a virtual tailspin. Moreover, over four million Indians live and work in Iran’s neighbouring Arab countries. The main silver lining is that neither the Obama administration, nor its allies like France and Germany, would want to see developments, which escalate tensions in the oil rich Gulf region. Imaginative and patient diplomacy and not military threats, is what is required, to deal with the Iranian nuclear impasse.
(Views expressed in the column are the author’s own)
G Parthasarathy is a former diplomat and currently visiting professor at the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi