Re: That's the best case scenario where the war doesn't spread to Iran...
Actually, it's not a matter for the war to "spread" to Iran, both Afghanistan and Iraq are merely steppingstones for the impending assault on Iran (to prevent it from becoming a nuclear challenger to Israel). I too fell for the PR ploy that compartmentalized and, somehow, isolated the three issues, namely, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Iran... until I realized they were all linked together and boiled down to the containment of IRAN.
Anyway, the masquerade of the so-called EU-3-Iran talks over Iran's nuclear endeavors is now falling apart... As the excerpt below shows, the notion that Europe might somehow play the "good cop" in world politics was just a wry pretense.
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The question is, of course, why Europe agreed to the position of the US president when they had signed an agreement with Iran, ie, the Paris Agreement, which the US press, including the New York Times, had decried as "deeply flawed" since the agreement recognized Iran's NPT rights and the "implementation" of those rights, in contrast to the US's consistent opposition to the idea of a future resumption of Iran's enrichment program.
After all, the Paris Agreement was a serious blow to the US's stance toward Iran, and, therefore, it was impossible for Europe to make common cause with the US on Iran without either the US changing its position, which it did not, or Europe revising itself, which it did by, for all practical purposes, burying the Paris Agreement the moment they agreed to Washington's recipe for Security Council action if Iran failed to heed their warnings.
Who killed the Paris Agreement? Well, at the moment it is not quite dead, only a short step from its coffin, which is wrapped in virulent political rhetoric and the Europeans' duplicity of maintaining the facade of "let's save the Paris Agreement" while, in effect, doing everything possible to undermine it, and moreover, trumping it with newer developments sought after by Washington.
This, in turn, might explain why the EU-3 has not given serious consideration so far to Iran's offer of an objective guarantee that it seeks only contained, low-grade enrichment for peaceful purposes under full IAEA monitoring. Instead, their new argument, in sharp contrast to the Paris Agreement, is that the only objective guarantee is the full and permanent suspension of Iran's enrichment program.
In other words, Europe has exchanged sincere talks and honored agreement for diplomatic chicanery, as if such shenanigans that rekindle Old Europe's Middle East colonial game (eg, the Sykes-Picot agreement) can be somehow overlooked and deemed defensible from the prism of New World diplomacy. Too bad for Europe, even UN chief Kofi Annan has explicitly warned that the Security Council would be deadlocked if Iran's nuclear issue were raised there, implicitly sending the message that China, and perhaps Russia, would perhaps veto any sanctions on Iran in the absence of any smoking gun on Iran's alleged nuclear weapon program, and in the light of Iran's adoption of the IAEA's Additional Protocol allowing unfettered inspection of Iran's nuclear facilities by the IAEA.
But, sadly, old habits are hard to kick, and one can see this in Tony Blair's upping the ante against Iran with his harsh statement that "all options are on the table", while in the same breath insisting that the idea of attacking Iran "is absurd". In the post-Iraq absurdist politics of Great Britain, whose government spokesman candidly admits that recent revelations about the US and Great Britain manufacturing evidence against Iraq in early 2002 "is nothing new", instead of admitting the horrendous failure of public trust reflected in such revelations, Blair may have learnt the wrong lesson from the Iraq fiasco - that Orwellian power politics work and one needs only to fine-tune them for the next gambit.
Notwithstanding the European lack of consistency and their diplomatic zig-zags dumping their autonomous diplomacy firmly in the laps of Washington, one wonders about the protean value, if any, of Iran's continuous dialogue with Europe, which has adopted a more demanding posture vis-a-vis Iran than the governing board of the IAEA. The initial Iranian rationale for separate talks with Europe, namely, the need to have a power bloc as nuclear interlocutor and catalyst in the brewing crisis, may have run its course, and the advantages, for both sides, of discontinuing the talks may appear to be overwhelming the disadvantages, for the following reasons:
First, the EU-3 have clearly negated the terms and spirit of the Paris Agreement and forfeited their independent atomic diplomacy by their united front with Washington. Second, if Iran drops its EU talks without at the same time resuming enrichment activities and, instead, focuses its diplomacy on the IAEA only, then the whole spectrum of Iran-EU trade and economic relations may have been saved from the potential backlash of the European nuclear reductionism discernible in the Paris Agreement's linkage diplomacy.
Third, various European leaders, such as Blair, have thrown down the gauntlet with their thinly disguised threat of military action, thus depriving themselves of the validity basis of bilateral negotiations, namely, the ethics of civility and soft power diplomacy, showing instead the ugly teeth of Old Europe resurrecting its hard power mentality.
Fourth, at this juncture, with the EU having publicly committed itself to sharply contrasting positions with the White House on one hand, and the Paris Agreement on the other, there may be no middle ground left for Europe. Hence, notwithstanding these and several other considerations, a damage-control approach by both sides may be none other than salvaging their relations by discontinuing their present talks.
Kaveh L Afrasiabi, PhD, is the author of After Khomeini: New Directions in Iran's Foreign Policy (Westview Press) and "Iran's Foreign Policy Since 9/11", Brown's Journal of World Affairs, co-authored with former deputy foreign minister Abbas Maleki, No 2, 2003. He teaches political science at Tehran University.
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