Don't Cry For Me, Iran
08.03.2005Hooman Majd
Tehran, August 2nd-3rd. Tuesday was the last day of the eight year presidency of Hojatoleslam Seyed Mohammad Khatami, and he’s going out with a bang. Three bangs, actually: a bomb set off at the offices of British Airways and BP, and two bullets in the head of a prominent judge (who presided over the trial of dissident Akbar Ganji): he was shot by a motorcyclist as he left the Islamic Guidance judiciary building. This in the middle of what could be the biggest crisis in Iranian relations with the West since the hostage crisis of 1979, namely, the impending collapse of negotiations with the EU over Iran’s nuclear program.
Much of the radio news late Tuesday evening however, was of President Khatami’s last day in office, and ended with an almost wistful ode to him by a female broadcaster with a terribly sweet voice. Tehranis, both those who loved and supported him and those who felt he didn’t push hard enough for reform (for there are precious few Iranians who wouldn’t agree that Khatami was at least a good man), exhibit a certain nervousness about the future that might be unexpected given the margin of victory for the new president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who was handed the reigns of power by Ayatollah Khamenei, the Supreme Leader, on Wednesday morning. The nervousness certainly extends to the rest of the world where suspicion of a government ideologically aligned with conservative theology is extremely high.
Iran, by declaring its intention over the weekend to resume uranium conversion at Isfahan while President Khatami was still in office, signaled the world that a change in government did not mean a change in its oft-stated position that Iran cannot and will not give up that right in any negotiation. The Iranians don’t like to be played (one of the big themes of any major speech on foreign relations is the declaration of Iran’s independence and that it won’t be taken lightly, a theme once again central in the Supreme Leader’s speech confirming Mr. Ahmadinejad today), and in the case of the EU negotiations there was a definite sense that that was indeed what the Europeans (and Americans) were doing: playing Iran by delaying new proposals until Ahmadinejad took office.
The New York Times wishes for President Ahmadinejad to be the man to break the impasse; the man to make a nuclear deal against all odds, but the reality is that as far as the Iranians are concerned they’ve already made a deal: it’s just that the Europeans (or the U.S.) haven’t accepted it yet. Since nuclear fuel self-sufficiency seems to be the one issue that virtually all Iranians from all walks of life agree upon, it is hard to imagine that anyone in power would back down from that goal, or if they did, how they would present it to their people as not having caved in to Western demands. As such, what is important is whether the EU and the U.S. can find a way to live with at least some measure of Iranian nuclear capability, not whether Iran under a new regime will give up it’s nuclear ambitions altogether. Drawing a line in the sand, as both sides have done until now, allows for no subtlety or compromise. The U.S. has insisted (more often than the French or the Germans) that Iran can never, under any circumstances, be allowed to produce nuclear fuel, and Iran has insisted in that as a right under every treaty it has signed.
For Mr. Ahmadinejad to pull a Nixonian diplomatic coup as the New York Times today, would mean that when he travels to New York in September to attend the U.N. 60th anniversary celebrations (as he has said he intends to), he would have to be invited to the White House for a tête-à-tête with President Bush. Assuming Iran’s president would accept the invitation, Mr. Bush might look into his eyes, as he did with Vladimir Putin, and as a fellow religious conservative, declare him to be a good soul. Dream on, you say, as they would do in Tehran as well. Iranians here doubt that he’ll even be given a U.S. visa to make it to New York (although how the U.S. could stop the head of state of a member nation from attending the U.N. General Assembly is not mentioned), let alone have a chat with George Bush. That perhaps says as much about how Iranians view the way America views Iran as it does about how they view America themselves. |
