Yes, There's An Answer

By Cernig

As anonymous and hawkish Bush administration officials prime the media for another round of recalcitrance on actually solving what they say is the most pressing issue of the day - Iran's nuclear program - and others indulge in some old-fashioned war-pimping, it's worth remembering that there's already a solution on the table that doesn't involve war. Robert Naiman, at the HuffPo, lays it out:

In March, Ambassador Pickering co-authored "A Solution for the US-Iran Nuclear Standoff" in the New York Review of Books. Pickering and his co-authors wrote:

"We propose that Iran's efforts to produce enriched uranium and other related nuclear activities be conducted on a multilateral basis, that is to say jointly managed and operated on Iranian soil by a consortium including Iran and other governments. This proposal provides a realistic, workable solution to the US-Iranian nuclear standoff. Turning Iran's sensitive nuclear activities into a multinational program will reduce the risk of proliferation and create the basis for a broader discussion not only of our disagreements but of our common interests as well. "

On May 31, the Boston Globe interviewed Iran's Ambassador to the UN, who said that Iran "would not suspend its own enrichment program, but would consider establishing an internationally owned consortium inside Iran that could produce nuclear fuel with Iranian participation." The Globe noted in a follow-up piece on June 10 that Iran had proposed this idea in its May 13 letter to the UN calling for comprehensive negotiations, that the proposal was broadly similar to the Pickering proposal, and that Iran's UN Ambassador had said that the details should be negotiated.

Unfortunately, most Americans don't read the New York Review of Books or the Boston Globe. So, while polls consistently show most Americans want negotiations with Iran to resolve the nuclear dispute, most Americans don't know that there's an offer on the table right now to resolve the nuclear dispute that the US government is walking away from.

Right now, Iran's government seems to be as divided as the Bush administration between hardliners and those who want a solution - the internationalising of Iran's enrichment facilities would let both sides have their cake and eat it too. Iran wouldn't have to concede a halt in enrichment, which it has described as a red line based on national pride, while the West would gain all the access and control it needed to ensure Iran's nuclear program was as transparent as such a program ever could be - more transparent by far than those of other nations including the US, UK, Israel, Pakistan, France and India.

It's time other Western nations put pressure on the US, not just Iran, to negotiate in good faith. In an op-ed in the UK's Financial Times yesterday, foreign policy heavyweight Prof. Anatol Lieven called on the British government to do exactly that- on the basis that an attack on Iran will lose the War on Terror in Afghanistan.

The British government can stop this nonsense. All that it needs to do is make clear to the US administration, initially in private but in public if necessary, that the consequence of an attack would be complete British military withdrawal, not only from Iraq but from Afghanistan as well ... By starting the withdrawal of most of the Nato forces from Afghanistan, British withdrawal would throw an immense new burden on the US military, strip the Afghan operation of its international legitimacy and almost certainly wreck it altogether.

For these reasons, this is not a step that, as a friend of Afghanistan, I would ever advocate, were it not for one blindingly obvious fact: that a US-backed Israeli attack on Iran will in any case doom our enterprise in Afghanistan to irretrievable failure. From the moment that Israeli munitions fall on Iran, all hope of stabilising Afghanistan on western terms will be lost. From then on, every British soldier who dies in Afghanistan will die for nothing.

... At present, according to informed western sources, Iran’s strategy towards the Taliban has been to open lines of communication but provide only symbolic amounts of aid. After all, so hostile were relations between Taliban Afghanistan and Iran that the countries almost went to war in 1998, and Iran supported the US overthrow of the Taliban after 9/11. Today, however, Iran has positioned itself so as to increase its help to the Taliban greatly if it is attacked by Israel and the US.

The Karzai administration is aware of all this, which is why all its leading elements are opposed to an attack on Iran and have done their utmost to improve relations with Tehran. This is also the strategy of the government of Iraq. If the US not only sweeps aside these views but allows Israel to cross Iraqi airspace, it will have ripped away even the façade of Afghan and Iraqi national sovereignty.

The British establishment supports the “special relationship” in large part because it believes that closeness to Washington allows Britain to “punch above its weight” in the world. Much of this belief is mythical. The issue of an Israeli attack on Iran, however, is one where a British government really can have a decisive effect and has a categorical duty to do so.

Meanwhile, John McCain continues to join with those anonymous Bush administration hawks in relegating Afghanistan to a back burner and has happily sang of bombing Iran, oblivious or unmindful of the blowback that would wreck any chances of success in Iraq or Afghanistan alike. Yet he says he's the strong one of national security and the War on Terror...