The renewed outburst of student riots in Tehran over the past week is threatening to upset a carefully constructed diplomatic effort designed to prevent the coming nuclear standoff with Iran from provoking an Iraq-style crisis in America's alliances. The Group of Eight summit at Evian two weeks ago brought the United States, Russia and the European Union together behind a common effort to control Iran's nuclear ambitions through legal and international means.
The stakes are high. The Europeans, the Russians and even President George W. Bush's closest ally, Tony Blair, all question Iran's inclusion in Bush's "axis of evil," but nobody wants a replay of the rows over Iraq, hence the attempt at a G8 deal on Iran.
The scheme is based on the somewhat risky assumption that the Iranian government, though badly split between the elected government of President Mohammed Khatami and the unelected ayatollahs who really control the country, remains a rational actor, able to respond reasonably to a judicious use of carrots and sticks when deployed by the rest of the international community. That may no longer be the case.
The student riots come at a time when the political civil war between the elected government and the ayatollahs is reaching a new head. Parliament is demanding a referendum on the reform legislation the Ayatollahs keep blocking. The hard core of elected reformers in parliament is threatening to resign en masse if the referendum is stopped, giving up on the hope of constitutional reform.
The judicial authorities, controlled by the ayatollahs, warn that if the parliamentarians resign they will face arrest – and the political civil war could then spill over onto the streets. The satellite TV channels beamed in from exile groups abroad say that with the latest riots, it already has.
Suddenly, grimly, everything is starting to happen at once.
This week, the International Atomic Energy Agency is to produce what promises to be an intensely critical report on Iran's nuclear capabilities. It is now clear that Iran is constructing a plant to enrich uranium at Natanz, and another at Arak to produce heavy water for a 40-megawatt "research" reactor outside Isfahan. (North Korea's plutonium comes from a similar 5 megawatt reactor.) All this is in addition to the light-water reactor the Russians are completing for Iran at Bushehr. That gives Iran two clear and not particularly challenging routes through known technologies to atomic weapons, either through enriched uranium or plutonium.
It is also clear that Iran has breached the spirit and the letter of its agreement with the IAEA to produce candid and timely reports on its nuclear development.
Under strong pressure from the Bush administration, the Russians have agreed to put much tighter controls on their own technology transfers at the Bushehr plant, supposedly to produce electricity, though Iran can hardly claim to be short of energy from oil and gas. Russia has promised to control the entire fuel cycle, from supplying the enriched uranium to taking the spent fuel back to Russia.
The G8 summit also agreed on a common plan to tighten the nuclear controls on Iran, through much tougher inspections by the IAEA. Iran, as a signatory of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, is required to cooperate with the IAEA. The problem is that Iran, like other signatories, is free to withdraw from the NPT after giving due notice. It seems only too likely that Iran will grudgingly cooperate with the IAEA just as long as it takes to assemble the equipment, the technology and the experienced personnel required to become a nuclear power. And then, presto, with one bound the ayatollahs are free to rattle their nuclear saber throughout the region.
Knowing this, the G8 also assembled a toolkit of sticks and carrots. If Iran behaved responsibly, then it could hope to get the Trade and Cooperation Agreement that it has long been negotiating with the European Union. This might finally get Iran's badly stalled economy moving again and start providing jobs for the millions of the restive young unemployed. That, along with the quiet opening of diplomatic exchanges with the United States last year on issues of common concern in Afghanistan and Iraq, was the carrot.
If that failed, there was always the stick; the prospect of a pre-emptive military strike upon Iran's nuclear facilities. The Americans could do it relatively easily, despite the massed batteries of Russian-made S-300 anti-aircraft and anti-cruise missile batteries deployed around Bushehr. The Israelis, with their own new cruise missiles aboard their Dolphin submarines, could probably destroy Iran's reactors just as its warplanes flattened Iraq's Osirak reactor 22 years ago.
The catch to the game of carrot and stick is that Iran has understandable reasons to go nuclear, which is why the nuclear project is one of the few things the ayatollahs and the elected government agree on. It lives in a dangerous neighborhood, with a nuclear-armed Pakistan to the east and a nuclear-armed Israel to the west. And the lesson Iran has drawn from Iraq's experience is that a nuke is the best security guarantee against the Bush administration.
Assuring a country poised on the brink of civil war that nuclear weapons are superfluous to its security was always going to be a hard sell. But with the riots bringing Iran's internal political crisis to a head, it may now be becoming impossible.
