Middle East Strategy at Harvard

From Raymond Tanter

As the Obama administration prepares for October 1 negotiations with Iran, Tehran steals a page from Pyongyang’s playbook: escalate confrontation in advance of engagement. Why not? Escalation to win concessions and backtracking on promises have worked for North Korea.

On September 27, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps conducted war games that included test launches of multiple short range Shahab-1 and Shahab-2 missiles, and on September 28, the Iranian regime tested a Shahab-3 missile with a range of 2,000 kilometers, capable of reaching Israel and U.S. military assets in the Persian Gulf.

Iran’s war games come on the heels of the revelation of a second, previously “unknown” uranium enrichment facility in Qom (shown above)—except the facility was not unknown to Western intelligence and wasn’t unknown to those who paid attention to the main Iranian opposition groups, the Mujahedeen-e Khalq (MEK) and the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI). In December 2005, the NCRI revealed that tunneling activity in the mountains outside of Qom was initiated in 2000 by an IRGC engineering unit, with the goal of constructing an underground nuclear facility.

On September 24, 2009, the NCRI revealed two additional sites in and near Tehran where the Iranian regime is working on detonators for nuclear weapons. The sites are part of METFAZ, a Farsi acronym for Research Center for Explosion and Impact; they undermine both the Iranian regime argument that its uranium enrichment is for peaceful purposes and the U.S. intelligence community judgment that Iran halted weaponization work in fall 2003, as reported in a 2007 National Intelligence Estimate.

In accord with the Iranian opposition group’s estimates (and undercutting that NIE) are the Israeli and German assessments of Iran’s clandestine efforts to design a nuclear warhead, as reported in the New York Times: “The Israelis, who have delivered veiled threats of a military strike, say they believe that Iran has restarted these ‘weaponization’ efforts, which would mark a final step in building a nuclear weapon. The Germans say they believe that the weapons work was never halted.”

Thanks to the Qom revelation, the Permanent Five members of the UN Security Council + Germany (P5+1) should have the upper hand during the October 1 meeting. Through the war games, Tehran likely hoped to regain some lost leverage. Now the issue is what Iran hopes to achieve through meeting with the P5+1.

Based on past behavior, it is unlikely that Tehran genuinely intends to cut a deal with the international community. Instead, the regime uses negotiations as ploys to buy time to continue with uranium enrichment until nuclear weapons status becomes a fait accompli. At the top of Iran’s priorities for the October 1 meeting will be the avoidance of harsher sanctions without meaningfully curtailing its nuclear activities. To this end, the regime can be expected to make vague pronouncements about continuing to work with the international community and the desire for more follow-on negotiations. Such a posture makes rallying Russia and China around stronger sanctions more difficult.

In the past, Tehran has hid its serial deception with promises of additional talks. As far back as June 14, 2008, Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki said he would offer to European Union foreign policy chief Javier Solana a “comprehensive” negotiation package of security, terrorism, narcotics, organized crime, and illegal migrants. In the subsequent Geneva meeting between Iran and the P5+1, talks deteriorated over the suspension of uranium enrichment; the P5+1 insisted on cessation, but Iran refused. In over a year’s time since this hint of a “comprehensive” offer, the Iranian regime has succeeded in expanding its stocks of enriched uranium and consolidating Revolutionary Guards control of the Iranian political system.

Former Revolutionary Guards General and now Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad also got in on the game of using arms control rhetoric as a ploy. On April 15, 2009, during the presidential election campaign, the Iranian Students News Agency (ISNA) reported him to have stated that Iran would offer a new proposal package for nuclear talks. And Bloomberg reported on April 26 that his government was preparing to offer the United States and European nations an updated version of a one-year-old proposal for talks about its nuclear program. “We are reconsidering our proposed package,” Ahmadinejad said in an interview on American ABC television.

Such “reconsideration” came as Ahmadinejad was facing pressure from election rival Mousavi, who criticized Ahmadinejad’s hard line stance on the nuclear program. Claiming that an Iranian proposal to the United States was in the offing was a gambit to give the appearance of moderation, both domestically and abroad, while continuing apace with uranium enrichment.

Foreign Minister Mottaki said on May 13 of this year that Iran was preparing a package of proposals for the P5+1 on the regime’s nuclear activities and promised to deliver it as soon as it was finalized. Leading up to Mottaki’s May 13 statement, the Iranian regime had begun testing more advanced uranium enrichment centrifuges at a pilot plant within the Natanz enrichment complex, according to IAEA reports.

The ploy was repeated over the summer. The July 2009 G8 Summit called on Tehran to assist IAEA investigators to understand the complete nature of the nation’s nuclear history and future plans. The Iranian regime announced what it called a new proposal after the summit. On July 11, the Wall Street Journal reported, “Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki said that Tehran had begun work on new proposals that will be put forward as a basis of discussion with the West, according to state media. He didn’t detail the proposals, nor did he say whether any part of the package would deal specifically with Iran’s nuclear program.” The reporter interpreted Mottaki’s statement as “a tentative signal that Tehran may be willing to start rebuilding relations after weeks of drubbing the U.S., Britain and other Western power [sic] for alleged complicity in election unrest.” Rather, such empty offers are an effective distraction from unrest and are designed to give the regime an air of legitimacy through negotiation with the international community.

The Iranian regime likely judges that the most effective method of buying time to enrich uranium is to enter a vague and drawn out proposal-counterproposal cycle with the P5+1. As long as Tehran appears somewhat engaged on the Obama initiative, the regime seeks to delay Western military action against its nuclear infrastructure.

The P5+1 should be prepared for Tehran to use both threats and proposals to buy time, distract from unrest, and give the appearance of moderation, and as such should give engagement without sanctions a short leash. As British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said during the G20 meeting,

Confronted by the serial deception of many years, the international community has no choice today but to draw a line in the sand… On October the 1st, Iran must now engage with the international community and join the international community as a partner. If it does not do so, it will be further isolated.

Toward this end, the P5+1 should continue to demand progress from Tehran on halting its nuclear weapons program, while pursuing crippling international sanctions, political recognition of Iran’s opposition groups, and/or threat of military strikes.

While Tehran steals a page from Pyongyang’s playbook of escalation in advance of engagement, Tehran’s militant and expansive ideology makes it impossible for its neighbors to live with a nuclear-armed Iran.