Speech by Hugh Barnes to a seminar organised by the Foreign Policy Centre and Institute of Political International Studies at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Tehran, on Sunday 14 May 2006
"Thank you, Dr Karimi, for your kind introduction and for inviting me to speak at today's seminar organized by the Institute for Political and International Studies, which has so generously hosted my research trip to Iran over the past two weeks.
"I would like to take this opportunity to explain the purpose of the Foreign Policy Centre's Iran programme and also to summarise the key recommendations in our pamphlet, UNDERSTANDING IRAN, which I wrote with my colleague Alex Bigham. But first let me just say that I believe today's seminar, and the dozens of recent meetings I have had in Iran, exemplify in a small way the kind of contact and dialogue between like-minded people on all sides, both in and out of government, that the Foreign Policy Centre believes will ultimately help us to "get out of the current delicate situation", in the words of President Ahmadinejad writing to his US counterpart last week.
We are meeting here today at the beginning of a crucial week of diplomacy. Over the weekend the so-called EU-3 (Britain, France and Germany) announced that it was working on a new package of security and economic incentives to encourage Iran to suspend its programme of uranium enrichment. On Friday, senior officials from the Permanent Members of the UN Security Council, plus Germany, will meet in London to review progress in this "delicate" task, but as a French Foreign Ministry spokesman made clear yesterday, a proposal for new security framework for the Middle East as a whole will bulk large in the package. The Foreign Policy Centre supports this idea. Indeed we argue, on page 46 of UNDERSTANDING IRAN, that in order to help resolve the nuclear dispute, the United States and the European Union should acknowledge that Iran has legitimate security concerns. Neighbouring Pakistan, India and Israel all are nuclear-armed, and therefore it is necessary to find some mechanism – a regional security arrangement – to persuade Iran that nuclear weapons are not essential for its safety. We argued that, as a first step, President Bush should endorse the idea of creating a regional security organisation in the Middle East, which would include Iran. Like the OSCE in Europe during the Cold War, this new organisation could begin to provide security guarantees between Middle East states as well as those outside the region. A more secure Iran would also create better conditions for the re-emergence of a pro-Western, peaceful, democratic movement inside the country.
At the same time, it is difficult to observe the frantic diplomacy of the EU-3 without reflecting on the missed opportunities of last two years and on the breakdown of the Paris agreement between Iran and the EU-3, due to the lack of incentives, as far as Iran was concerned, in the earlier framework agreement. On the nuclear issue it is clear that the European policy of negotiated containment, ambiguously supported by Russia, has failed. Two months ago, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) finally decided to report Iran to the UN Security Council after pointing out 'many failures and breaches of its obligations to comply with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) Safeguards Agreement'. Last month, Iran raised the stakes by announcing it had already succeeded in enriching uranium to the low level used in civilian nuclear power plants. The Security Council will almost certainly fail to resolve the problem. It is likely to continue to assert the IAEA view that Iran must cease enrichment activities. It is unlikely to impose sanctions because China and Russia have to be persuaded not to veto any resolution. The next logical step for Iran would be to follow the example of North Korea three years ago by withdrawing from the NPT and expelling the IAEA inspectors. That would lead to a more dangerous situation, as it would then be difficult to constrain Iran without military action, so there is an urgent need to persuade the regime to become less confrontational in its strategic policy. The only way to do that is through diplomacy and, as I will argue later on, diplomacy will not succeed without direct US intervention. Many influential figures in America, such as former secretary of state Madeleine Albright and former national security advisor Sandy Berger have called for direct talks. In the view of the Foreign Policy Centre, diplomacy has failed thus far because Iran has little incentive to deal as long as its main antagonist, the United States, is not at the table.
To those who say that it is unrealistic to imagine that the United States and Iran could open a dialogue at the present time, the FPC says that you only have to look at the overtures to co-operation between the two countries over the troubled future of Iraq, or the six-nation talks on North Korea's nuclear programme. Here is an interesting precedent. Last year the assistant secretary of state Christopher Hill, the chief US negotiator at those talks, was given wide latitude to meet bilaterally with North Korean officials and may even have traveled to Pyongyang.
The Foreign Policy Centre, a London-based think-tank, has launched an Iran programme because we believe it is essential that UK policy on Iran is well informed and because we want to engage with the various reformist elements in Iran; both inside and outside the structures of power. The first phase of the programme involved researching and writing the report UNDERSTANDING IRAN, in which we argue that the West's failure to engage successfully with Iran is due to a failure to understand the structure of the regime and the background to recent political changes. The second phase of the programme consists of this research trip to Iran and a forthcoming report that will outline its findings. Later in the year – as phase three – the Foreign Policy Centre plans to arrange a series of private meetings between analysts and officials with a view to exploring the way forward for Iran's relationship with the international community as a whole.
Iran has a growing sense of strategic encirclement (by Turkey, Afghanistan, Iraq and, common to all these, the United States) and of nuclear disadvantage (vis-à-vis Israel, India and Pakistan). Though disguised in assertions about Iran's right to nuclear energy, the regime's strategic thinking has been quite simple: the United States invaded Iraq because Iraq did not have nuclear weapons; the United States has not invaded North Korea because North Korea has nuclear weapons. The flaws in this logic would be exposed if President Bush pledged that the United States will never attack a non-nuclear Iran, while emphasising that by acquiring nuclear weapons capabilities Iran actually increases the likelihood of military confrontation with the United States. The West should remind the conservatives and reformers alike that a nuclear Iran would trigger a nuclear arms race in the region, as Egypt and Saudi Arabia would move quickly to develop their own arsenals.
The neo-conservative governments of the United States and Iran may appear to be on a collision course. But the authors believe that there remain a large number of diplomatic options that would be acceptable to Iran, the United States and the EU as a way of resolving the current crisis. Military action would be a highly dangerous move that could damage regional security, would not prevent nuclear proliferation, would encourage acts of terrorism and would result in civilian deaths.
Nuclear proliferation is, in any case, just one of many unresolved issues at the centre of Iran's relationship with the West. It was noticeable, for example, that President Ahmadinejad was careful not to mention the dispute over uranium enrichment in his letter to President Bush, while he did refer to the future of Palestine. Of course, this was a typical example of Ahmadinejad's grandstanding style. Yet the international community should recognize that Iran's dispute with the West must be seen in the wider context of the Middle East. The regime in Tehran will continue to balk at the NPT and its protocols as long as other nations seem to benefit from Western double standards. It will always be difficult to enforce the NPT until the architecture and workings of the treaty are repaired. In this respect, the Foreign Policy Centre believes that we should spend less time discussing Chapter Seven of the UN Charter, which allows for economic and military sanctions, and more time thinking about Article Six of the NPT, which calls on all its signatories, including the United States, to make steps towards disarmament. The years between 1987, when Reagan and Gorbachev, agreed to remove Cruise missiles and SS-20s from Europe, and 1996, which saw the signing of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, represented a golden decade of disarmament. But ever since then the momentum has been lost. The examples of Ukraine, Kazakhstan and South Africa prove that nations can voluntarily denuclearize – and while persuading Iran of the benefits of a non-nuclear, the United States, Britain, Russia, China and France should try to practice what they preach.
The only long-term solution to Iran's problems is democracy, but it cannot be dictated, Iraq-style, or it will backfire. It can only be encouraged, through dialogue and open economic activity. The best hope for change in Iran comes from outside the circles of power through the actions of ordinary people dissatisfied with their economic conditions and eager for democracy. However, such change remains a distant prospect. Even if there is reason to believe that the mullahs' days are numbered, Iran's theocracy is not yet about to collapse. It is hard to believe the West can do much to speed its demise. Any reform movement will need time to recover from the setbacks of recent years, and from the restrictions on social and political freedoms that have combined to leave much of the public dispirited and disconnected from its rulers.
The spectre of armed conflict with the United States will only help Ahmadinejad to consolidate his power. In any case, the US forces are already overstretched, and the Iranian regime holds a trump card in Iraq. The only chance of modifying Iran's behaviour in the short term will come from a serious effort to engage with the current leadership. It is wrong to argue that engagement is the same as appeasement. Nor does talking to the Iranian leadership signify indifference to the regime's abuses of human rights. Given Iran's complex domestic politics, it seems unlikely that Tehran and Washington can strike a grand bargain. Yet a genuine 'carrot-and-stick' policy remains a viable option as long as the carrots are as big as the sticks.
Here Britain, the EU-3 and non-governmental organizations have a key role to play, and it is the determination of the Foreign Policy Centre that its Iran programme will rise to the challenge of promoting not only debate but also a kind of mutual understanding.
Thank you.
The West needs to understand Iran