June 16, 2012

The Obama administration appears to be thinking about making a bigger offer to Iran at next week's nuclear talks in Moscow. At the last round of talks in Baghdad last month, caution won and the administration offered the minimum that it thought would interest the Iranians, without much success.

The bigger offer might include a complete nuclear deal, but it could also move outside the nuclear sphere to cover a much wider range of subjects. Potentially there are a lot of areas of shared interest between Iran and the West. For example, Iran has a lot of help it could offer Nato and its allies in Afghanistan; Iran has a shared interest in a stable oil price and Iran is bitterly opposed to Al Qaida and its aims.

The talks between the P5+1 group - Britain, France, US, China, Russia, plus Germany - and Iran have dragged on for months, with a strong suspicion that the Iranian negotiating team (who report back to the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamanei) does not have a real interest in making a deal if it is focused solely on the nuclear stand-off.

Current discussion in the Obama administration has revived a debate that took place among US officials for much of last year about whether to propose one big deal or try a more incremental approach to Iran. Senior policy officials at the Defence Department are said to have favoured offering a bigger deal to Iran, accompanied by a military threat were it not accepted, says US foreign affairs commentator Laura Rozen in 'Al-Monitor'.

But she adds this approach was countered by officials from the State Department, who argued that there was such a lack of trust or diplomatic contact between the West and Iran that it was more prudent to first propose a smaller step as a confidence-building measure. This approach is the one that prevailed when talks resumed in Istanbul in April and continued in Baghdad last month.

That was when the P5+1 negotiators' incremental process included a range of proposed interim confidence-building measures. The P5+1 asked Iran to stop its 20 per cent enrichment activities, export its stockpile of 20 per cent enriched uranium and halt operations at Fordo, a fortified, uranium-enrichment site near the Iranian city of Qom. In return, the international community offered cooperation with Iran's civil-nuclear programme, isotopes for Iran's medical reactor and a lifting of sanctions on exports of US civilian aircraft parts for Iran. This approach did not get anywhere with the Iranians, although the talks did not break down entirely and are at least continuing.

From its side, Iran has been preparing for the Moscow round. It tried hard and failed to get the P5+1 to agree to a preliminary technical round, but it has been busy at the Parchin military complex, where the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and western governments have accused Iran of "sanitising" by trying to hide evidence of work on developing nuclear weapons.

This "sanitising" by Iran was caught on satellite cameras, but as Gareth Porter reports in IPS News, the nature of the Iranian work and the circumstances surrounding them suggest that Iran is doing all this to gain leverage in its negotiations with the IAEA, rather than to hide past nuclear experiments.
Porter quotes Greg Thielmann, a former director of Strategic, Proliferation and Military Affairs Office of the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, saying that the effect of the changes is to "increase the interest of the IAEA in an inspection at Parchin as soon as possible and to give Iran more leverage in the negotiations".

Porter also quotes comments from nuclear scientist Dr Behrad Nakhai, who has worked at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and has closely followed the Iranian nuclear programme, when he suggests that Iran's overt moves on the ground in Parchin were a way of ensuring that "the IAEA will be enticed to give more value to an inspection of Parchin".

It is a real problem that there have been no preparatory meetings between the P5+1 and Iran. It is a worry that only a few days before the next round, there is no agreed agenda for these important talks, which means that the first session will be devoted to talking about talks. This means that the Moscow talks could derail very easily, as both sides may arrive with false assumptions about what they hope to achieve.

Ali Baqeri, Deputy Secretary of Iran's Supreme National Security Council has stressed the importance of holding preparatory "expert" meetings before the Moscow talks. He has sent two letters to Helga Schmid, deputy to European Union Foreign Policy Chief, Catherine Ashton, expressing Iran's readiness to hold preparatory meetings before the negotiations and making clear that "the success of the Moscow meeting will depend on making the necessary preparation and setting a comprehensives agenda agreed by the sides," he added.

This approach was rejected by Ashton, who told the Iranians that the P5+1 did not want technical discussions although they might agree to political discussions before the main meetings, which did not get any response from Iran. All this leaves many doubts about any breakthrough in Moscow next week.

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