hankyoreh

By Selig S. Harrison, director of the Asia Program at the Center for International Policy

Despite continuing tensions with North Korea, the danger of another Korean War is steadily receding. The most explosive region of the World now is not Northeast Asia but the Persian Gulf, where a U.S. or Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities, sooner or later, is a much more plausible possibility than a U.S. or Japanese military adventure in North Korea.

Even beyond the Persian Gulf itself, the Bush Administration’s fixation on the ‘‘Iranian threat’’ increasingly distorts U.S. foreign policy. The rationale for the U.S. decision to deploy a missile shield in eastern Europe, which has sharpened tension between Washington and Moscow, is the perceived threat of an Iranian long-range missile capability.

During the decade before the overthrow of the U.S.-backed regime of Mohammed Reza Shah Pahlavi, I visited Iran frequently as the Washington Post Bureau Chief in New Dehli. I have just returned from a week-long visit to Teheran, my first since the 1979 revolution that established the Islamic Republic.

My strongest impression is that foreign and defense policy decisions, including those relating to Iran’s nuclear programs, are controlled by a brain trust of pragmatists around the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, and his National Security Council, not by the rabble-rousing President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Ahmadinejad’s anti-Isreal, anti-U.S. rhetoric makes the possibility of an accommodation with Iran seem impossible, but the terms for a settlement of the nuclear issue put forward by Khamenei’s nuclear negotiator, Ali Larijani, in his recent, secret Madrid negotiations with Europearn Union representative Javier Solana, suggest a willingness to compromise.

What Larijani proposed, according to a variety of sources in Teheran, was that uranium enrichment for electrical power generation be conducted within Iran by a jointly-controlled multinational consortium in which Iran would participate along with European and other International companies under International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) supervision. Some EU countries like this idea, but the United States fears that Iran could expel the foreign companies at some future date, nationalize the enrichment operations, and convert them to military purposes. Iran also wants to operate a research and development program under its own control, subject to IAEA inspection, as part of the deal. The Bush Administration is particularly opposed to the R and D demand, but may have to give in to European pressures to explore the fine print of the consortium idea. This could keep negotiations going for some time and slow down the drive for new U.N. sanctions.

My interviews in Teheran embraced key Foreign Ministry officials including 90 minutes with Deputy Foreign Minister Abbas Aragchi, who represented Iran in the recent regional talks at Sharn El Sheikh, Egypt; advisers to the National Security Council and the President’s office, leading editors, both conservative and reformist, and resident diplomats.

The nuclear issue could be defused, I concluded, and cooperation between the United States and Iran in Iraq and Afghanistan could gradually develop, if the United States would end its policy of ‘‘regime change,’’ phasing out ongoing CIA and Pentagon covert operations designed to destabilize the Islamic Republic.

‘‘The United States is like a fox caught in a trap’’ in Iraq, said Amir Mohieban, editor of the influential conservative daily Reselaat, in a Tehran conservation two weeks ago. ‘‘Why should we free the fox so he can make a dinner out of us?’’

In the most widely-reported covert operations currently underway in Iran, the United States is smuggling weapons and money to disaffected non-Persian ethnic minority factions, mainly among the Kurds in the northwest, the Khuzestani Arabs in the oil fields of the southwest and the Baluch in the eastern border area adjacent to Pakistan and Afganistan. But at the recent Iran-U.S. talks in Baghdad, Iranian delegates focused on less-publicized sabotage, espionage, and assassination missions in the Persian heartland of Iran by a cult-like, U.S-backed militia of Persian exiles known as the Mujahideen-e-Khalq (MEK).

The MEK backed Saddam Hussein in the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq war, and its 3,600 fighters, many of them women, stayed on in Iraq afterward. Since the invasion of Iraq, U.S. intelligence agencies have disarmed the fighters but have kept the MEK base camp near the Iranian border intact and have used MEK operatives for missions in Iran, even though the State Department has listed the MEK as a terrorist organization guilty of large-scale human rights violations.

In the Baghdad talks, Iran rejected a U.S. offer to transfer the MEK camps to Jordan or Morocco, aides to the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, told me. What Teheran wants is a complete dismantlement of MEK para-military forces, primarily through Red Cross-monitored reunions between MEK members and their families in the privacy of Baghdad hotel rooms so that those who want to return to Iran with an amnesty can do so.

This proposal should clearly be accepted, given the gravity of the MEK human rights and terrorist abuses detailed in the State Department’s Terrorist List. Moreover, dismantling the MEK would be the best way to signal U.S. readiness for an accommodation with Teheran, since it is the only militarized exile group seeking to overthrow the Islamic Republic and is the darling of the Washington lobby pushing for ‘‘regime change’’ in Iran.

In this new approach to Iran, the United States would let Iran’s moderates and reformers, led by former President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and a vigorous, relatively free press, work for greater democratization in their own way and at their own place, without U.S. ‘‘help’’ that stigmatizes them as foreign agents.

It was a naive blunder for President Bush to announce that $75 billion is being funneled to Iranians ‘‘seeking to promote openness and freedom for the Iranian people.’’ This gave hardliners in the Interior Ministry and intelligences linked to the revolutionary Guard their excuse for the unconscionable recent arrests of four Iranian-American dual citizens.

Similarly, hard-line elements are strengthened by pressure tactics on the nuclear issue, such as the drive for U.N. sanctions, efforts to cut off Iranian banks from the international financial system and the clumsy saber-rattling that accompanied Vice President Cheney’s recent Persian Gulf foray. Shortly before Cheney arrived, the United States stationed two aircraft carriers equipped with nuclear-capable aircraft 150 miles off Iran’s coast. ‘‘Can you assure us that there are no nuclear weapons aboard those carriers?’’ asked Ali Reza Akbari, a National Security Council advisor and former Deputy Defence Minister - the same question that North Korean leaders ask about the U.S. carriers stationed close to Korea and Japan.