NEGOTIATING WITH IRAN, 1979 AND 2012
Elliott Abrams
Weekly Standard, April 20, 2012
As the United States and other members of the [international community negotiate] with Iran, it is worth recalling the classic analysis of Iran’s negotiating style sent in from the U.S. embassy in Tehran on August 13, 1979. The author of the cable, political counselor Victor Tomseth, and the man who authorized it, charge d’affaires Bruce Laingen, became hostages when the embassy was seized on November 4, 1979.
The cable is an analysis of the “underlying cultural and psychological qualities” that explain the difficulties the embassy had been having in negotiations with the new regime. In one famous line, the cable claims that “Perhaps the single dominant aspect of the Persian psyche is an overriding egoism…that leaves little room for understanding points of view other than one’s own.” There is also a “pervasive unease about the nature of the world in which…nothing is permanent and…hostile forces abound.” Persians therefore see themselves as “obviously justified in using almost any means available to exploit such opportunities” to protect themselves. Tomseth then adds that Persians have a poor understanding of causality, “an aversion to accepting responsibility for one’s actions,” and resist “the idea that Iranian behavior has consequences” on American policy.
From these analyses, explained at greater length, the cable draws lessons. First, “one should never assume that his side of the issue will be recognized, let alone that it will be conceded to have merits.…” Second, the Iranian negotiator will not seek cooperation or a long-term relationship of trust; instead, he “will assume that his opposite number is his adversary” and will “seek to maximize the benefits to himself that are immediately available.” Third, “linkages will be neither readily comprehended nor accepted.” Fourth, and especially relevant now, “one should insist on performance as the sine qua non at each stage of the negotiations. Statements of intention count for almost nothing.” Fifth, “cultivation of good will for good will’s sake is a waste of effort.” And finally, “one should be prepared for the threat of breakdown in negotiations at any given moment and not be cowed by this possibility.”
With these warnings in mind, reading accounts of the first round of negotiations held in Istanbul on April 14 cannot be reassuring. The most detailed account is from [journalist] Laura Rozen. There we see a “Western diplomat” explaining that “The morning session was very positive: the vibe…was, ‘wow, they are engaging.’” Rozen reports that a “European diplomat” happily noted to her that EU foreign minister Lady Catherine Ashton “rebuilt a rapport with [Saeed] Jalili,” the Iranian negotiator. “The Iranian delegation body language when [US envoy] Wendy [Sherman] spoke was direct and engaged,” another European diplomat told Rozen.
Such nonsense must make the Iranians smile. Indeed, one would love to see the Iranian version of Tomseth’s cable, explaining the ingenuousness of American and other Western negotiators: seeking personal rapport and good vibes, committed to the value of the process itself, and wanting above all to prevent a “breakdown in negotiations.”
Nor can it be reassuring that the two most important negotiators are Ashton and Sherman. Prior to 2008, Ashton’s only involvement in world affairs was six years (1977-1983) as a high official of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND). CND is a leftist organization that, while Ashton was one of its leaders and the Soviet Union was an expansionist power, called for unilateral nuclear disarmament by the United Kingdom and the prevention of any deployment of nuclear weapons there. CND has a long history of denouncing U.S. policy just about everywhere—from the Vietnam War to today’s Middle East. Rozen’s account shows Ashton very much in charge of the Istanbul talks.… [The upcoming Baghdad talks] were delayed from May 10 until May 23 to accommodate Ashton’s calendar.
Sherman, who leads the U.S. delegation, is now under secretary of state for political affairs. In the Clinton administration, Sherman was counselor to Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and “policy coordinator” on North Korea. At the end of her tenure, she wrote in the New York Times that North Korea is “a country of immense pride.” She added that after the Albright trip to Pyongyang in October 2000, where Albright happily exchanged friendly toasts with her hosts, “North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong Il, appears ready to make landmark commitments about the missile program.…”
There is no record of Sherman acknowledging that her judgment on North Korea was wrong.… While talks continued for years, North Korea continued the development of nuclear weapons and of missiles—a somber thought in the context of the Iran negotiations.
The next round of talks is scheduled for Baghdad on May 23. Ashton called the Istanbul talks “constructive and useful.” That reminded me of the last time an EU foreign minister stood next to Jalili and said, “The meeting of today has been constructive.” That was in 2007.
WHAT NUCLEAR FATWA?
Dore Gold
Israel Hayom, April 20, 2012
When U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced the talks that were held [on April 14] between the P5+1 (five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council, plus Germany) and Iran, she detailed how the idea for these negotiations was raised. She explained that she had heard a report from Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu about their visit with Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. According to the Turks, Khamenei told them that, under Islam, weapons of mass destruction are prohibited.
Clinton suggested that the supreme leader’s stance needed to be “operationalized” and explained: “We will be meeting with the Iranians to discuss how you translate what is a stated belief into a plan of action.” However, the religious argument being used by the Iranians to prove that their nuclear program is not military in nature is nothing new. In fact, on Aug. 10, 2005, the Iranian government sent an official letter to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in Vienna stating that “Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has issued the fatwa that the production, stockpiling, and use of nuclear weapons are forbidden under Islam.” A fatwa is a written opinion on Islamic law, issued by a religious authority.
In the years that followed, several Western governments, including Britain and France, made many repeated inquiries about Khamenei’s nuclear fatwa. At the IAEA, Pierre Goldschmidt, the body’s former deputy director-general, wanted to see if this fatwa even existed.… On Feb. 4, 2012, he said that he had actually asked for a copy of the exact text of the nuclear fatwa in 2005 but the Iranians never presented anything in writing.
The Iranians have also presented the argument about a nuclear fatwa with the American press. Even before they sent a letter about the fatwa to the IAEA, the Iranian ambassador to the U.N., Mohammad Javad Zarif, wrote an article on Nov. 5, 2004, in the opinion section of the L.A. Times, in which he referred to “serious ideological restrictions against weapons of mass destruction, including a religious decree issued by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran, prohibiting the development and use of nuclear weapons.…”
To this day, the story of the nuclear fatwa is repeated in the mass media. Just last [month], in The Washington Post, [Fareed] Zakaria reminded his readers “the Islamic Republic, logically, religiously and theoretically, considers the possession of nuclear weapons a grave sin.” And during a three-part CNN series on Iran that was televised during the week of April 14, 2012, Christiane Amanpour interviewed Mohammad Larijani, a former negotiator, and currently an adviser to Khamenei. Amanpour again heard from Larijani the argument about the nuclear fatwa, which he used during his interview to assuage Western fears. Unfortunately, she did not challenge him on this point.
Yet there are others who have challenged the nuclear fatwa. Mehdi Khalaji is an expert on Shiite Islam who studied in Iran’s religious seminaries in Qom, Iran.… [He] agrees that there is no written document that could be described as a fatwa on the subject of nuclear weapons. Khalaji also explains that even if a nuclear fatwa existed, changing a fatwa is common practice among Shiite legal authorities.…
Importantly, Khalaji reminds his readers about the use of deception, or taqiyya, that [is] religiously permitted in Shiite Islam.… In his major work on Islamic government, Ayatollah Khomeini described “taqiyya” as an act whose purpose was the “preservation of Islam and the Shii school.” Khalaji points out that after coming to power, Khomeini actually stated in 1981, in an address to the Revolutionary Guard: “Islamic law exists to serve the interests of the Muslim community and of Islam.… To save Muslim lives…for the sake of Islam’s survival it is obligatory to lie.…”
In short, all the talk about a nuclear fatwa might just be a case of “taqiyya,” or diplomatic deception, especially since the Iranians have refused to provide the West with a document of the supposed fatwa over all these years.
Reports about the Iranian nuclear fatwa actually date it back to 2003. Yet the IAEA disclosed in November 2011 that activities “relevant to the development of a nuclear explosive device” took place in 2003 and some of these activities were “ongoing.…” Thus whether the famous nuclear fatwa exists or not, what is clear is that Iran persisted in developing an atomic bomb despite the supposed religious declarations that have been ascribed to Supreme Leader Khamenei.
(Dore Gold, a former Israeli Ambassador to the United Nations,
is president of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs.)
DE-FUSE DAGAN
Hirsh Goodman
Jerusalem Post, May 4, 2012
There was a time, not so long ago, when the names of the heads of [Israel’s] Mossad and the Shin Bet were secret. These people remained, for the most part, anonymous for a good part of their lives.… Nowadays, [however], it seems these blokes just can’t [keep quiet], and they make a beeline for every microphone they can lay their hands on, resulting in a disservice to both the country and themselves.
Meir Dagan, the immediate former head of the Mossad, for example, would have vastly served both better by remaining silent.… Instead, he has come out as impulsive, self-serving, totally irresponsible and void of self-control to the point where at [last week’s] Jerusalem Post Conference in New York, he stooped to calling a minister in the government “a liar” in front of an audience of 1,200 people who had come to celebrate Israel, not watch its leadership squabble on the stage.…
When Ariel Sharon brought Dagan into the Mossad, the talk was that Sharon had chosen a bulldozer like himself to shake the place up, which Dagan did very quickly and, some would argue, all-too thoroughly, throwing some of the baby out with the bathwater and leading to operational catastrophes such as the assassination of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, the Hamas strongman, in Dubai in January 2010. While successful, unfortunately for Israel, the operation was filmed in real time by some two dozen surveillance cameras at the Al Bustan Rotana Hotel, where Mabhouh met his death at the hands of two of the most unlikely tennis players you would ever meet, and presented to the world as a 27-minute edited spy thriller by Dubai’s police chief, Dhai Khalfan Tamim.…
That said, it was widely believed that Dagan had done a good job, that he had restored confidence to the organization, brought in young people with scientific minds, taking the Iranians by surprise when their centrifuges began to spin out of control and Stutnex arrived on their doorstep. Then Iranian nuclear scientists began to disappear when they traveled abroad, and others died while on their way to work in Tehran and other cities. There were impressive demises of Hezbollah leaders in Beirut and even in the heart of Damascus, and generally, as far as the public was concerned, Dagan was something of a national hero. Until he opened his mouth, that is.
Several months ago, when the public debate in Israel over whether to attack Iran or not was at its height, I asked a person I trust implicitly why, if we were going to attack, is everyone speaking so much about it? He answered me in one word: “Dagan.”
It was Dagan who started the whole snowball rolling when giving his parting remarks to defense correspondents as he was leaving his job, saying that an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities would be…useless, counter-productive and have extremely negative consequences for Israel for little gain. He also accused prime minister [Binyamin Netanyahu] and the defense minister [Ehud Barak] of wanting such an attack for essentially political purposes.…
His message was repeated on television and in a backgrounder with Yediot Aharonot, the country’s largest newspaper, and again and again since, including a devastating interview with Lesley Stahl on 60 Minutes in March of this year, and culminating in his latest performance at The Jerusalem Post Conference.…
I have not gone into the Yuval Diskin case. The immediate past head of the Shin Bet is also warning us we have dangerous leaders at the helm. He too would have done us all a favor had he been silent and not tried a mini-Dagan without being quite so categorical on the Iranian element.
The Dagan example, however, is more than enough on its own for Israel seriously to reconsider whether the heads of its security organizations should be known to the public, what they should be allowed to say once they are out of service, and how long they are expected to hold their tongues before treading on the country’s security as a stepping stone into politics.
INCITING GENOCIDE IS A CRIME
Robert Bernstein, Irwin Cotler & Stuart Robinowitz
Wall Street Journal, May 5, 2012
Many of Iran’s crimes are well-known to Americans and observers world-wide. The Tehran regime wants to build a nuclear weapon despite being a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty; it supports the brutal crackdown of Syria’s Bashar al-Assad against his own people; it is the leading state sponsor of terrorism, killing innocents from Argentina to Lebanon, Afghanistan and beyond; and it is engaged in massive domestic repression. Less recognized, however, is the legal significance of Iran’s genocidal anti-Semitic and anti-Israel rhetoric, which constitutes one of the most serious crimes under international law.
The United Nations’ Genocide Convention outlaws not only acts of genocide but “incitement” to genocide, an egregious offense whether or not genocide has yet occurred. The convention’s goal, of course, is to prevent genocide before it takes place.…
Iran has given the world ample warning. A website affiliated with Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei declared in February that Iran would be justified in killing all Israeli Jews—which Tehran’s long-range missiles could accomplish in nine minutes, boasted the site. Khamenei, for his part, has called Israel a “cancerous tumor that must be removed” and declared that there is “justification to kill all the Jews and annihilate Israel, and Iran must take the helm.”
Also in February, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad hosted Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in Tehran, as billboards in the city declared that it is every Muslim’s duty to “wipe out” Israel. “If all the Jews gathered in Israel, it would save us the trouble of going after them world-wide,” Nasrallah has said. “It is an open war until the elimination of Israel and until the death of the last Jew on the earth.”
Iranian officials’ threats are accompanied by their denial of the Holocaust and regular characterization of Jews as nonhuman or subhuman: “bloodthirsty barbarians,” “filthy bacteria,” “wild beasts,” “cattle,” “cancer,” “filthiest criminals,” “a blot,” “a stain,” “wild dogs” and the like. Similar slurs were made in Nazi Germany.… They are the precursors to genocide.…
Those who incite genocide, and those who defend them, often invoke the freedom of speech. But no free-speech law condones threats of mass murder. The Nuremberg tribunal convicted and executed Nazi newspaper publisher Julius Streicher for inciting the murder of Europe’s Jews, even though he hadn’t committed murders directly. Like Khamenei and Ahmadinejad, Streicher referred to Jews as “a nation of bloodsuckers and extortionists,” adding that “The Jewish problem is not yet solved. Only when world Jewry has been annihilated will it have been solved.…”
Such [precedent] should lead state parties to the Genocide Convention to file complaints against Iran—which is also party to the convention—before the International Court of Justice. Member states should request that the U.N. Security Council pass a resolution condemning Iran’s incitement to genocide. They should also request that the council refer the matter to the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, who can indict Khamenei, Ahmadinejad and their collaborators.… This threat of criminal prosecution should be added to existing diplomatic and economic pressures meant to deter terrorism and nuclear-weapons development by Tehran.…
