Iran: something interesting

This I missed:  Iran’s presidential candidates sweeping the floor with Saeed Jalili, the apparent front runner, for lack of seriousness in pursuing a nuclear agreement with the P5+1.  I am grateful to the well-informed (and informing) Laura Rozen for pointing it out to me, along with her publication of the P5+1 proposal for confidence building measures.

Together these betoken some reason for optimism about nuclear talks that have appeared to be going nowhere.  Saeed Jalili is clearly the Supreme Leader’s candidate.  Would the others have piled on so blatantly about his shortcomings as a negotiator without believing that there is room for debate?  That is room the Supreme Leader allows them, as they are all pretty much regime loyalists.  It is also room they presumably think might help them in the general public, whose votes will decide the outcome of the Iranian presidential election June 14.

But ultimately whoever is elected president will have little impact on the nuclear issue, which is very much the Supreme Leader’s turf.  He has issued a fatwa against the making and use of weapons of mass destruction, as sinful and prohibited by Islam.  A religious judgment of this sort can be superseded.  Its validity moreover extends only to the death of its author.  Western religious leaders’ strictures against nuclear weapons have not prevented their manufacture and even use.  We might expect better of a religious judgment in Iran, but would we get it?

The question on some peoples’ minds here in Doha, where I am attending the US/Islamic World Forum, is whether the fatwa can be used as the framework for an eventual solution to the Iranian nuclear issue.   No one thinks it is sufficient in and of itself, or that any negotiated solution can be reached that does not include robust verification.  After all, there are clear indications that Tehran has pursued work on nuclear weapons in the past.  It has not “come clean” on those and has blocked the International Atomic Energy Agency from pursuing the issue fully.  But in the aftermath of the election, President Obama could send a message of congratulations to the winner that refers to the fatwa and offers cooperation in implementing it.  The fatwa is, after all, a religious opinion from the chief of state of an Islamic republic.  It is worth testing how far it can take us in a negotiation seeking a definitive solution on the nuclear issue.

From the American perspective, such a definitive solution would have to include a verifiable end to any nuclear weapons ambitions, including a limit on enrichment.  From the Iranian perspective, the “end-state” will have to include a guarantee that the United States will not seek regime change in Iran.  We are admittedly lousy at regime change, but that doesn’t mean Washington would be willing to end all the efforts that Iran considers aimed at bringing down its theocratic system.  An open discussion of this issue in the US Senate might point in quite a different direction.  We naturally worry about the Iranian willingness to deliver their end of the bargain:  no nuclear weapons program.  They naturally worry about our ability to deliver our end of the bargain too.

So yes, there are interesting developments that may eventually lead in the right direction.  But it is still a long way to a negotiated solution.