Quotes of the Day
Iran's hard-liners are back. Even with a reform-minded President formally in charge, the stern mullahs' persistent strength is visible everywhere. Last week the streets around the parliament building in Tehran's Baharestan district were festooned with posters hailing the Basij Islamic militia, radical volunteers who serve as one of the regime's most loyal protection forces. Upstairs in his sixth-floor office, Isfahan representative Hassan Kamran was wearing a white Basiji scarf around his neck in solidarity with the diehards, who are seen by many Iranians as free-ranging thugs. He was ranting against the U.S., warning that if President George W. Bush dares to attack Iran's nuclear facilities, Tehran will retaliate by striking Israel and U.S. ships in the Persian Gulf. "As Imam Khomeini taught us," he says, "we will respond to force with force."
This is the voice of militant Iran, where Islamic conservatives have made a thundering return to political office this year just as their country's nuclear ambitions have sparked growing alarm in the West. Yet despite Kamran's bluster, Iran's government has remained willing to negotiate in the standoff over its nuclear program. The U.S. has charged that what Iran claims to be a peaceful pursuit of nuclear energy is likely part of a rogue regime's covert effort to get its own nuclear weapons. After months of negotiating with European Union officials, Iran agreed to suspend the uranium-enrichment program that is at the heart of the accusations. Ten days later, however, Tehran put the deal in jeopardy by demanding an exemption for research involving a small number of centrifuges that are central to making bomb-grade fuel. By last weekend weary negotiators were still dickering over a compromise to salvage the hard-won agreement. The fits and starts gave ammunition to Bush Administration officials who are ready to send Iran's case to the U.N. Security Council for possible sanctions. If the deal is to be saved, someone will have to back down.
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The agreement Iran hammered out with diplomats from Britain, France and Germany could well be a critical step toward ending the Islamic regime's nuclear brinkmanship. Talks aimed at reaching a permanent understanding are scheduled to start in mid-December. The mullahs have agreed to freeze a variety of activities involving uranium enrichment and plutonium separation, which the West interprets as including the manufacture, import and testing of centrifuges. In return, Iran accepted various sweeteners, such as potential cooperation in economic, security and even nuclear matters that could one day reduce the country's isolation from the West.
It won't be easy for Iran to win the West's trust. When Tehran sought to change the terms of the agreement last week, it fueled doubts that Iran was negotiating in good faith. And according to European diplomats, the ruling clerics show no sign that they would agree to the West's bottom line: that Iran permanently abandon development of all nuclear technology that could give the nation the capability to construct an atomic weapon. The lead Iranian negotiator, national-security chief Hassan Rowhani, head of a commission on nuclear policy that reports directly to Supreme Leader Ayatullah Ali Khamenei, says, "Terminating our enrichment activities has been our red line and still is."
For the U.S. and a growing number of allies, it is unthinkable that an undemocratic Islamist regime that supports terrorism and opposes the Arab-Israeli peace process could get its hands anywhere near an atom bomb. Iranian reformers clearly understand that position. "If we have a democratic government, the world could trust it" on nuclear matters, says Reza Khatami, brother of President Mohammed Khatami and an outspoken reformer who was disqualified from seeking re-election to parliament this year. Iranian leaders were clearly concerned about U.S. pressure, says a European diplomat in Tehran, "or they wouldn't have bothered negotiating with us." Three days after Bush was re-elected, the Supreme Leader made a conciliatory gesture in his nationally televised Friday sermon. Directly addressing Bush, Khamenei said, "No, sir, we are not seeking to have nuclear weapons." Some Iranian officials insist that a compromise is within reach. Ali Akbar Salehi, a former representative to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) who still advises the government, told TIME in an interview last week that Iran's enrichment facilities could perhaps be privatized via an Iranian-European partnership to help eliminate skepticism about secret Iranian intentions. Mohammed Javad Larijani, a pragmatic conservative and leading Iranian mathematician, says, "Iran wants to clear the air of suspicion."
The mullahs publicly deny on moral grounds that Iran plans to enter the nuclear club. The Supreme Leader has said Islam forbids all weapons of mass destruction because they kill innocent civilians. But the on-again, off-again dealmaking causes Western diplomats to wonder whether the resurgent mullahs are courting confrontation with a U.S. Administration that has already sent troops into Afghanistan and Iraq, Iran's immediate neighbors to the east and west. In Tehran defiance is certainly back in the air now that conservatives have wrested control of the 290-seat Majlis from reformers in elections that were widely condemned at home and abroad as rigged. Supporters of the ruling mullahs seem poised to take back the presidency next spring. The up-and-coming pragmatic conservatives, who negotiated the nuclear deal and agree with reformers that Iran should cooperate with the outside world, have been accused of treachery by hard-liners, who control militant organizations like the Basij, the Revolutionary Guards, the Shari'a judicial system and Islamic charities.
Puffed up with grand notions of their country's historical greatness, the mullahs have convinced themselves that their Middle Eastern importance and cunning diplomacy give Iran a tactical edge in the nuclear showdown. They scoff at U.S. arguments that Iran's huge oil and gas reserves make nuclear power needless and point out that before the 1979 Islamic revolution, Washington supported the Shah's plan to build nuclear-power plants. In spite of bitter differences with the mullahs over other issues, like freedom and human rights, moderate leaders, including Khatami, have embraced Iran's nuclear aspirations. The regime has won some key diplomatic victories, such as Europe's formal acknowledgment in the Nov. 14 agreement that Iran has the right to peaceful nuclear technology. This affirms that under IAEA supervision, Tehran is technically entitled to operate facilities, including its two Russian-built light-water reactors in Bushehr, a pilot enrichment facility in Natanz, a future uranium-conversion site in Isfahan and a heavy-water production plant in Arak.
Many Iranian citizens, like U.S. officials, assume the mullahs are seeking A-bombs. The public debate has not been about whether Iran should have nuclear technology but about how to resist international pressure to bar it. Millions of Iranians are avidly following the showdown on Iranian TV talk shows, and the ruling clerics have earned more popular support than they have had in years. Even Iranians who dislike the mullahs are showing pride in the idea of Iran becoming an atomic power. "If the West has nuclear weapons, we need them as well," says accountant Amir Taheri, 25, as he and two female friends sip milk shakes at a U.S.-style shopping-center food court in affluent north Tehran.
Iranians believe the clerics have plenty of legitimate reasons to want atomic weapons: they feel threatened by the U.S.; Iran is encircled by nuclear powers like Israel, Russia, Pakistan and India; and the nation was victimized by Saddam Hussein's chemical attacks in the war with Iraq in the 1980s. Some Iranians think possession of the Bomb would make the Islamic regime untouchable. Others are worried that it could lead to North Korea — style isolation and impoverishment.
In private, hard-liners are high-fiving one another because of what they consider declining odds that the second-term Bush Administration will pursue regime change in Tehran. "Don't show your teeth if you can't bite," says Amir Mohebbian, political editor of the conservative Resalat newspaper. Observing U.S. difficulties in taming the Iraqis, Iranian leaders are far less worried than they were two years ago that U.S. forces might motor on toward Tehran. Some commentators are mocking Washington's tough anti-Iran rhetoric, confident that no U.S. allies have the stomach for a new military venture. The mullahs seem sure that Bush doesn't either, despite his "axis of evil" talk. They know U.S. forces are stretched tight and oil prices, important to the U.S. economy, are up to $50 per bbl. In any case, Tehran officials say, Iran's substantial trade ties with Russia and China probably ensure a Security Council veto if the U.S. pursues U.N. sanctions.
Tehran's pragmatic conservatives seem well aware that tensions with the West could rise sharply if dialogue collapses. Stopping short of declaring Iran in formal breach of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT), which requires strict international supervision, the IAEA has issued scathing criticisms of Iran's past failures to inform it of suspicious facilities, activities and materials and its chronic foot dragging on cooperation. European negotiators remain skeptical that Iran will stick to its word. That's not surprising when even some Iranian clerics contacted by TIME questioned the validity of Khamenei's religious ruling barring nuclear weapons.
Nuclear politics is fast becoming central to Iran's 2005 presidential-election contest, as the pragmatists jostle with hard-liners for the upper hand. If the mullahs continue to hold sway, it seems unlikely that Iran will give up its nuclear dreams, any more than it would make peace with the Great Satan it broke with 25 years ago in November. Ali Larijani, the leading pragmatic conservative presidential candidate, has hinted that Iran might quit the NPT if the nuclear talks with Europe fail — a move that would give Washington justification to push for U.N. sanctions. Defense Minister Ali Shamkhani, loyal to the clerics, warns that Iran would retaliate in the event of an attack and could mount a pre-emptive strike if military commanders calculated that the U.S. or Israel was about to hit Iran's nuclear facilities. "We will not sit with arms folded," he told the al-Jazeera network. Backing up the threat, Iran unveiled 1,300-km-range Shahab-3 missiles at a national parade in September, where one banner bore the slogan WIPE ISRAEL OFF THE MAP.
For the mullahs, brinkmanship carries risks. An aggressive posture on nuclear issues runs counter to Iran's otherwise cautious foreign policy and could further undermine the regime's international legitimacy. Given the depth of their unpopularity at home, especially among young Iranians who want real democracy and better ties to the West, the clerics might not be able to count on the populace to rally around the flag if their reckless actions trigger a serious confrontation with the U.S. Some pro-West Iranians, believing that a showdown with the U.S. is just what is needed to make the mullahs' regime crumble, fault the Europeans for giving the mullahs a way out. "I love George Bush," says Hassan, 22, a businessman awaiting a flight at Tehran's Mehrabad Airport. "He wants freedom for Iranians, and he's against terrorism. He's a cowboy!"
The pragmatic conservatives will probably try to keep the nuclear dialogue alive. They say they would like to expand Iran's limited cooperation with the U.S. on issues like Iraq and Afghanistan. But that posture did not afford much political cover for Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi at last week's regional summit on Iraq's future. At the official dinner, Egyptian hosts seated him next to Colin Powell. But Iran's government, miffed at the Secretary of State's allegation that Iran was adapting missiles for nuclear warheads, rejected any substantive discussion during the rare encounter.
Just like Iran's fading reformers, the pragmatic conservatives will be vigorously opposed by the regime's powerful mullahs if they show signs of moderation. That's what happened to Mohammed Ali Abtahi, a reformist cleric who, in frustration over the right-wing takeover of parliament, resigned a month ago as Iran's Vice President. "They kicked us out of the political field, arguing that we were soft and weak," he told TIME last week. "They do not want to lose the backing of the minority of Iranians who still support them." As long as the mullahs prevail, so may Iran's quarter-century-old confrontation with the West, only now with nuclear weapons in play.
- Scott MacLeod; Nahid Siamdoust