By Jacques Amalric
    Libération

    Thursday 22 December 2005

    It's better to talk, even with the deaf, than to break off. It's by virtue of this old diplomatic adage that officials from the European "Troika" (Berlin, London, Paris) went to Vienna yesterday to resume their discussions with officials from the Iranian nuclear program. Discussions from which no one expects the slightest positive development, so decided does the Iran of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad appear to be on attaining the rank of a regional nuclear power. Didn't Teheran's new negotiator, Ari Larijani, just mention the case of North Korea - which has been skillfully tacking since 1994, all the while pursuing its efforts to acquire nuclear weapons and missiles capable of delivering them - as the example to follow?

    A single fact suffices to illustrate the Europeans' quandary: their discussions with Iran were interrupted last month after Teheran - in spite of its previous commitments not to - resumed the uranium conversion process, the preliminary step to enrichment and one indispensable for nuclear militarization. So now, nothing has changed since then in Teheran's behavior. Quite the opposite, if one is to judge by several news items from recent months. Haven't we learned during the past few weeks that Teheran rejected an offer from Moscow to enrich Iranian uranium in Russian installations before overseeing the usage the mullahs' regime would make of it? That Iran - in spite of the timid warnings from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) - was about to "convert" an additional fifty tons of uranium? That Iran had just successfully tested a third-generation Shahab missile, built with North Korean aid, that could reach Ankara or Karachi, Tel-Aviv or Riyadh? That Iran had procured "recipes" allowing it to produce certain elements of nuclear weapons - notably the casting and the fabrication of the half-spheres of uranium metal the usage of which is easily guessed - as early as 1987, thanks to the Pakistani connection?

    That long-ago date (1987) suffices to remind us that Teheran's nuclear ambitions don't just go back a few years. In fact, it's the only part of the late Shah's modernization program for Iran that the Imam Khomeini adopted for his own account. But this issue takes on an all the more critical dimension today as President Ahmadinejad has launched a growing number of provocations over several weeks. That began during the United Nations' General Assembly, when Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, just inaugurated, delivered an extremely hard-line speech after having implored for the return of the Mahdi, "the hidden imam," who disappeared in 1941 and who is supposed to return to establish an ideal Islamic society. It continued at the end of October, when he demanded that Israel be "erased from the map of the world" and said that "whoever recognizes Israel burns in the flames of his own people's anger." A few days later, after having proceeded to a purge of senior public officials and diplomatic personnel, the president described the Hebrew state as a "tumor," agreeing with the revisionists who question the reality of the Holocaust and suggesting a transfer of the "Zionist" regime to Germany or Austria. A defense for the theory of the clash of civilizations, "a historic battle which began hundreds of years ago between the world of global arrogance and the world of Islam."

    This clear violation of the United Nations' Charter (to threaten a member country with annihilation) has up until now rated Iran only indignant condemnations from some Westerners, Moscow's discreet reprobation, and the silence of Arab capitals, even though some of the latter (Egypt and Jordan) have recognized Israel's existence and were openly condemned by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. So much caution, corroborated by the Europeans' hesitation to bring Iran before the Security Council for the violation of its nuclear commitments, can only reinforce the ultra-conservative president in his extremist positions that should - he believes - stifle the discontent of the Iranian populace.

    The president, in fact, has not been able to keep a single one of the social - and demagogic - promises of his campaign and is obviously seeking through national-religious one-upmanship to silence his opponents. He's all the more inclined in that direction in that he deems (correctly) that the international context favors his approach: bogged down in Iraq, the United States, in spite of the warlike speeches of certain neo-conservatives, knows very well that Teheran can complicate its task still further through its connections with the Shiite community. Elsewhere, Iran has the same ability to cause harm in Lebanon, through Hezbollah. Other precious assets should there be a hearing before the Security Council: energy needs, notably India's and China's, shelter Teheran from potential Western sanctions. And Iran can always count on understanding from Moscow, its big weapons and nuclear equipment supplier. The probable result of this scenario: a nuclear Iran that will incite Saudi Arabia and Egypt to follow the same path, and the intrusion of deterrence throughout the Middle East via Israel, which already has nuclear weapons. For Iran's nuclear program seems too far advanced, dispersed, and camouflaged in subterranean installations to become the object of a pre-emptive attack of the same sort Israel conducted in 1981 against the Iraqi Osirak reactor.