The Obama Administration has agreed to start negotiations with Iran on the basis of the latest Iranian proposal. A decision I certainly applaud and fervently hope that we can finesse to include the nuclear issue (an issue that was part of Iran’s May 2008 submission and one that they have suggested could still be talked about). I want to return to the nuclear issue in more detail below, but first I want to discuss the overlap between the two sides that this most recent agenda represents. Much has been written and said about how wide ranging Iran’s proposal is but few seem to realize that it is actually a subset of the intersection of those two proposals. Let’s review the major points of the West’s proposal (presented to Iran on 14 June 2008 by the governments of China, France, Germany, the Russian Federation, the United Kingdom, the United States of America and the European Union):
1) Nuclear Energy
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2) Political
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3) Economic
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4) Agriculture
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5) Environment, Infrastructure
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6) Economic, social and human development/humanitarian issues
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It is interesting to examine the West’s political section in a little more detail. This section included “support for Iran in playing an important and constructive role in international affairs,” “realizing the objective of a Middle East free of weapons of mass destruction,” and “promotion of dialogue and cooperation on non-proliferation, regional security and stabilization issues.” There is a lot of room in those proposals for expanding the agenda past what, I’m sure, the West had in mind and might very well explain some of the points that Iran lists in this current version.
Iran’s 2008 submission contained a number of important points on the nuclear issue that I hope we can incorporate in the coming talks. First, and most important, is Iran’s suggestion that the talks include “Establishing enrichment and nuclear fuel production consortiums in different parts of the world— including Iran .” (Emphasis added.) I believe, and my colleague John Thomson and I have written extensively about just this point since 2006, that such consortiums are the best way of ensuring that Iran does not get a nuclear bomb. It is my understanding that Iran’s 2008 proposals are still on the table, though this submission might supersede them. This is one advantage of Iran’s proposal not containing an explicit section on the nuclear issue. We should simply assume that these proposals continue to be on the table and ask them “What do you mean by international consortiums?” Surprisingly, the West has never asked this question even though Iran has, at the highest levels, brought this item up a number of times.
Of course, the West has been turned off by the awful prolog to the proposal; a prolog made all the more disgusting in light of the terrible suppression of the Iranian people since the June elections. Iran would have been better served, at least in terms of public relations in the West, by simply pointing out that their most recent package was this intersection. But then, the prolog was undoubtedly written for internal consumption and justification for a regime that has to be worried about its legitimacy rather than for the Western public.