E-Paper
Not another Iraq
In the Indian elite there is a palpable irritation with the Left over its decision to demand a full debate in Parliament on the UPA government?s second vote against Iran in the IAEA last week.
In the Indian elite there is a palpable irritation with the Left over its decision to demand a full debate in Parliament on the UPA government’s second vote against Iran in the IAEA last week. Although this falls a good way short of its earlier threat to withdraw its support, few doubt that a debate in which the Left pits itself openly against the government for the first time will seriously weaken the alliance and shorten its life. When the Sensex has just crossed the 10,000 mark and India is the new flavour of the year for international investors, this is the last thing the country needs.
The Left’s critics are ascribing its decision to stubbornness, an inflated sense of its own importance and a failure to recognise the ‘paradigm shift’ in foreign policy after the end of the Cold War and the dawn of a unipolar day. But while these sentiments may well have played some part in shaping its decision, in truth what the Left has done is give the UPA government an honourable way out of becoming an accessory to the second greatest crime of the 21st century. This will be a military strike, either by the US alone or in collusion with Israel, on Iran.
If you ask a spokesman for the Indian government, he will vehemently deny the existence of any such danger. On the contrary, he will claim that India has helped to postpone, and possibly prevent, military action by insisting that “confrontation should be avoided and any outstanding issue ought to be resolved through dialogue”. The resolution, he will point out, “has won a period of six weeks, before the March IAEA board meeting, for diplomatic efforts to continue and to get negotiations between the EU-3 and Iran back on track”. Indeed, so sanguine is the Indian government that its spokesman has not hesitated to assert that India’s vote against Iran “should not be interpreted as in any way detracting from the traditionally close and friendly relations we enjoy with [that country]”.
There have been few worse examples of double-think in foreign policy. This pious optimism presupposes that Iran will bend before the ‘will of the international community’ and do all of the five things that the IAEA resolution has commanded it to do. These are: re-establish the full and sustained suspension of all uranium enrichment activity, including research; reconsider (i.e., stop) the construction of a heavy water moderated research reactor; ratify and implement the Additional Protocol to its Safeguards Agreement; in the interim, continue to
act in accordance with that protocol; and implement ‘transparency measures’, which extend beyond the formal requirements of the Safeguards Agreement and Additional Protocol and include such access to individuals, documentation, dual-use items, military-owned workshops, and research and development as the IAEA may request in support of its ongoing investigations. Only if it does not, will the question of UN sanctions, and the US’s repeated threats of military strikes become relevant.
But the Indian government knew perfectly well, even before the vote, that Iran would not agree to these conditions. Every responsible Iranian leader, from its ambassador at the IAEA to its foreign minister and president, had warned the world that if the IAEA referred it to the Security Council, it would immediately terminate its voluntary observance of enhanced safeguards and resume full-scale uranium enrichment and associated activities. That is what it has since done.
It also knew that the problem did not lie with President Ahmadinejad or Iran’s revolutionary council. The Iranian government could not have acted in any other way because it has broken no law. The nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, of which it is a signatory, expressly gives it the right to enrich uranium provided it does so under IAEA safeguards. Iran had gone a step further and accepted enhanced safeguards. The NPT moreover, does not, in any of its clauses, prohibit a signatory from carrying out research that would give it the capacity to make nuclear weapons. (The West tried to plug this loophole at the 2005 NPT review conference, but failed). The law, therefore, remains that research that could create the capacity to build a bomb is not illegal and proscribed.
Iran went wrong, and aroused worldwide suspicion of its intentions, when it tried to keep the facilities in which it was carrying out the research hidden from the IAEA and, therefore, outside the safeguards regime. But even the conservative Financial Times conceded, in an editorial on February 6, that Iran’s determination to acquire and develop dual-use technology is fuelled by its acute apprehensions about its security. It has tried, the paper concedes, to assuage these by means of diplomacy, but “America rebuffed Iran’s overtures for a ‘grand bargain’ in 2003 and Europe failed to act on pledges to discuss security in the subsequent deal the EU-3 reached with Teheran on a nuclear moratorium.”
In insisting that Iran give up the right to enrich uranium altogether, what the US, EU and now the IAEA are asking it to do is surrender its sovereignty. No Iranian government that did so in response to a direct threat would survive for very long. The West may find it convenient to discount the power of nationalism and, therefore, turn a blind eye to the dilemma in which it has placed the Iranian government, but Indian policy-makers can hardly have forgotten the potent force that brought them independence. They, therefore, know perfectly well that in Iran’s position they would have done exactly the same thing.
The West is now on a collision course with Iran. By ratcheting up its threats, the US and the EU are making it less and less possible for the regime to climb down. The February 4 vote has, therefore, set in motion a chain reaction that will end in a military strike on Iran. That will be another gross violation of Article 2 of the UN charter, and will destroy what is left of the Westphalian State system. But it would not end there. Iran would retaliate by turning Iraq into a living hell
for the foreign troops that remain. Since it would almost certainly do this by unleashing a new wave of Shia ‘terrorism’ in the country and forging an alliance with the Sunnis in central Iraq, that could easily become the excuse for more American or ‘allied’ military strikes on its defence establishments and its infrastructure on the Kosovo and Iraq models. No one can predict where this escalation will end.
The Indian spokesman’s assertion that India’s vote will not affect its friendly ties with Iran is pure poppycock. The truth is that India has already stumbled into becoming an accessory to a future military strike on its nuclear installations. What is far worse in doing so, it has tacitly endorsed the US’s invocation, in its 2002 National Security Doctrine, of the right to attack or invade another country merely on the suspicion that it might one day pose a threat to its national interest. That doctrine erases the distinction between aggression and self-defence and, therefore, the very basis of international law. It spells the end of a world order based on law.
Manmohan Singh will do well to remember an argument he had used with great effect when justifying the signature of the Uruguay Round trade agreement: in any society, it is the poor who need the shelter of the law more than the rich. In terms of military, economic and technological power, India is still among the poorer nations of the world. By signing on to the
US’s decision to rule the world on the basis of vague consensuses among the rich nations backed by the threat of military force, it is chopping down the bough on which it sits.
By insisting on a parliamentary debate, the Left has given the government one final chance to get out of a self-destructive commitment in an honourable way. For no one, even in the US Congress, can reasonably expect it to ignore the wishes of the people, and face defeat and a possible fall from power, on this issue.
