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catalyst for change through dialogue and understanding
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In This Issue:
Iran's Nuclear Energy Program
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Recap: Mehrangiz Kar Speaks on the Role of Women and Human Rights in Iran
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 Mehrangiz Kar
Blogging for Peace
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A Road Map for US-Iran Relations by R.K. Ramazani
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Professor R.K. Ramazani
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"This notion that the United States is getting ready to attack Iran is simply ridiculous. Having said that, all options are on the table."George W. Bush
"The Europeans have given the Iranians a path, to a different kind of relationship with the international community in which they establish confidence that they are not trying to build a nuclear weapon under the cover of a civilian nuclear program."Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice
"The president is seized with the idea that unless Europe and the United States are on the same page -- both in terms of carrots and sticks -- that nothing reasonably can be done in terms of negotiations."Senator Joseph Biden
Due to extensive political and economic relations, we have a different view of Europe compared to our view about the United States."Majlis National Security and Foreign Policy Committee Chairman Aladdin Borujerdi
"The search for common national interests are, the United States must look deeper to arrive at a meaningful dialogue with Iran.R.K. Ramazani
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This Week In Photos
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Hassan Rowhani & Pres. Putin
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Mohamed el-Baradei (IAEA)
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Iranians for Peace Blog
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Tehran Street Corner
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Iran's Nuclear Energy Program
Iran's nuclear program was started under Shah Pahlavi, who announced in 1974 that he intended to pursue an ambitious nuclear plan, installing 23 gigawatts by the year 1994. This program was supported and cultivated by the United States prior to the Islamic Revolution. To suggest that the development of nuclear technology has no basis in nuclear energy completely ignores the history of the program.
Iran’s present energy needs are estimated to be 31 gigawatts, and are expected to triple in the next fifteen years in relation to its increasing population and improving economy. However, the original nuclear energy plan was stalled by both the Iran-Iraq war and financial limitations. Nonetheless, Iran has moved from being the second biggest oil producer to being the fifth, making alternative energy sources once again more attractive.
Iran’s nuclear program was revived in 1995, when Iran signed a $1 billion contract with Russia, to complete the 1 gigawatt plant at Bushehr within four years. Progress was stalled when the Germans failed to deliver parts and equipment in the face of pressure from Europe and the United States. Nevertheless, Russia continues to play an integral role in Iran’s nuclear expansion, and hopes to play a major role in Iran's nuclear energy expansion plans by completing the full construction of the plan and delivering nuclear fuel to the site.
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Ultimately, Russia, Europe, the United States and Iran are concerned by Iran’s insistence on developing the full atomic fuel cycle, but not for the same reasons. From Russia’s perspective, this is not economically beneficial to their interests, nor economically viable for Iran.
Conventional wisdom suggests that at least eight reactors are necessary to make an investment in the fuel cycle viable. Iran has suggested that if it continues to invest billions in the construction of nuclear power plants, it must also develop a mechanism for ensuring a continued supply of nuclear fuel.
The United States believes that Iran has other intentions in developing the full fuel cycle, namely weapons, a notion perpetuated by current hostilities between the countries.
However, a nuclear Iran does not have to be the enemy of America. The United States can feasibly supply Iran nuclear fuel in the short term, and allow the development of the fuel cycle as a reward for the resolution of other issues with regard to the current regime.
The acceptance of IAEA protocols, US engagement in nuclear development and oversight, and the reduction of regional security threats, namely the United States, would resolve the question of Iranian weapons proliferation.
Unfortunately, the unyielding insistence by the United States, and now Europe, that Iran is not allowed to develop the complete fuel cycle has transformed Iran’s domestic debate over nuclear technology. The debate has moved away from a discussion on economic viability and necessity and towards the national rights to knowledge and technology. Ultimately, such demands will consolidate nationalist fervor around the regime and prevent the creation of an environment where the resolution of other demands will be unapproachable.
The opinions presented in AIC Update are not necessarily the opinion of the Council and are intended to create a positive environment for debate.
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Mehrangiz Kar Speaks on the Role of Women and Human Rights in Iran
NEW BRUNSWICK, NJ, February 26, 2005 – Mehrangiz Kar, winner of the Ludovic Trarieux International Human Rights Prize, detailed the women’s movement in Iran, its role in the larger human rights movement, and its part in “Tribal Life and Women’s Rights in Iran,” presented by the Rutgers University Center for Middle East Studies and co-sponsored by the American Iranian Council
Kar focused on the role of women in the Iranian human rights movement since 1997. She suggested that the women’s movement made strides in the early days of the President Khatami’s reform movement, but has been forced to find alternative ways of voicing its opinion, including boycotting elections in recent years.
Kar concluded her presentation by emphasizing that there must be a moderation of religious extremism in Iran if human rights are to be fully realized. Mehrangiz Kar’s speech was followed by an in-depth question and answer session and traditional Persian meal.
Commenting on Kar’s speech, the American Iranian Council’s Founder and President Hooshang Amirahmadi, Ph.D. said: “The women’s movement in Iran was at the forefront of improving human and political rights.”
The event also included a compelling multimedia presentation by Dr. Cima Sedigh on tribal life and women’s education of the Bakhtiari tribe.
The American Iranian Council (AIC) is a nonprofit and nonpartisan tax-exempt [501 (C) 3]
educational organization dedicated to improved US-Iran relations through dialogue, better understanding, and constructive engagement.
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Blogging for Peace
Online journals, better known as blogs, have become a staple of the American political scene, often breaking news stories and providing an outlet for otherwise unheard complaints and criticisms. The phenomenon is culturally diverse; there are approximately 75,000 blogs and a few hundred regularly visited web logs written by Iranians in English and other languages, belonging to expatriates who live in North America, Europe, and Canada..
While the range of commentary on the current state of US-Iran relations varies from regime change to rapprochement, the underlying current in recent weeks has been to prevent a US military attack on Iran. In an interesting culmination of this sentiment, the writers of Iranians for Peace, a blog introduced by Iranian journalist journalist N. Alavi, has invited “all Iranian bloggers who believe that " Democracy" in Iran could only emerge and flourish in a climate of independence, stability, peace and economic prosperity, to join me in launching the "March 19 campaign" as per the following action plan:”
1) Declare March 19th, 2005 as our "National Sovereignty Day" and change our blogs' titles to "No war on Iran" on that date;
2) Post an article (on March 19) in our blogs stressing our commitment to our right of self-determination and explain in our own words why we oppose any foreign interference;
3) Send a copy of the same article by email to the U.S President at president@whitehouse.gov, or by fax to 202-456-2461, or by mail to:
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20500
4) Alert the U.S media of our campaign and seek support from their civil society."
Iranians for Peace blog can be found at http://peaceiran.blogspot.com/
The Council sincerely supports the efforts of bloggers, both inside and outside Iran, to infuse the debate on US-Iran relations with public sentiment.
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On January 13, 1999 the American Iranian Council, in conjunction with the Asia Society, organized a conference entitled “Revisiting US-Iran Relations.” At that conference, R.K. Ramazani gave a speech entitled “A Road Map for US-Iran Relations”. The following speech delicately examines the prevailing tendencies in dealing with Iran, some of which have reemerged in various policy documents in recent months, and identifies an alternative approach. Consequently, Professor Ramazani’s lecture is as relevant today as it was six years ago.
A Road Map for US-Iran Relations
R. K. Ramazani
I would like to make three interrelated points relevant to the American Iranian Council’s concern with US-Iran relations.
1. First I would like to warn against a new analytical orthodoxy that threatens to dominate interpretations of the Iranian situation. Before the presidency of Seyyed Mohammad Khatami, the old analytical orthodoxy held fast to the view that Iran’s foreign policy could not change because there were no moderates in Iran. The new orthodoxy grudgingly accepts the existence of moderates, but sees Iran’s foreign policy nevertheless as incapable of positive change because it is caught up in the struggle between moderates and radicals. To be sure, factional politics strike deep roots in Iranian history and Iranians themselves seem to subscribe to this new analytical orthodoxy as well. But I am here concerned with the way this orthodoxy skews our understanding of the Iranian situation in the United States. To cite an example of the influence of this Manichean thinking in the press media, a leading American newspaper editorial categorically blamed the barbaric acts of murder of Iranian intellectuals in recent months on “the heavy hand of the Islamic revolutionary regime” as opposed to “Iranian moderates” led by the Khatami government and concluded in a cavalier manner that “Iran cannot reasonably expect to find a fair place in the contemporary world.” Such thinking is fraught with danger because it is based on questionable assumptions which can lead to poor policy prescriptions.
Given the constraints of time, let me briefly identify some of these simplistic assumptions. The new analytical orthodoxy assumes that Iran’s foreign policy is simply the mirror image of its domestic politics; that the division between moderates and radicals reflects a struggle exclusively for raw power; that the struggle is between light and darkness, good and evil, and paragon and villain; that factions within the political elite and the ones in the society at large are one and the same; that factional world views remain the same regardless of time and circumstances; that the factional battle is a zero-sum game and hence political factions are incapable of negotiating, bargaining and horse-trade; that all those who are dubbed as radical are violent and all those who are called moderate are peace-loving; that psychological, cultural, and moral factors do not matter; and that the global environment, of whatever nature – political, economic, scientific, technological or cultural – does not count in understanding the Iranian situation.
2. Second, I would like to warn against the prevailing tendency to apply a simplistic balance of power notion to the Iranian situation as a way of improving US-Iranian relations. This tendency totally disregards significant value aspirations on both sides, but particularly overlooks Iran’s unprecedented experiment with democracy at home and peace abroad. Before I get to the essence of this experiment, let me say that not a few pundits propose that Washington should play Iranian moderates against radicals. Even more egregiously, they recommend that the United States should play potentially powerful Iran against Iraq, as if we had learned no lessons from having played for decades such a shortsighted balance of power game. Saddam Hussein is the brainchild of such a policy, as was the Shah before him. But today’s Iran will act as the surrogate of no great power, a proposition that can be grasped only if we have a deeper understanding of the context of the central premise of Iran’s foreign policy, which I call “faqih-guided democratic peace.” Such an understanding demands that we heed Cicero’s admonition. In his words, “To be ignorant of what happened before you were born is to remain always a child.”
Not to remain a child, it is important to remember that the Iranian Revolution was, according to Forrest D. Colburn, the preeminent authority on Third World revolutions, “the most original of contemporary revolutions” because Iranian revolutionaries, unlike Ho Chi Minh, Mao, Castro and others, evaded “the lure of Marxism-Leninism” and, I might add, also evaded the lure of the faint version of Western liberalism which the Constitutional revolutionaries adopted at the turn of the century.
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In evading both Eastern and Western models, the revolutionaries claimed that they adopted an authentic Islamic model. But, in essence, the revolution strikes deep roots in what I call the “triple hybrid character” of the Iranian sense of national identity, namely, a synthesis of the Iranic, the Islamic and the modern strands of Iranian civilization. Ayatollah Khomeini’s favorite motto, “independence, freedom and Islam,” reflects, I think, all three strands. This synthesizing proclivity of Iranian culture lies at the heart of what appears often to uncritical Western eyes as illogical Iranian attempts to combine contradictory principles, the most important example of which is to be found in the principles of sovereignty of the divine and sovereignty of the people – both enshrined in the Iranian Constitution. President Khatami believes that liberty and religion are compatible and, in talking to the American people in January 1998, he invoked America’s own historical experience in combining religion and democracy, as he saw it. We tend to forget that seemingly contradictory principles are often worked out in action, as exemplified by the principles of sovereignty and universality in the Charter of the United Nations.
The central premise of President Khatami’s foreign policy mentioned before rejects the clash of civilizations hypothesis which, according to its author, assumes that such values as “respect for the sacredness of life and human dignity, tolerance and a desire for liberty, order, fairness and stability do not resonate in Islamic societies …” On the contrary, viewing the oneness of humankind as a manifestation of God’s creation of man in “His Own Image,” President Khatami called on the United Nations to designate the year 2001 as the “Year of Dialogue Among Civilizations.” His proposal has been approved. Meanwhile, by according “removal of tension the highest priority” in Iran’s foreign policy, his government has improved relations with an unprecedented number of nations around the world in a remarkably short period of time, despite numerous domestic and foreign pressures.
3. The third and final point that I would like to make is to suggest that as important as the search for common national interests are, the United States must look deeper to arrive at a meaningful dialogue with Iran. President Khatami’s courageous and innovative foreign policy of democratic peace, I strongly believe, also calls for a search for common values and perceptions. Toward this end, we need to take seriously the proclamations and actions of the Khatami government with respect to the principles of liberty, civil society, the rule of law, government accountability, people’s participation in decision-making processes, and respect for women and for the new generation, as well as perceptions of national interests. In response to this call, I would like to suggest that in their relations on the basis of international law in all respects, including international human rights law as well as humanitarian law. Judging by President Khatami’s address to the United Nations in September 1998, he wishes to see the world community address such issues as terrorism in all its form, the thread of weapons of mass destruction, the problems of Afghanistan and Kosovo, and Persian Gulf security as well as global civil society and respect for women and young people worldwide. It is reasonable, therefore, to assume that an international law approach to US-Iran relations may well have real appeal to the Iranian people and eventually to their government. As a matter of fact, such an approach might also help us to close the gap between our pious proclamations on human rights, the rule of law and democracy and some of our practices that contradict such values and principles. This is, in my view, the kind of road map that the United States needs in dealing with Iran.
The preceding lecture can be found in the book titled “Revisiting US-Iran Relations,” published by the American Iranian Council in March 1999. It also includes the seminal speech by the late Ambassador Cyrus Vance, entitled “US-Iran Relations: Has the Time Come?,” and other article,s including two additional speeches given at the historic panel on Revisiting the Hostage Crisis held in Paris on July 28, 1998 and sponsored by the Center for World Dialogue.
Please click here to purchase this and other books published by the Council
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Vision
The vision of the American Iranian Council is that the United States and Iran will work together, since their common interests far outweigh their differences. AIC also envisions the Iranian-American community playing an increasingly significant role in American society, and Iran becoming a democratically developed member of the global community with full respect for human rights.
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Mission
The mission of AIC is to be a constructive force, in cooperation and partnership with other organizations, in bringing the United States and Iran together, involving the Iranian-American community in the dialogue, and bringing attention to social and political conditions in Iran.
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Goals
The three interrelated goals of the American Iranian Council are:
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To serve as a platform for sustained dialogue on U.S.-Iran relations.
2. To serve as a catalyst to educate all Americans, including Iranian-Americans, regarding this dialogue.
3. To serve as a forum for discussion of issues of importance in Iranian society.
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