Iran: Post-Nuclear Fuel Deal, Debating Next Steps

Upon yesterday’s news that a draft sanctions resolution was presented to the UN Security Council (full text of the resolution in PDF here), Iran’s regime swiftly dismissed the move as inconsequential, with one senior official saying that the draft “has no legitimacy at all.” The chief of Iran’s atomic energy organization not only predicted that the sanctions won’t pass, but insisted that U.S. leaders were discrediting themselves internationally by even pursuing such a measure.

As currently written, the proposed UN resolution builds upon previous sanctions to, among other things, target Iranian banks and empower member states to inspect suspicious Iranian cargo shipments.

Richard Haass of the Council on Foreign Relations believes that Iran’s leaders are more threatened than they let on, saying that “The fact that Iran … has spent much of the last week trying to derail this diplomatic effort with an alternative plan … suggests that Iran did not want this new UN resolution to pass.” But in the end, Haass concedes that neither UN sanctions nor U.S. legislation targeting Iran’s Revolutionary Guard will divert Iran from its goal, meaning that “the world will soon reach the long-predicted fork in the road: an Israeli or American decision to undertake a potentially risky and costly preventive military strike on Iranian nuclear installations, or an Israeli and American decision to carry out a potentially risky and costly policy of living with an Iranian nuclear weapon (or something close to it) through a mixture of deterrence and defense.”

Yet Barbara Slavin still holds out hope for a negotiated agreement. “The Obama administration has always said that its sanctions policy was meant to convince Iran to seek a diplomatic solution,” she writes at The Washington Note. “The question is whether it is prepared to test that proposition.”

Thus far, however, Rami Khouri — editor-at-large of The Daily Star and professor at American University of Beirut — is perturbed by the Obama administration’s chilly reaction to a nuclear fuel swap deal quite similar to the one endorsed by the U.S. in October of last year. “The available signs indicate that the Obama administration remains committed to its schizophrenic policy of reaching out to Iran while also sermonizing to it with condescension and even some disdain,” he says. Deriding this approach as presumptuous and aggressive, Khouri urges both the U.S. and Israel to “Drop the arrogance and double standards, negotiate fairly and realistically, and accept that Iran is a power that is at once strong, technically proficient, and proud of its sovereignty.”

Flynt and Hillary Mann Leverett agree, decrying the confusion that they believe “still runs high in official Washington” — a confusion that could be dangerous if, as the Leveretts contend, the draft UN resolution provokes a “serious international backlash against the United States on the issue.”