Multilateral diplomacy on the Iran nuclear issue, led by the “Iran Six”, is falling to pieces as a result of sharpening disagreements on how to respond to Tehran's defiance of demands from the United Nations Security Council that it suspend uranium-enrichment activities.

More importantly, the division has been caused by the extent to which Iran has been prepared to accept nuclear transparency, and demonstrate the peacefulness of its nuclear program.
U.S. neo-conservatives and their allies in Israel may be up in arms, sounding alarms over Iran's nuclear threat, yet the international community is increasingly drifting in the opposite direction, with growing assurances that Iran's program may not have a military dimension or “intent” after all.
On Monday, diplomats from the five permanent UN Security Council member countries -- the United States, Britain, Russia, France and China -- and Germany spoke by telephone on how to approach the issue. It was the first time the six powers had spoken on Iran since a ministerial-level meeting in New York late last month.
The United States’ own intelligence report on Iran, released last December, concluded that Iran's nuclear program has not been geared towards “weaponization” since 2003, a conclusion that has yet to be recanted or revised by the U.S. intelligence community as a whole. The report's findings call into doubt current attempts to toughen sanctions on Iran, which are hampered further by the findings of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) regarding the absence of any evidence of military aspects of the nuclear program.
The latest IAEA report recycles U.S.-led concerns about Iran's missile program and certain tests in the past, yet the fact is that all the six “outstanding issues” identified in the August 2007 IAEA-Iran Work Plan have been resolved to Iran's satisfaction. As per the concluding paragraph of that agreement, Iran's file should now be “normalized”.
But this is unlikely to happen as long as broader tensions related to geopolitical issues between Tehran and Washington remain and that, put plainly, is why Washington's addiction to using the leverage of Iran's file at the Security Council will be inherited by the next occupant of the White House.
This is partly because serious efforts are underway in the U.S., led by the neo-conservatives from the U.S. President George W. Bush administration, to augment the perception of an Iran nuclear threat, obviating any possibility of Iran-U.S. rapprochement short of a full suspension of Iran's enrichment program.
To illustrate this, a new high-powered organization called United Against Nuclear Iran has been formed which seeks a key role in formulating the U.S.'s next Iran policy. Led by former Central Intelligence Agency director James Woolsey, former ambassador to the UN Richard Holbrooke and Dennis Ross, a former U.S. envoy to the Middle East, this group appears be a brainchild of hawkish neo-con U.S. diplomat John Bolton.
His fingerprint on the organization is directly absent, as he is not listed as one of its leaders. Yet his former assistant, Mark Wallace, who is its executive director, is obviously a Bolton boy.
Somehow, this private U.S. advocacy group, which was launched into existence just a couple of weeks ago, has managed something that most long-standing non-governmental organizations with deep ties to the United Nations can only dream of -- gaining a forum at the UN headquarters in New York.
This is precisely what happened this week at the main UN building, much to the chagrin of not only Iran but also the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), which dispatched an angry letter to UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon, protesting the misuse of the UN's facilities by UN-unrelated organizations.
It turns out that the U.S. mission to the UN sponsored this particular, poorly attended event, which was in effect boycotted by the UN member states. Yet this would be confusing for anyone looking at the group's website, which advertises its “forum at the United Nations”.
The forum was, “a travesty of UN norms, that's all,” a NAM diplomat told the author, while another diplomat from Egypt put the blame for this abnormality, simply, on “U.S. political pressure”.
This does not bode well either for the UN secretary general or for the U.S.'s ambassador to the UN, Zalmay Khalilzad. He should know better than to let his discredited predecessor and his cronies damage the UN's credibility by letting a well-funded group, backed by the pro-Israel lobbyists, take the world stage.
The lukewarm reaction of UN workers and international diplomats to this ill-suited event alone proves the intentions behind it backfired. The only thing gained was a new knowledge of how far the U.S. is willing to go to undermine world organizations to push ahead its viewpoints.
The trouble is that with U.S. presidential politics going through a transition period, there is no longer a set U.S. policy, for example on Iran, and this explains the extra efforts of U.S. neo-cons to marshal support, even by enlisting some former diplomats from the graveyard of U.S. diplomacy.
The groups hope to erect tall barriers against any potential initiative by the next U.S. president to steer Washington's Iran policy in a drastically new direction.
Tantamount to desperate efforts to nip in the bud such a prospect looming on the horizon, particularly if Democratic Senator Barack Obama wins the contest, the real intention behind the initiative of this new anti-Iran “coalition” is to ensure policy continuity against the risk of any novel discontinuities that may somehow “appease” Tehran.
An integral aspect of this neo-con strategy is to smear Iran as much as possible, devalue Iran's cooperation with the IAEA, dismiss its proposals, such as an international consortium, and to augment the perception of a “nuclear Iran”, irrespective of the lack of any viable evidence of military diversion on Iran's part, let alone a smoking gun.
Interestingly, one of the speakers at this above-mentioned event was Gary Samore of the Council on Foreign Relations, who spoke at length about Iran's presumed nuclear “intentions” with hardly any focus on the net gains of Iran-IAEA cooperation. For example, the fact that the IAEA has surveillance cameras at the Natanz enrichment facility and has conducted numerous unannounced visits there since March 2007
Also, without presenting any clue as to why he should be trusted more on Iran, given the fact that he was horrendously wrong on Iraq: in 2002, Samore penned a report on Iraq and the weapons of mass destruction, stating categorically that Iraq had an active weapons of mass destruction program.
Neither Samore nor the other speaker, Henry Sokolski, had any convincing answer to a pertinent question by former ambassador William Leurs, the current president of United Nations Association of the United States, regarding the necessity of a U.S. dialogue with Iran on a broad range of issues including, Afghanistan and Iraq.
Forget about international consensus on Iran, the U.S. itself lacks consensus on what to do and misguided initiatives such as United Against Nuclear Iran can only exacerbate this situation, thanks to their false sirens on Iran which are contradictory to the global community's desire for a genuinely different U.S. foreign policy.
(Source: Asia Times)