AFTER the invasion of Iraq, nothing has as sharply fractured the international community as the crisis over Iran’s nuclear activities, and the United States’ high-powered effort to corner Teheran. Convinced that “Axis-of-Evil” state Iran is bent on acquiring nuclear weapons after having become the Middle East’s “greatest exporter of terrorism” (according to Condi Rice), Washington precipitated a confrontation with it at the International Atomic Energy Agency’s board of governors with help from the European Union-3 (Germany, France and Britain).
This confrontation presented an extraordinarily tough challenge to India-indeed, a litmus test for its foreign policy independence. How would India defend Iran’s right to peaceful nuclear activities while voicing concerns about “proliferation” in the “neighbourhood” at Washington’s goading? How would it balance its energy security and regional interests, which lie in friendship with Iran, against “strategic partnership” with Washington? Could India maintain its leadership of the Non-Aligned Movement while ducking the Iran issue?
In the event, India comprehensively failed the test. It sacrificed its policy independence. It even subordinated its vital interests to its unequal partnership with Washington. India’s vote was primarily driven by its keenness to join the global cabal called the Nuclear Club on American terms under the July 18 nuclear deal. In the process, India split NAM, the bulk of whose weighty members abstained from the vote, including Brazil, South Africa, Malaysia, Algeria and Nigeria. Even tiny Sri Lanka and our neighbour Pakistan abstained. India dealt a major blow to its own standing in the world, particularly among the peoples of the Global South, where it belongs.
The Vienna vote showed India at sixes and sevens. It endorsed a motion indicting Iran for “non-compliance” with Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty safeguards. But its Foreign Ministry says that “finding Iran non-compliant is not justified”; the IAEA Director-General’s reports concede that “good progress has been made in Iran’s correction of [alleged safeguards] breaches”. So India should have opposed the resolution, which lays the ground for reporting Iran to the Security Council because its activities raise “peace and security” issues, which are within the Council’s “competence”.
The Indian decision to vote with the US “in a crunch situation” was taken even before Manmohan Singh’s visit to the US. (The Hindu, Sept 17) This was done after the US sent a lobbying delegation to New Delhi, led by under-secretary for disarmament Robert Joseph. India then acted out a mere charade. It colluded with the US-EU-3 in gratuitously altering IAEA decision-making procedures, from consensus to a majority vote, which would facilitate an anti-Iran resolution.
India’s post facto rationalisation was that the resolution would facilitate diplomacy to resolve the Iran crisis. In fact, the crisis got aggravated: Iran feels offended and terms the resolution “illegal”. And the US is triumphalist. Iran feels badly let down by India not only because the two have had excellent political and economic relations-including in balancing Pakistan’s influence in Afghanistan-, but because Teheran regards India, with Russia and China, as “big states in the eastern hemisphere”, which “can play a balancing role in today’s world”. (President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at the UN General Assembly)
India claims that it kept Iran fully informed, indeed pleaded its case globally and “helped” it: Iran hotly denies this. It says Manmohan Singh didn’t give Ahmedinejad an inkling of India’s voting intentions when he called him two days earlier. Numerous India-Iran oil-and-gas-related deals/proposals could be jeopardised, affecting India’s energy security. This is especially so with the Iran-Pakistan gas pipeline, now under advanced negotiation. This holds the key to economic integration of the entire South Asia-West and Central Asia region.
At the root of India’s shameful stand are misperceptions about Iran’s nuclear activities and a craving to get India “normalised” as a nuclear weapons-state. It was revealed in 2002 that Iran had years earlier acquired a small number of uranium centrifuges. Other countries, including Israel, Pakistan, Taiwan, the two Koreas and India too, have indulged in clandestine nuclear acquisitions. Most got away. Iran was targeted because of deep-rooted US prejudices and an eye on the Gulf oil. Iran adopted a highly cooperative attitude towards IAEA inspections. These haven’t revealed evidence of a military programme. Traces of enriched uranium were detected on some equipment. But these were sourced to imports from A Q Khan’s network.
IAEA reports, including the latest (September 2), don’t conclude that Iran has violated its NPT obligations. According to the International Institute of Strategic Studies, London, Iran is five to 10 years away from a weapons capability. Iran’s nuclear effort is crude. It has a pilot plant at Natanz, with just 164 centrifuges, in place of the thousands needed to make one bomb a year. Isfahan has a facility to convert uranium oxide to hexafluoride gas. But the gas is “too contaminated with… molybdenum and other elements to be used as feed material”. The EU-3’s mediatory effort wasn’t honest. It was wound up after Mahmoud Ahmadinejad won as president against the ‘moderate’ Rafsanjani. The EU reneged on its original incentives package and demanded Iran abandon enrichment forever. Iran refused to renounce its sovereign right and resumed conversion.
The US-EU-3 then decided to confront Iran at the IAEA. For credibility, they needed a Third World heavyweight-collaborator. India played their game. The Vienna resolution imposes harsh demands upon Iran — even tougher than the IAEA’s intrusive Additional Protocol. It demands greater inspection powers, including “access to individuals… and R&D locations”. Iran is being pressed to convert its 2004 legally non-binding offer to suspend enrichment into an obligation. Iran is being given third-degree treatment, like Iraq in the 1990s. Such abuse of power sets a terrible precedent which could be invoked against another country the US doesn’t like.
India’s cooperation with Iran isn’t only economically, but also politically, significant. In the 1990s, Iran repeatedly came to India’s rescue at the UN human rights commission over Kashmir. The two have high stakes in working together. The real question is: Does India’s future lie in South Asia, linked to West and Central Asia, and Southeast-East Asia? Or does it lie with Washington? New Delhi shouldn’t fudge the answer.

East & West and twin towers of New World Order
Tom Plate

AN ADMITTEDLY general but perhaps not insignificant consensus in America on the necessary future direction of US foreign policy finally appears to be emerging — and not a moment too soon. Sure, the idea is not exactly the intellectual equivalent of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. And, sure, it has been in formulation for a decade and a half, going back to the fall of the Berlin Wall. But whoever said America was that quick? Whatever, if the direction proves as sensible as it would appear to be right now, it was well worth waiting for. The new foreign-policy consensus might be called Global Getting-Along. Catchy? Perhaps not. But the new consensus idea is quite different from the prior conceptual framework, known as communist containment, which ruled the US foreign-policy roost until 1989, or more recently from unilateralism, which more or less ruled Washington under the first George Bush administration of 2001-2004, though not of course the quieter, gentler administration of his father (1989-93).
The new Global Getting-Along (GGA) aims at avoiding major military conflict with anyone hefty enough to actually hurt the US (perhaps, China? India? Russia? Japan?), and it emphasises international economic integration, global rule making and a mature balancing of domestic versus international priorities. The rough consensus idea was nicely articulated last week by Richard N. Haass, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations. This is the (sometimes but not always smug) New York-based intellectual temple of foreign-policy wisdom perhaps best known for its authoritative journal Foreign Affairs. Haass, a former top adviser to Secretary of State Colin Powell and Special Assistant to the first President Bush, laid out his thoughts at a World Affairs Council luncheon while promoting his latest book, The Opportunity, which, to be honest, is so luminously solid, sensible and un-smug it almost seems, well, un-American.
The new consensus direction, Haass suggested, would have America steer clear of all unpleasant and risky foreign-policy directions. That would include clashing with any civilization, or preclude playing chicken with China. “There’s no need for competition with China,” Haass said. “There’s every reason for cooperation,” adding: “We can’t do it by ourselves. Unilateralism is not an option.” He emphasised that the most significant and difficult world problems are shared headaches that will require multilateral solutions. “If you don’t have almost total global involvement on a major issue, you have a hole in the net, and no solution.” Isolation, no more than unilateralism, makes no sense. But if America is to avoid the fate of other empires, it must not squander resources. Hurricane Katrina, as Haass notes, lifted the roof over more than homes and apartment buildings; it has “resurfaced the age-old American dilemma of how much we do abroad versus how much we do here at home.” Referring to the current daunting US budget deficit, he invoked the mild wit of the late Herbert Stein, top economic adviser in the Nixon administration: “That which can not go on forever, won’t.”
The mildness, sense of proportion and near-humility of the Haass presentation was a breath of fresh air. And its focus on relating maturely to emerging China (given the enormous stakes involved) went over extremely well with his Asia-conscious West Coast audience. Interestingly enough, that sensible approach was mirrored last week by a notable speech from the Chinese side: “The development of our relationship is in the fundamental interests of our two countries as well as our peoples. It has and will continue to have the wide-ranging support from our governments and peoples. It is capable of removing the disruptions and moving ahead.” The speaker was none other than China’s ambassador to the United Nations. The setting was a luncheon hosted by the Asia Society in New York. Like Haass, Zhou Wenzhong was modest, sensible and forward looking. “China never seeks hegemony. China never dreams a Soviet Union dream” China respects US interests in the Asia-Pacific region and welcomes its active and constructive role in Asia”. Taken together, these two speeches comprise a promising perspective on the international relations of the future. They are important statements, by serious persons, that could help the world develop a sense of where it has been and where it needs to go. The new consensus is not too good to be true. But it needs to be accepted as true, if the world wants to realise good.

Serious reforms a must if UN is to live up to its promise
Ron Silver

As the United Nations celebrates its 60th anniversary as a symbol of peace and a beacon of hope, we must offer a frank and critical assessment of its failure to deliver on the promise to halt global human rights abuses, improve economic and social development and significantly enhance world security. In all three categories, the United Nations has either ignored its charter mandate or has been so overwhelmed with bureaucracy, ineptitude, corruption and inefficiency that it could not carry out its mission. The United Nations was born from the ashes of World War II with a primary goal of creating a charter around which all countries could join in the collective effort to prevent the outbreak of future wars.
It was a just and noble cause in the wake of 30 million casualties during World War I and more than 60 million casualties in World War II. The UN Charter says that only the nations that abide by international law, honor each other’s borders, renounce aggression and respect human rights can be members of the United Nations. But barely a year after that charter was drafted, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill issued a stern warning, voicing his concerns that the Soviet Union — a UN member — was a growing threat to world peace. From the day of the United Nations’ founding, dozens of its “member’’ nations have participated in open and deliberate acts of hostile aggression and have engaged in the most heinous human rights abuses with no regard for the mission or the mandate of the United Nations.
Even a cursory review of the UN role in international conflicts reveals a long list of failures to halt human rights abuses, mediate border disputes between countries and resolve issues of arms escalation and acts of aggression between nations. The United Nations was unable to halt the hostility between India and Pakistan in 1947, the Arab-Israeli conflicts of the late 1940s, the ongoing political repression of the people of Cuba, the slaughter of millions of Cambodian refugees by the ruthless dictator Pol Pot in the 1970s, the hardships and abuses faced by Somali refugees in the 1990s and, most recently, the government-sponsored genocides in Rwanda and Bosnia in which hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians have been killed.
Recent news reports have also raised questions of fraud and corruption within the United Nations. One example is the scandal involving the $1.5 billion project to renovate UN headquarters in New York. Real estate mogul Donald Trump is quoted in a documentary — produced by Citizens United Foundation and Peace River Company, LLC — that examines the United Nations as it turns 60. He says he was completely baffled after a meeting with UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan in which he offered to manage the renovation project for free and finish the work at a saving of $500 million to $1 billion. According to Trump, UN officials weren’t interested in saving $1 billion.
As we reflect upon the record of the United Nations, it has become apparent that sweeping policy reforms are needed along with an overhaul of the UN bureaucracy to offer any hope of eliminating the waste, inefficiency and corruption that have eaten the United Nations like a cancer. It is time to seek real, substantive reform — from the United Nations’ global policies and practices to its dysfunctional internal structure and bureaucracy — so that the world body can eventually live up to its name as a symbol of peace and a beacon of hope for all of humanity.