CAIRO — President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran has settled on a strategy of trying to consolidate power by surrounding himself with loyalists at home while appearing to signal to the international community a readiness to address the nuclear issue, political commentators, diplomats and scientists said on Thursday.
While much attention has been focused on Mr. Ahmadinejad’s decision to try to pack his cabinet with loyalists, his choice of a well-respected physicist, Ali Akbar Salehi, as a vice president and the head of Iran’s nuclear agency has been greeted in the diplomatic and scientific community as signaling a possibly less dogmatic, more pragmatic nuclear policy.
Two other recent developments have added to that perception. The first, according to diplomats and scientists, is recent indications that Iran may be prepared to be more cooperative with the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna. The second was Mr. Ahmadinejad’s decision to retain the foreign minister, Manouchehr Mottaki, and not to move a more conservative ally into that position.
The United States and Western Europe have accused Iran of developing a nuclear weapons program and demanded that it stop uranium enrichment. Iran has refused, insisting that it is pursuing only peaceful nuclear energy.
On Thursday, the Russian Foreign Ministry said Russia, the United States, Britain, China, France and Germany would meet on Sept. 2 to discuss Iran’s nuclear program. The United States and France have given Iran until the end of September to respond to their most recent demands or face a new round of sanctions.
Experts said that the Iranian president and the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, might have calculated that resolving the nuclear standoff could satisfy two needs. It could help the troubled economy by heading off new sanctions — and possibly assist in lifting existing sanctions — while giving the two leaders much-needed credibility for having achieved a positive policy objective.
Experts were quick to caution that this outline might well prove to be wishful thinking. Trying to discern events in Iran today is something like the Kremlin-watching that went on during the cold war. Repression, arrests and censorship have made independent reporting impossible in Iran. Indeed, there is a competing view that Iran will never make any concessions on its nuclear program, figuring that conflict with Washington may restore some degree of national unity.
Moreover, some experts said that Iran’s severe political crisis had caused such unprecedented paralysis and infighting that Mr. Ahmadinejad might not have the power to carry out any cohesive policy in a bitterly divided government.
Nevertheless, the appointment of Mr. Salehi to head the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran — even though it is the supreme leader who decides nuclear policy — was seen as significant enough to warrant at least a flicker of optimism.
Mr. Salehi served as Iran’s representative to the I.A.E.A. when the reform leader Mohammad Khatami was president. It was during that time, in 2003, that the agency became aware of Iran’s 18 years of lying about its secret nuclear program. For Mr. Ahmadinejad, Mr. Salehi’s appointment also serves a political purpose: he succeeds Gholam Reza Aghazadeh, the agency’s longtime director, who is seen as an ally of Mir Hussein Moussavi, the leader of the political opposition.
One Western diplomat who spent years working in Iran and has grown increasingly pessimistic about its political future, said there was at least one hopeful sign.
“One signal deserves to be explored,” he said. “It seems that in the past few days the Iranians have been surprisingly cooperative with the I.A.E.A.”
Iran allowed the agency’s inspectors to visit the nearly finished Arak heavy water reactor last week after a yearlong ban, diplomats told The Associated Press. Last week, they added, Tehran acceded to the agency’s requests to expand its monitoring of the Natanz uranium enrichment site, which produces nuclear materials that could be further enriched to weapons grade.
But the chances of making progress on the nuclear issue may hinge on developments in the Iranian government. While the turmoil that gripped the capital, Tehran, after the June presidential election has eased, many experts say, the fight now seems to have moved inside the institutions of power, possibly limiting Mr. Ahmadinejad’s room to maneuver.
“Ahmadinejad will have great difficulty governing,” said Muhammad Sahimi, an Iranian expatriate and professor at chemical engineering at the University of Southern California who remains in close contact with a network of friends and relatives around Iran. “He is being opposed on all sides. Khamenei’s authority has been greatly damaged. Cracks in the conservative camp have become too glaring, and every day there are new revelations.”
Still, most experts on Iran’s nuclear policy say they are heartened by what they have seen of late, though they are not expecting any breakthroughs.
Iran’s representative to the I.A.E.A., Ali Asghar Soltanieh, said this week that Tehran would agree to “talks without preconditions.” He is close to Mr. Salehi, the new head of the Iranian atomic agency, and even though Mr. Soltanieh retracted the statement a day later, the incident was seen by some as another possible signal.
“I think Iran plays a little cat and mouse now at the I.A.E.A. level,” said one commentator with expertise on the nuclear issue. “He did not make the original statement without Tehran’s authorization.”
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