“How Obama changed the election campaign”
Gary G. Sick interviewed by Marilisa Palumbo 14 May 2009

Professor Sick, the US administration seems ready to drop preconditions requesting Iran to suspend the uranium enrichment process before any direct talks. Do you think they are on the right track to achieve something there?

Yes I do. If I understand it correctly I think what the Obama administration is basically doing is sending some very clear signals to Iran saying “we are prepared to deal with you and it’s really up to you Iranians, if you want to deal with us.” And one of the things that this has accomplished – as this is an election year in Iran and we are in the middle of a presidential campaign – is that there is now a public debate going on in the country, for the very first time, about what kind of relationship they should have with United States and the West. They never had that discussion, they never had to because the United States was always hostile and intimidating. Now they have to start to think “if the United States starts to behave differently, what should we do?” And there is in fact a discussion going on between the various candidates who are basically saying: “I can deal better with this problem”. For instance Mir Hossein Mousavi, who is the principle contender right now against Ahmadinejad, has said the President can’t do this, because his whole attitude is wrong. Mr Ali Larijani – speaker of the Majlis (the Iranian parliament) and former representative of Iran in the nuclear talks – has said that parliament must be involved in all decisions. Everybody wants to be part of the action. So the Obama administration, without really making any tangible offer to Iran, has inspired a discussion in Iranian politics that I think is extremely healthy. We shall see what it actually produces as far as the election is concerned, but the discussion itself is a very healthy thing.

Former President Khatami has chosen not to run again and now Mousavi is the reformist candidate. Do you think he is a better choice than Khatami and if so, why?

I have enormous respect for Khatami. He is a remarkable man and he represents some very impressive thinking, I think the very best that Iranian culture has to offer. At the same time he is not a political leader. He has demonstrated over the years that he is not someone who is prepared to go to the barricades and fight for what he wants. Mousavi on the other hand is someone who has managed that country during one of its most difficult periods, the Iran-Iraq war, when they had to organize the entire society in a post-revolutionary environment. And most Iranians gave him very high marks for that. He is also an extremely cultured man; he and his wife are both artists and he has shown a kind of toughness and an ability to manage that Ahmadinejad clearly lacks. I think a lot of Iranians are going to ask themselves: can we go ahead for another four years with all this rhetoric or should we have somebody who can actually run a government? And I think if the question is posed exactly in those terms, Mousavi can be a very impressive candidate. Khatami would not have been a very impressive candidate, he is not a real manager either.

Do you think he has a real chance of becoming president?

He believes he does, Khatami believes he does and a lot of people believe that he does. But I’m not making any predictions.

But Mousavi too will not renounce the nuclear program, will he?

No, not at all. There is no Iranian candidate anywhere who would in fact say “we are going to give up our nuclear program”. The reality is that Iran has invested very heavily in developing nuclear technology and they say it is for peaceful purposes. The problem is that a program designed for peaceful purposes can be changed to non-peaceful purposes over a relatively short period. There are something like forty countries in the world that have the capacity, if they wanted, to build a nuclear weapon. They are not doing it. But they could. And I would argue that Iran is already a member of that club. They have made enough progress now that they have the know-how, they have the techniques and if they want to build the bomb they can. And I think that all of the talk from the West about “we’ve got another year” is nonsense. Even if we bombed them they would have the capacity to rebuild very quickly. And probably if we bomb them – Israel, or the United States, and I don’t think that’s going to happen – Iran can say: “all right, we withdraw from the non proliferation treaty, we expel all the inspectors and all the people who are keeping an eye on our program and we are going underground, secretly, and we are going to build a bomb.” So the hardliners would be the winners. We would end up with a hard-line government, a government that is secretive and determined to build a bomb.

If the nuclear program is not up for discussion, what can the West do now?

The point now is not that you cannot turn back the clock and make them ignorant, you cannot take away the knowledge of what they have already accomplished. What you can do is beef up the security inspections, have much greater transparency, have more inspectors in the country and have them also visit non-nuclear sites that are suspect. This could provide early warnings so that if Iran decides to go for a bomb you would know that, because you have people there watching. And you would have a period of time, 18 months or so, before they could actually produce a weapon. With that you would have some protection on the nuclear issue.

Another question about Mousavi: do you think he will be able to deal more effectively with the religious leadership, perhaps the strongest centre of power in the country?

He is not going to be able to transform the system overnight, because the system is based on religious rule. That is the nature of the Iranian constitution and that is the role of the Supreme Leader. However Khamenei, the Supreme Leader, in reality cannot make decisions unilaterally. He has to consult a lot of different power centres which include the Revolutionary guards, the Presidency and a number of other institutions. My view is that Mousavi – because of his background and his much greater management and executive experience, and perhaps a better sense of balance – will make the presidency a more important power centre than it has been in the past. He is not going to eliminate the role of the Supreme Leader but I think the role of the presidency will become far greater than it is today. I think he will be able to fashion a coalition of his own with some of these power centres.

Obama has chosen Dennis Ross as his envoy for Iran, but we really have not heard from him. The hawkish positions he has expressed in the past are at odds with the current administration’s stance on Iran…

I know, everything Obama has said so far is different from what Ross has written about and it suggests that whatever his official role might be, he is not making US policy on this subject, at least not at this point. One thing that was very surprising to me was that, when they had the five power talks in London a couple of weeks ago, the American delegation was led by William Burns who is the Undersecretary of State and he was accompanied by Puneet Talwar, from the National Security Council staff, someone very close to Vice President Joe Biden. Dennis Ross was not even there. It is very clear that he has sort of disappeared from sight. They are supposedly working on a major new study reevaluating American policy towards Iran and I assume he is very much engaged in that process. 

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