How Iran Wins Friends and Influences People

(Nov. 23) - Iran is at the top of its diplomatic game.

The U.S. has staunch allied support for a tougher line on Tehran's nuclear ambitions, including at least nominal backing from Russia and China. The U.N.'s nuclear watchdog agency last week reported the latest evidence of Iranian deception. And domestic unrest continues to undermine the country's claims to theocratic democracy. Yet Iran still counts powerful friends on its side and seems no closer to facing potent international sanctions.

Today Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad visits a welcoming Brazil, an influential power among the world's unaligned countries, and where President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has made clear that when it comes to Iran he prefers persuasion to punishment.

"There's no point in leaving Iran isolated," da Silva said this morning on his weekly radio show, as The Associated Press reports. Da Silva recently played host to Israeli and Palestinian leaders and has said he views Iran as a key player in his bid at Mideast peacemaking. "It's important that someone sits down with Iran, talks with Iran and tries to establish some balance so that the Middle East can return to a certain sense of normalcy."
The rest of Ahmadinejad's South American itinerary attests to how little his pariah status in the West affects Iran's position elsewhere. He is set to stop in Bolivia, which like Iran has significant natural gas reserves, and Venezuela, where President Hugo Chavez shares both Iran's penchant for opposing the U.S. and its profit from the rise in oil prices that accompanies tension in the Persian Gulf.

Brazil also shares energy ties with Iran, as well as a reluctance to step in line behind Washington. Da Silva told the Agence France-Presse in September that American rhetoric on Iran reminds him of the run-up to the war in Iraq. "Even today, those leaders in favor of the war in Iraq are unable to explain why they invaded if there were no chemical weapons. Well, I am seeing the same sort of things starting to happen over Iran," he said.

Washington does have a stronger hand against Iran than it did during the Bush years. Backing the U.S. are fellow U.N. Security Council permanent members Britain and France, as well as Germany. Envoys from the four countries met Friday in Brussels with the two other permanent members, Russia and China. There the so-called P-5+1 group expressed disappointment that Tehran has pulled back from its Oct. 1 agreement to ship uranium out of the country for enrichment elsewhere, a first step toward the West's efforts to stop Iran from enriching -- and eventually weaponizing -- the nuclear fuel.

But years of foiled U.S. attempts to punish Iran suggest neither Russia nor China will play along with the Obama administration's reported plans to seek sanctions early next year if Iran doesn't compromise. Russia, on a much greater scale than Venezuela, sees its geopolitical influence increase with the price of oil. And China, always reluctant to support interference in another country's affairs, last week rebuffed President Obama's quest for additional endorsement of sanctions, as Sphere's James Graff reported. State Department spokesman Robert Wood acknowledged on Friday that the P-5+1 set no date to meet again.

Last week also brought the latest report from the International Atomic Energy Agency casting doubt on the candor and ostensibly peaceful aims of Iran's nuclear program. The IAEA reported contradictory information from the Iranians, the discovery of unreported nuclear materials and "a number of outstanding issues which give rise to concerns, and which need to be clarified to exclude the existence of possible military dimensions to Iran's nuclear program."

The Institute for Science and International Security, a Washington-based group that carefully tracks weapons proliferation, points out that "given that Iran's answers could significantly reduce suspicions about its past activities, its lack of cooperation is perplexing, at best."

Yet the tactic of alternatively complying with and defying international demands is one the Iranians have perfected over many years and at least three U.S. administrations. The Iranian war games that began Sunday -- all but formally organized around a defense against Israeli or U.S. air attacks on Iran's nuclear installations -- are just the most explicit message of defiance.

The domestic unrest fueled by Ahmadinejad's disputed re-election in June had raised hopes among regime opponents that at least some kind of change would come to the government of Iran, while the resulting street violence and imprisonment of protesting students and opposition members threatened to alienate some Iranian allies abroad. Despite the residual objection from parts of Iranian society, though, the followers of Ahmadinejad and Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, have largely cowed the opposition -- not least through an accelerated pace of executions The New York Times describes as a message to political opponents.

One of the most recent and most poignant accounts of the crackdown's victims came out this week from Newsweek reporter Maziar Bahari, who was repeatedly tortured in the months since his June 21 arrest in Tehran. Despite international outcry from writers and Western political leaders, Bahari was held for more than 118 days.

In that case Iran apparently yielded to international pressure, with a disenchanted official admitting to Bahari that at a time of nuclear diplomacy, "you were more of a liability than an asset in jail." Having friends like Brazil's da Silva could help shield Iran from such pressure in the weeks and months ahead.