Iran and the US continue to play cat and mouse as the pressure is building, face-saving options are few, and the spectre of war looms ominously ahead, writes Mustafa El-Labbad The passing of the 21 February deadline that the UN Security Council had set for Iran to halt its uranium enrichment activities has pushed the Iranian nuclear crisis to a critical phase. Harsher sanctions are certainly in store, judging by the meeting of the five permanent Security Council members plus Germany in London on Monday for that purpose. And after that meeting failed to produce a concrete decision, because of the divide between China and Russia on one side and the rest of the participants on the other, the six countries did agree to consider the meeting open until they arrive at a new consensus over a peaceful way to compel Iran to cede to Security Council demands. More importantly, the division of opinion in that meeting was not over the principle of turning up the heat on Iran, but over the degree to which it should be turned up, with China and Russia hoping to exercise an element of restraint on Western participant eagerness to set the heat to blazing. So here is how the crisis has escalated so far: in July, the Security Council passed Resolution 1696, giving Iran three months to totally halt uranium enrichment. Iran refused to comply, leading to Resolution 1737, at the end of last year, imposing minimal sanctions and giving Iran another grace period. Now the Security Council is on the verge of forming a new resolution that will raise the level of economic sanction if Iran still refuses to comply by the time another grace period has ended. The imposition of economic sanctions is founded on the assumption that the political leadership of the country they are invoked against will cave in to such outside pressures for no other reason than to stay in power. It presumes an integral link between economics and politics, whereby negative repercussions in the former domain rebound on the latter and ultimately compel a political change of tack. We can therefore envision that the new so-called "intelligent" sanctions package will be multi-faceted. It will start by banning the export to Iran of advanced technology, on the grounds that this can be utilised for military purposes. The West imposed a similar ban on eastern bloc countries during the Cold War. Another measure will be to place the names of officials connected with Iran's nuclear programme on a blacklist barring their entrance into other countries. Of course, there will be a range of financial sanctions. Under one of them, governments around the world will be obliged to turn down applications for export loans by domestic firms wishing to export their products to Iran. In tandem with the escalating pace of the drive against Iran on the economic-political front, the US is parading more of its military muscle in the Gulf. Hordes of Patriot antiballistic missiles have turned their noses towards Iran and American aircraft carriers are forging the waters of the Gulf, under the command of USS Eisenhower, famous for having served as the logistical backbone for the Desert Storm and Desert Fox operations against Iraq. US Vice-president Dick Cheney's statements that his government has not ruled out the option of military action against Iran give this muscle flexing a voice that harmonises with "leaks" to the press of a finalised American plan to strike Iranian nuclear installations. The point of all this sabre rattling is obvious. Iran is the most powerful enemy the US has faced since the fall of the Soviet Union. It is stronger than Serbia, Somalia, Afghanistan and Iraq, and it has assets none of these could boast of, not least of which is its ability to rock the international oil market merely because it sits on top of the Straits of Hormuz through which passes 40 per cent of the world's energy supplies. Little wonder, therefore, that within an hour after Cheney's latest strident statement, the price of oil shot up 69 cents and the price of an ounce of gold -- that currency of choice in times of crisis -- rose by $6.7. Interspersed in this militaristic din are offers of dialogue, which have become something of a classical counterpoint over the past quarter of a century. Washington, in particular, has sounded them, albeit without great success in concealing the fact that it is chomping at the bit to pull out its guns in order to attain its political and strategic objectives and is only interested in diplomacy sofar as it provides cover for its war effort. Therefore, even as Cheney talked of military options, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said how willing Washington would be to speak to Tehran, if only the latter gave up enriching uranium first. Of course, she knows as well as the people in Tehran do that in agreeing to this condition Iran would be handing Washington exactly what it wants in advance of any talks, thereby forfeiting the chance to dangle the abandonment of uranium enrichment as the reward for the best economic, political and strategic advantages it can haggle for. For their part, the Iranians, who are clearly more politically and diplomatically astute than Serbia or Iraq was in the 1990s, are applying the same approach to the crisis: political brinkmanship mixed with overtures to parley. President Ahmadinejad has declared that his country's nuclear programme is "a train without breaks," implying that Washington will not be able to stop it even by military means. At the same time, Ali Larijani, who heads the programme, has invited Washington to engage "direct unconditional dialogue." The Iranians, however, know as well as Washington that in taking up this initiative the Bush administration would be handing Tehran a political victory and itself and the neo-conservatives another political setback. Economic sanctions take a while to mature and yield the desired effects. The maturity time varies from country to country, depending on the particular country's autonomous resources and the degree to which it is linked to the global economy. Iran's economic capacities far exceed those of Iraq and Serbia when those two countries faced sanctions. Because of the increasing revenues it has reaped from the rise in oil prices over the past few years, it should be able to hold out much longer. This is why the Bush administration undoubtedly sees another round of economic sanctions as an opportunity: it will then be able to argue that these failed to compel Iran to relinquish its nuclear ambitions and that stronger measures are required. The chances are, then, that the economic sanctions the world is talking about now are only a prelude to war, as was the case with Serbia and Iraq in the past.
