Looking for daylight in Iran

International Herald Tribune:

The New York Times

THURSDAY, AUGUST 4, 2005 Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Tehran mayor who won a landslide victory in Iran's presidential elections in June, began his term Wednesday. The rest of the world will be watching his performance with interest, to say the least.

Iran has been escalating tensions on the nuclear front. This week a senior Iranian official announced plans to resume the country's nuclear program by removing the seals placed by the United Nations nuclear agency at a site where uranium is converted into a gas for enrichment. Europe, which has taken the lead in dealing with Iran's nuclear ambitions, responded with incoherence.

First, European officials threatened to end negotiations and take the matter to the UN Security Council - presumably to bring up the issue of sanctions. But since China dislikes sanctions, any such proposal would probably run into a veto.

France, Germany and Britain then followed up with pleas to Tehran not to do anything, because they are just days away from delivering a package of incentives as part of their effort to bribe Iran to keep it from enriching its uranium.

Given all this floundering, it was a welcome piece of news when a new U.S. intelligence assessment projected that Iran was 10 years - not five years, as had been thought - away from being able to make the key ingredient for a nuclear bomb.

Meanwhile, in Tehran, Ahmadinejad has other disturbing issues awaiting his attention. For one, there's the failing health of Akbar Ganji, a jailed journalist who is now on a hunger strike. And even though assassinations are rare in Iran, the judge in Ganji's trial was killed Tuesday.

Then there's the recent arrest of Abdolfattah Soltani, a lawyer who defended Ganji and also worked with Shirin Ebadi, the Iranian Nobel Peace Prize winner. Ebadi has been successful enough as a champion of human rights that she is now being accused in government-controlled news media reports of a slew of absurd charges, including burglary.

Untangling all of this will determine whether Ahmadinejad is the independent populist he claimed to be during the campaign or just another pawn of the clerical power brokers who backed him. No Iranian president to date has ever been able to defy the wishes of the unelected ayatollahs who rule Iran, and it is highly unlikely that Ahmadinejad will prove to be any different. Still, he ran on an economic platform that implicitly challenged the cronyism and corruption of clerical rule. It would be a welcome surprise if a radical conservative like Ahmadinejad could cut a nuclear deal, just as the fiercely anti-communist Richard Nixon was able to reach out to communist China.