A successful agreement on Iran’s nuclear programme could significantly enhance U.S. leverage and influence throughout the Greater Middle East, according to a new report signed by 31 former senior U.S. foreign-policy officials and regional experts and released here Wednesday.

The 115-page report, “Iran and Its Neighbors: Regional Implications for U.S. Policy of a Nuclear Agreement,” argues that a nuclear accord would open the way towards co-operation between the two countries on key areas of mutual concern, including stabilising both Iraq and Afghanistan and even facilitating a political settlement to the bloody civil war in Syria.The study comes amidst what its authors called a “tectonic shift” in the Middle East triggered in major part by the military successes of the Islamic State of Syria and the Levant (ISIL).

“A comprehensive nuclear agreement would enable the United States to perceive [regional] priorities without every lens being colored by that single issue,” according to the report, the latest in a series published the last several years by the New York-based Iran Project, which has sponsored high-level informal exchanges with Iran since it was founded in 2002.

“If the leaders of the United States and Iran are prepared to take on their domestic political opponents’ opposition to the agreement now taking shape, then their governments can turn to the broader agenda of regional issues,” concluded the report, whose signatories included former U.S. National Security Advisers Zbigniew Brzezinski and Brent Scowcroft, as well as more than a dozen former top-ranking diplomats,

Conversely, failure to reach an accord between Iran and the so-called P5+1 (the U.S., Britain, France, Russia, China plus Germany) could result in “Iran’s eventual acquisition of a nuclear weapons, a greatly reduced chance of defeating major threats elsewhere in the region, and even war,” the study warned.

The report comes as negotiations over a comprehensive nuclear agreement between Iran and the P5+1 are set to formally resume in New York Thursday, as diplomats from around the world gather for the opening of the U.N. General Assembly, which will be addressed by both Presidents Barack Obama and Hassan Rouhani, among other world leaders, next week.

The parties have set a Nov. 24 deadline, exactly one year after they signed a Joint Plan of Action (JPOA) in Geneva that eased some economic sanctions against Tehran in exchange for its freezing or rolling back key elements of its nuclear programme.

While the two sides have reportedly agreed in principle on a number of important issues, there remain large gaps between them, particularly with respect to proposed limits on the size of Iran’s uranium-enrichment programme and their duration.

The study also comes amidst what its authors called a “tectonic shift” in the Middle East triggered in major part by the military successes of the Islamic State of Syria and the Levant (ISIL), a development that has been greeted by virtually all of the region’s regimes, as well as the U.S. — which is trying to patch together an international coalition against the Sunni extremist group — as a major threat.

“The rise of ISIS has reinforced Iran’s role in support of the government in Iraq and raises the possibility of U.S.-Iran cooperation in stabilizing Iraq even before a nuclear agreement is signed,” according to the report which nonetheless stressed that any agreement should impose “severe restrictions on Iran’s nuclear activities… [to reduce] the risks that Iran could acquire nuclear weapons.”

Still, the thrust of the report, which includes individual essays by recognised experts on Iran’s relations with seven of its neighbours, focuses on how Washington’s interests in the region could be enhanced by “parallel and even joint U.S. and Iran actions” after an agreement is reached.

Such co-operation would most probably begin in dealing with ISIL in Iraq whose government is supported by both Washington and Tehran.

Indeed, as noted by Paul Pillar, a former top CIA Middle East analyst, both countries have recently taken a number of parallel steps in Iraq, notably by encouraging the removal of Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki and by taking separate military actions – U.S. airstrikes and Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) advisers — to help break ISIL’s months-long siege of the town of Amerli.

“There’s ample potential here for more communication on a source of very high concern to both of us,” Pillar said at the report’s release at the Wilson Center here. “[The Iranians] see the sources of instability in Iraq; they see it is not in their interest to have unending instability [there].”

A second area of mutual interest is Afghanistan, from which U.S. and NATO troops are steadily withdrawing amidst growing concerns about the ability of government’s security forces to hold the Taliban at bay.

While it is no secret that the U.S. and Iran worked closely together in forging the government and constitution that were adopted after coalition forces ousted the Taliban in late 2001, noted Barnett Rubin, an Afghanistan expert who after the 9/11 attacks served in senior positions at the State Department and later the U.N., “what’s not as well known is that the IRGC worked closely on the ground with the CIA and U.S. Special Forces” during that campaign.

With political tensions over recent election results between the two main presidential candidates and their supporters on the rise, according to Rubin, some co-operation between Iran and the U.S. is likely to be “very important” to ensure political stability.

“A nuclear agreement would open the way for a diplomatic and political process that would make it possible to retain some of the important gains we have made in Afghanistan over the past 13 years,” he said.

As for Syria, Iran, as one of President Bashar Al-Assad’s two main foreign backers, must be included in any efforts to achieve a political settlement, according to the report. Until now, it has been invited to participate only as an observer, largely due to U.S. and Saudi opposition.

“The Iranians are not wedded to …the continuation of the Baathist regime,” said Frank Wisner, who served as ambassador to Egypt and India, among other senior posts in his career. In talks with Iranian officials he said he had been struck by “the degree to which they feel themselves over-stretched,” particularly now that they are more involved in Iraq.

The report anticipates considerable resistance by key U.S. regional allies to any rapprochement with Iran that could follow a nuclear agreement, particularly from Israel, which has been outspoken in its opposition to any accord that would permit Iran to continue enriching uranium.

“It goes without saying that this is of primordial importance to Israel,” noted Thomas Pickering, who has co-chaired the Iran Project and served as U.S. ambassador to Israel and the U.N., among other top diplomatic posts.

Washington must make it clear to Israel and its supporters here that an agreement “would certainly improve prospects for tranquillity in the region” and that it would be a “serious mistake” for Israel to attack Iran, as it has threatened to do, while an agreement is in force, he said.

Washington must also take great pains to reassure Saudi Arabia and other Sunni-led Gulf states that a nuclear agreement will not come at their expense, according to the report.

“Such reassurance might require a period of increased U.S. military support and a defined U.S. presence (such as the maintenance of bases in the smaller Gulf States and of military and intelligence cooperation with the GCC (Gulf Co-operation Council) states),” the report said.

“Riyadh would be willing to explore a reduction of tensions with Tehran if the Saudis were more confident of their American ally,” the report said.

Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at Lobelog.com. He can be contacted at ipsnoram@ips.org

Edited by Kitty Stapp

Two pillars of the U.S. foreign policy establishment urged Congress Monday to forgo any new sanctions legislation directed against Iran, warning that it will risk “undermining or even shutting down” ongoing negotiations over Tehran’s nuclear programme.

In a letter to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, Gen. Brent Scowcroft (ret.), who served as national security adviser to Presidents Gerald Ford and George H.W. Bush, and Zbigniew Brzezinski, who served in the same post under President Jimmy Carter, said that an interim agreement with Iran – the focus of critical talks the next round of which is to begin Wednesday in Geneva – “would advance the national security of the United States, Israel, and other partners in the region.

“More sanctions now as these unprecedented negotiations are just getting underway would reconfirm Iranians in their belief that the U.S. is not prepared to make any agreement with the current government of Iran,” the two men wrote. “We call on all Americans and the U.S. Congress to stand firmly with the President in the difficult but historic negotiations with Iran.”

The letter, which was made available by the New York-based Iran Project, comes amidst an increasingly strident campaign by the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his supporters in the powerful Israel lobby here to oppose an interim accord that reportedly would permit Tehran to continue enriching uranium, albeit at a low level that would not lend itself to the production of a nuclear weapon.

Since negotiators from the so-called P5+1 (the U.S., Britain, France, Russia, China plus Germany) and Iran came within a hair’s breadth of concluding such an accord at the last round of talks in Geneva earlier this month, Netanyahu has repeatedly denounced it as a “very bad deal,” while other Israeli officials have suggested it could lead to their taking unilateral military action against Tehran’s nuclear facilities.

“We are not bluffing. We are very serious – preparing ourselves for the possibility that Israel will have to defend itself by itself,” Israel’s outgoing national security chief told Monday’s edition of the Financial Times.

“…If you ask about (Netanyahu) personally as a prime minister, he is ready to take such decisions,” he added noting Israel’s opposition to any accord that does not result in the complete dismantling of Iran’s nuclear programme, including its uranium enrichment.

Secretary of State John Kerry, European Union (EU) foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton, and Iran’s foreign minister, Mohammed Javad Zarif reportedly reached agreement on a draft accord.

Among other provisions, it required Iran to freeze the installation of new centrifuges in its two enrichment plants; halt production of 20-percent enriched uranium; and convert most of its 20-percent stockpile to fuel rods or other forms that reduce the possibility it could be used for making a weapon – all overseen by enhanced inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

In return, the P5+1 would ease some of the sanctions that have inflicted serious damage on Iran’s economy, although Kerry has insisted that core financial and oil sanctions would remain in place pending Iran’s compliance and a more comprehensive agreement to be negotiated over the next six months to a year.

But the 11^th-hour intervention by French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius, who reportedly objected to language regarding Iran’s claims to a legal right to enrichment, as well as the disposition of Iran’s yet-to-be-completed Arak heavy-water nuclear reactor, resulted in changes in the draft that Zarif was unable to accept without further consultations in Tehran – as well as with Western capitals.

As a result, U.S. officials have voiced cautious optimism that an agreement can be finalised as early as the end of this week.

Fabius’s intervention came on the eve of a three-day visit to Israel by President Francois Hollande, who received a hero’s welcome in Tel Aviv Sunday.

It has spurred speculation that Paris is seeking to consolidate its position with Washington’s two most-influential allies and Iran’s arch-rivals in the region – Israel and Saudi Arabia – at a moment when Obama appears more interested in a rapprochement with Tehran for a variety of reasons, including hoped-for cooperation in containing the civil war in Syria and stabilising Iraq and Afghanistan.

Obama spoke by telephone with Hollande last week, and U.S. officials have expressed confidence that Paris is cooperating on a new draft that should also prove agreeable to Tehran.

France’s last-minute veto was also cheered by neo-conservatives and other hawks, many Republicans, and some Democrats, such as Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman Robert Menendez, who are considered close to the Israel lobby which has been pressed hard by Netanyahu to push for the Senate to vote on legislation approved last summer by the Republican-led House of Representatives. That legislation would sanction foreign companies that import any Iranian oil.

But the Democratic leadership in the Senate, notably the heads of the Armed Services Committee, Carl Levin, and Intelligence Committee, Dianne Feinstein, have sided with the administration in opposing new sanctions while negotiations are underway. And Reid, who controls the Senate’s calendar, appears inclined to support them.

Netanyahu’s pressure, which is not expected to ease even if an interim accord is reached this week, is causing growing disquiet about the future of bilateral relations here, with some observers characterising the split between the two governments as the worst in at least a generation.

“America and Israel are in uncharted waters,” warned Robert Satloff, the head of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), a spin-off of the powerful American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), in Politico Monday.

Nonetheless, the Democratic leadership in the Senate, notably the heads of the Armed Services Committee, Carl Levin, and Intelligence Committee, Dianne Feinstein, have sided with the administration in opposing new sanctions while negotiations are underway. And Reid, who controls the Senate’s calendar, appears inclined to support them.

Scowcroft and Brzezinski, both of whom opposed the Iraq war, are the latest in the foreign policy establishment to come out publicly against additional sanctions which, in any case, are most unlikely to be considered by either house before Wednesday’s talks begin.

Leslie Gelb, the president emeritus of the influential Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), wrote in the Daily Beast Monday that a short-term deal “would lead to the Mideast equivalent of ending the Cold War with the Soviet Union … [and] could reduce, even sharply, the biggest threat to regional peace, an Iranian nuclear bomb, and open paths to taming dangerous conflicts in Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan.”

Writing in the Washington Post Sunday, former CIA Middle East analyst Kenneth Pollack, a key champion of the Iraq War at the Brookings Institution, wrote that Israeli demands that Iran be forced to dismantle its nuclear programme were unrealistic.

“…[O]ur worst mistake would be to make an impossible ideal the enemy of a tangible, ‘good enough’ agreement…,” he wrote. “If we can get it, such a final deal should be more than adequate to remove the Iranian nuclear program as a source of fear and instability in the Middle East.”

In their letter, Scowcroft and Brzezinski argued that the “agreement under discussion would slow crucial elements of the Iran program, make it more transparent and allow time to reach a more comprehensive agreement in the coming year.”

“Should the United States fail to take this historic opportunity, we risk failing to achieve our non-proliferation goal and losing the support of allies and friends while increasing the probability of war,” they wrote.

Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at Lobelog.com.

While the U.S. and Iranian heads of state have yet to meet, the 68^th session of the United Nations General Assembly may mark a new era between the two countries.

After more than 30 years of frozen US-Iran relations, President Barack Obama announced Tuesday during his address to the world body that Secretary of State John Kerry would be directly involved in talks over Iran’s nuclear programme.“As Javad [Zarif] has said, now is the time to stop behaving like carpet merchants." -- William Luers of the Iran Project

Obama’s announcement comes on the heels of Iranian President Hassan Rouhani’s decision earlier this month to move Iran’s nuclear negotiating file from the Supreme National Security Council to its Foreign Ministry headed by Kerry’s counterpart, Mohammad Javad Zarif.

Kerry and Zarif are scheduled to meet on Thursday, EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton announced on Monday, adding that Zarif and the P5+1 (the U.S., Britain, France, China and Russia plus Germany) would meet in Geneva in October.

The Kerry-Zarif meeting would be the highest-level formal encounter of the two countries since the 1979 U.N. General Assembly when then Secretary of State Cyrus Vance met with Provisional Foreign Minister Ibrahim Yazdi seven months after the Islamic Revolution, according to Columbia University Professor Gary Sick.

“It’s very important if what Obama said meant that Kerry will be negotiating with Zarif directly and permanently,” Iran expert Trita Parsi told IPS.

“The U.S. would then be investing more in the diplomatic process, which means more political will and a greater cost of failure, and that is exactly what we need to overcome the political obstacles,” said the president of the National Iranian American Council.

The “mistrust” between the U.S. and Iran “has deep roots”, Obama said before acknowledging the U.S. role in “overthrowing an Iranian government” as part of U.S. “interference” in Iranian affairs.

Iran’s new president, Hassan Rouhani, addresses the general debate of the sixty-eighth session of the General Assembly. Credit: UN Photo/Sarah Fretwell

He went on to cite some of Washington’s own grievances, including the 1979 Iranian takeover of the U.S. embassy in Tehran and Iran threatening Israel “with destruction”.

But in a speech that emphasised the importance of pursuing diplomacy before resorting to force in securing U.S. interests, Obama’s message on Iran was clear.

“We should be able to achieve a resolution that respects the rights of the Iranian people, while giving the world confidence that the Iranian programme is peaceful,” he said.

“The fascinating thing is that he’s talking to multiple audiences and re-explaining to Americans why negotiating with Iran is the way to go,” Heather Hurlburt, a former speechwriter for President Bill Clinton, told IPS.

“We are not seeking regime change and we respect the right of the Iranian people to access peaceful nuclear energy.  Instead, we insist that the Iranian government meet its responsibilities under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and U.N. Security Council resolutions,” said Obama.

“He’s signaling to Iran that we’re prepared for mutual rights and mutual respect at a moment when the Iranians seem more ready to hear that than in past and he’s signaling how we see that piece of the puzzle fitting in with other regional issues,” noted Hurlburt, who heads the DC-based National Security Network.

While Zarif listened to Obama’s morning address in the General Assembly auditorium, no U.S. delegate was visible during Rouhani’s afternoon speech.

For Iran’s part, Rouhani did not attend a lunch hosted by U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon at which Obama was present. Iran also reportedly rejected a U.S. offer for an encounter earlier in the day.

But some experts suggest that too much attention has been placed on an Obama-Rouhani meeting.

“Expectations are already high on both sides but if nothing concrete is ready, a meeting without something solid would be damaging for each president,” William Luers, a former senior U.S. official and ambassador, told IPS in an email.

“As Javad [Zarif] has said, now is the time to stop behaving like ‘carpet merchants’,” said the director of the prominent Iran Project.

“Zarif and Kerry are as good a pair as we could ask for to find out whether diplomacy can succeed. We all believe it can. The handshakes can wait,” he said.

“The important development is that both sides appear to be serious at pursuing direct talks at a high level, and the important issue is whether those talks will make substantive progress,” international relations expert Stephen Walt told IPS.

“A brief meeting between Obama and Rouhani would have been stagecraft, but not statecraft,” said the Harvard Kennedy Professor.

During his speech, Iran’s president spoke strongly against foreign military intervention in the Middle East, particularly in Syria, and against the rounds of sanctions that have been imposed on Iran.

“Unjust sanctions, as manifestation of structural violence, are intrinsically inhumane and against peace. And contrary to the claims of those who pursue and impose them, it is not the states and the political elite that are targeted, but rather, it is the common people who are victimised,” he said.

“Rouhani had the delicate task of delivering a speech that addresses multiple audiences, and the first part of his speech, especially the part about the sanctions, was addressing a domestic hardline audience,” Yasmin Alem, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, told IPS.

“The second part was about Iran’s commitment to constructive dialogue and its willingness to negotiate and reach a settlement,” said the Iran expert.

“Iran seeks constructive engagement with other countries based on mutual respect and common interest, and within the same framework does not seek to increase tensions with the United States,” said the Iranian president, adding that he “listened carefully” to Obama’s speech.

“Commensurate with the political will of the leadership in the United States and hoping that they will refrain from following the short-sighted interest of warmongering pressure groups, we can arrive at a framework to manage our differences,” said the recently elected centrist cleric, who served as a nuclear negotiator under reformist president Mohammad Khatami.

“It was interesting to hear him to talk about how we can ‘manage’ relations,” Alem told IPS.

“Iran is still a long way from establishing normal relations with the U.S. and this echoes Obama’s words this morning in saying all that is down the road,” said Alem.

“It’s a good sign that both leaders are clear about the situation and on the same page,” she said.

The administration of President Barack Obama should put more emphasis on diplomacy in its quest for a satisfactory resolution of Iran’s nuclear programme, according to a major new report released by The Iran Project.

Endorsed by nearly three dozen former top U.S. diplomatic, military, and intelligence officials, the report calls for Washington to “rebalance” its dual-track policy toward Tehran by strengthening the diplomatic track to take advantage of the pressure it has exerted on Tehran through ever-stricter sanctions and threats of military action.

“Much has been accomplished through pressure, but the results have fallen short of expectations in several ways, and unintended consequences pose risks,” according to the report, the latest in a series by The Iran Project and the first to make specific policy reccomendations designed to both defuse persistent tensions over Tehran’s nuclear programme and lay the groundwork for a broader dialogue between the two countries.

Previous reports have focused instead on the costs and benefits of sanctions and military action against Iran.

The pressure track, the new, 84-page report argues, may have weakened Iran’s economy and slowed the expansion of its nuclear programme, but it has not produced any breakthrough nor markedly reduced Tehran’s regional influence.

Moreover, the pressure track may also have hardened Tehran’s resistance to pressure, contributed to a rise in repression in Iran, and compounded sectarian tensions across the volatile Middle East, according to the report.

It was signed by, among other prominent foreign-policy figures, former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski; the former Republican chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Sen. Richard Lugar; and one of the most highly decorated diplomats of his generation, former Amb. Thomas Pickering, a core member of The Iran Project.

“A strengthened diplomatic track that includes the promise of sanctions relief in exchange for verifiable (Iranian) cooperation could help to end the standoff and produce a nuclear deal,” the report asserts.

The report comes amidst uncertainty about the future of negotiations over Iran’s nuclear programme between Tehran and the “P5+1”, the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council plus Germany. In the latest round of talks in Almaty, Kazakhstan, earlier this month, it appears that neither side moved off its previous position, and no date for new high-level talks has been set.

Nonetheless, all parties said the discussions were more detailed and substantive than in past meetings and stressed that there had been no breakdown in the process. Most analysts believe that little or no progress can be expected until after the presidential elections in Iran Jun. 14.

The lack of apparent progress – coupled with the installation of more and more sophisticated centrifuges by Iran at uranium enrichment facilities at Natanz and Fordo – has encouraged the Israel lobby on Capitol Hill, notably the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and the Foundation for the Defence of Democracies (FDD), to press Congress for new sanctions against Iran and foreign companies that do business with it that, if approved and fully enforced, would amount to a de facto trade embargo against the Islamic Republic.

A key Senate committee Tuesday approved a resolution calling on Obama to more strictly enforce existing sanctions and to provide military and other support to Israel if the Jewish state “is compelled to take military action in self-defense”.

The new report, “Strategic Options for Iran: Balancing Pressure With Diplomacy,” also comes amidst a spate of other studies by influential mainstream think tanks that have argued for greater flexibility by the administration in its dealings with Iran.

Just last week, an Atlantic Council task force, which Defence Secretary Chuck Hagel co-chaired until he was nominated to his new post, released a report that called for Washington to “make a more concerted effort to keep Iran from getting to keep Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, while lessening the chances for war through reinvigorated diplomacy that offers Iran a realistic and face-saving way out of the nuclear standoff.”

While it concluded that Washington should retain the option to strike Iran’s nuclear facilities to prevent it from acquiring a weapon, it also warned that ramifications of a “premature military strike …could also be dire.”

Similarly, a new book co-authored by a former top Gulf expert in the Reagan administration, Geoffrey Kemp of the Center for the National Interest, and based on months of consultations with elite national-security experts recommended a “more aggressive U.S. strategy. …(A)llowing very limited and closely monitored (uranium) enrichment within Iran is far preferable to war, and is less risky,” according to the book.

Meanwhile, another recent report by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace warned that, “Economic pressure or military force cannot ‘end’ Iran’s nuclear program. …The only sustainable solution for assuring that Iran’s nuclear program remains purely peaceful is a mutually agreeable diplomatic solution.”

This emerging elite – if not Congressional – consensus will be bolstered by The Iran Project’s report which insists that “no change in U.S. policy will be possible unless President Obama makes the negotiation of a nuclear deal with Iran one of his top priorities.”

The report stresses that any direct talks – which the administration in recent months appears to have endorsed – should complement the efforts of the P5+1 and that emphasising the diplomatic track would not mean abandoning the pressure track, “including maintaining the option of using military force should the Iranians move quickly to build a bomb.”

“Yet the more the President threatens the use of force, the more difficult it will be for Iran’s defiant leadership to consider any offer, and the more the President will be under pressure to use military force,” it warned.

The report defines a minimum nuclear deal as including Iran’s agreement to produce only low-enriched uranium (3.5-5 percent); cease its production of 20-percent enriched uranium; reduce its existing stockpiles of enriched uranium; and forswear production of plutonium – all under a strict monitoring regime by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

In return, Washington and its P5+1 partners would offer some sanctions relief (although the report notes that Obama’s flexibility to roll back U.S. sanctions is limited by Congress); a commitment not to impose new sanctions for a period of time; and formal recognition of Iran’s limited enrichment programme.

If such a minimum agreement can be reached, according to the report, Washington should broaden talks with Tehran to explore opportunities for cooperation, notably on Afghanistan and Iraq, drug trafficking, and even Syria, although that would be substantially more ambitious.

While the administration has called for direct talks with Tehran’s to clarify its position on the nuclear programme, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has expressed strong scepticism about their usefulness so long as Washington is “holding a gun against Iran”.

At the same time, he has not ruled out such talks – previously a taboo subject in Tehran that has now become a major subject of public debate.

*Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at http://www.lobelog.com.