As
Ugly as It Gets
Published: May
25, 2010 NY Times
By THOMAS L.
FRIEDMAN
I confess that when I first saw the May
17 picture of Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, joining
his Brazilian counterpart, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, and the
Turkish prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, with raised arms
— after their signing of a putative deal to defuse the crisis
over Iran’s nuclear weapons program — all I could think
of was: Is there anything uglier than watching democrats sell out
other democrats to a Holocaust-denying, vote-stealing Iranian thug
just to tweak the U.S. and show that they, too, can play at the big
power table?
No, that’s about as ugly as it
gets.
“For years, nonaligned and
developing countries have faulted America for cynically pursuing
its own interests without regard for human rights,” observed
Karim Sadjadpour of the Carnegie Endowment. “As Turkey and
Brazil aspire to play on the global stage, they’re going to
face the same criticisms they once doled out. Lula and
Erdogan’s visit to Iran came just days after Iran executed
five political prisoners who were tortured into confessions. They
warmly embraced Ahmadinejad as their brother, but didn’t
mention a word about human rights. There seems to be a mistaken
assumption that the Palestinians are the only people that seek
justice in the Middle East, and if you just invoke their cause you
can coddle the likes of Ahmadinejad.”
Turkey and Brazil are both nascent democracies
that have overcome their own histories of military rule. For their
leaders to embrace and strengthen an Iranian president who uses his
army and police to crush and kill Iranian democrats — people
seeking the same freedom of speech and political choice that Turks
and Brazilians now enjoy — is shameful.
“Lula is a political giant, but
morally he has been a deep disappointment,” said Moisés Naím,
editor in chief of Foreign Policy magazine and a former trade
minister in Venezuela.
Lula, Naím noted, “has supported
the thwarting of democracy across Latin America.” He
regularly praises Venezuela’s strongman Hugo Chávez and Fidel
Castro, the Cuban dictator — and now Ahmadinejad —
while denouncing Colombia, one of the great democratic success
stories, because it let U.S. planes use Colombian airfields to
fight narco-traffickers. “Lula has been great for Brazil but
terrible for his democratic neighbors,” said Naím. Lula, who
rose to prominence as a progressive labor leader in Brazil, has
turned his back on the violently repressed labor leaders of
Iran.
Sure, had Brazil and Turkey actually
persuaded the Iranians to verifiably end their whole suspected
nuclear weapons program, America would have endorsed it. But that
is not what happened.
Iran today has about 4,850 pounds of
low-enriched uranium. Under the May 17 deal, it has supposedly
agreed to send some 2,640 pounds from its stockpile to Turkey for
conversion into the type of nuclear fuel needed to power
Tehran’s medical reactor — a fuel that cannot be used
for a bomb. But that would still leave Iran with a roughly
2,200-pound uranium stockpile, which it still refuses to put under
international inspection and is free to augment and continue to
reprocess to the higher levels needed for a bomb. Experts say it
would only take months for Iran to again amass sufficient quantity
for a nuclear weapon.
So what this deal really does is what
Iran wanted it to do: weaken the global coalition to pressure Iran
to open its nuclear facilities to U.N. inspectors, and, as a
special bonus, legitimize Ahmadinejad on the anniversary of his
crushing the Iranian democracy movement that was demanding a
recount of Iran’s tainted June 2009
elections.
In my view, the “Green
Revolution” in Iran is the most important, self-generated,
democracy movement to appear in the Middle East in decades. It has
been suppressed, but it is not going away, and, ultimately, its
success — not any nuclear deal with the Iranian clerics
— is the only sustainable source of security and stability.
We have spent far too little time and energy nurturing that
democratic trend and far too much chasing a nuclear
deal.
As Abbas Milani, an Iran expert at
Stanford University, put it to me: “The only long-term
solution to the impasse is for a more democratic, responsible,
transparent regime in Tehran. It has been, in my view, a great con
game successfully played by the clerical regime to make the nuclear
issue the almost sole focal point of its relations with the U.S.
and the West. The West should have always followed a two-track
policy: earnest negotiations on the nuclear issue and no less
earnest discussion on the issues of human rights and democracy in
Iran.”
I’d prefer that Iran never get a
bomb. The world would be much safer without more nukes, especially
in the Middle East. But if Iran does go nuclear, it makes a huge
difference whether a democratic Iran has its finger on the trigger
or this current murderous clerical dictatorship. Anyone working to
delay that and to foster real democracy in Iran is on the side of
the angels. Anyone who enables this tyrannical regime and gives
cover for its nuclear mischief will one day have to answer to the
Iranian people.
A version of this op-ed
appeared in print on May 26, 2010, on page A27 of the New
York edition.
Fonte: Site NY Times
