INDONESIA - Tehran Faces Higher Pressures And A Strong Russian/Chinese Message.

The five permanent members of the UN Security Council (UNSC) and Germany - notably including China and Russia - on March 2 announced progress in agreeing on possible new sanctions against Iran for refusing to suspend uranium enrichment. The US and its Western allies are concentrating on diplomacy to get Tehran to suspend uranium enrichment. The US has made it clear that the other option was war (see news10-Iran-NukeIssueMar5-07).

The nuclear issue is not the only factor influencing US decisions concerning Iran, which has been playing the role of a hegemon in the Middle East and this has greatly upset Sunni Arab states worried about the prospect of a wider Shi'ite-Sunni war than the one in Iraq where US forces are battling extremists from both sects (see rim3-IraqUSfightingExtremistsMar5-07).

The political directors of foreign ministries in the US, Russia, China, Britain, France and Germany held a two-hour conference call on March 1 and discussed what to include in a new UNSC resolution calling for sanctions tougher than the ones issued by the council on Dec. 23. The US State Department on March 2 announced that the six diplomats "had a good productive discussion during which they made progress in agreeing on the elements of a resolution. A few more issues remain for discussion, and the political directors agreed to convene another conference call on Saturday morning" {March 3). The State Department said it expected that ambassadors from the six powers "could begin drafting the text of a resolution next week".

Tehran on March 3 was alarmed by the US announcement and the subsequent silence in Moscow and Beijing, the two trading partners of Iran previously opposed to tougher UN sanctions against the Shi'ite theocracy. The message from Moscow had been strong since the Dec. 23 UNSC resolution as Russia again delayed work on completing Iran's nuclear reactor at Bushehr.

Iran's refusal to freeze all its enrichment-related activities had prompted the UNSC on Dec. 23 to impose sanctions targeting its nuclear and missile programmes and the persons involved in them. The council gave Tehran 60 days to Feb. 21 to halt enrichment or face additional measures.

The more recent report from the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) that Iran was expanding enrichment instead of suspending it set the stage for new UN sanctions to try to pressure Tehran to agree to a freeze before negotiations on its nuclear programme.

Iran insists its nuclear programme is aimed solely at producing nuclear energy, not weapons, and it has adamantly refused to stop it. The US and its Western allies have been suspicious that Iran's programme was to produce nuclear weapons. Moscow has made it clear that Russia will not allow Iran to produce nuclear weapons.

UN diplomats on March 3 said the six powers, which have been the key players in trying to negotiate with Iran, all believed that the initial sanctions had a positive effect on Tehran. The British Ambassador to the UN, Emyr Jones Parry, said recently that the new resolution would be looking at an "incremental" strengthening of sanctions.

The US, Britain and France might want tough new sanctions, but will probably have to settle for less to ensure that Russia and China, which still have close ties to Iran, will not use their veto power in the UNSC to block a resolution.

The UN sanctions - adding to US sanctions against Tehran since the 1990s and American pressures since Imam Khomeini's 1979 Islamic revolution, which was followed by establishment of a Shi'ite theocracy hostile to the West - have had stronger effects on Iran's economy than most theocrats had anticipated. These and US sanctions have affected Iran's petroleum sector, with Tehran still unable to export natural gas on the scale it had wanted since the 1980s and its oilfields are facing serious structural problems.

Iran's crude oil production capacity is losing between 400,000-500,000 b/d every year because of a lack of proper upstream rehabilitation work since late 1978. There has been a forecast in the US that, at its current rates of high oil consumption - with Tehran still keeping domestic fuels heavily subsidised - and fall in production, Iran could no longer be able to export crude oil by 2015, whereas now the country is the second largest crude oil producer in OPEC (see survey of Iran to be serialised by the APS Review in April).

Tehran's defiance of the West goes beyond Iran's nuclear ambitions. The Shi'ite theocracy is acting as a super-power in the Middle East, using as well as playing direct roles on the side of the Shi'ite communities in neighbouring Iraq (where the Shi'ites are the majority and control the US-backed government), in the oil-rich Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia, in Bahrain (where the Shi'ites are the majority and the rulers are part of the Sunni minority), in Lebanon (where the Iran-sponsored Shi'ite group Hizbullah is seeking to topple a Sunni-led government opposed to remaining influences of Syria's Alawite/Ba'thist dictatorship), and in other countries ruled by Sunni regimes.

These regional issues, as well as Tehran's nuclear ambitions, were on top of the agenda of talks between Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad, who visited Saudi Arabia on March 3-4, and King Abdullah ibn Abdul-Aziz in Riyadh. Saudi Arabia, a close ally of the US, now is representing the Sunni regimes in its diplomatic offensive against Iran in the Arab region and the Muslim world.

Preparations for Ahmadi-Nejad's visit, initiated at Tehran's request, had been made in the previous weeks through dialogue between Iran's top security official and nuclear negotiator Ali Larijani and his Saudi counterpart, Prince Bandar ibn Sultan, who now heads his country's national security agency and for many years served as the Saudi ambassador to Washington. Prince Bandar recently met secretly with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert as part of quiet diplomacy between Riyadh and the Jewish state to ease a deadlock in the US-led peace process between Israel and the Palestinians.