It’s not just the U.S. working to isolate Iran

Every year, Iranian leader Mahmoud Ahmadenijad makes a pilgrimage to the U.N., to scold the United States before an international audience that extends him all the diplomatic courtesies owed to a country in good international standing. But the U.N. has recently become a less hospitable place for the Iranian leader.

U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon frequently chides Ahmadinejad for failing to prove Iran’s nuclear program is peaceful. Yukiya Amano, who heads the International Atomic Energy Agency, the U.N.’s nuclear watchdog, has also faulted Ahmadinejad’s nuclear policies. "Iran has not provided the necessary co-operation to permit the agency to confirm that all nuclear material in Iran is in peaceful activities," Amano said earlier this month.

The United States, meanwhile, has continued its strategy of using the U.N.’s vast diplomatic machinery to isolate Iran. The U.S. mustered 80 votes – 6 more votes than last year — in support of an annual resolution criticizing Iran human rights record citing evidence of torture, flogging and stoning in the Islamic Republic. An effort by Iran to block the U.N. censure fell forty votes short. Last week, the United States and its western allies mounted an effective campaign to block Iran from gaining a seat on the board of a new U.N. agency’ promoting women’s rights.

And earlier this week, Nigeria, reported to the U.N. Security Council that it had seized a shipment of Iranian arms that arrived in Lagos in violation of U.N. resolutions. As if that weren’t bad enough, the Nigerian government this week reported that a shipment of Iranian auto parts to Nigeria -was discovered to also be carrying  286 pounds of high-quality heroin. The revelations prompted a visit to Nigeria from Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki.

The effort has not brought about a decisive change in Iran’s behavior, and Tehran can still count on a group of protectors, including China and Russia, to ease the pressure. (Though even that protection is not ironclad: China recently released its hold on the publication of a U.N. report that discusses allegations of the illicit trade in sensitive ballistic missile and nuclear technology between Iran and North Korea.) And in January, the U.S. will confront a newly composed Security Council — including key regional powerhouses like Brazil, India and South Africa — that will be less inclined to follow Washington’s lead on sanctions and human rights policies.

Nevertheless, the United States and its allies have reaped political benefits from the steady flow of negative news about Iran on the world stage. According to some nuclear specialists, the diplomatic campaign has impaired Tehran’s effort to acquire the materials it needs to advance its nuclear enrichment activities.

Karim Sadjadpour, an Iran expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said he doubted that the various developments at the U.N. would have a significant impact, positive or negative, on the most important diplomatic development involving U.S. relations with Iran: The effort by the five permanent members of the Security Council — the United States, China, Britain, France and Russia — plus Germany, to engage Iran in substantive talks over the fate of its nuclear program.

But Sadjadpour also said that the Iranian president’s lack of diplomatic tact is costing his country influence. "The greatest ally the United States has had in isolating the Iranian government has been Mahmoud Ahmadinejad," he said. "He has a unique ability to alienate people of all creeds."

David Albright, a nuclear expert and a former U.N. official, said that the U.N. has closed a series of loopholes in previous rounds of sanctions against Iran, successfully complicating Iran’s effort to acquire materials for its nuclear enrichment program. In the short term, the sanctions "do hurt them," Albright said, but he also noted that the sanctions may benefit Iran’s domestic nuclear and military industries by spurringdevelop nuclear parts indigenously.  "If they can’t get it overseas they’ll make it themselves and eventually they will succeed," Albright said.

Human rights advocates say that Iran’s standing at the United Nations has suffered since its violent crackdown on opposition groups following last year’s presidential election.  "The recent spate of no confidence votes at the UN is the international community’s way of telling Iran to clean up its act when it comes to human rights," said Philippe Bolopion, the U.N. representative for Human Rights Watch. "Most countries singling out Iran at the U.N. are less concerned with the US agenda than with Iran’s contempt for U.N. resolutions and it’s deteriorating rights record."

But Iranian officials blamed the United States for rallying opposition to its cause. "The United States of America is the mastermind and the main provocateur," Mohammad Javad Larijani, a top Iranian human rights official, told delegates of the General Assembly’s 92 member human rights committee, which passed the resolution censoring Iran by a vote of 80-44, with 57 abstentions. "It has nothing to do with human rights."

"What is our crime?," Larijani said, deriding Canada, which drafted the resolution, and Britain, which he called the United Kingdom of Devils, as American lackeys. "Our crime is that our democracy is not a replica, it is not a zerox copy of western democracy. We do not want to be a western democracy."

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