To no one's surprise, Total SA of France will develop the two oil and gas fields off Iran where Conoco Inc. ran into trouble with the U.S. State Department. Total at midmonth signed a deal with National Iranian Oil Co. similar to Conoco's March agreement torpedoed by Washington, D.C.
So much for U.S. isolation of Iran. The Islamic republic has found buyers for its oil despite a U.S. embargo. Now it has found some of the international capital it needs to restore, maintain, and expand its oil and gas industry. Days after announcement of the Total deal, NIOC made 10 oil and gas projects, upstream and downstream, available to international investors.
HOWLING FROM SIDELINES
Officials of the U.S. State Department are howling about it, of course. That's all they can do from the economic and political sidelines where they have solidly emplaced themselves and international oil and gas companies based in the U.S. They want to treat Iran as a uniform menace. The rest of the world does not.
The U.S. could have moved away from its self-discrediting policy toward Iran by allowing the Conoco deal to proceed. Doing so would have acknowledged Iran's internal divisions, frictions from which explain some-though probably not all--of the international misbehavior that the administration of U.S. President Bill Clinton ascribes wholesale to the Iranian government. Refusal to make crucial distinctions about a regime as complex as Iran's provides no basis from which to make serious allegations or upon which to make policy.
But Iran has missed an opportunity, too. Last month, the European Union used the Salman Rushdie issue as an avenue toward improved relations. Rushdie wrote a novel considered blasphemous to Islam by the late Ayatollah Khomeini, who in February 1989 called on Muslims worldwide to find and kit the author. Rushdie has lived in hiding ever since.
By targeting improved relations with Iran, the EU distinguished itself in an important way from the U.S., which targets nothing constructive. The EU further selected a specific goal: lifting of the Rushdie fatwa, or order to kill.
Tehran fumbled the overture. While Iranian officials in Europe were trying to appease their EU counterparts, the Iranian news agency was calling on Europeans to respect "religious values." Iranian moderates insisted the government has dissociated itself from the fatwa but warned that Rushdie remained in danger from revolutionaries beyond the government's reach. Individual officials were quoted as deploring the fatwa but wishing that the EU would concern itself with other matters.
Of course, outright denunciation of the fatwa is too much to expect of a government as tenuous as Iran's. But Iranian officials cannot dismiss the Rushdie fatwa as an issue. It is the face their country wears in the world. To varying degrees, the fatwa has a religious context among Iranians. To the rest of the world, it is just a murder threat.
TERRIBLE DILEMMA
Iranian diplomats might at least have acknowledged that the fatwa creates a terrible dilemma for them. They want to do business but can do nothing about the thuggery of those in their country who do not. They are right not to pretend to have immediate solutions to the problem. They must not, however, pretend that the problem doesn't matter.
So Iranian officials have expressed righteous concern for Rushdie's safety and left the affair in a muddle, apparently hoping that the dilemma somehow, sometime, will go away. In that they differ little from the U.S. officials who insist on portraying them all as demons.
Copyright 1995 Oil & Gas Journal. All Rights Reserved.