Stephen Walt writes: Will the U.S. and the rest of the P5+1 manage to turn a potential diplomatic breakthrough with Iran into another counterproductive failure? It’s too soon to tell, but betting on failure has been the smart wager in the past.

The Baghdad talks between Iran and the P5+1 apparently got a lot of serious issues on the table, but didn’t achieve a breakthrough, let alone an agreement. The main reason is the hardline position adopted by the United States and its partners, and especially our refusal to grant any sort of sanctions relief. The parties will resume discussions in Moscow in June.

From a purely strategic point of view, this situation is pretty simple. Iran is not going to give up its right to enrich uranium. Period. If the West insists on a full suspension, there won’t be a deal. It’s that simple. At the same time, the U.S. and the rest of the P5+1 would like to maximize the amount of time it would take Iran to “break out” and assemble a weapon. The best way to do that is to limit Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium to concentrations of less than 5 percent. If Iran insists on keeping a large supply of 20 percent enriched uranium on hand, we’ll walk too.

So there you have the outline of the deal–we accept low-level enrichment and lift sanctions, and Iran gives up the 20% stuff–although there are other details what will have to be worked out too. Frankly, given where we are today, it’s surprising the U.S. isn’t grabbing that deal with both hands. Why? Because unless the U.S. is willing to invade and occupy Iran (and we aren’t) or unless we are willing to bomb its facilities over and over (i.e., every time Iran rebuilds them), there is no way to prevent Iran from having the potential to obtain nuclear weapons if it decides it wants to. They know how to build centrifuges, folks, and the rest of the technology isn’t that hard to master. So the potential is there, and there’s no realistic way to eliminate it.

The smart strategy, therefore, is to keep them as far away from the bomb as possible, and to reduce Iran’s incentive to go all the way to an actual weapon. And the best way to do that — duh! — is to take the threat of military force off the table and to stop babbling about the need for regime change.

ABC News reports: Iranian dissidents have long suspected that the country’s Islamist regime has used the cover of its not-so-covert war with Israel to crack down on internal opponents, and that a leading Iranian nuclear scientist whose death was blamed on Mossad might really have been killed by his own government.

Now a prominent opposition blogger based in London says that discrepancies in the recent trial and execution of the “Israeli spy” officially charged with killing scientist Masoud Ali Mohammadi are yet more evidence that Iranian intelligence agents may have been the real assassins.

Mohammadi, a nuclear physicist, died in January 2010 when a motorcycle parked outside his house was detonated by remote control when he walked past.

A half dozen scientists and officials linked to the nation’s nuclear and long-range missile programs have died under suspicious circumstances since 2010, deaths the Iranian regime usually blames on Israel, the U.S., and the U.K. When Mohammadi died, the regime immediately blamed his murder on a “triangle of wickedness,” meaning the U.S., Israel and their “hired agents.”

“Zionists did it,” said President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. “They hate us and they don’t want us to progress.” Ali Larjani, chairman of the Iranian parliament, said the government had “clear information that the intelligence regime of the Zionist regime and the CIA wanted to implement terrorist acts.”

But Western intelligence agencies had conflicting information about whether Mohammadi, a particle physicist, was really contributing to the nuclear program. Iranian dissidents, meanwhile, said Mohammadi had been killed by the regime because he was a supporter of reformist candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi, whom many believe actually won the 2009 Iranian presidential election before vote-tampering handed the victory to Ahmadinejad. A German-based opposition group released a photo of an alleged Arab hitman who had supposedly carried out Mohammadi’s assassination on regime orders.

At Mohammadi’s funeral, hundreds of regime loyalists waving anti-Israel banners packed the procession, where they clashed with supporters of Mousavi’s Green Movement.

More than two years later, on May 15, 2012, the Iranian government executed 24-year-old Majid Jamali Fashi, who had been convicted of assassinating Mohammadi.

Iranian authorities claimed that Fashi, 24, was recruited and trained by Mossad and was paid $120,000 to kill Mohammadi. In January 2011, Iranian media had broadcast Fashi’s confession, in which he said he “received different training including chasing, running, counter-chasing and techniques for planting bombs in a car” while in Tel Aviv. Fashi also confessed to receiving forged travel documents in Azerbaijan to travel to Israel, Iran’s Press TV reported.

A report which refers to Iran’s “not-so-covert war with Israel” stumbles at the gate. Can the reporter possibly not know that he got that back to front? It could just be standard mainstream sloppy journalism. Really, most of the content of this article is recycled news — the one new element comes not from ABC’s own reporting but from the London-based Iranian dissident Potkin Azarmehr in this post.

Azarmehr points to two rather glaring discrepancies in the fake Israeli passport that the Iranian hitman, Jamali Fashi, was supposedly provided by Mossad. The photo of Jamali would have been taken before the passport was issued in 2003 at which time Jamali would only have been 15, but he appears older. Also, he is not posing in the standard face-forward position used universally for passport photos. But then commenters on Azarmehr’s blog noticed an even more glaring problem: the passport contains exactly the same information as can be found on an image of an Israeli passport appearing on Wikipedia.

What others have not noted is perhaps the most basic problem with Jamali’s Israeli passport: it shows no name nor birth year!

Whatever Mossad is or is not capable of doing, I have no doubt that they could provide an agent with a flawless passport. (As for why they would be handing out such passports is a question I’ll come back to in a moment.)

So, whoever made Jamali’s Israeli passport it seems they were more likely serving the Iranian rather than the Israeli government and their objective was not to construct a physical document that could be shown to an immigration official but instead a document that could appear on TV. For that purpose, Wikipedia might have appeared to provide enough information.

Even so, the passport-maker seems to have been singularly lacking in imagination. Where Wikipedia redacted personally identifying information from an image of what is obviously a real Israeli passport, in the fake passport, instead of filling in the gaps the passport-maker just left these spaces blank — hence no surname or given name.

However, there was one blank he had to fill: the photo — and here’s where he seems to have been inspired by a creative impulse. How should Jamali pose? Just like another Israeli spy, Jonathan Pollard. Perhaps Israel has a special format it reserves for passports issued to spies, the counterfeiter thought.

OK. Enough of this blogger’s attention to detail.

There is a more basic question: why in heaven’s name would Mossad give an Iranian agent an Israeli passport? An Israeli passport is like the kiss of death and thus Mossad goes to great lengths to disguise the Israeli identity of its own operatives. So while the Israelis move around under assumed non-Israeli identity, they give their Iranian assassin an Israeli passport as though they wanted to pin a target on his back?

There is of course the much more obvious explanation: the Jamali-Mossad story was a dumb Iranian plot designed to cover up their own assassination of one of their own nuclear scientists.

But why is this story emerging now? Jamali’s confession was used by Iranian authorities to demonstrate that the dissident People’s Mujahedin of Iran or MEK have been collaborating with Israel in conducting assassinations inside Iran. The MEK, designated a terrorist organization by the U.S. government, is attempting to get this label removed. For that purpose there’s little doubt that the Jamali story, as it is now being retold, could serve as a useful element in the MEK’s PR campaign.

There is also another question: does this story have some relevance to the current negotiations between Iran and the P5 Plus One? Perhaps.

Can a government that’s willing to assassinate its own nuclear scientists operate a viable nuclear program whether that be for peaceful or military purpose?

As Jacques E.C. Hymans has noted, authoritarian governance and the challenges of scientific development do not work well together. Fear shackles creativity. That Iran’s nuclear program has advanced at a snail’s pace might not simply be a reflection of caution among Iran’s leaders but rather that the scientific community upon whose efforts progress depends has become so risk-averse that they are incapable of moving any faster. For those who fear the creation of an Iranian bomb, probably the smartest thing to do would be to do nothing.

Tony Karon writes: Nobody was expecting a breakthrough at Wednesday’s nuclear talks in Baghdad, but most weren’t expecting a breakdown, either. Indeed, predictions were that Iran and the P5+1 (the U.S., Britain, France, Germany, Russia and China) would engage on more detailed proposals for concrete, reciprocal confidence building measures, and then adjourn by day’s end having scheduled a new round of talks in a few weeks. But in what may be an exercise in brinkmanship, or a sign of an impending crisis, Iranian officials balked at the offer from the Western powers. ”The points of agreement are not yet sufficient for another round,” an anonymous Iranian official at the talks told AFP.

Iran’s state media, whose upbeat spin on the talks in recent weeks had many analysts concluding that Tehran was preparing its public for a deal, slammed what it called the “outdated” and “unbalanced” proposals by the Western powers in Baghdad. At Iranian insistence, Thursday will see a second day of talks in Baghdad, and the parties remained locked in negotiations until midnight. That looked like a tactic to create a mini crisis on the key sticking point in the talks: the question of whether Iran will be granted any relief from escalating Western sanctions if it agrees to the immediate confidence-building steps demanded by the P5+1. [Continue reading…]

Tony Karon writes: Anyone banking on a big-win breakthrough in Wednesday’s nuclear talks with Iran will likely find themselves in the same boat as investors who bet on an instant surge in the Facebook stock price last week. If there’s value to be found in nuclear negotiations with Iran, then — like an investment in Facebook — it’s likely to emerge over time. And in both cases, even the long-term outcome remains uncertain.

After weeks of upbeat assessments, Western officials seemed to tamp down expectations ahead of the meeting that got underway in Baghdad on Wednesday. “If we talk substantively on elements of a deal and agree to meet again in three weeks, Baghdad will have been a success,” a senior U.S. official told al-Monitor on Monday. The spin ahead of the talks in recent weeks has been positive — almost too positive for diplomats, who naturally prefer diminished expectations. At home, Iran’s leaders are proclaiming a great victory in the willingness of Western powers to negotiate while Iran continues to enrich uranium, suggesting that they’re preparing their public for a compromised deal that will be sold as a great victory. The Western narrative paints Iran’s willingness to negotiate as a consequence of ever tightening economic sanctions, implying that such pressure must be maintained to curb its nuclear ambitions.

There are some positive signs: Sunday’s talks in Tehran between IAEA chief Yukiya Amano and Iran’s nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili appear to have yielded an in-principle agreement, not yet inked or finalized, to expand the nuclear-watchdog agency’s access to sensitive sites in Iran. Amano, who has taken a tough line in dealing with Iran, was upbeat, expecting a signed agreement “quite soon.” But the IAEA talks are the undercard to the negotiations between Iran and the P5+1 (the U.S., France, Britain, Germany, Russia and China). Even if they improve the atmosphere for the Baghdad meeting, a breakdown between Iran and the P5+1 would likely imperil any progress made by the IAEA.

It is widely assumed that the only things standing in the way of Iran developing nuclear weapons are either external pressures (sanctions, sabotage, assassinations, the threat of military strikes, and the constraints imposed by the NPT), or that Iran has yet to decide to apply its nuclear know-how to the creation of weapons.

Jacques E.C. Hymans suggests a third obstacle which is an authoritarian political culture that undermines the pursuit of such a goal.

Nuclear research and development organizations depend heavily on intense commitment, creative thinking, and a shared spirit of cooperation among large numbers of highly educated scientific and technical workers. To elicit this positive behavior, management needs to respect their professional autonomy and facilitate their efforts, and not simply order them around. Respect for professional autonomy was instrumental to the brilliant successes of the earliest nuclear weapons projects. Even in Stalin’s Soviet Union, as the historian David Holloway has written, “it is striking how the apparatus of the police state fused with the physics community to build the bomb. . . . [The physics community’s] autonomy was not destroyed by the creation of the nuclear project. It continued to exist within the administrative system that was set up to manage the project.”

By contrast, most rulers of recent would-be nuclear states have tended to rely on a coercive, authoritarian management approach to advance their quest for the bomb, using appeals to scientists’ greed and fear as the primary motivators. That coercive approach is a major mistake, because it produces a sense of alienation in the workers by removing their sense of professionalism. As a result, nuclear programs lose their way. Moreover, underneath these bad management choices lie bad management cultures. In developing states with inadequate civil service protections, every decision tends to become politicized, and state bureaucrats quickly learn to keep their heads down. Not even the highly technical matters faced by nuclear scientific and technical workers are safe from meddling politicians. The result is precisely the reverse of what the politicians intend: not heightened efficiency but rather a mixture of bureaucratic sloth, corruption, and endless blame shifting.

Although it is difficult to measure the quality of state institutions precisely, the historical record strongly indicates that the more a state has conformed to the professional management culture generally found in developed states, the less time it has needed to get its first bomb and the lower its chances of failure. Conversely, the more a state has conformed to the authoritarian management culture typically found in developing states, the more time it has needed to get its first bomb and the higher its chances of failure.