COMMENTARY Building a
case, any case, against Iran By Kaveh L
Afrasiabi
The British think tank,
International Institute for Strategic Studies
(IISS), has just released a new study on Iran's
weapons of mass destruction (WMD) - "Iran's
Strategic Weapons Programs - A Net Assessment" -
declaring with much fanfare that Tehran is five
years or so from developing nuclear bombs.
How
history repeats itself. One is reminded
of the IISS's previous "strategic dossier"
on Iraq in 2002, which became Paul Wolfowitz's
bible in the Washington neo-conservatives'
crusade to rationalize their planned invasion.
Indeed, the IISS's website still features
the photo of Wolfowitz, the then deputy secretary
of defense, with the write-up that he "refers to
Iraq's 'Strategic Weapons Program - A Net
Assessment'." The date was September 2002, a few
days before secretary of state Colin Powell made
his now infamous speech at the United Nations
Security Council, pounding on the table and
insisting that Iraq had an active WMD program in
"advanced stages", referring
to, among other things, the
findings by Great Britain about the menace of
Iraq's WMD.
Two years and a costly
military occupation of a sovereign Arab nation
exacting more than 100,000 civilian casualties and
untold suffering later, Powell has reportedly
admitted in an interview that his UN speech was "a
blot on my record". Such frank admissions, albeit
late and ineffectual, are indeed rare in the
United States and, unfortunately, even rarer in
Great Britain, as one would have hoped that the
"objective" and "dispassionate" experts at the
London think-tank would perhaps issue a single
statement retracting their exaggerated claims
about Iraq's WMD.
Not only have they not
done so, worse, they have now recycled their old
habit, with a great deal of media sensationalism,
by issuing a new report on Iran.
The
IISS's 2002 report on Iraq, aptly utilized by
Prime Minister Tony Blair and his cabinet members
as well, made incendiary statements subsequently
proven utterly wrong, eg, "Iraq has made every
effort to retain nuclear capabilities for the
future ... Iraq could assemble nuclear weapons
within months if fissile material from foreign
sources were obtained".
Of
course, retrospectively, we all remember President
George W Bush's claim in his 2002 State of the
Union address that Iraq was trying to procure
fissile materials from Africa, this despite the
Central Intelligence Agency's finding to the
contrary.
Understandably, the IISS's
leadership may secretly wish us to fall into a
Nietzschian "chasm of forgetfulness" and forget
the media statement of the IISS's current
director, John Lipman, dated September 9, 2002,
when he defended the "Iraq dossier" as the result
of an "accurate" and "dispassionate" study, the
lietmotif for which was "the increasing
threat posed by Iraq's program to develop nuclear,
biological and chemical weapons".
Lipman's
statements were categorical: "The retention of WMD
capabilities by Iraq is self-evidently the core
objective of the regime ... war, sanctions and
inspections have not eliminated Iraq's nuclear
capabilities, nor have they removed Baghdad's
enduring interests in developing these
capabilities."
Exactly two years after
making such patently false statements about Iraq's
WMD program, clearly disproven by the US
government's own findings, Lipman and his director
of studies, Gary Samore, are at it again, stating
unequivocally that Iran has the intentions to
acquire nuclear weapons, lending partial support
to the recent conclusion of the US intelligence
community that Tehran is many years away from
reaching this objective, but by cutting the
estimate of US intelligence by some five years, by
contending that "by the end of the decade" Iran
could have its first arsenal of nuclear weapons.
Coincidentally or not, the IISS report
comes at a crucial time, in advance of a meeting
of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)
on Iran on December 19 that could result in the
issue of Tehran's nuclear program being referred
to the United Nations Security Council, where it
is possible that sanctions could be imposed.
The head of the IAEA, Mohammad ElBaradei,
this month presented a comprehensive report on
Tehran's nuclear program in which he criticized
Iran for failing to keep its suspension on
uranium-enrichment activities and defined Tehran's
cooperation with the agency on its nuclear issue
as "overdue".
US politicians and Blair are
lobbying Moscow and Beijing not to exercise their
veto in the Security Council when Iran's case
comes up.
At a glance, the IISS report
lends support to Lipman's claim that it "does not
advocate any particular policy for dealing with
Iran's nuclear issue", but this is only half the
truth, since an authoritative report's claim that
Iran is energetically pursuing nuclear weapons
under the guise of its peaceful nuclear program at
this point in time has clear policy connotations
or implications. In a word, it lends critical and
"scientific" support to the European Union's
emerging united front with the US against Iran.
The EU-3 (Britain, Germany and France)
have been at the forefront of negotiations with
Iran over its nuclear program, but it has now
called on Tehran to suspend all enrichment
activities.
The IISS's Iran dossier is
almost entirely familiar territory. It contains no
new technical information on Iran's nuclear
program and draws heavily on the findings of the
IAEA, nuanced by Samore's personal observations of
some of the nuclear sites he has visited. The
report's chronology of the Iran-Europe nuclear
talks is familiar as well, and absent in that
section are any necessary insights gleaned from
Iranian nuclear policymakers and negotiators.
The report's claim of Iran's nuclear
weapons' intentions is based on hypothetical
conjectures, by repeatedly stating that "if" Iran
diverts its enrichment activities toward producing
highly enriched uranium, then it could possibly have
its bombs in five years or so, but first it has to
manufacture better-quality uranium hexafluoride
(UF6) gas than is presently the case at its
facilities in Isfahan and elsewhere.
Such
hypothetical hyperbole leaves much to be desired.
For one thing, the range of "ifs" and "buts" is
too extensive, and the present pattern of
Iran-IAEA cooperation too solid to make them
probable. As the IAEA chief made clear in his
report on Iran, during the past 18 years, Iran has
devoted considerable energy toward acquiring an
independent nuclear fuel cycle. But this is all
within the purview of the nuclear
Non-Proliferation Treaty, and the fact that as a
result of this technological breakthrough Iran has
become potentially "proliferation-prone" does not
automatically translate into
"proliferation-driven".
Iran prides itself
for its innovative self-reliance, by producing
locally many nuclear components denied to Iran by
the West. This sets it apart from, say, Libya,
which relied completely on imported technology,
without the benefit of a scientific nuclear
infrastructure, thus making it easy to dismantle,
whereas Iran is quite capable of "reversed
engineering" due to its indigenous technology.
Thus, it is not so much the question of
technological capability, or to put it in the
IISS's jargon, "projected future capability" that
is in doubt, as just about any nation possessing
the full nuclear cycle can build a bomb in a
relatively short time if it chooses to do so.
Rather, the main question is verifiability of the
civil nature of the Iranian nuclear program and
the enduring commitment of Iran to its treaty
obligations with the IAEA.
The IISS,
echoing the official Downing Street line on Iran,
has underestimated and undervalued Iran's
adherence to the intrusive Additional Protocol,
this while all but dismissing as irrelevant Iran's
leaders' stated opposition to nuclear weapons. The
forcefulness with which Iran's leaders have
denounced nuclear weapons, not to mention the
scope of Iran's cooperation with the IAEA
inspections, need to be taken into consideration,
in light of Iran's absence of a traditional
threat, such as Saddam Hussein.
A sound
threat analysis from Iran's vantage point could
have reached the opposite conclusion to the one
drawn by the IISS, namely, the counterproductive
nature of nuclear weapons for Iran's regional
policy, especially in the Persian Gulf, where it
enjoys balanced relations with Saudi Arabia, the
linchpin of the Gulf Cooperation Council.
Instead of proving an anti-Israel
deterrent, an atomic Iran will likely rattle the
Arab world and cause a dangerous pattern of
proliferation on the part of both Saudi Arabia and
Egypt, notwithstanding the sedimented Arab-Persian
rivalry, although the word rivalry is a bit too
strong these days and is better replaced with
milder adjectives such as "competition".
This is not to preclude the possibility of
a nuclear (weapon) Iran in the future, especially
if Israel gets to become a substantially bigger
national security concern for Iran in light of
Israel's overstretch in Iraq, among the Kurds,
etc, given the stern Iranian reaction to the
recent Israel-Pakistan rapprochement brokered by
Turkey.
Said otherwise, the ball is not
entirely in Iran's court, and if Israel is really
serious about Iran's commitment to
non-proliferation, then it must engage in
proactive, self-limiting, measures, such as
allowing IAEA inspections, supporting the ideal of
a nuclear-free Middle East zone, showing greater
flexibility with respect to managing the regional
arms race, and working toward a just resolution of
the repressed rights of Palestinian people.
Already, Iran's Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali
Khamenei, has declared Israel's recent withdrawal
from Gaza "a partial victory".
In
conclusion, if need be, Iran can be a moderating
influence on radical Islamists, and Israel, and
the United States would be remiss to constantly
emphasize the negative on Iran's role with respect
to the Palestinians. This is, in fact, one more
flaw of the IISS's report, by providing a
caricature of Iran's foreign policy intentions and
priorities, without showing any keen understanding
of the complexities of Iran's multi-layered
regional policies in the turbulent Middle East.
Kaveh L Afrasiabi, PhD, is the
author of After Khomeini: New Directions in
Iran's Foreign Policy (Westview Press) and
co-authored "Negotiating Iran's Nuclear Populism",
The Brown Journal of World Affairs, Volume X11,
issue 2, Summer 2005, with Mustafa Kibaroglu.
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