Page 2 of
3 Debunking Iran's nuclear myth
makers By Kaveh L Afrasiabi
betrayal", has been quiet
lately, but he owes an explanation to the nation as to how
to justify the cumulative damage to its
interests by the pursuit of the hardline and
inflexible approach decried by a growing chorus of
Iranian officials and policy experts today.
One caveat. At the Center for Strategic
Research in November 2004, this author pointedly
reminded Saidi that the net result of the hardline
position advocated by him and some of his
colleagues would only lead to
UN Security Council action, a threat deprecated by
Saidi and others at the time. This should be a
lesson to the Iranian policymaking machinery, to
ensure that scientists are not given the wrong hat
as diplomatic negotiators and vice versa. A better
division of labor is called for.
This
aside, another positive implication of the
suspension of enrichment activities would be to
curtail the relentless propaganda and
pseudo-analysis that propel public doubts about
the peaceful nature of Iran's nuclear program.
The fact is that after some three years of
intrusive inspections, the IAEA has discovered no
smoking gun and in its various reports, including
the September 2006 report, it has admitted that
"to date there is no evidence that the previously
undeclared nuclear material and activities were
related to a nuclear-weapons program".
But
don't tell that to the formidable army of Iran
nuclear myth makers, whose venerable list includes
US Under Secretary of State Nicholas Burns, who
said in Dubai this week that "there is no doubt
that Iran is actively pursuing nuclear weapons".
Burns and his boss, Secretary of State Condoleezza
Rice, have been busy accusing Iran of meddling
inside Iraq and aiming to "dominate the region",
which is, said Burns, "why we have seen the US
station two [aircraft] carrier battle groups in
the region".
This belies the earlier
report in the New York Times that the dispatch of
a second carrier group was meant as a "signal to
Iran" on the nuclear issue. Obviously, it doesn't
hurt to have multi-purpose missions.
"Americans are
used to speaking nonsense. None of their allegations
are documented. Can they offer any evidence of what they
say?" This is a question posed by Iran's consul
in the Iraqi city of Basra to a Los Angeles
Times reporter. Not an irrelevant question, in
light of the recent statement by a
powerful US senator, Jay Rockefeller, chairman
of the Senate Intelligence Committee, who
has access to classified information. He bluntly told
the US media that there is "little
evidence" corroborating the accusations that Iran
is proliferating nuclear weapons. Rockefeller and
several other US lawmakers, such as Senator
Chuck Hagel, have warned that we are witnessing a
remake of the march to war in Iraq
vis-a-vis Iran. Obviously, history repeats its tragedies.
In US academic
circles, a number of prominent scholars have
penned their support to the US
government's crusade against Iran, including Graham Allison, director of
the Belfer Center at Harvard University's Kennedy
School. "No one in the international community
doubts that Iran's hidden objective in building
enrichment facilities is to build nuclear bombs,"
Graham wrote in a recent issue of the Harvard
International Review.
Yet even the IAEA
chief, Mohammad ElBaradei, has admitted that the
"jury is still out" and the suspicions of Iran's
alleged proliferation center on "Iran's
intentions", ie, the subjective mindset
extrapolated from Iran's behavior.
And
contrary to what Graham and others say, the list
of dissenters from their doubt-free paradigm is
long and includes Russian President Vladimir Putin
and his foreign minister, both of whom are on
record admitting that, to paraphrase Putin in
February 2005, the information on Iran has
"convinced us that Iran does not have the
intention to build a nuclear bomb". Echoing this
sentiment, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov
recently told Interfax: "Reports from Iran do not
indicate a real threat to peace and security."
That has not prevented many Americans from
continuing to push the opposite line. Case in
point: three scholars at the conservative Hoover
Institution penned an article in a recent issue of
the Washington Quarterly claiming that Iran is
pursuing nuclear weapons largely as a deterrent
against US power. [1]
Such
certainties presume to know Iran's
national-security priorities without a shred of doubt, and are
often made by pundits, including expatriate Iranians,
who have not put foot inside Iran for decades.
This makes a mockery of value-free analysis. As
the example of Allison at Harvard demonstrates,
lending academic support to the US government's
Iran policy plays a key role in the Chomskyan
"manufacturing consensus" on Iran as a pretext for
the next war.
What is peculiar about
the Iran nuclear myth makers is their obliviousness
to contrary information, ie, counter-facts and/or
"anomalies" that undercut their carefully
constructed truth paradigms on Iran's nuclear
program. Allison in his article does not even
bother with the statement by the director of
national
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