US spies concoct a potent Iran
brew By Kaveh L Afrasiabi
Two years after the last National
Intelligence Estimate (NIE)on Iran that claimed
"with high confidence that Iran currently is
determined to develop nuclear weapons despite its
international obligations and international
pressure", the 2007 NIE by the US's 16 spy
agencies claims otherwise. That is, that Iran
"halted" its secret weapons program in the autumn
of 2003. Crediting this to pressure by the
international community, the new report is clearly
geared to sustain the crumbling United Nations
coalition on Iran.
As expected,
Washington, which released the report with much
fan-fare, has been quick to
frame it with the appropriate nuance, by letting
National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley do the
talking, "It confirms that we were right to be
worried about Iran seeking to develop nuclear
weapons," Hadley said. "It tells us that we have
made progress in trying to ensure that this does
not happen. But the intelligence also tells us
that the risk of Iran acquiring a nuclear weapon
remains a very serious problem."
In other
words, let's not have a let-up with the sanctions
that the new report proves are effectively
working.
The new NIE reports with "high
confidence" that the military-run program was shut
in 2003, and it concludes with "moderate
confidence" that the program had not restarted as
of mid-2007.
The timing of the report's
release is curious, coinciding both with Iranian
President Mahmud Ahmadinejad's crucial meeting
with the heads of states of the Gulf Cooperation
Council, where Ahmadinejad has made substantial
progress in confidence-building by advancing the
idea of security and economic cooperation in the
region, and with critical discussions with the
so-called "Five plus One" countries regarding the
next United Nations steps against Iran. The Five
plus One includes the five permanent members of
the UN security Council - United States, the
United Kingdom, France, Russia and China - plus
Germany.
Irrespective of Hadley's
comments, the new NIE actually undermines much of
the rationale behind the US-led push for a third
round of US sanctions on Iran, by flatly
contradicting what until now has been held as an
article of faith by US politicians and much of the
media. That is, the notion that Iran has been
pursuing an open weapons program via its
uranium-enrichment and reprocessing activities.
Casting heavy doubt on that flawed theory
or "truth paradigm" [1], the new NIE
simultaneously recycles the previous reports's air
of certainty and lack of minutest doubt and
presents its new findings, which are in stark
contrast, if not flagrant contradiction, to the
previous report's. Such intelligence flip-flops on
Iran simply reduce the credibility of any
information on that country from Washington and
raise international doubts about its real
intentions.
Thus, given the credibility
gaps in US information on Iran, the real question
is whether or not the new report actually helps or
harms the US's bid to escalate sanctions on Iran?
This is an important question since reports
indicate strong reservations on the part of China
and Russia to go along with further sanctions
imposed either unilaterally or multilaterally.
To open a caveat, former US national
security advisor, Zbingnew Brzezinski, has written
an article in the US media claiming that China,
depicted as a "geopolitically status-quo power",
is inclined to come on board more sanctions and
even the "revisionist" Russians can be persuaded
with the right "patient diplomacy".
Brzezinski does not mention the
China-Russia alliance within the anti-North
Atlantic Treaty Organization, the Shanghai
Cooperation Organization, which has accorded Iran
observer status, conveniently relying on a
caricature of China's evolving global power
projections and intentions.
Cultivating
partners against Iran by benign analyses or
dubious intelligence reports will not cut it and
the US is today in dire need of a serious
rethinking of its long-term policies and
intentions in the Middle East, nowadays featuring
a "rising Iran".
In the absence of such a
rethinking, the unrealistic expectation of "zero
centrifuges" will persist. Instead, the US could
contemplate the utility of an alternative,
coercion-free Iran diplomacy centered on shared
and parallel interests with the US, that is, both
nations' vested interest in the Organization of
Petroleum Exporting Countries' oil flowing from
the Persian Gulf to the international market, as
well as on an internationally monitored Iranian
nuclear program. In other words, it is time for
"realism, not idealism" in the US's policy
regarding Iran's nuclear program. [2]
To
open another caveat, this author's past exposure
to Iran's nuclear decision-makers, particularly in
2004 and 2005, leaves no doubt the new US report's
claim that Iran "halted" certain nuclear
activities due to external pressure should be
taken with a grain of salt. This is in view of the
fact that all exhaustive International Atomic
Energy Agency (IAEA)inspections have produced no
such conclusions and, on the contrary, have
actually reinforced the Iranian claim that Iran
has never diverted to military development.
The various programs that Iran halted in
2004-2005, as a result of intense negotiations
with the European troika of Germany, France and
Britain, were "voluntary, non-legally binding"
confidence-building measures, and not any illicit,
military activities, such as those alluded to in
the US's new intelligence report. If the latter
were true, then the world community needs to know
what specific activities were involved and why the
US has until now failed to share them, for
example, with the IAEA. After all, IAEA chief
Mohamad ElBaradei has been quite forthcoming in
his latest press interviews regarding the lack of
any knowledge of Iran's pursuit of nuclear
weapons.
What is troubling about the new
NIE is that top US intelligence officials have
been going on record, for instance in their
congressional testimony, promising no repetition
of past errors put on full display with respect to
Iraq, no "cherry picking" intelligence on Iran,
and even threatening to resign if selective
intelligence were to be misused for military
adventures against Iran.
With the US
intelligence community on the defensive since the
post-Iraq-invasion revelations still plaguing the
George W Bush administration, the latter may have
managed a mini-coup with the intelligence
community by procuring a new report that confirms
an Iranian nuclear weapons program, albeit one
that it claims has been "halted".
If
complemented by a follow-up report that Iran is
now poised to change course and resurrect its
halted activities, then theoretically speaking,
that gives ample justification for Washington's
planned "pre-emptive strikes" on Iran, not to
mention added sanctions. Yet, even short of such a
follow-up, the present state of mind on Iran
fueled by the new intelligence report is
sufficiently paranoid to warrant tough new actions
against Tehran.
But, does this new report
really represent an improvement in the US's
intelligence on Iran? Or is it the same attitude
that continuously falls shy of acknowledging
Iran's legitimate nuclear rights, and needs for
peaceful purposes, and the viability of existing
mechanisms, for verification, by the IAEA, not to
mention the proposed additional "objective
guarantees" that Iran has put on the table?
This aside, the US has for now taken a
qualitative step away from the military option by
releasing this new report that states
unequivocally an Iranian freeze on its
proliferation impulse, while simultaneously giving
that military option a new lease of life by the
related allegation of past proliferation
activities.
On the whole however, this
puts the US behavior with regard to Iran in a
thick cloud of uncertainty, let alone credibility
gap, with the pendulum capable of swinging in
wildly different directions almost at will. The
bottom line, thanks to its vast cadre of
intelligence "alchemists" is that the US and its
even more gullible politicians, has now
pre-positioned itself for yet another disastrous
gambit in the volatile Middle East.
The
temporary freeze on the military option by the new
intelligence report has nested within it its exact
opposite, and may be calculated as part and parcel
of a roundabout way of dealing with Iran's
"nuclear menace". This is, indeed, a menacing
development. Notes 1. Debunking the Iran nuclear
mythmakers Asia Times Online, January
25, 2007 and Iran, nuclear challenges
The Iranian Journal Of International Affaris,
Spring, 2007. 2. Realism, not idealism,
Harvard International Review, May 2007.
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