COMMENT Kissinger's foggy lens on Iran
By Kaveh L Afrasiabi
Henry Kissinger has thrown his shoulder behind the so-called "push-back"
strategy being applied to the new US National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on
Iran's nuclear program. Specifically, he's even given hawks in the lame-duck
George W Bush administration a helping hand in countering the backlash sparked
by the NIE's most inconvenient finding - that Iran is not currently pursuing a
nuclear weapons program.
Despite the decades which have passed since he served in the Richard Nixon and
Gerald Ford administrations, former US secretary of state Kissinger is still
considered one of the most prescient US observers of global affairs. His recent
opinion pieces published in The Washington Post go a long way in fanning
the
flames of a perceived Iranian nuclear threat - at least at the level of
American public opinion - now that much of the fear has been extinguished by
the NIE's findings.
In his opinion column titled "Misreading the Iran report, why spying and
policymaking don't mix," [1] Kissinger refers to the various aspects of the
still-confidential NIE report that, according to wire reports, is some 140
pages long and has had only several pages of its conclusions released to the
public.
Clearly, Kissinger is much more than a former official or present-day White
House consultant. He wields tremendous influence on Washington's foreign
decision-making in light of his long track record within the American foreign
policy machine. His privileged access to the entire NIE report allows Kissinger
to avoid what he refers to as "misinterpretations" and insist that the report
is in broad agreement with the main conclusions of the previous US intelligence
reports on Iran.
According to Kissinger, the 2007 NIE report does not actually contradict, but
rather confirms, the 2005 report that stated with confidence that Iran was
actively pursuing nuclear weapons. The former report "holds that Iran may be
able to produce enough highly enriched uranium for a nuclear weapon by the end
of 2009 and, with increasing confidence, more warheads by the period 2010 to
2015".
Relying on both the NIE reports, Kissinger then provides his supposedly novel
insight: "If my analysis is correct, we could be witnessing not a halt of the
Iranian weapons program - as the NIE asserts - but a subtle, ultimately more
dangerous, version of it that will phase in the warhead when fissile material
production has matured." But doesn't this contradict his earlier statement that
that two of the three main components of the nuclear weapons program have not
been halted in Iran?
This is, in fact, so typical of Kissinger. He's long made a virtue out of
rehashing old ideas and assumptions as refreshingly new simply through
linguistic acrobatics intermixed with calibrated obfuscation. Such rhetoric is
swathed in additional, artificial layers of semantic ambiguity and "double
talk". Worse, Kissinger's trademark has long been to simultaneously embrace
contradictory ideas and yet escape serious scrutiny in a thick fog of semantic
wordplay.
As a result, Kissinger can be everything to everyone these days. He's at once
an avid advocate of serious disarmament and also a powerful voice for a "strong
American military" and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's reliance on its
nuclear arsenal. He's an enthusiastic supporter of various arms limitation
treaties and also a reasonable voice for their reconsideration. He's a
proponent of post-Cold War, post-hegemonic America and, equally, a principal
architect of American primacy in the new global milieu (not to overlook his own
singular contributions to the thesis of a "new Cold War" in the Middle East in
recent publications in the Arab press). It's nothing new: during the 1970s,
Kissinger went to Baghdad and promised that the US would do everything possible
"to reduce Israel's size", when, in fact, he never even waved a finger in that
direction.
Kissinger now writes opinion columns about the perils of nuclear weapons
without ever repudiating his earlier views. For example, in 1957, he wrote that
"with proper tactics, nuclear war need not be as destructive as it appears".
Of course, none of this is particularly surprising. In declassified US
government documents from 1969, Kissinger voices vehement criticisms on US
intelligent estimates on the military threats posed by the Soviet Union. At the
time he attributed much more bellicose intentions and "strategic perspectives"
to Moscow than proved to be the case. It's all part of a consistent pattern of
this old Cold Warrior who continues to view the new Middle East realities
through the same Manichaeanism: polarized Cold War lenses. It is no surprise
that today, as in the past, Kissinger demonstrates an uncanny ability to
present contrary ideas with ease.
In his Washington Post opinion piece Kissinger accepts as verified fact the
2007 NIE's claim that Iran halted a secret nuclear weapons program in 2003, in
response to the US's post-September 11, 2001, military offensives in the
region. The scenario poses the question that, after Saddam Hussein's downfall,
is it unreasonable to assume that the ayatollahs concluded that restraint had
become imperative?
Just a few lines further, Kissinger "conjectures" that Iran continues on the
relentless path of nuclear weapons buildup following the prescriptions of
deterrence with regard to "American regional aspirations". The poor logic of
assuming that Iran stopped thinking about US deterrence in the very year when
the US invaded Iran's neighbor, escapes Kissinger. But, does that mean "nuclear
deterrent"?
The answer is a resounding "no" for a variety of reasons. Among them is the
fact that Iran is not blind to the overwhelming fire power of the US, as well
as the fact that short of having a "second strike capability" it is rather
futile to think of a nuclear shield against the American threat. The ability to
have such capability, on the other hand, is beyond the means and resources of
Iran, which has little to worry about from other countries in the region in any
case. For example, Israel is out of area and does not represent a locked-down
hostile power as is the case with Israel-Arab conflict, and Pakistan's nuclear
arsenal is entirely directed against its traditional foe, India, and will be so
for the foreseeable future.
Furthermore, a number of Iran's "near neighbors" such as Ukraine and Kazakhstan
have "de-nuclearized" themselves, which is equally beneficial when seen through
the prism of Iran's national security calculations. Besides, Iran considers
itself a revisionist regional and global power of a different kind. Iran's
leadership envisions a nation that pioneers "ethical foreign policy" and seeks
a revised and more just global order, away from the present ossified
hierarchies, including the nuclear hierarchy that, in the words of Iran's
president, reflects a past era.
The biggest flaw in Kissinger's "push-back" is its defective understanding of
the nature and purpose of Iranian power. He, along with a host of other
American pundits, misreads Iran's might as a mirror-image of American power on
a reduced scale. As a result, all the vices attributed to US power, such as
hegemony and domination, are recycled with respect to Iran, albeit with the
caveat that it is also a sectarian Shi'ite power. Clearly, the purveyors of
"push-back" do not want to emphasize the NIE findings that undermine their
charges of gross misconduct on Iran's part.
What is also troubling is Kissinger's advice that US officials and policymakers
stop using intelligence reports as public justifications. This represents a
disservice to the America where the rules of democracy mandate the perpetual
public justification of the government's domestic and foreign policies. This is
especially true now, at a time when the false rationalizations for the invasion
of Iraq in 2003 brought to light the serious pitfalls of incorrect
intelligence. It is often a deciding factor in how history renders war or
peace.
The history of the Arab-Israeli conflict in the Middle East is a solid example
of how faulty intelligence has fueled war after war. At times, this has been
done deliberately. For example, in 1990 when the US reportedly did not take the
threat of Iraq's invasion of Kuwait seriously, and in retrospect may have done
so as part of a careful scenario for action. Another example is a conflict
inseparable from Kissinger: Vietnam and the secret US military incursions into
Laos and Cambodia that occurred under his watch. Historian Howard Zinn has
shown that despite the official US government's denial, its sensitivity to
"public opinion" actually played a large role in ending the US military
presence in Vietnam. [2]
Kissinger's commentary shows that he is not only out of step with America, but
also with the emerging and complex realities of the Middle East. It's time for
Henry Kissinger to stop viewing the world through a Cold War lens.
Notes 1. Henry Kissinger,
Misreding the Iran report Washington Post, December 13, 2007.
2. Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States. Harper
Perennial (April 1, 2003).
Kaveh L Afrasiabi, PhD, is the author of After Khomeini: New
Directions in Iran's Foreign Policy (Westview Press) and co-author of
"Negotiating Iran's Nuclear Populism", Brown Journal of World Affairs, Volume
XII, Issue 2, Summer 2005, with Mustafa Kibaroglu. He also wrote "Keeping
Iran's nuclear potential latent", Harvard International Review, and is author
of
Iran's Nuclear Program: Debating Facts Versus Fiction.
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