False bells on Iran's nuclear
program By Kaveh L Afrasiabi
Confusion over an assessment of Iran's
nuclear program by the Rand Corporation in the
past week perfectly illustrates the quagmire that
anyone has to contend with when sifting through
bias on media reports.
When the
Republican-leaning New York Post says history may
well mark United States President Barack Obama "as
the leader who let Iran get the bomb - and so
doomed the Middle East to a new Dark Age", it
based its assertion on a report it attributed to
Rand Corporation analyst Gregory Jones.
"Using the latest data from the
International Atomic Energy Agency, he recently
concluded that, if Iran's centrifuges continue
to produce enriched uranium at current capacity,
the regime will have 90% of the 20 kilograms it
needs to produce a nuclear weapon within two
months - certainly by summer's end," the Post
said in an opinion piece. [1]
The Post
report was at least an accurate reflection of Jones'
calculations in a report
dated June 2, but inaccurately reported that it
was published by the Rand Corporation, when it was
in fact from the Non-proliferation Policy
Education Center. [2] Jones has written for Rand,
but his last report for the non-profit policy and
research think-tank was published in 2009.
Yet the New York Post was not alone. A
deluge of commentaries took it at face value that
Rand was alleging with iron-clad certainty that
Iran was "two months away from making nuclear
bombs". Media sources who attributed the report to
Rand included Israel's Ynetnews, the Daily Mail in
the United Kingdom, the Weekly Standard and
American Thinker, the latter under the headline,
"RAND Corp: Iran 8 weeks from the Bomb". [3]
The Rand Corporation's own report,
Iran's Nuclear Future: Critical US Policy
Choices, financed by the US Air Force and
published on June 7, contained no such timetable
and is about policy alternatives for the United
States and urges greater engagement. [4]
The study's lead author Lynn E Davis, a
senior political scientist at Rand, summed up the
report in a statement saying, "The challenge for
the United States is to influence how the Iranian
leadership pursues [national security] interests,
for they could provide reasons for acquiring
nuclear weapons."
For
all it is worth, the
Rand report failed to mention that the US
intelligence community has yet to revise its
December 2009 finding that Iran as of early 2003
has stopped its nuclear weapon program. Nor does
it mention that the IAEA despite its expressed
concerns about the "possible military dimension"
of Iran's nuclear activities has repeatedly stated
that after extensive inspections it has found "no
evidence of diversion of declared nuclear
material".
Close scrutiny of the study
shows repeated references to "considerable
uncertainties" regarding Iran's nuclear program
and, on page 14, it states categorically that
"Iran is likely in the near to medium term to
strive to stay within the bounds of international
norms and laws established by the NPT [nuclear
Non-Proliferation Treaty], while continuing with
uranium enrichment and warhead experimentation."
This is hardly an affirmation of an
Iranian march toward nuclear weapons, unless the
scope of outside inspections of Iran's nuclear
activities by the International Atomic Energy
Agency (IAEA) is considered irrelevant. The IAEA's
surveillance cameras at Tehran's enrichment
facility in Natanz can easily detect any diversion
of nuclear material.
A report by
investigative journalist Seymour Hersh titled
"Iran And The Bomb - How Real is the Nuclear
Threat?" and published in the June 6 issue of The New
Yorker magazine quotes former IAEA director
general Mohammad ElBaradei as saying he didn't see
"a shred of evidence" in 12 years in charge to
suggest Iran is building nuclear-weapons
facilities and using enriched materials.
"I don’t believe Iran is a clear and
present danger. All I see is the hype about the
threat posed by Iran," ElBaradei, a likely
candidate for future Egyptian president, told
Hersh in the interview. An abstract of Hersh's
piece says:
There’s a large body of evidence,
however, including some of America’s most highly
classified intelligence assessments, suggesting
that the U.S. could be in danger of repeating a
mistake similar to the one made with Saddam
Hussein’s Iraq eight years ago - allowing
anxieties about the policies of a tyrannical
regime to distort our estimates of the state’s
military capacities and intentions. The two most
recent National Intelligence Estimates (N.I.E.s)
on Iranian nuclear progress have stated that
there is no conclusive evidence that Iran has
made any effort to build the bomb since 2003.
Yet Iran is heavily invested in nuclear
technology. In the past four years, it has
tripled the number of centrifuges in operation
at its main enrichment facility at Natanz, which
is buried deep underground.
International Atomic Energy Agency
(IAEA) inspectors have expressed frustration
with Iran’s level of cooperation, but have been
unable to find any evidence suggesting that
enriched uranium has been diverted to an illicit
weapons program. [5]
Such frustration
was in evidence on Monday when Yukiya Amano,
ElBaradei's successor at the global nuclear
watchdog, told the IAEA board the agency had
acquired new "information related to possible past
or current undisclosed nuclear related activities
that seem to point to the existence of possible
military dimensions to Iran's nuclear program".
The disclosure of new information came as
Iran announced it would enrich nuclear fuel at an
underground facility whose function had been
secret until 2009, boosting its production of
enriched uranium in spite of UN sanctions over its
refusal to halt the enrichment program, according
to a report in the Wall Street Journal.
It
is ironic, albeit understandable from the prism of
the US Air Force, which is in competition with
other branches of the US military and has a vested
interest in promoting itself by getting ahead in
the "war-games", that the Rand report on Iran's
nuclear program pays scant attention to the actual
program and, instead, focuses on various potential
scenarios and the policy implications for the US,
Israel, and Iran's neighbors in Persian Gulf.
Although maintaining that "different
future Iranian nuclear postures are possible", it
nonetheless takes for granted Iran's evolution of
a nuclear weapons program that allegedly could be
either "virtual", ie fully developed short of
building the actual bombs", or "ambiguous" or
"declared". The reason for the multiple authors'
collective certainty that Iran is acquiring a
nuclear weapon capability is that "Iran's national
security interest could be served by nuclear
weapons".
Not so, and in fact the Rand
study itself provides several clues that
contradict its abstract generalization on Iran's
national security interests, such as the
implication of Iran's Arab neighbors being spurred
to emulate Iran and build their own bombs and thus
hurl the oil region into a costly nuclear arms
race, to US playing nuclear shield for the
supposedly vulnerable Gulf Cooperation Council
(GCC) states indefinitely, etc. As the authors
concede, "expanded US conventional activities
could be counterproductive" and "heighten Iranian
threat perception."
In addition to a
distorted understanding of Iran's national
security interests and priorities, the report also
has a distorted view of how Iran's neighbors view
the Iranian nuclear threat, claiming that none of
the Gulf Cooperation States (GCC) states support
"an approach that seeks to reduce the threat posed
to Iran".
In fact, the myth of a
monolithic GCC bloc with a unified voice on Iran
needs debunking, and following the report's own
line of argument, the GCC states should logically
support a more congenial security environment with
reduced risks for Iran that could, in turn, keep
Iran's nuclear potential just that; potential
rather than actual.
Interestingly, the
Rand report's release coincided with a Washington
conference on the changing Middle East and future
of US-Iran relations on Tuesday, featuring the
former head of US Central Command, Admiral James
Fallon, who told the audience that there was very
little chance of any US and or Israeli strike on
Iran and that the US and Iran should pursue the
path of comprehensive dialogue and engagement in
light of their shared concerns in the region.
Unfortunately, instead of giving coverage
to such voices of reason, the US media and others
opted to give prominent and erroneous billing of
alarming new information about Iran's nuclear
program; yet another example of Chomskyan
"manufacturing consent".
Kaveh L Afrasiabi, PhD, is
the author of After Khomeini: New Directions
in Iran's Foreign Policy (Westview Press) . For
his Wikipedia entry, click here.
He is author of Reading
In Iran Foreign Policy After September 11
(BookSurge Publishing , October 23, 2008) and his
latest book, Looking
for rights at Harvard, is now available.
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