Are Iranians marching in lock-step toward developing an atomic bomb? There are plenty of voices within Iran, including at the highest level, advocating caution or even a suspension of uranium enrichment. This idea should be encouraged, as it would comply with UN resolutions and undercut the nuclear myth makers in the US. Jan 25, 2006
By Kaveh L Afrasiabi The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has requested that Iran suspend its uranium enrichment and reprocessing activities as a "confidence-building measure", in light of Iran's 18 years of non-transparency. Tehran now faces two paths: either heed this call or face tougher sanctions and, worse, the possibility of war.
Increasingly, the voices of dissent in Iran on the nation's nuclear policy are getting louder and louder, reflecting a growing disenchantment with the confrontational policies of President
Mahmud Ahmadinejad, which according to many Iranian pundits have put vital national-security interests at risk.
"It is starting to look like a real tragedy," a Tehran political-science professor told the author, adding, "An inexperienced mayor [of Tehran] with no previous international exposure was put at the helm, and he brought in his aides who were equally novices in the realm of international politics, at a critical time in Iran's foreign relations. The result has been near-disastrous. But, hopefully, other leaders will put a stop to this nonsense."
That hope is based on the fact that the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Seyed Ali Khamenei, has made known his displeasure with Ahmadinejad's hardline politics through an editorial in the newspaper Jomhuri Eslami, which has called on the president to stay out of the nuclear issue.
This sentiment has been reflected by another newspaper, Kargozaran, associated with the technocratic elite, some of whom, such as Ali Larijani, the head of powerful Supreme National Security Council, proposed a temporary freeze early last year (see
Sideshows on Iran's frogmarch to the UN, Asia Times Online, February 7, 2006).
What would a temporary suspension achieve? The answer is: it would satisfy, albeit temporarily, the United Nations Security Council's demand, reflected in Resolutions 1696 and 1737, for a halt to the enrichment activities, given the fact that these resolutions refer to the IAEA resolutions that requested these suspensions as a "non-legally binding" and "voluntary" measure.
In other words, no matter how insistent the United States and its European allies are on a permanent suspension, there is nothing in either the UN resolutions and/or the IAEA resolutions that would endorse their unreasonable demand, which lacks a legal basis. Also, a one-year suspension would deflect the US military threat and prevent "lame duck" US President George W Bush from initiating military action against Iran.
Since 2003, Iranian officials have admitted that their previous declarations to the IAEA were inaccurate and have promised to take "corrective steps" to redeem the past shortcomings, a promise they have executed in good faith through increased transparency, IAEA access to military sites, and a nearly two-year suspension of the enrichment program as per the terms of the so-called Paris Agreement (for more on the collapse of the agreement, see
Myth of the EU olive branch, August 30, 2005).
Today, a re-suspension of the enrichment program would fit in the framework of those "corrective measures" and create the space for negotiations and long-term agreements, not to mention averting the crisis and putting a stop to the collateral damage caused by sanctions and the threat of war that have scared away foreign investors, caused capital flight, and put the nation's economic projects in jeopardy.
Otherwise, the present trend toward the international isolation of Iran will continue, in light of the statement of European Union foreign ministers in Brussels this week that vowed to apply the Iran sanctions and "if necessary" to "go further than a UN list in targeting those linked to Tehran's nuclear work".
Not only that: in the absence of an Iranian compromise that would at least partially satisfy the Security Council, the pressure on Russia to curtail its nuclear cooperation with Iran further and, at a minimum, to withhold the delivery of nuclear fuel to Iran will undoubtedly intensify. In fact, today in Iran there are few if any officials or experts who are optimistic that the Russian-built power plant in Bushehr will ever become operational as long as the nuclear standoff continues.
One of the few, apparently, is the head of Iran's Atomic Energy Agency, Gholamreza Aghazadeh, who optimistically, and one might add rather naively, stated that the Russian delivery of nuclear fuel "will materialize in December".
Ironically, in the same breath Aghazadeh admitted that "today in the world there is a global consensus against Iran that includes even China and Russia and their 'red line' is the suspension of our activities". In a clue to the growing inter-elite rift on the nuclear policy, Aghazadeh stated:
Unfortunately some officials in the country were saying, "Aghazadeh, we were living our lives, why did you ruin everything?" One of the officials would say: "We have already experienced war, so why should we face another war?" - and all this at a time when some of the members of the nuclear negotiation team did not have much belief in the nature of the nuclear activities and the nationalist pride.
Another official of the Iranian atomic-energy organization, Mohammad Saidi, who has routinely told the Iranian press that any suspension of enrichment activities would be a "national 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 intelligence, John Negroponte, last February that Iran had not "produced or acquired the necessary fissile material for nuclear weapons", focusing instead on Negroponte's other statement that Iran would be capable of producing nuclear weapons within a decade.
But, of course, any country with mastery of the nuclear-fuel cycle has such a capability, as Japan's leaders have recently boasted publicly. The question is, has Iran put forth sufficient objective guarantees to ensure the low ceilings on uranium enrichment, and the answer is a definite yes. Iran has put forth a litany of initiatives with respect to robust IAEA monitoring of the enrichment cycle and immediate conversion of enriched uranium to fuel rods, which needs serious scrutiny by the international community.
Another question: Has Iran provided sufficient clarifications regarding its peaceful nuclear intentions? Again the answer, in lieu of a decree, or
fatwa , by Iran's Supreme Leader, attached to Iran's response to the international incentive package, is affirmative. In a recent article in the Los Angeles Times, Iran's representative to the UN labored both points, reaffirming that Iran has no nuclear-weapons intentions.
Insight from the field of international relations is called for here. Robert Jervis has noted what happens when policymakers assimilate "incoming information to their existing beliefs ... People see evidence as less ambiguous than it is, think that their views are steadily being confirmed, and so feel justified in holding to them firmly." [2]
Interestingly, US government officials have supported the IAEA's finding on the foreign source of Iranian equipment that contained traces of highly enriched uranium, and some of them have told Arms Control Today that "the isotopic composition of the recently discovered particles appears similar to other particles that agency inspectors previously found at other sites in Iran. Those particles originated from imported enrichment-related equipment." [3]
Unfortunately, the malady of self-serving hypotheses is not exclusive to the Americans and has infected the Europeans as well. Case in point: a German author favoring sanctions bases his argument on Iran's "as-yet-undiscovered secret nuclear-weapon program". [4] But can we really exclude the possibility that there is no such program in existence, seeing how the virtually identical certainty about Iraq's intentions caused one of the worst Western policy blunders in the modern era? In hindsight, shouldn't Western experts and officials start paying some attention to Iran's non-proliferation declarations, instead of dismissing them as a ruse, as Allison has done in his book on nuclear terrorism?
This author in his several years of interaction with Iranian policymakers and foreign-policy experts has never once detected any evidence that would corroborate the Western pundits' claim that Iran is seeking a nuclear deterrent capability and, in fact, can recount several intimate conversations when important officials involved with national-security issues emphasized the "spiraling effect" of an Iranian nuclearization in the Persian Gulf region that would tax the Iranian economy and harm the country's long-term national-security calculus.
But, alas, the Western nuclear myth makers are too busy protecting their vested institutional interests by recycling their flimsy truth paradigm on Iran to bother themselves with such minor details.
Notes1. "In large measure, Iran's leaders seek nuclear weapons to deter a US attack." Quoted from Michael McFaul, Abbas Milani and Larry Diamond, "A win-win US strategy for dealing with Iran", Washington Quarterly, Vol 30, No 1 (Winter 2006-07). The authors dispense with any empirical proof for their allegation that Iran is pursuing a nuclear-weapon program and, what is more, contradict themselves when calling for "a verifiable and indefinite suspension of all enrichment activities" and, simultaneously, for a "limited and temporary suspension". Worse, their justification of serious sanctions on Iran in the absence of Iran's compliance with suspension demands makes their pretensions of objectivity ring hollow.
2. Robert Jervis, "Deterrence and perception", International Security, Vol 7, No 3 (Winter 1982-83), p 21.
3. Arms Control Today, July/August 2006, p 31.
4. Peter Rudolph, "Sanctions against Iran: Options, problems, perspectives", Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik Comments 37, German Institute for International and Security Affairs, September 2005, p 3.
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. Copyright 2007 Asia Times Online Ltd.
The prospect of the seemingly inevitable war against Iran is no less than terrifying. That the war has already started, with Special Forces and CIA operations on-going in that country, twenty-plus thousand more troops on the way to Iraq, the kidnapping of Iranian envoys in Iraq, our funding of opposition groups, and the arrival of second carrier group, is clear. We all know this will be disastrous, but Congress is doomed to offer only rhetorical resistance. The Doubleduh-Cheney Gang will have its way. It listens to nobody and really doesn't care about opposition. It marches to a drum that shuts out any other sound.