AZG Armenian Daily #167, 02/09/2006

World press

THE IRANIAN `CRISIS’

The United Nations Security Council deadline for Iran to stop
producing enriched uranium expires on 31 August, and UN
Secretary-General Kofi Annnan arrives in Tehran on 2
September. Washington demands UN sanctions against Iran if it doesn’t
stop, and hints at air strikes against Iranian nuclear installations
if sanctions don’t happen or don’t work. Welcome to the crisis.

The media love a crisis, but this one seriously lacks credibility. In
June John Negroponte, US Director of National Intelligence, told the
BBC that Iran could have a nuclear bomb ready between 2010 and
2015. But he said "could", not "will", and only in five or ten years’
time. So why are we having a crisis this autumn?

The US government’s explanation is that President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad
threatened in May to "wipe Israel off the map," and that nuclear
weapons are the way he plans to do it. (Any that are left over would
presumably be given to terrorists.) As proof of Iran’s evil ambitions,
it points to the fact, revealed in 2003, that Iran had been concealing
some parts of its so-called peaceful nuclear energy programme from the
International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) for eighteen years.

But there are a number of holes in this narrative, and the first is
that Ahmedinejad never said he wanted to "wipe Israel off the map."
This is a strange and perhaps deliberate mistranslation of his actual
words, a direct quote from the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the
font of all wisdom in revolutionary Iran, who said some twenty years
ago that "this regime occupying Jerusalem (i.e. Israel) must vanish
from the page of time."

It was a statement about the future (possibly the quite far future) as
ordained by God. It was NOT a threat to destroy Israel. Attacking
Israel has never been Iranian policy, and a few days later the man who
really runs Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, publicly stated that Iran
"will not commit aggression against any nation." While Ahmadinejad
continues to say nasty things about Israel, he too has explicitly
rejected accusations that Iran plans to attack it.

Of course it doesn’t. Israel has had its unacknowledged nuclear
weapons targeted on Iran since Ahmadinejad was a small boy. Even if
Iran were eventually to get some too, it could not realistically hope
to catch up with Israel’s hundreds of weapons and sophisticated
delivery vehicles. (Israel can strike Iran with aircraft, with
ballistic missiles, and possibly with Harpoon missiles fired from its
German-built Dolphin-class submarines and refitted to carry nuclear
warheads.)

If Iran doesn’t have a serious nuclear weapons programme, why did it
hide two of its nuclear facilities from the IAEA for eighteen years?
Eighteen years before 2003 was 1987, at the height of Saddam Hussein’s
US-backed war against Iran, with Iraqi missiles falling daily on
Iranian cities. They had conventional explosive warheads, but the
Iranians suspected (rightly, at that time) that Saddam was working on
nuclear weapons as well.

So the Iranians probably decided to revive the Shah’s old nuclear
weapons programme, and hid the plans for the new facilities to keep
them off Saddam’s target list and to avoid an early confrontation with
the IAEA. Then the war ended, and work on Iranian nuclear weapons
stopped too, at the latest after UN inspectors dismantled Saddam’s
nuclear programme in the early 1990s. We can be sure of this because
Iran would have had nuclear weapons long ago if it had wanted them
badly enough: it doesn’t take over eighteen years for a country with
Iran’s resources.

The undeclared nuclear facilities remained secret because it was
embarrassing to admit that Iran had concealed them, but no great
effort went into finishing them. (In fact, President Ahmadinejad
finally opened one of them, the heavy water facility at Arak, only
this month.) But the fact that Iran hid them for so long is the only
reason that anybody has for doubting the legitimacy of its current
actions, since it is quite legal for a signatory of the Nuclear
Non-Proliferation Treaty to develop the technologies and facilities
for enriching nuclear fuels for power plants.

Iran probably does now intend to work steadily towards a "threshold"
nuclear capability (the ability to break out of the NPT and build
nuclear weapons very rapidly if necessary) because it is surrounded by
nuclear weapons powers: India and Pakistan to the east, the Russians
to the north, Israel to the west, and US forces on both its western
and eastern borders in Iraq and Afghanistan. But a threshold nuclear
capability is still perfectly legal, and many countries that have
signed the NPT have achieved it already.

Iran’s actions are not worth a real crisis, and the situation is
certainly not very urgent. Iran’s reply to the Security Council
offered further negotiations on the issue, though it will not agree to
stop enriching uranium as a precondition for talks. In these
circumstances, neither Russia or China, two veto-holding powers, will
vote to impose serious sanctions on Iran, nor will a number of the
non-permanent members of the Security Council. So if the Bush
administration truly believes that this is important and urgent, it
will have to act alone and outside the law.

Would it really do such a foolish thing again after the Iraq fiasco?
Unfortunately, it might.

By Gwynne Dyer