http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/5387
Playing Games with Iran
William O. Beeman | July 21, 2008
Editor: John Feffer
Foreign Policy In Focus www.fpif.org
By now the structure of the U.S. game with Iran is clear. In the first move, the United States and Iran make some small progress toward improved relations. In the counter move, hardliners in the United States and Israel launch attacks against Iran in order to sabotage these improving relations.
In the latest iteration of this game, the U.S. State Department has made an interesting gambit. It announced that Undersecretary of State William Burns would sit at the table on July 20 as members of the European Union entered into talks with Iran over its nuclear program. At the same time, the United States has been reported to be considering opening a formal American Interests Section in Tehran. These two actions will be the first serious public diplomatic activities between the two nations in nearly three decades. (Three earlier meetings in Baghdad between U.S. Iraqi Envoy Ryan Crocker and Iranian Ambassador to Iraq Hassan Kazemi-Qomi focused on security in Iraq).
The counter-moves came fast and furious. First, former UN ambassador and prominent neoconservative John Bolton launched a jeremiad against the U.S. government on July 15 in the Wall Street Journal. Criticizing the administration for failing to act militarily against Iran, Bolton placed his hopes on Israel to carry out the military attack that he fervently desires. “Instead of debating how much longer to continue five years of failed diplomacy, we should be intensively considering what cooperation the U.S. will extend to Israel before, during and after a strike on Iran,” he wrote.
Following closely on Bolton’s editorial, The New York Times printed another attack against Iran on Friday, July 18, just one day before the opening of the European talks, by Benny Morris, an historian at Ben-Gurion University. Like Bolton, Morris presents an Iranian nuclear weapons program as an established fact, implies that Iran would make a first-strike attack on Israel, and thus justifies pre-emptive military action on Israel’s part.
Both Bolton and Morris base their attacks on false premises. Diplomatic dealings with Iran have, in fact, succeeded on the few occasions they have been tried. There is no proof anywhere that Iran actually has a nuclear weapons program at present, a fact underscored by the National Intelligence Estimate of December 2007. In fact, Iran’s nuclear experiments are still at a primitive level, far from any possibility of manufacturing weapons. Iran has never directly threatened Israel and is not likely considering a first strike against Israel.
Such attacks have followed every minuscule improvement in U.S-Iranian relations during the Bush administration. Every first move in a warming trend – such as Iranian support for the U.S. war against the Taliban in Afghanistan, U.S. aid to Iran during the Bam earthquake in 2003, and Iran’s formal offer to enter into comprehensive negotiations with the United States in 2003 – has been followed by sharp criticism from both inside and outside of the Brush administration. Detractors have countered these advances with accusations of Iranian support for Hezbullah and Hamas, and support for “special groups” attacking U.S. forces in Iraq. True to form, the U.S. military announced the launching of a new crackdown on weapons smuggling from Iran to coincide with the Saturday talks,
None of these accusations, along with the Iranian weapons program and plot to launch a first-strike against Israel, has ever been proven. The most memorable of these attacks was the labeling of Iran as part of the “Axis of Evil” in President George Bush’s 2002 State of the Union Address, just as Iran’s military aid to the United States was beginning to create a climate of trust between the two nations.
Bolton, Morris, and their ilk may represent the last, weak gasp of the hawks who would embroil the United States and Israel in a disastrous confrontation with Iran. Indeed, for the time being, it seems that cooler heads are prevailing. Though Western commentators described the talks at the one-shot Saturday meeting negatively as a “deadlock,” William Burns’ official presence at the table was an important benchmark. Iran did not accept the Western proposals on the spot, but was given two weeks to respond. The Iranians appeared pleased. Saeed Jalili, Iran’s chief negotiator, called the negotiating process a “very beautiful endeavor.”
Despite this progress, the power of the American and Israeli extremists should not be underestimated. They still have the ear of Vice President Dick Cheney and a dwindling coterie of his supporters in the Department of Defense. A group of Israeli politicians, including Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak and Israeli Defense Force Chief of Staff Gaby Ashkenazi, have arrived in Washington, according to Mother Jones magazine, presumably to convince the Bush administration to allow them to carry out their attack.
Hostile rhetoric against Iran also plays into the U.S. electoral process. For American politicians, Iran is a universal bogeyman, useful in an election year as a device to show elected officials as tough on foreign miscreants. Indeed, since the Iranian Revolution U.S.-Iranian relations have been a centerpiece in election debates. Conspiracy theorists believe fervently that the Republican Party engineered an “October Surprise” in 1980 with Iranian officials – delaying the release of the American Hostages until after the U.S. Presidential election – and thus denied Jimmy Carter a second term. The purported event -- true or not -- has supplied a permanent political term for American elections.
In every presidential election since, U.S.-Iranian relations have been featured in presidential debates and campaign ads, with universal negativity toward Iran. This year is no exception with Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and John McCain all expressing hostile attitudes toward Iran. And this year’s October Surprise is the rumor that the Bush administration will bomb Iran just before the election to give a boost to John McCain. Unless the Israeli hawks get there first.
Foreign Policy In Focus (www.fpif.org) contributor William O. Beeman is professor and chair of the department of anthropology at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. He is president of the Middle East Section of the American Anthropological Association and the author, most recently, of The "Great Satan" vs. the "Mad Mullahs": How the United States and Iran Demonize Each Other.
Monday, July 21, 2008
Sunday, July 20, 2008
William O. Beeman--Bolton Appears to Advocate for Israeli Strike on Iran
Bolton Appears to Advocate for Israeli Strike on Iran
William O. Beeman
The drums of war against Iran are sounding again. Former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton has called for regime change in Iran in an editorial for the Wall Street Journal on Tuesday, July 15, 2008. The editorial appears to be aimed at facilitating an Israeli attack on Iran.
For Ambassador Bolton, virtually the last of the unrepentant neoconservatives, hope of effecting regime change in Iran springs eternal. But his editorial is not just a wish. It is designed to influence the Bush administration to allow Israel to proceed with a bombing of Iranian nuclear facilities—an action they have been champing at the bit to carry out for some time. Ambassador Bolton writes: “instead of debating how much longer to continue five years of failed diplomacy, we should be intensively considering what cooperation the U.S. will extend to Israel before, during and after a strike on Iran.”
The magazine Mother Jones reported on July 10 that “a parade of high level Israeli officials are on their way to the White House over the next two weeks to discuss Iran policy.” These include Israeli Defense Minister, Ehud Barak and Israeli Defense Force Chief of Staff Gaby Ashkenazi. One of the points of discussion will undoubtedly be obtaining the go-ahead for an Israeli military attack, just as was sought unsuccessfully more than a year and a half ago in as reported by the Daily Telegraph of London on February 25 of 2007.
To their credit American military officials remain recalcitrant. The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported on July 8 that Joint Chiefs of Staff Head, Admiral Mike Mullen, traveled to Israel specifically to tell Israeli Defense Force Chief of Staff Gaby Ashkenazi that Israel does not have an American ' green light ' to launch an air strike against Iran's nuclear facilities..
You can see the frustration in Mr. Bolton's rhetoric--excoriating the Bush administration for being pusillanimous. His impatience is palpable. He writes: “. . . consider what comes next for the U.S.: the Bush administration's last six months pursuing its limp diplomatic efforts, plus six months of a new president getting his national security team and policies together. In other words, one more year for Tehran to proceed unhindered to ‘the point of no return.’”
To elevate the heat on Washington, Ambassador Bolton is not above trotting out old information about the Iranian situation long decried as misleading or false. He claims that Iranian nuclear weapons development is an established fact, and hints that Iran is close to making a bomb.
Inconveniently for Ambassador Bolton, there is no proof anywhere that an Iranian nuclear weapons program exits. The National Intelligence Estimate of 2007 declares as much, and a series of hearings before the Committee on Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Subcommittee on Federal Financial Management, Government Information, Federal Services, and International Security on April 24 involved a parade of witnesses who verified the findings of the report. Typical was the testimony of research scientist Dr. Jim Walsh of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who stated: . “The fact that Iran did halt its military weaponization efforts, and that it did so because of changes in the international environment ‘indicates Tehran's decisions are guided by a cost- benefit approach rather than a rush to a weapon irrespective of the political, economic, and military costs.’
Even if Iran somehow did have an active nuclear weapons program, they would still be years away from perfecting even the rudimentary techniques of weapons manufacture. Nuclear scientist Dr. Behrad Nakhai, formerly of the Oakridge Research Laboratories monitors Iran’s nuclear program closely. Having just returned from Iran on July 13, he reported, “Looking carefully at Iran’s nuclear program as it stands at present, it is only reasonable to conclude that Iran’s uranium enrichment efforts have so far been very elementary—effectively just practice runs for the very lowest levels of enrichment.”
Ambassador Bolton has the additional effrontery to call diplomacy "failed" while neglecting to note that the U.S. has engaged in none of it--including a comprehensive 2003 Iranian initiative offering to negotiate all differences between the United States and Iran--which Mr. Bolton presumably had a hand in rejecting..
It is shoddy and cheap for Washington to assert that the diplomacy undertaken by European powers as somehow justifying American frustration with Iran, when we have done nothing, except to host three meetings, in which Ambassador to Iraq, Christopher Crocker hurled invective at the Iranian ambassador in Baghdad.
More and more it is looking like the neoconservative agenda of regime change throughout the Middle East as a means to achieve American and Israeli hegemony in the region is going down in flames. Bolton's editorial is the last gasp of this vampire movement, even as more moderate American and Israeli citizens try to drive a stake through its heart.
William O. Beeman is Professor and Chair of the Department of Anthropology, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN. He is President of the Middle East Section of the American Anthropological Association, and former Director of Middle East Studies at Brown University. His most recent book is The “Great Satan” vs. the “Mad Mullahs”: How the United States and Iran Demonize Each Other, University of Chicago Press.
William O. Beeman
The drums of war against Iran are sounding again. Former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton has called for regime change in Iran in an editorial for the Wall Street Journal on Tuesday, July 15, 2008. The editorial appears to be aimed at facilitating an Israeli attack on Iran.
For Ambassador Bolton, virtually the last of the unrepentant neoconservatives, hope of effecting regime change in Iran springs eternal. But his editorial is not just a wish. It is designed to influence the Bush administration to allow Israel to proceed with a bombing of Iranian nuclear facilities—an action they have been champing at the bit to carry out for some time. Ambassador Bolton writes: “instead of debating how much longer to continue five years of failed diplomacy, we should be intensively considering what cooperation the U.S. will extend to Israel before, during and after a strike on Iran.”
The magazine Mother Jones reported on July 10 that “a parade of high level Israeli officials are on their way to the White House over the next two weeks to discuss Iran policy.” These include Israeli Defense Minister, Ehud Barak and Israeli Defense Force Chief of Staff Gaby Ashkenazi. One of the points of discussion will undoubtedly be obtaining the go-ahead for an Israeli military attack, just as was sought unsuccessfully more than a year and a half ago in as reported by the Daily Telegraph of London on February 25 of 2007.
To their credit American military officials remain recalcitrant. The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported on July 8 that Joint Chiefs of Staff Head, Admiral Mike Mullen, traveled to Israel specifically to tell Israeli Defense Force Chief of Staff Gaby Ashkenazi that Israel does not have an American ' green light ' to launch an air strike against Iran's nuclear facilities..
You can see the frustration in Mr. Bolton's rhetoric--excoriating the Bush administration for being pusillanimous. His impatience is palpable. He writes: “. . . consider what comes next for the U.S.: the Bush administration's last six months pursuing its limp diplomatic efforts, plus six months of a new president getting his national security team and policies together. In other words, one more year for Tehran to proceed unhindered to ‘the point of no return.’”
To elevate the heat on Washington, Ambassador Bolton is not above trotting out old information about the Iranian situation long decried as misleading or false. He claims that Iranian nuclear weapons development is an established fact, and hints that Iran is close to making a bomb.
Inconveniently for Ambassador Bolton, there is no proof anywhere that an Iranian nuclear weapons program exits. The National Intelligence Estimate of 2007 declares as much, and a series of hearings before the Committee on Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Subcommittee on Federal Financial Management, Government Information, Federal Services, and International Security on April 24 involved a parade of witnesses who verified the findings of the report. Typical was the testimony of research scientist Dr. Jim Walsh of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who stated: . “The fact that Iran did halt its military weaponization efforts, and that it did so because of changes in the international environment ‘indicates Tehran's decisions are guided by a cost- benefit approach rather than a rush to a weapon irrespective of the political, economic, and military costs.’
Even if Iran somehow did have an active nuclear weapons program, they would still be years away from perfecting even the rudimentary techniques of weapons manufacture. Nuclear scientist Dr. Behrad Nakhai, formerly of the Oakridge Research Laboratories monitors Iran’s nuclear program closely. Having just returned from Iran on July 13, he reported, “Looking carefully at Iran’s nuclear program as it stands at present, it is only reasonable to conclude that Iran’s uranium enrichment efforts have so far been very elementary—effectively just practice runs for the very lowest levels of enrichment.”
Ambassador Bolton has the additional effrontery to call diplomacy "failed" while neglecting to note that the U.S. has engaged in none of it--including a comprehensive 2003 Iranian initiative offering to negotiate all differences between the United States and Iran--which Mr. Bolton presumably had a hand in rejecting..
It is shoddy and cheap for Washington to assert that the diplomacy undertaken by European powers as somehow justifying American frustration with Iran, when we have done nothing, except to host three meetings, in which Ambassador to Iraq, Christopher Crocker hurled invective at the Iranian ambassador in Baghdad.
More and more it is looking like the neoconservative agenda of regime change throughout the Middle East as a means to achieve American and Israeli hegemony in the region is going down in flames. Bolton's editorial is the last gasp of this vampire movement, even as more moderate American and Israeli citizens try to drive a stake through its heart.
William O. Beeman is Professor and Chair of the Department of Anthropology, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN. He is President of the Middle East Section of the American Anthropological Association, and former Director of Middle East Studies at Brown University. His most recent book is The “Great Satan” vs. the “Mad Mullahs”: How the United States and Iran Demonize Each Other, University of Chicago Press.
Tuesday, July 15, 2008
Behrad Nakhai and William O. Beeman--Iran’s Nuclear Activity: Don’t Believe the Hype (New America Media)
Iran’s Nuclear Activity: Don’t Believe the Hype
New America Media, Commentary, Behrad Nakhai and William O. Beeman , Posted: Jul 16, 2008
Editor's Note: Rumors that Iran is less than a year away from making a nuclear bomb are false and misleading, argue the commentators, who say that there is little relationship between Iran’s current state of low enriched uranium and the production of a nuclear weapon.
Is Iran a year away from making a nuclear bomb?
This is what is being whispered in Washington as a “parade” of Israeli officials comes to Washington in the next two weeks to consult on Iran, and presumably to renew Israel’s request for the Bush administration’s blessing to bomb Iranian nuclear facilities, according to Mother Jones magazine. Visitors will include Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak and Israeli Defense Force Chief of Staff Gaby Ashkenazi. Former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton published an editorial in the Wall Street Journal with the thinly veiled purpose of convincing Bush officials to let Israel launch its attack. He wrote, “The crucial turning point is when Iran masters all the capabilities to weaponize without further external possibility of stopping it.”
Bolton would have the American public believe that this turning point is imminent, and he is buttressed by other neoconservative alarmists. Patrick Clawson, deputy director for research of the conservative Washington Institute for Near East Policy and senior editor of Middle East Quarterly, told Mother Jones on July 10, “It certainly appears from the last [International Atomic Energy Agency] report that Iran is on track to have enough kilos [of low enriched uranium that can be enriched to weapons grade] within a year…. What most people concentrate on is when Iran would have 600 to 700 kilos of its own low enriched uranium, which is enough to make enough highly enriched uranium for a bomb…. If everything works perfectly, [it would take] two months. If everything doesn't work perfectly, a bit longer. The answer would be the space of a few months."
This would be both ominous and convincing if it were true, but it is false and utterly misleading. Unfortunately Clawson, Bolton, and those who make similar predictions know nothing about nuclear engineering. The truth is that there is little relationship between Iran’s current state of low enriched uranium and the production of a nuclear weapon. There are many intervening steps that would take years to accomplish.
Getting from low enriched uranium (LEU) to high enriched uranium (HEU) not only requires enough quality LEU, but also perfectly tuned working machineries that Iran currently lacks. Contrary to Clawson’s assertions, Iran is far from being at that point. The quality of the LEU is also questionable. Moreover, from all indications, Iran's current setup is fragile and prone to breakage. By some reports the Iranian equipment is almost non-usable even for low enrichment purposes.
Iran is engaged in peaceful nuclear research and not nuclear weapons production — a fact re-affirmed by the National Intelligence Estimate of December 2007. However, the program falls short of even low-level enrichment capability. The nation must still pass through a number of technological stages to gain a useful sustained low-level enrichment capability.
Even if another nation were to provide good quality LEU to Iran, Iran does not currently have the required resources to enrich the LEU to HEU. And if another nation were to provide Iran with HEU, Iran does not have the capability to assemble a test bomb, let alone a threatening bomb.
Commentators like Clawson make it appear trivial to assemble a “bomb” once HEU is obtained. In practice, however, handling of such HEU and the ability to assemble a working bomb is not at all trivial. That is why the United States, Russia and other nuclear nations have atomic tests. Once testing begins, the bomb-making process could never proceed unnoticed — even if conducted underground. We should remember that North Korea’s nuclear bomb tests were unsuccessful. This may be one reason they were willing to relinquish their nuclear program.
Finally, even if Iran were to obtain a bomb, it is not clear how they could provide a delivery system for the bomb with their present level of military technology. Iran has been testing conventional missiles — and not very successfully, as was recently seen in their over-hyped “show of strength” on July 10, when missile launches failed, and had to be “Photoshopped” in to the publicity pictures.
A nuclear loaded missile is a vastly different technological accomplishment from a conventional missile. An airplane might be an alternative delivery mechanism, but Iran has no aircraft capable of delivering a sophisticated nuclear weapon.
Looking carefully at Iran’s nuclear program as it stands at present, it is only reasonable to conclude that Iran’s uranium enrichment efforts have so far been very elementary — effectively just practice runs for the very lowest levels of enrichment. In theory, LEU, with the proper technological equipment and skill, could be developed into a weapon. But this is a bit like saying that theoretically carbon could be made into dynamite. In both cases, it is a long way from the raw material to the finished product. Iran’s LEU is currently of no practical use except as a means to learning the enrichment process. And it is certainly no cause whatever for a military attack.
Dr. Behrad Nakhai is a nuclear scientist. He holds a Ph.D. in nuclear engineering from the University of Tennessee. He is currently working as a nuclear engineer performing nuclear safety analysis. He was formerly a research nuclear scientist at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and has also been a faculty member at the Center for Nuclear Studies in Memphis, TN, and the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. He has just returned from Iran.
William O. Beeman is Professor and Chair of the Department of Anthropology, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN. He is President of the Middle East Section of the American Anthropological Association, and former Director of Middle East Studies at Brown University. His most recent book is “The ‘Great Satan’ vs. the ‘Mad Mullahs’: How the United States and Iran Demonize Each Other”, University of Chicago Press.
William O. Beeman--United Nations Resolutions Against Iran have Failed—and for good reason: their basic premise no longer applies
United Nations Resolutions Against Iran have Failed—and for good reason: their basic premise no longer applies
William O. Beeman
The United Nations Security Council Resolution 1696 calling for Iran to suspend nuclear enrichment were passed on July 31, 2006, nearly two years ago. Every sanction and demand placed on Iran since that time has been based on this Resolution and its strengthened re-iteration, Resolution 1737 on December 27.
Clearly after two years the Resolution and its follow-ups have not worked. Iran has not suspended its uranium enrichment activities, and indications this week are that it is not likely to do so in the future. The United States and its reluctant European allies clearly can not put enough pressure on Iran to cause it to abandon what the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, to which Iran (but not Israel, Pakistan or India) is signatory, is its “inalienable right” to peaceful nuclear development. As long as it does not violate Provision One of the NPT, namely the agreement not to develop nuclear weaponry.
Ironically Security Council Resolution 1696 reaffirms the right to peaceful nuclear development. Since this Resolution has failed, it is worth looking at it again to examine its flaws.
It is first essential to understand the purpose of the resolution, which is stated clearly in points one and two of the Resolution in which the Security Council:
1. Calls upon Iran without further delay to take the steps required by the IAEA Board of Governors in its resolution GOV/2006/14, which are essential to build confidence in the exclusively peaceful purpose of its nuclear programme and to resolve outstanding questions,
2. Demands, in this context, that Iran shall suspend all enrichment-related and reprocessing activities, including research and development, to be verified by the IAEA
The IAEA Report on which this resolution was based, GOV/2006/14 was formulated on February 7, 2006, now nearly two and one-half years ago.
What is striking about both the IAEA Report and the UN Resolution is that both call on Iran to suspend its enrichment activities to “build confidence” that Iran is not violating Provision One of the NPT.
However, the world seems to have forgotten that the suspension of uranium enrichment was merely a means to that confidence building, and not an end in itself. The Bush administration now focuses on suspension of enrichment rather than confidence building. Since enrichment of uranium for nuclear fuel is clearly allowed under the NPT, this creates a paradox, and is the principal flaw in the Resolution. No one talked about alternative means of confidence building, though imaginative diplomacy would certainly have been able to craft such a provision that would have been acceptable to Iran.
More importantly, in two and one half years, a lot has taken place. Most notably, the United States National Intelligence Estimate was published in December 2007 in which it is clearly stated that Iran does not have an active nuclear weapons program. The IAEA continually reaffirms this estimate, and both Russia and China are in agreement as well.
If Iran does not have a weapons program, it is not in violation of NPT Provision One. There is no need for the confidence building called for in Resolution 1696, and therefore no need for suspension of Iran’s enrichment program.
The anger and public denial of the NIE on the part of President Bush, Vice-President Cheney and others in the Bush administration results from frustration with this situation. And no wonder, the basic reason for the Security Council Resolution has now been completely gutted. Bush officials spent hours and hours berating, jawboning and cajoling other nations, particularly European Allies, to go along with these Resolutions, and even to implement further sanctions based on them now to no avail.
The deep irony in the situation is that American intelligence itself has vitiated the very reason for these actions.
Iranians see through this charade. For this reason they refuse to relinquish their treaty rights, and have determined to stand up to the United States. They have earned the anger of the Bush administration, but the admiration—often grudging—of much of the rest of the world.
It is certainly time to revisit the original Resolution 1969 to find new ways to guarantee to the world that Iran is in fact not building weapons. Since there is no evidence whatever that they are, this should be easy, if the United States will only stop trying to force Iran into the impossible choice of giving up an inalienable right in order to satisfy a rapacious U.S. administration bent on its destruction. Appeasement cuts both ways.
William O. Beeman is Professor and Chair of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota. He is President of the Middle East Section of the American Anthropological Association. His latest book, The “Great Statan” vs. the “Mad Mullahs”: How the United States and Iran Demonize Each Other was published in April in an updated edition by the University of Chicago Press.
William O. Beeman
The United Nations Security Council Resolution 1696 calling for Iran to suspend nuclear enrichment were passed on July 31, 2006, nearly two years ago. Every sanction and demand placed on Iran since that time has been based on this Resolution and its strengthened re-iteration, Resolution 1737 on December 27.
Clearly after two years the Resolution and its follow-ups have not worked. Iran has not suspended its uranium enrichment activities, and indications this week are that it is not likely to do so in the future. The United States and its reluctant European allies clearly can not put enough pressure on Iran to cause it to abandon what the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, to which Iran (but not Israel, Pakistan or India) is signatory, is its “inalienable right” to peaceful nuclear development. As long as it does not violate Provision One of the NPT, namely the agreement not to develop nuclear weaponry.
Ironically Security Council Resolution 1696 reaffirms the right to peaceful nuclear development. Since this Resolution has failed, it is worth looking at it again to examine its flaws.
It is first essential to understand the purpose of the resolution, which is stated clearly in points one and two of the Resolution in which the Security Council:
1. Calls upon Iran without further delay to take the steps required by the IAEA Board of Governors in its resolution GOV/2006/14, which are essential to build confidence in the exclusively peaceful purpose of its nuclear programme and to resolve outstanding questions,
2. Demands, in this context, that Iran shall suspend all enrichment-related and reprocessing activities, including research and development, to be verified by the IAEA
The IAEA Report on which this resolution was based, GOV/2006/14 was formulated on February 7, 2006, now nearly two and one-half years ago.
What is striking about both the IAEA Report and the UN Resolution is that both call on Iran to suspend its enrichment activities to “build confidence” that Iran is not violating Provision One of the NPT.
However, the world seems to have forgotten that the suspension of uranium enrichment was merely a means to that confidence building, and not an end in itself. The Bush administration now focuses on suspension of enrichment rather than confidence building. Since enrichment of uranium for nuclear fuel is clearly allowed under the NPT, this creates a paradox, and is the principal flaw in the Resolution. No one talked about alternative means of confidence building, though imaginative diplomacy would certainly have been able to craft such a provision that would have been acceptable to Iran.
More importantly, in two and one half years, a lot has taken place. Most notably, the United States National Intelligence Estimate was published in December 2007 in which it is clearly stated that Iran does not have an active nuclear weapons program. The IAEA continually reaffirms this estimate, and both Russia and China are in agreement as well.
If Iran does not have a weapons program, it is not in violation of NPT Provision One. There is no need for the confidence building called for in Resolution 1696, and therefore no need for suspension of Iran’s enrichment program.
The anger and public denial of the NIE on the part of President Bush, Vice-President Cheney and others in the Bush administration results from frustration with this situation. And no wonder, the basic reason for the Security Council Resolution has now been completely gutted. Bush officials spent hours and hours berating, jawboning and cajoling other nations, particularly European Allies, to go along with these Resolutions, and even to implement further sanctions based on them now to no avail.
The deep irony in the situation is that American intelligence itself has vitiated the very reason for these actions.
Iranians see through this charade. For this reason they refuse to relinquish their treaty rights, and have determined to stand up to the United States. They have earned the anger of the Bush administration, but the admiration—often grudging—of much of the rest of the world.
It is certainly time to revisit the original Resolution 1969 to find new ways to guarantee to the world that Iran is in fact not building weapons. Since there is no evidence whatever that they are, this should be easy, if the United States will only stop trying to force Iran into the impossible choice of giving up an inalienable right in order to satisfy a rapacious U.S. administration bent on its destruction. Appeasement cuts both ways.
William O. Beeman is Professor and Chair of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota. He is President of the Middle East Section of the American Anthropological Association. His latest book, The “Great Statan” vs. the “Mad Mullahs”: How the United States and Iran Demonize Each Other was published in April in an updated edition by the University of Chicago Press.
John Bolton calls for Bombing of Iran
Note from William O. Beeman
John Bolton's call for military action in Iran (below) should be blatantly derided by the American public.
For John Bolton hope of effecting regime change in Iran springs eternal. However, my suspicion is that this piece was written to convince the Bush administration to give their blessing to an Israeli attack on Iran. Reportedly this week a passel of Israeli officials are in Washington lobbying hard to get the go-ahead on their military attack. To their credit the Bush officials are recalcitrant. You can see this in Mr. Bolton's rhetoric--excoriating the Bush administration for being pusillanimous. I certainly hope that cooler heads prevail in Washington.
Mr. Bolton is not above citing misleading and utterly false information about the Iranian situation. Of course, he claims that Iranian nuclear weapons development is an established fact when there is still no proof that it exists--including the conveniently ignored NIE Report of 2007 claiming that the weapons program does not exist. He has the gall to call diplomacy "failed" while neglecting to note that the U.S. has engaged in none of it--including the 2003 Iranian initiative, which he presumably had a hand in rejecting..
It is so shoddy and cheap for Washington to claim the diplomacy undertaken by European powers as somehow justifying American frustration with Iran, when we have done nothing, except to host Christopher Crocker hurling invective at the Iranian ambassador in Baghdad--some diplomacy! More and more it is looking like the neoconservative agenda of regime change throughout the Middle East to clear the way for American hegemony in the region is going down in flames. Bolton's editorial is the last gasp of this vampire movement, even as we try to drive a stake through its heart.
Best,
Bill Beeman
University of Minnesota
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121607841801452581.html?mod=opinion_main_commentaries
>
> Wall Street Journal
>
> Israel, Iran and the Bomb
> By JOHN R. BOLTON
> July 15, 2008; Page A19
>
> Iran's test salvo of ballistic missiles last week together with recent threatening rhetoric by commanders of the Islamic Republic's Revolutionary Guards emphasizes how close the Middle East is to a fundamental, in fact an irreversible, turning point.
>
> Tehran's efforts to intimidate the United States and Israel from using military force against its nuclear program, combined with yet another diplomatic charm offensive with the Europeans, are two sides of the same policy coin. The regime is buying the short additional period of time it needs to produce deliverable nuclear weapons, the strategic objective it has been pursuing clandestinely for 20 years.
>
> Between Iran and its long-sought objective, however, a shadow may fall: targeted military action, either Israeli or American. Yes, Iran cannot deliver a nuclear weapon on target today, and perhaps not for several years. Estimates vary widely, and no one knows for sure when it will have a deliverable weapon except the mullahs, and they're not telling. But that is not the key date. Rather, the crucial turning point is when Iran masters all the capabilities to weaponize without further external possibility of stopping it. Then the decision to weaponize, and its timing, is Tehran's alone. We do not know if Iran is at this point, or very near to it. All we do know is that, after five years of failed diplomacy by the EU-3 (Britain, France and Germany), Iran is simply five years closer to nuclear weapons.
>
> And yet, true to form, State Department comments to Congress last week . even as Iran's missiles were ascending . downplayed Iran's nuclear progress, ignoring the cost of failed diplomacy. But the confident assumption that we have years to deal with the problem is high-stakes gambling on a policy that cannot be reversed if it fails. If Iran reaches weaponization before State's jaunty prediction, the Middle East, and indeed global, balance of power changes in potentially catastrophic ways.
>
> And consider what comes next for the U.S.: the Bush administration's last six months pursuing its limp diplomatic efforts, plus six months of a new president getting his national security team and policies together. In other words, one more year for Tehran to proceed unhindered to "the point of no return."
>
> We have almost certainly lost the race between giving "strong incentives" for Iran to abandon its pursuit of nuclear weapons, and its scientific and technological efforts to do just that. Swift, sweeping, effectively enforced sanctions might have made a difference five years ago. No longer. Existing sanctions have doubtless caused some pain, but Iran's real economic woes stem from nearly 30 years of mismanagement by the Islamic Revolution.
>
> More sanctions today (even assuming, heroically, support from Russia and China) will simply be too little, too late. While regime change in Tehran would be the preferable solution, there is almost no possibility of dislodging the mullahs in time. Had we done more in the past five years to support the discontented . the young, the non-Persian minorities and the economically disaffected . things might be different. Regime change, however, cannot be turned on and off like a light switch, although the difficulty of effecting it is no excuse not to do more now.
>
> That is why Israel is now at an urgent decision point: whether to use targeted military force to break Iran's indigenous control over the nuclear fuel cycle at one or more critical points. If successful, such highly risky and deeply unattractive air strikes or sabotage will not resolve the Iranian nuclear crisis. But they have the potential to buy considerable time, thereby putting that critical asset back on our side of the ledger rather than on Iran's.
>
> With whatever time is bought, we may be able to effect regime change in Tehran, or at least get the process underway. The alternative is Iran with nuclear weapons, the most deeply unattractive alternative of all.
>
> But the urgency of the situation has not impressed Barack Obama or the EU-3. Remarkably, on July 9, Sen. Obama, as if stumbling on a new idea, said Iran "must suffer threats of economic sanctions" and that we needed "direct diplomacy . . . so we avoid provocation" and "give strong incentives . . . to change their behavior." Javier Solana, chief EU negotiator, was at the time busy fixing a meeting with the Iranians to continue five years of doing exactly what Mr. Obama was proclaiming, without results.
>
> John McCain responded to Iran's missile salvo by stressing again the need for a workable missile defense system to defend the U.S. against attacks by rogue states like Iran and North Korea. He is undoubtedly correct, highlighting yet another reason why November's election is so critical, given the unceasing complaints about missile defense from most Democrats.
>
> Important as missile defense is, however, it is only a component of a postfailure policy on Iran's nuclear-weapons capacity. In whatever limited amount of time before then, we must face a very hard issue: What will the U.S. do if Israel decides to initiate military action? There was a time when the Bush administration might itself have seriously considered using force, but all public signs are that such a moment has passed.
>
> Israel sees clearly what the next 12 months will bring, which is why ongoing U.S.-Israeli consultations could be dispositive. Israel told the Bush administration it would destroy North Korea's reactor in Syria in spring, 2007, and said it would not wait past summer's end to take action. And take action it did, seeing a Syrian nuclear capability, for all practical purposes Iran's agent on its northern border, as an existential threat. When the real source of the threat, not just a surrogate, nears the capacity for nuclear Holocaust, can anyone seriously doubt Israel's propensities, whatever the impact on gasoline prices?
>
> Thus, instead of debating how much longer to continue five years of failed diplomacy, we should be intensively considering what cooperation the U.S. will extend to Israel before, during and after a strike on Iran. We will be blamed for the strike anyway, and certainly feel whatever negative consequences result, so there is compelling logic to make it as successful as possible. At a minimum, we should place no obstacles in Israel's path, and facilitate its efforts where we can.
>
> These subjects are decidedly unpleasant. A nuclear Iran is more so.
>
> Mr. Bolton, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, is the author of "Surrender Is Not an Option: Defending America at the United Nations" (Simon & Schuster, 2007).
>
John Bolton's call for military action in Iran (below) should be blatantly derided by the American public.
For John Bolton hope of effecting regime change in Iran springs eternal. However, my suspicion is that this piece was written to convince the Bush administration to give their blessing to an Israeli attack on Iran. Reportedly this week a passel of Israeli officials are in Washington lobbying hard to get the go-ahead on their military attack. To their credit the Bush officials are recalcitrant. You can see this in Mr. Bolton's rhetoric--excoriating the Bush administration for being pusillanimous. I certainly hope that cooler heads prevail in Washington.
Mr. Bolton is not above citing misleading and utterly false information about the Iranian situation. Of course, he claims that Iranian nuclear weapons development is an established fact when there is still no proof that it exists--including the conveniently ignored NIE Report of 2007 claiming that the weapons program does not exist. He has the gall to call diplomacy "failed" while neglecting to note that the U.S. has engaged in none of it--including the 2003 Iranian initiative, which he presumably had a hand in rejecting..
It is so shoddy and cheap for Washington to claim the diplomacy undertaken by European powers as somehow justifying American frustration with Iran, when we have done nothing, except to host Christopher Crocker hurling invective at the Iranian ambassador in Baghdad--some diplomacy! More and more it is looking like the neoconservative agenda of regime change throughout the Middle East to clear the way for American hegemony in the region is going down in flames. Bolton's editorial is the last gasp of this vampire movement, even as we try to drive a stake through its heart.
Best,
Bill Beeman
University of Minnesota
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121607841801452581.html?mod=opinion_main_commentaries
>
> Wall Street Journal
>
> Israel, Iran and the Bomb
> By JOHN R. BOLTON
> July 15, 2008; Page A19
>
> Iran's test salvo of ballistic missiles last week together with recent threatening rhetoric by commanders of the Islamic Republic's Revolutionary Guards emphasizes how close the Middle East is to a fundamental, in fact an irreversible, turning point.
>
> Tehran's efforts to intimidate the United States and Israel from using military force against its nuclear program, combined with yet another diplomatic charm offensive with the Europeans, are two sides of the same policy coin. The regime is buying the short additional period of time it needs to produce deliverable nuclear weapons, the strategic objective it has been pursuing clandestinely for 20 years.
>
> Between Iran and its long-sought objective, however, a shadow may fall: targeted military action, either Israeli or American. Yes, Iran cannot deliver a nuclear weapon on target today, and perhaps not for several years. Estimates vary widely, and no one knows for sure when it will have a deliverable weapon except the mullahs, and they're not telling. But that is not the key date. Rather, the crucial turning point is when Iran masters all the capabilities to weaponize without further external possibility of stopping it. Then the decision to weaponize, and its timing, is Tehran's alone. We do not know if Iran is at this point, or very near to it. All we do know is that, after five years of failed diplomacy by the EU-3 (Britain, France and Germany), Iran is simply five years closer to nuclear weapons.
>
> And yet, true to form, State Department comments to Congress last week . even as Iran's missiles were ascending . downplayed Iran's nuclear progress, ignoring the cost of failed diplomacy. But the confident assumption that we have years to deal with the problem is high-stakes gambling on a policy that cannot be reversed if it fails. If Iran reaches weaponization before State's jaunty prediction, the Middle East, and indeed global, balance of power changes in potentially catastrophic ways.
>
> And consider what comes next for the U.S.: the Bush administration's last six months pursuing its limp diplomatic efforts, plus six months of a new president getting his national security team and policies together. In other words, one more year for Tehran to proceed unhindered to "the point of no return."
>
> We have almost certainly lost the race between giving "strong incentives" for Iran to abandon its pursuit of nuclear weapons, and its scientific and technological efforts to do just that. Swift, sweeping, effectively enforced sanctions might have made a difference five years ago. No longer. Existing sanctions have doubtless caused some pain, but Iran's real economic woes stem from nearly 30 years of mismanagement by the Islamic Revolution.
>
> More sanctions today (even assuming, heroically, support from Russia and China) will simply be too little, too late. While regime change in Tehran would be the preferable solution, there is almost no possibility of dislodging the mullahs in time. Had we done more in the past five years to support the discontented . the young, the non-Persian minorities and the economically disaffected . things might be different. Regime change, however, cannot be turned on and off like a light switch, although the difficulty of effecting it is no excuse not to do more now.
>
> That is why Israel is now at an urgent decision point: whether to use targeted military force to break Iran's indigenous control over the nuclear fuel cycle at one or more critical points. If successful, such highly risky and deeply unattractive air strikes or sabotage will not resolve the Iranian nuclear crisis. But they have the potential to buy considerable time, thereby putting that critical asset back on our side of the ledger rather than on Iran's.
>
> With whatever time is bought, we may be able to effect regime change in Tehran, or at least get the process underway. The alternative is Iran with nuclear weapons, the most deeply unattractive alternative of all.
>
> But the urgency of the situation has not impressed Barack Obama or the EU-3. Remarkably, on July 9, Sen. Obama, as if stumbling on a new idea, said Iran "must suffer threats of economic sanctions" and that we needed "direct diplomacy . . . so we avoid provocation" and "give strong incentives . . . to change their behavior." Javier Solana, chief EU negotiator, was at the time busy fixing a meeting with the Iranians to continue five years of doing exactly what Mr. Obama was proclaiming, without results.
>
> John McCain responded to Iran's missile salvo by stressing again the need for a workable missile defense system to defend the U.S. against attacks by rogue states like Iran and North Korea. He is undoubtedly correct, highlighting yet another reason why November's election is so critical, given the unceasing complaints about missile defense from most Democrats.
>
> Important as missile defense is, however, it is only a component of a postfailure policy on Iran's nuclear-weapons capacity. In whatever limited amount of time before then, we must face a very hard issue: What will the U.S. do if Israel decides to initiate military action? There was a time when the Bush administration might itself have seriously considered using force, but all public signs are that such a moment has passed.
>
> Israel sees clearly what the next 12 months will bring, which is why ongoing U.S.-Israeli consultations could be dispositive. Israel told the Bush administration it would destroy North Korea's reactor in Syria in spring, 2007, and said it would not wait past summer's end to take action. And take action it did, seeing a Syrian nuclear capability, for all practical purposes Iran's agent on its northern border, as an existential threat. When the real source of the threat, not just a surrogate, nears the capacity for nuclear Holocaust, can anyone seriously doubt Israel's propensities, whatever the impact on gasoline prices?
>
> Thus, instead of debating how much longer to continue five years of failed diplomacy, we should be intensively considering what cooperation the U.S. will extend to Israel before, during and after a strike on Iran. We will be blamed for the strike anyway, and certainly feel whatever negative consequences result, so there is compelling logic to make it as successful as possible. At a minimum, we should place no obstacles in Israel's path, and facilitate its efforts where we can.
>
> These subjects are decidedly unpleasant. A nuclear Iran is more so.
>
> Mr. Bolton, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, is the author of "Surrender Is Not an Option: Defending America at the United Nations" (Simon & Schuster, 2007).
>
Monday, July 14, 2008
Ahmadinejad favors opening of U.S. Consulate in Tehran
Date: Tue, 15 Jul 2008 00:07:08 +0200
Contact: Hossein Bastani, h.bastani@roozonline.com
Only three weeks after Ahmadinejad and his administration spokesperson claimed that American forces intended to “kidnap or assassinate him in Iraq,” Ahmadinejad identified the perpetrators of his accusation as “Palestinian, Iraqi, Afghan or American.” But that was not Ahmadinejad’s only strange remark in yesterday’s press conference, because he also welcomed the reopening of the U.S. Consulate Office in Iran and insisted that Ali Akbar Velayati, the supreme leader’s foreign policy advisor has no say on the nuclear issue.
The head of Iran’s ninth administration also indicated that his potential kidnappers chanted “anti-American and anti-Iranian” slogans while carrying out their operation. Previously, Ahmadinejad had claimed that “enemies planned to kidnap or assassinate him” in a gathering with a number of clerics from the Qom Seminary School Teachers’ Association, adding, “By changing one or two plans their operation was disrupted, and they only realized that after we had left Iraq.”
Supreme Leader’s Advisor is not Involved
In yesterday’s press conference, in addition to introducing new claims in connection with his previous kidnap and assassination plot, Ahmadinejad also responded to a question about the recent article of Ali Akbar Velayati, Ayatollah Khamenei’s foreign policy advisor, which received much worldwide attention. Ahmadinejad’s response was unprecedented in its kind.
Former foreign minister Velayati’s article was originally published in three European newspapers simultaneously, and was considered in democratic circles as the Iranian supreme leader’s decision to take full charge of the nuclear case and diffuse the crisis in a new way; especially since Velayati is his especial advisor in foreign affairs.
Ahmadinejad, however, had this to say about Velayati’s recent remarks: “Mr Velayati is an esteemed person. He has opinions and he states them. Everyone in the Islamic Republic of Iran is free to state their opinion. However, he is not involved in making decisions in the nuclear case.”
Also, commenting on positive interpretations of Iran’s recent position with regarding talks with the 5+1 Group (five UN Security Council members and Germany), Ahmadinejad said, “Some people wanted to organize a celebration and say that Iran had stepped back but their celebration did not last long.”
Verbally Welcoming Relations with America?
Nevertheless, despite his prior stance with respect to Velayati, Ahmadinejad did not oppose America’s presence in nuclear negotiations with Iran, adding, “If the Americans want to come too, they should come. We would not invite them… If America wants to enter negotiations, it must not set preconditions.”
Responding to another question about the ninth administration’s invitation of Houshang Amirahmadi to visit Iran, Ahmadinejad strongly denied secret attempts to establish relations with the United States, adding, “Iran does not need mediators to negotiate with America. Whenever is becomes necessary, we will negotiate with them directly… If it is necessary that we negotiate with the United States, and it is to the benefit of the Iranian nation, I will come myself and say that we will negotiate because it benefits the Iranian nation.”
In an unexpected move, Ahmadinejad welcomed the idea to “reopen America’s interest section in Tehran,” while at the same time denying receipt of any official offer in this respect: “Iran will consider the United States’ request to reopen that country’s interest section in Tehran and favors any action that would result in enhanced ties between nations of the world.”
Contact: Hossein Bastani, h.bastani@roozonline.com
Only three weeks after Ahmadinejad and his administration spokesperson claimed that American forces intended to “kidnap or assassinate him in Iraq,” Ahmadinejad identified the perpetrators of his accusation as “Palestinian, Iraqi, Afghan or American.” But that was not Ahmadinejad’s only strange remark in yesterday’s press conference, because he also welcomed the reopening of the U.S. Consulate Office in Iran and insisted that Ali Akbar Velayati, the supreme leader’s foreign policy advisor has no say on the nuclear issue.
The head of Iran’s ninth administration also indicated that his potential kidnappers chanted “anti-American and anti-Iranian” slogans while carrying out their operation. Previously, Ahmadinejad had claimed that “enemies planned to kidnap or assassinate him” in a gathering with a number of clerics from the Qom Seminary School Teachers’ Association, adding, “By changing one or two plans their operation was disrupted, and they only realized that after we had left Iraq.”
Supreme Leader’s Advisor is not Involved
In yesterday’s press conference, in addition to introducing new claims in connection with his previous kidnap and assassination plot, Ahmadinejad also responded to a question about the recent article of Ali Akbar Velayati, Ayatollah Khamenei’s foreign policy advisor, which received much worldwide attention. Ahmadinejad’s response was unprecedented in its kind.
Former foreign minister Velayati’s article was originally published in three European newspapers simultaneously, and was considered in democratic circles as the Iranian supreme leader’s decision to take full charge of the nuclear case and diffuse the crisis in a new way; especially since Velayati is his especial advisor in foreign affairs.
Ahmadinejad, however, had this to say about Velayati’s recent remarks: “Mr Velayati is an esteemed person. He has opinions and he states them. Everyone in the Islamic Republic of Iran is free to state their opinion. However, he is not involved in making decisions in the nuclear case.”
Also, commenting on positive interpretations of Iran’s recent position with regarding talks with the 5+1 Group (five UN Security Council members and Germany), Ahmadinejad said, “Some people wanted to organize a celebration and say that Iran had stepped back but their celebration did not last long.”
Verbally Welcoming Relations with America?
Nevertheless, despite his prior stance with respect to Velayati, Ahmadinejad did not oppose America’s presence in nuclear negotiations with Iran, adding, “If the Americans want to come too, they should come. We would not invite them… If America wants to enter negotiations, it must not set preconditions.”
Responding to another question about the ninth administration’s invitation of Houshang Amirahmadi to visit Iran, Ahmadinejad strongly denied secret attempts to establish relations with the United States, adding, “Iran does not need mediators to negotiate with America. Whenever is becomes necessary, we will negotiate with them directly… If it is necessary that we negotiate with the United States, and it is to the benefit of the Iranian nation, I will come myself and say that we will negotiate because it benefits the Iranian nation.”
In an unexpected move, Ahmadinejad welcomed the idea to “reopen America’s interest section in Tehran,” while at the same time denying receipt of any official offer in this respect: “Iran will consider the United States’ request to reopen that country’s interest section in Tehran and favors any action that would result in enhanced ties between nations of the world.”
Friday, July 11, 2008
State Department's Iran Democracy Fund Shrouded in Secrecy
State Department's Iran Democracy Fund Shrouded in Secrecy
By Jason Leopold
The Public Record
Thursday, July 10, 2008
Since 2006, Congress has poured tens of millions of dollars into a State Department program aimed at promoting regime change in Iran.
The ³Democracy Program² initiative has been shrouded in secrecy since its inception and many critics of the initiative (who are also outspoken critics of the Iranian government) believe that it is directly linked to a spate of arrests of dozens of Iranian dissidents suspected of working secretly with the Bush administration to topple the Iranian government.
Up until last November, the program was operated by the State Department¹s Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs and overseen by David Denehy, the bureau¹s senior adviser. The program was reportedly moved last November to the State Department's Bureau of Iranian Affairs. Denehy did not return calls for comment.
One of the influential figures who helped launch the democracy program was Elizabeth Cheney, the daughter of Vice President Dick Cheney, who as Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs, headed the Iran-Syria Policy and Operations Group and, with the financial help of a prominent Republican foundation, the International Republican Institute, financed efforts of dozens of Iranian and Syrian exiles to promote a campaign to overthrow their government leaders. Elizabeth Cheney left the State Department last year to work on Fred Thompson's presidential campaign.
An aggressive effort by the State Department to fund regime change in Iran is ongoing, but the State Department has refused to provide lawmakers with specific details of the program other than to say that the core mission of the initiative is to assist ³those inside Iran who desire basic civil liberties such as freedom of expression, greater rights for women, more open political process, and broader freedom of the press.²
Congress has appropriated more than $120 million to fund the project. The State Department has spent most of the money on the U.S.-backed Radio Farda, Voice of America (VOA), Radio Free Europe, and to broadcast Persian programs into Iran via VOA satellite television.
Some funds, according to State Department sources familiar with the how the program is run, have also been secretly funneled to exile Iranian organizations, and politically connected individuals in order to help the U.S. establish contacts with Iranian opposition groups.
In June of 2007, the State Department said it would spend $16 million on democracy promotion projects that extends beyond broadcasting. However, to date the State Department has not released details on how it intends to obligate or expend those funds.
A State Department spokesman declined to comment for this story.
Carah Ong, an Iran Policy Analyst at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, said in an interview that because the State Department operates the program under a veil of secrecy ³we don¹t know where the money is going.²
³There is no reporting requirement to Congress,² Ong said. ³There¹s absolutely no accountability at all with this money.²
Next Wednesday, the House Appropriations Subcommittee on State and Foreign Operations will consider the fiscal year 2009 budget that calls for setting aside $65 million http://www.state.gov/documents/organization/100014.pdf for additional regime change and democracy promotion efforts inside Iran.
The State Department has said it intends to spend $1.2 million of those funds to launch Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty Azerbaijani in an effort to address the lack of objective and comprehensive news and information for Azerbaijanis, the largest ethnic minority group in Iran.
The $65 million requested by the State Department ³is more than three times the amount appropriated for FY 2008, which is estimated to be $21.623 million,² Ong said of the $65 million in democracy promotion funds for Iran. ³This tripling in Economic Support Funds is the result of several developments. First, some restructuring recently occurred in the State Department and its Iran desk.
³Second, the FY 2008 Foreign Operations bill appropriated $60 million (under Section 693) for so-called "Programs to Promote Democracy, Rule of Law and Governance in Iran." It has been unclear since Section 693 was originally added as an amendment introduced by Rep. Ander Crenshaw (R-FL) to the House Foreign Operations Appropriations bill for exactly which programs this funding was meant. Was it meant to increase funding for the Economic Support Fund or the Human Rights and Democracy Fund? Or was it meant to serve as an overall guideline for total spending on so-called "democracy promotion" programs? This is still a question that needs to be answered.²
The State Department has refused to provide specific details on the nuances of the democracy promotion project. The agency told lawmakers that the classified nature of the democracy promotion project serves to protect the identity of Iranian individuals and organizations that have received funding to promote a U.S. policy of regime change in Iran from being harassed or threatened by the Iranian government.
Yet that is exactly what has happened to some Iranian dissidents?even those who have publicly denounced the program.
A letter sent to lawmakers last October by Trita Parsi, the president of the National Iranian American Council, and more than a dozen other Middle East scholars all of whom are critics of the Iranian government, stated that the ³secret State Department ³democracy promotion² funding has enabled Iranian authorities to label those supporting reforms or engagement with the West as foreign agents and traitors. Recent detentions of Iranian-American scholars, journalists, union leaders, student activists, and others are widely viewed as responses to threats posed by U.S.-funded efforts.²
³We believe this program, intended to aid the cause of democracy in Iran, has failed and has instead invigorated a campaign by conservative regime elements to harass and intimidate those seeking reform and greater openness in Iran,² the Oct. 11, 2007 letter says. ³The intended beneficiaries of the funding, - human rights advocates, civil society activists and others - uniformly denounce the program,²
³Rather than promoting democracy, the U.S. funding has narrowed the space for the pro-democracy movement to operate,² Parsi said. ³Today, the conditions for civil society have significantly deteriorated. Executions are at an all-time high. Many human rights workers have been imprisoned.²
Ong said most of the State Department funds have been doled out to organizations outside of Iran, such as Freedom House and Eurasia Foundation because ³no one in Iran will take the money.²
But just the possibility that some Iranians may be linked to American led efforts to overthrow the Iranian government, or have accepted money from the Bush administration, has led to numerous arrests last year. Emaddeddin Baghi, a human rights activist based in Tehran who was sent back to prison in September said ³it is neither wise nor morally justifiable for the U.S. to continue its path² of promoting regime change by trying to give money to dissidents.
Last year, Haleh Esfandiari, was arrested and sent to a prison in Tehran on charges of spying for the U.S. She was incarcerated for eight months, four of which were spent in solitary confinement.
Former Congressman Lee Hamilton told CNN last year that Esfandiari was likely captured because Iranians believed she was linked to the State Department¹s campaign to promote regime change in Iran. Hamilton said Esfandiari did not receive any funds but he said the secrecy surrounding the State Department¹s democracy program was causing more harm than good.
³If the policy of the United States government is to overthrow the government, then the Democracy Fund obviously would be viewed with a great deal of suspicion and hostility by the target government," Hamilton said in May 2007, shortly after Esfandiari¹s arrest.
In an October column published in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Esfandiari, the director of Woodrow Wilson Center¹s Middle East program said ³the fact that the identity of Iranian recipients of U.S. aid is regarded as classified information by the U.S. government feeds the regime's paranoia and casts suspicion on all Iranian² non-government organizations.
Last September, Sen. Joseph Lieberman, (I-Conn.), introduced an amendment to the Senate Foreign Operations Bill, adopted by unanimous consent, that restored the democracy promotion funds to the $75 million requested by the State Department. An earlier version of the bill reduced the funding by less than half.
"This amendment would provide $75 million in funds, the amount requested by the administration; in fact, announced by Secretary of State [Condoleezza] Rice,² Lieberman said in a floor statement last September. ³That announcement, I know from sources I have, was broadly heard and appreciated within the Iranian civil society dissident movement. The committee has recommended one-third of that amount of money. This $75 million would go to labor activists, women's groups, journalists, human rights advocates, and other members of Iranian civil society. It provides Congress an opportunity to demonstrate that even as we condemn the behavior of the Iranian regime, we stand with the Iranian people, a people with a proud history who truly are, in my opinion, yearning to be free. That freedom is suppressed by the fanatical regime that dominates their lives today.²
But Shirin Ebadi, who was awarded the Nobel Peace prize in 2003, explained that ³no truly nationalist and democratic group will accept² State Department funds to promote a policy of regime change because ³Iranian reformists believe that democracy can't be imported. It must be indigenous.²
³They believe that the best Washington can do for democracy in Iran is to leave them alone,² Ebadi wrote in a May 30, 2007 column published in The International Herald Tribune. Ebadi¹s column was published as Congress approved emergency supplemental legislation to fund the Iraq war, which contained a $75 million earmark for the State Department¹s Iran Democracy project.
³The secret dimension of the distribution of the $75 million has also created immense problems for Iranian reformists, democratic groups and human rights activists. Aware of their own deep unpopularity, the hard-liners in Iran are terrified by the prospects of a "velvet revolution" and have become obsessed with preventing contacts between Iranian scholars, artists, journalists and political activists and their American counterparts,² Ebadi added. ³Thus, Washington's policy of "helping" the cause of democracy in Iran has backfired. It has made it more difficult for the more moderate factions within Iran's power hierarchy to argue for an accommodation with the West.²
The final appropriation for 2008 was set at $60 million to be made available for "programs to promote democracy, the rule of law and governance in Iran."
But a statement that was included with the bill cited only two numbers related to Iran: $21.8 million for Economic Support Funds (ESF) and $8 million for the Democracy Fund. It is unknown how the State Department intends to spend the remainder of the $60 million.
Ong and Parsi have called on the Government Accountability Office to conduct an investigation to examine the effectiveness of the program, which the GAO said it has initiated but could not say when the report would be complete.
Additionally, Ong said she has been trying to educate lawmakers for more than a year on how the program has backfired.
³It¹s difficult to bring the voices of Iranian dissidents to the Hill to explain how the program is hurting their cause because if they speak out publicly they will be arrested when they return to Iran and accused of being spies,² Ong said in an interview. ³I¹ve tried to raise this issue with some members [of Congress] and some listen and some don¹t.²
By Jason Leopold
The Public Record
Thursday, July 10, 2008
Since 2006, Congress has poured tens of millions of dollars into a State Department program aimed at promoting regime change in Iran.
The ³Democracy Program² initiative has been shrouded in secrecy since its inception and many critics of the initiative (who are also outspoken critics of the Iranian government) believe that it is directly linked to a spate of arrests of dozens of Iranian dissidents suspected of working secretly with the Bush administration to topple the Iranian government.
Up until last November, the program was operated by the State Department¹s Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs and overseen by David Denehy, the bureau¹s senior adviser. The program was reportedly moved last November to the State Department's Bureau of Iranian Affairs. Denehy did not return calls for comment.
One of the influential figures who helped launch the democracy program was Elizabeth Cheney, the daughter of Vice President Dick Cheney, who as Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs, headed the Iran-Syria Policy and Operations Group and, with the financial help of a prominent Republican foundation, the International Republican Institute, financed efforts of dozens of Iranian and Syrian exiles to promote a campaign to overthrow their government leaders. Elizabeth Cheney left the State Department last year to work on Fred Thompson's presidential campaign.
An aggressive effort by the State Department to fund regime change in Iran is ongoing, but the State Department has refused to provide lawmakers with specific details of the program other than to say that the core mission of the initiative is to assist ³those inside Iran who desire basic civil liberties such as freedom of expression, greater rights for women, more open political process, and broader freedom of the press.²
Congress has appropriated more than $120 million to fund the project. The State Department has spent most of the money on the U.S.-backed Radio Farda, Voice of America (VOA), Radio Free Europe, and to broadcast Persian programs into Iran via VOA satellite television.
Some funds, according to State Department sources familiar with the how the program is run, have also been secretly funneled to exile Iranian organizations, and politically connected individuals in order to help the U.S. establish contacts with Iranian opposition groups.
In June of 2007, the State Department said it would spend $16 million on democracy promotion projects that extends beyond broadcasting. However, to date the State Department has not released details on how it intends to obligate or expend those funds.
A State Department spokesman declined to comment for this story.
Carah Ong, an Iran Policy Analyst at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, said in an interview that because the State Department operates the program under a veil of secrecy ³we don¹t know where the money is going.²
³There is no reporting requirement to Congress,² Ong said. ³There¹s absolutely no accountability at all with this money.²
Next Wednesday, the House Appropriations Subcommittee on State and Foreign Operations will consider the fiscal year 2009 budget that calls for setting aside $65 million http://www.state.gov/documents/organization/100014.pdf for additional regime change and democracy promotion efforts inside Iran.
The State Department has said it intends to spend $1.2 million of those funds to launch Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty Azerbaijani in an effort to address the lack of objective and comprehensive news and information for Azerbaijanis, the largest ethnic minority group in Iran.
The $65 million requested by the State Department ³is more than three times the amount appropriated for FY 2008, which is estimated to be $21.623 million,² Ong said of the $65 million in democracy promotion funds for Iran. ³This tripling in Economic Support Funds is the result of several developments. First, some restructuring recently occurred in the State Department and its Iran desk.
³Second, the FY 2008 Foreign Operations bill appropriated $60 million (under Section 693) for so-called "Programs to Promote Democracy, Rule of Law and Governance in Iran." It has been unclear since Section 693 was originally added as an amendment introduced by Rep. Ander Crenshaw (R-FL) to the House Foreign Operations Appropriations bill for exactly which programs this funding was meant. Was it meant to increase funding for the Economic Support Fund or the Human Rights and Democracy Fund? Or was it meant to serve as an overall guideline for total spending on so-called "democracy promotion" programs? This is still a question that needs to be answered.²
The State Department has refused to provide specific details on the nuances of the democracy promotion project. The agency told lawmakers that the classified nature of the democracy promotion project serves to protect the identity of Iranian individuals and organizations that have received funding to promote a U.S. policy of regime change in Iran from being harassed or threatened by the Iranian government.
Yet that is exactly what has happened to some Iranian dissidents?even those who have publicly denounced the program.
A letter sent to lawmakers last October by Trita Parsi, the president of the National Iranian American Council, and more than a dozen other Middle East scholars all of whom are critics of the Iranian government, stated that the ³secret State Department ³democracy promotion² funding has enabled Iranian authorities to label those supporting reforms or engagement with the West as foreign agents and traitors. Recent detentions of Iranian-American scholars, journalists, union leaders, student activists, and others are widely viewed as responses to threats posed by U.S.-funded efforts.²
³We believe this program, intended to aid the cause of democracy in Iran, has failed and has instead invigorated a campaign by conservative regime elements to harass and intimidate those seeking reform and greater openness in Iran,² the Oct. 11, 2007 letter says. ³The intended beneficiaries of the funding, - human rights advocates, civil society activists and others - uniformly denounce the program,²
³Rather than promoting democracy, the U.S. funding has narrowed the space for the pro-democracy movement to operate,² Parsi said. ³Today, the conditions for civil society have significantly deteriorated. Executions are at an all-time high. Many human rights workers have been imprisoned.²
Ong said most of the State Department funds have been doled out to organizations outside of Iran, such as Freedom House and Eurasia Foundation because ³no one in Iran will take the money.²
But just the possibility that some Iranians may be linked to American led efforts to overthrow the Iranian government, or have accepted money from the Bush administration, has led to numerous arrests last year. Emaddeddin Baghi, a human rights activist based in Tehran who was sent back to prison in September said ³it is neither wise nor morally justifiable for the U.S. to continue its path² of promoting regime change by trying to give money to dissidents.
Last year, Haleh Esfandiari, was arrested and sent to a prison in Tehran on charges of spying for the U.S. She was incarcerated for eight months, four of which were spent in solitary confinement.
Former Congressman Lee Hamilton told CNN last year that Esfandiari was likely captured because Iranians believed she was linked to the State Department¹s campaign to promote regime change in Iran. Hamilton said Esfandiari did not receive any funds but he said the secrecy surrounding the State Department¹s democracy program was causing more harm than good.
³If the policy of the United States government is to overthrow the government, then the Democracy Fund obviously would be viewed with a great deal of suspicion and hostility by the target government," Hamilton said in May 2007, shortly after Esfandiari¹s arrest.
In an October column published in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Esfandiari, the director of Woodrow Wilson Center¹s Middle East program said ³the fact that the identity of Iranian recipients of U.S. aid is regarded as classified information by the U.S. government feeds the regime's paranoia and casts suspicion on all Iranian² non-government organizations.
Last September, Sen. Joseph Lieberman, (I-Conn.), introduced an amendment to the Senate Foreign Operations Bill, adopted by unanimous consent, that restored the democracy promotion funds to the $75 million requested by the State Department. An earlier version of the bill reduced the funding by less than half.
"This amendment would provide $75 million in funds, the amount requested by the administration; in fact, announced by Secretary of State [Condoleezza] Rice,² Lieberman said in a floor statement last September. ³That announcement, I know from sources I have, was broadly heard and appreciated within the Iranian civil society dissident movement. The committee has recommended one-third of that amount of money. This $75 million would go to labor activists, women's groups, journalists, human rights advocates, and other members of Iranian civil society. It provides Congress an opportunity to demonstrate that even as we condemn the behavior of the Iranian regime, we stand with the Iranian people, a people with a proud history who truly are, in my opinion, yearning to be free. That freedom is suppressed by the fanatical regime that dominates their lives today.²
But Shirin Ebadi, who was awarded the Nobel Peace prize in 2003, explained that ³no truly nationalist and democratic group will accept² State Department funds to promote a policy of regime change because ³Iranian reformists believe that democracy can't be imported. It must be indigenous.²
³They believe that the best Washington can do for democracy in Iran is to leave them alone,² Ebadi wrote in a May 30, 2007 column published in The International Herald Tribune. Ebadi¹s column was published as Congress approved emergency supplemental legislation to fund the Iraq war, which contained a $75 million earmark for the State Department¹s Iran Democracy project.
³The secret dimension of the distribution of the $75 million has also created immense problems for Iranian reformists, democratic groups and human rights activists. Aware of their own deep unpopularity, the hard-liners in Iran are terrified by the prospects of a "velvet revolution" and have become obsessed with preventing contacts between Iranian scholars, artists, journalists and political activists and their American counterparts,² Ebadi added. ³Thus, Washington's policy of "helping" the cause of democracy in Iran has backfired. It has made it more difficult for the more moderate factions within Iran's power hierarchy to argue for an accommodation with the West.²
The final appropriation for 2008 was set at $60 million to be made available for "programs to promote democracy, the rule of law and governance in Iran."
But a statement that was included with the bill cited only two numbers related to Iran: $21.8 million for Economic Support Funds (ESF) and $8 million for the Democracy Fund. It is unknown how the State Department intends to spend the remainder of the $60 million.
Ong and Parsi have called on the Government Accountability Office to conduct an investigation to examine the effectiveness of the program, which the GAO said it has initiated but could not say when the report would be complete.
Additionally, Ong said she has been trying to educate lawmakers for more than a year on how the program has backfired.
³It¹s difficult to bring the voices of Iranian dissidents to the Hill to explain how the program is hurting their cause because if they speak out publicly they will be arrested when they return to Iran and accused of being spies,² Ong said in an interview. ³I¹ve tried to raise this issue with some members [of Congress] and some listen and some don¹t.²
Monday, July 07, 2008
William O. Beeman---Will the U.S. Support Terrorists to Destabilize Iran? (New America Media)
Will the U.S. Support Terrorists to Destabilize Iran?
New America Media, News analysis, William O. Beeman, Posted: Jul 07, 2008
Editor’s note: All attempts to justify a military attack on Iran have failed and the US is now looking at supporting fringe and terrorist groups to destabilize the country. It won’t work, says NAM contributing writer, William O. Beeman, but it will destabilize the region for years to come. Beeman is Professor and Chair of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Minnesota. He is President of the Middle East Section of the American Anthropological Association. The second edition of his book, The “Great Satan” vs. the “Mad Mullahs”: How the United States and Iran Demonize Each Other, has just been published by the University of Chicago Press.
Elements of the Bush administration have begun to resemble semi-insane Captain Queeg in "The Caine Mutiny" with regard to Iran. Reckless and obsessive to destroy Iran’s regime, they fondle their ball bearings, and pursue any scheme that they believe will get rid of the mullahs before the inauguration of the new American president in January 2009.
In desperation, they have turned to supporting fringe-level ethnic separatists—all of whom are terrorists and enemies of the United States who are also hostile to Iran. This strategy is truly the last gasp of a failed Middle East policy. It is ill-conceived, and if continued, will foment continued violence in the region for years without affecting the Iranian regime in any significant way.
All attempts to justify a military attack on Iran have failed. Iran’s continuing nuclear program remains the Bush administration’s prime bulwark against Iran, but it is a very weak bulwark. There is still no evidence whatever for an Iranian nuclear weapons program. Last December’s National Intelligence Estimate stated clearly that no current nuclear military program exists. Iran remains unwilling to halt uranium enrichment for peaceful purposes that is guaranteed to them under the Nuclear Non-proliferation treaty, but responded positively on July 4 to European calls for negotiations on the nuclear issue, undercutting the Bush hard line (and effecting a drop in oil prices).
Other accusations against Iran are equally feeble. Claims of its support for attacks against U.S. troops in Iraq have failed for lack of any evidence. Iran’s supposed “proxy” attacks on Israel through Lebanese Hezbollah and Palestinian Hamas strain credulity, since these two groups are acknowledged by all credible experts to formulate their political agendas independently from Iran.
Continually frustrated in their attempts to launch any legitimate attack against Iran, Vice President Cheney and a group of die-hard neoconservatives hovering in and around his office, particularly his former Middle East adviser David Wurmser, have long been rumored to be engineering active support for dissident opposition groups who share their goal to overthrow the current Iranian regime. Many of these groups are aligned with non-Persian ethnic factions in Iran, notably Arabs, Kurds, Azerbaijanis and Baluchis. Serious analysts in the region have tended to dismiss these efforts as silly and ineffective. Nevertheless, neoconservative organizations such as the American Enterprise Institute, the Center for Near East Policy and the Hudson Institute have quietly championed the idea that Iran could be successfully dismembered along ethnic lines.
The American Enterprise Institute has long been a hotbed for debate over these plans. In October 2005, it hosted a conference entitled “The Unknown Iran: Another Case for Federalism?” in which the specter of an ethnic dismemberment of Iran was raised. The AEI has subsequently been host to several conclaves where this idea of fomenting ethnic violence has been discussed, in which representatives from dissident groups are regularly invited to hold forth.
The host of the 2005 conference Michael Ledeen and his cronies Michael Rubin, Danielle Pletka and Myrav Wurmser, the wife of Cheney’s former adviser, David Wurmser, have a curious rhetorical stance regarding Iran’s ethnic dissidents. They write long pieces pointing out that Persians are a minority in Iran, that ethnic groups are restive, that the central government lacks support from the fringe elements in the population. Then in the last paragraph they suddenly deny recommending that ethnic dissident groups be supported. Likewise Ledeen calls incessantly for the overthrow of the Iranian government, then denies that he is calling for military action.
The military continues to entertain the dismemberment of Iran and retired military officer and novelist Ralph Peters proposed the idea in the June 2006 issue of the Armed Forces Journal. His article, ”Blood Borders” champions national independence for every ethnic group in the Middle East, redrawing the borders of Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Turkey.
The problem would not be so acute, except for the fact that these groups, now somewhat ineffective, would be truly bad news if provided with significant U.S. aid and weapons. They would never be effective at eliminating the Iranian government, but they could become a source of instability and violence throughout the region for years to come. Because they are basically all anti-American in their orientation, the United States will also be harmed if they are strengthened.
Iran specialists have been aware of these groups for years, and largely discounted them. However, assertions of active United States support for them, awakened by journalist Seymour Hersh in the July 7 issue of the New Yorker, have become real cause for concern. The groups include:
*The M.E.K—Mujaheddin-e Khalq—officially a terrorist group in the United States for having killed Americans before the Revolution. They are Marxist in orientation, and are despised in Iran, since they were protected by Saddam Hussein all during the Iran-Iraq war, and are directly supported by the United States today.
*The PJAK—the “Party for a Free Life in Kurdistan,” a trans-national Kurdish militant organization dedicated to an independent Kurdistan. They are supported by the United States when they launch attacks against Iranian forces, but faulted when they launch attacks against Turkish forces in Turkey.
*The Jundallah—based in Sunni Muslim Balochistan. They are supported by extreme conservative Salafi groups in Saudi Arabia. The Salafi movement also forms the religious philosophy of the Taliban of Afghanistan and Al-Qaeda. Claims of U.S. support for Jundallah are now several years old. In April 2007 Brian Ross and Christopher Isham of ABC News reported that the United States had been aiding Jundallah to attack Iranian targets. Jundallah’s leader, Abdul Malik Rigi, appeared on the Iranian service of the Voice of America, where he was identified as "the leader of popular Iranian resistance movement." More disturbing are Jundallah’s wider connections. As Seymour Hersh points out: “Ramzi Yousef, who was convicted for his role in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who is considered one of the leading planners of the September 11th attacks, are Baluchi Sunni fundamentalists.”
Sunni Arab separatists in the Southeast Iranian province of Khuzistan, especially in its capital, Ahwaz, have been active since the time of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. There is no identifiable organization as with the other groups above, but Iranian security forces claim that the current round of violence, which includes the assassination of an Iranian Shi’ite cleric, Hojjat ol-Eslam Hesham Seymari on June 26, 2007, were “trained under the umbrella of the Americans in Iraq." The militants have also been linked with the London-based Ahvaz Arab People's Democratic-Popular Front.
The Southern Azerbaijan National Awakening Movement, SANAM or GAMOH, led by Mahmudali Chehregani was founded in 1995, and is perhaps the weakest of the ethnic separatist movements today. Nevertheless, Chehregani was hosted in Washington by the U.S. Department of Defense in June 2003, according to the Washington Times, and addressed a number of neoconservative venues. One difficulty with this movement is Chehregani’s antipathy to Kurds, whom he calls “guests” in the Azerbaijan region of Iran.
These separatist movements continue to have support in some legislative circles. Two of the most avid supporters are Senator Sam Brownback of Kansas and Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen of Florida, both Republicans. Both favor removing the MEK from the list of terrorist organizations, and Brownback served as host to Mahmud Ali Chehregani in Washington.
No serious analyst of Iranian affairs believes that a strategy of ethnic division would bring down the central government of the Islamic Republic. Iran expert Vali Nasr, who teaches at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University was quoted by Hersh as saying, “Iran is an old country—like France and Germany—and its citizens are just as nationalistic. . . . working with the minorities will backfire, and alienate the majority of the population.” Not to mention serious consequences for the United States.
Monday, June 30, 2008
Interview with Dr. Ali Asghar Soltanieh--Iranian ambassador to IAEA
On Mon, 30 Jun 2008 17:12:38 +0100, "CASMII"
CASMII Exclusive: Interview with Iran's Ambassador to IAEA
30 June 2007
Mohammad Kamaali, board member of CASMII UK speaks to Iran's Ambassador to the IAEA Dr Ali Asghar Soltanieh who was recently in London to attend an international conference on a Middle East Weapons of Mass Destruction Free Zone, organised by the School of Oriental and African Studies, SOAS.
In this interview Dr Soltanieh explains the reasons behind Iran's determination to develop an indigenous uranium enrichment capability and why Iran believes the countries pursuing or relying on nuclear weapons are making a mistake. He also gives his viewpoint on how international institutions such as the UN Security Council are in practice used as instruments of political pressure by a select few member states, ultimately undermining the authority and credibility of those institutions.
The following is a transcript of the interview with minor editing for clarity.
A Podcast is also available for download from here [.mp3].
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Mohammad Kamaali: Thank you Mr Ambassador for agreeing to talk to us. If you could please briefly explain the history of Iran's nuclear programme, where it started, what stage is it at present and what are your future plans.
Dr Ali Asghar Soltanieh: It is simple, Iran’s nuclear programme did not start yesterday for it to be stopped tomorrow as it is today demanded by some countries like the US. Nuclear activities in Iran go back to half a century ago, before and after the [1979] revolution. In fact, I myself started my work before the revolution in the Atomic Energy Organisation (AEO) and I have witnessed the double standard approach before and after the revolution.
A very simple question that is always addressed to us is what is the justification for Iran to have nuclear energy while it has huge amounts of natural resources of oil and gas. This question was never raised before the revolution when the [oil] resources were much more than today and the population was about half. [Today] the added value of the oil bid for application in our chemical and petrochemical industry is much more because we now have a lot of advancements in this area which we can use for producing a great amount of by-products. So the added value is much more than thirty years ago, in addition to the price of oil which is of course increasing everyday.
Therefore there are good technical and financial justifications for having also nuclear energy as an option. But at the same time we have never envisioned an ambitious programme so as to consider nuclear energy as the only option. We have always thought of the policy of diversifying energy resources. We have used a technical/scientific program in the IAEA namely the VASP programme; with which countries use all their data to find out in a scientific way what share nuclear energy can play for them. Using this programme we have come to the conclusion that in the next twenty years, roughly by 2020, we will have up to 20,000 megawatts from nuclear energy. Right now in our national grid we have about 35,000 megawatts and if Bushehr becomes operational, the share of nuclear energy will be 1,000 out of 35,000 megawatts. But given the constant growth of industry and naturally for many other uses across the country, the energy demand is increasing. Therefore 20,000 megawatts by the year 2020 again will be perhaps a small portion of this sort of energy. It is not 400% therefore it is not that ambitious, it is a more realistic approach so that step-by-step we can have a gradual contribution from nuclear power.
Now the issue which I think has been made so much politicised but is mainly technical is when you have nuclear energy and you want to have nuclear energy for different applications including nuclear power then the issue is that you need reactors and reactors need fuel and the fuel should be assured.
MK: Could you explain what those other purposes might be?
AS: Yes, in fact I have been twice the director of nuclear research centre in Tehran (NRC). One of the main applications of nuclear energy is in producing various radioisotopes for medical, agricultural and industrial purposes. Right now over 200 hospitals and clinics are using the radioisotopes produced in Tehran's 5 megawatts reactor; and of course in addition to these applications the sources also could be used for many leakage applications in industry as well as agriculture of course.
We do have for example a gamma radiation centre in Tehran. Everyday trucks of the chemical by-products and in fact the material used in the medical applications are sterilised by gamma radiation by cold sources there. There are various applications which are increasing everyday not only in Iran but in the whole world.
Therefore for all these we come back to the nuclear material used for that purpose, for either radioactive sources or reactor. But then the question is you need fuel and the fuel should be assured. The main question is why we started to choose our own way for enrichment in order to produce the fuel indigenously.
I explain this to you very briefly; I am sure that your colleagues will be convinced because this is part of history and these are well documented facts. First of all we have a confidence deficit for the last thirty years particularly after the revolution when Western countries immediately stopped their nuclear cooperation [with Iran.] We paid $2m before the revolution in order to have new fuel for the Tehran reactor which produces mainly radioisotopes. The Americans neither gave the fuel nor the $2m that they received. Therefore when I was the Ambassador to the IAEA 26 years ago, I raised the issue of an urgent need for fuel with the Director General at the time, Hans Blix, and asked the IAEA to do something as intermediation for this problem. The IAEA in fact wrote to different potential suppliers, reflecting our request; unfortunately none of them agreed to even give the fuel for Tehran's research reactor which has been under the IAEA's full-scope Safeguards.
MK: Were they obliged to accept Iran's request at all?
AS: Yes, because this is under the IAEA. First of all the US was legally obliged because they had a contract; they received $2m out of $2.3m before the revolution. The fuel was ready to ship and they stopped the shipment of that fuel. Finally when the Argentineans had success in enrichment, they announced their readiness to give fuel to Iran under the auspices of the IAEA and that is what happened. Therefore the Tehran reactor right now is working with Argentinean fuel and this was in fact a good sign of South-South cooperation.
Now I give this as one example and there are many examples both bilaterally and multilaterally that have affected us. I want you to consider these and then everybody could easily judge if they were in Iran's position whether or not they would have taken the same decisions [as we did] . This is one reason. The second reason is this: Iran was part of Eurodif, an enrichment company in France, to which the Shah gave $1bn as a loan thirty years ago. Right now that I am giving this interview, Iran holds 10% of the shares of that company, but we have not even received 1 gram of uranium from that factory, uranium which is being produced under the full-scope of [the IAEA] safeguard. That is also another reason why Iran was disappointed and frustrated, and therefore it had to decide otherwise.
The next issue of course is the Bushehr power plant which is a tragedy in fact among all industrial projects of the world. It was supposed to be in operation almost twenty eight years ago and after thirty years it is still not in operation. We spent another $1bn [in dealing] with the Russians and it is still not in operation. And I want to inform you that, while we thank the Russians for their cooperation, they have only given the fuel so far for the first load and the first year. They have not provided any guarantees on paper for the fuel in the next five or ten years. Therefore there is no guarantee for even the Bushehr power plant.
Having all these in mind and with this background we had no choice but to have our own enrichment and fuel production. However, there was also another important development in the international arena which in fact pushed Iran to make this decision. In the IAEA there was a committee for guaranteeing nuclear supply. That committee collapsed in 1987 after seven years of negotiation. It means that after seven years of negotiation, they were not able to have one piece of paper as a legally binding assurance for guaranteeing nuclear fuel.
MK: Was there any particular reason for that?
AS: The reason was because the industrialized countries did not want to give that assurance and this is their historical mistake. This was 1987 and if you refer to the IAEA website and reports you will see that the IAEA has reported that Iran in fact decided to go after enrichment by coincidence after 1987. It means that when we lost all hope in international arrangements and also the bilateral problems we had after the revolution when [our partners] did not cooperate, altogether pushed Iran and Iranian decision-makers to the position that there is no other choice but to go for indigenous enrichment and fuel production. So we have designed the Natanz nuclear plant so as to produce, if it works annually with 54,000 P1 type centrifuges, the fuel required for the annual consumption of the Bushehr nuclear plant
MK: Is the Natanz nuclear plant under IAEA inspections?
AS: Natanz is under the full-scope of IAEA inspections and beyond . In order to remove any ambiguity and provide 100% transparency guarantee, we agreed and negotiated a legal text with the IAEA and have accepted further legal obligations. These two legal texts are called Facility Attachment and Safeguard Approach for Natanz Enrichment. It means that the operator inspectors do not need to discuss each time what to see, how to see, where to install or not to install cameras.. Therefore this is the legal obligation that Iran has accepted that everything is under the most intrusive and robust inspections. Apart from that we have also agreed that the agency could have short notice snapshot inspections, within two hours or so. This is of course maximum transparency and assurance.
MK: Do these measures apply to other nuclear sites across Iran as well?
AS: Yes, in fact this is the case. Since it was established over 35 years ago, the Tehran research reactor has been under continuous Agency surveillance and there is also a Facility Attachment for Tehran research reactor as well as in Isfahan and other [sites]. Therefore even in Isfahan which is a Uranium conversion [facility] we do have IAEA cameras. In fact I took the ambassadors of the Non-aligned Movement (NAM), G77 and the Arab League to Isfahan and in that visit I invited and permitted over 100 international journalists to also accompany me to visit all parts of the Isfahan [facility]; they were able to see with their own eyes the IAEA cameras installed in different corners of that facility. Similar facilities in other countries do not have these cameras and therefore we have accepted additional measures to make sure that everything is under the full-scope Safeguards.
MK: So what has the IAEA or its Director General expressed concern about, especially in its latest report?
AS: We implemented the Additional Protocol for two and a half years voluntarily but a historical mistake was made by the US and a couple of other Western countries that after so much cooperation and having even suspended these activities, they conveyed this file to New York. Of course it was not officially referred because it was not following the provision of the statute of the IAEA Safeguards.
In fact immediately after the involvement of the UN Security Council in this issue, which is in fact an unlawful involvement, the Iranian Parliament passed a law restricting the government to only accept the Comprehensive Safeguards of the NPT. Therefore we were not going to discuss the issues beyond our legal obligations such as the so called "outstanding issues." However after one year that we stopped these discussions we as a matter of fact showed our maximum flexibility and concession. Under the work-plan which was negotiated and agreed with the IAEA we decided to resolve those issues. But of course the Agency asked not only Iran but many other countries to sign, ratify and implement the Additional Protocol. Because of the unfortunate decision to get the UN Security Council involved and the ongoing resolutions that they are passing against Iran, one can not expect a parliament in a democratic society to ignore this fact and pass and ratify the Additional Protocol. I want to say that the Director General [of the IAEA] has reported that over one hundred countries at present do not implement the Additional Protocol and therefore this is not only about Iran.
MK: The latest report of the IAEA contains some issues mentioned in the media especially with regards to the contents of that particular laptop and there are the explosives and detonator tests, missile re-entry vehicles and the uranium metal document. These are the things that have been raised and branded as outstanding questions with regards to Iran's nuclear programme. Some of it has been answered in the work-plan, some of it even contradicts the actual work-plan. How does Iran view the latest report in particular with regards to the track record of its relationship with the IAEA?
AS: The work-plan, which we agreed with the IAEA [Aug. 07], has resolved all six issues, called the outstanding issues, and the Director General has clearly reported to the whole world that they are resolved in the past reports.
One issue which was not categorized as an outstanding issue was the issue of "alleged studies." That is the allegation by the US that there were some studies on Green Salt, high explosives and re-entry missiles. And as you correctly mentioned it was the issue the so-called “laptop”. After the first process i.e. the six outstanding issues which were all nuclear-related matters and within the domain of the IAEA, was over, in a compromise we accepted to also discuss these matters. Because missiles or explosives are not within the contents of the statute of the IAEA. These are outside the domain of the IAEA. But we showed flexibility and we said OK let us have the documents, we will study them and give our assessment.
In the work-plan it was clearly mentioned that the Agency was obliged to deliver this document and we were only obliged to give our assessment of it. No discussions, no interviews, not even visits. That was the agreement and understanding with the IAEA. The high officials and the head of the legal department, policy making and technical safeguard departments were also present when this text was finalised. It is interesting that in spite of the Americans' march against Mr ElBaradei and the IAEA secretariat about the [IAEA-Iran] work-plan, this document was supported almost unanimously in the IAEA and even in the Board of Governors it was discussed and many European countries and others welcomed the IAEA for having achieved this work-plan.
Therefore this work-plan has an important status and both sides should fulfil their obligations. Unfortunately the Americans prevented the IAEA to fulfil its obligation by not delivering the documents and not permitting the IAEA to deliver the documents to Iran. But again we showed flexibility and we accepted that the documents could only be shown so that we could put an end to this endless process. Finally [the documents] were shown and we explained comprehensively why these papers are forged and baseless. We had many meetings, over 200 pages of explanation have been given in a confidential manner to the IAEA and unfortunately the Americans are still trying to keep this file [open] by continuing to make ceaseless allegations.
MK: How were these documents shown to you? Was it in a paper format? Was it digital? Did they have any confidential seals?
AS: That is an important point you raised. In the first round of our meeting, they simply brought some sheets of papers in hard copy and said that we were not allowed to take them outside the room or make a copy. Then in the second round the secretariat was further embarrassed and they apologised to Iran and said that this time the Americans had not even permitted [the IAEA] to obtain or show hard copies [of the documents]. Therefore they brought us electronic versions, which were shown on a computer laptop screen. This has created a lot of problems for the secretariat and Iran; the Director General has in fact complained about the US actions creating impediments in the work, and in the last report he has indeed criticised this.
MK: Doesn't this play with the credibility of the IAEA as a whole and if it does, is it the case that the IAEA has to do whatever the US asks it to do?
AS: That is exactly the concern reflected in the Non-Alignment Movement statement. Here over one hundred countries expressed their serious concern and dissatisfaction and objection to this status quo. That one country is somehow interfering in the impartial and professional work of the IAEA. It is absolutely a violation of the spirit and the letter of [the IAEA] statute that one state has allegations against another state and gives documents to the IAEA but dictates what to do with it and how to do it and when to do it. This is 100% against the statutory obligations of each member state. That is exactly what happened.
Apart from these issues, among all the documents and material received from the United States against Iran, those essentially forged documents and communications, none of them have any seals of “confidential” or “highly confidential” or “top secret”. How can one imagine that a country has had some sort of a Manhattan nuclear weapon project and all these communications between the Ministry of Defence and all other organisations related to it lack any level of confidentiality on such papers and that this is just normal communication? While they have put some secret codes in order to show that they are some secret projects, at the same time one of the sheets in the third line in parenthesis explains that 111 or 12 or whatever, that this code is about a "nuclear weapon warhead"! This is ridiculous; and there are numerous points like this that we have fully explained to the agency inspectors.
In the meeting we had in Tehran, every problem, every shortcoming and inconsistency was thoroughly discussed and reflected. Therefore this matter is in fact over and I just want to conclude by saying that for the last five years there have been over twenty seven allegations about military sites in Iran and at least 248 samples have been taken from military sites and have been fully analysed which proved that none has any evidence of nuclear weapons or nuclear material. Therefore they have been baseless.
MK: Do you expect any more UN Security Council sanctions against Iran, given that IAEA reports have been in the passed used as justification for UNSC resolutions?
AS: No, in fact there were some attempts in this direction by the US before June in the Board of Governors. For almost two weeks they made much effort to lobby and convince many member states by talking to their capitals. The US mission in Vienna tried hard to convince the member states to have a resolution in the IAEA against Iran. Based even on that report they were unable to succeed. It means that the member states of the IAEA, who are the same members of the United Nations, disagree [with the US] because they do not assess this report as negative, because over ten paragraphs are very positive in the report particularly the paragraphs which repeat that there is no evidence of diversion of nuclear material and facility, towards military nuclear purposes and that all nuclear material are accounted for. This is a very important message.
MK: What about the UN Security Council itself and if another sanctions resolution is passed what would be Iran's likely response?
AS: Well I have to say that these resolutions have been in fact counter-productive. It has in fact undermined to a great extent the authority of the IAEA and it has not had any effect on our nuclear activities. We have even speeded up and tried to show our determination that by sanctions or resolutions or threats of military attack, Iran will not give up its inalienable right for these activities. But at the same time we follow a policy which makes the US administration very disappointed. In spite of the disappointment and frustration about the UN Security Council resolutions which have been in fact very negative on the UN ['s image] and proved that the UNSC is used as an instrument against countries, Iran decided not to react to reduce or halt its cooperation with the IAEA. Therefore despite those resolutions we continue our cooperation with the IAEA within our legal obligations under the Comprehensive Safeguards of the NPT agreement and therefore we neither suspended enrichment nor we suspended [our cooperation with the IAEA]. That is exactly the policy which has upset the US administration. Because they love to hear the news that Iran has decided either to stop or reduce the inspections or to withdraw from NPT and we have not done either.
MK: Does Iran have any incentive to go after Nuclear weapons given Israel's presence and Pakistan's and other countries around Iran?
AS: The answer is very simply, no. It is not a slogan, I have some logic for it. First of all there are religious fatwas or decrees that we are against weapons of mass destruction. We have proved this by our action during the eight years of imposed war by Saddam where Iraq used chemical weapons and over 100,000 people were affected; over 30,000 are still under treatment. Everybody knows that Iran had at that time considerable advanced chemical and petrochemical technology. We could have produced and used [such weapons.] We didn't do that. This is a clear example at a time when we were facing to be or not to be.
The second reason is if a country like Iran or other developing countries decide to have nuclear weapons, how many can they have? Maybe a couple of them? They cannot have 1000s of nuclear bombs in order to compete for example with the United States. Then the quantity would be the crucial factor in competing with the adversaries where they are.
Therefore nuclear weapons create vulnerability for the country. As soon as a country obtains nuclear weapons they will have a problem because they cannot compete in this way. We know in the cold war the Soviet Union and the US were just competing over the number of their warheads because it was this quantity that was playing the role. Therefore this is a historical mistake for any country to go after nuclear weapons. We do not need it.
Apart from this, the [Iranian] revolution for the last 30 years since its triumph has had one simple message; that the Islamic Republic and this democratic system that has been established after the revolution could only be sustained by popular support and the unity of the people who play their role for the sustainable and continuous progress of the country. Therefore this is the main thing the government respects namely to have the popular support and also to make every effort that our cooperation with all countries of the whole world is promoted every day. And that we will always be committed to international laws. That is why you have never heard any news that Iran has had any problems with its neighbours.
MK: Finally I want to touch upon the way forward. How do you see this current crisis -if it is a real crisis, if it is even a nuclear crisis- can be resolved? There are various ideas floating such as a joint consortium [for enrichment], you've got the temporary suspension of enrichment, the Additional Protocol ideas. How do you think this can be resolved?
AS: I will try to be very concise. We are going to continue our cooperation with the IAEA. All our activities are under routine inspection. We have already given our explanations to the IAEA on the last issue of so-called alleged studies; and that if there are any questions or ambiguities for the IAEA or even member states we are well prepared to answer them because we are transparent and we want to make sure that all member states are confident that everything is for peaceful purposes.
At the same time and with the same mentality we welcome all member states in parallel to work with the IAEA to come to the negotiating table. Negotiating table means they can come and we can discuss the common elements about international issues and many things that concern all of us. International security, regional security, international cooperation, energy, energy safety and many other issues. That is why we have given our package which includes all these elements and we were open minded and we have received the 5+1 or the so called 3+3 package. We are studying these carefully. I personally hope and I am optimistic that if the 5+1 showed they have a political will and they want to prove their political and good intention, they should immediately come to the negotiating table without any preconditions and we can have two proposals on the table for discussion.
MK: Would Iran be prepared to accept the Additional Protocol if Iran's file is returned from the UN Security Council to the board of the IAEA?
AS: Well of course this question should be addressed to the Parliament. But I can say that the file has not officially been referred to [the UNSC]. But let's say if the UNSC stopped its illegal involvement, engagement or interference, this of course will help and the environment will be better. Because as long as the UN Security Council is involved and passes resolutions, they just continue to poison the environment and put the spirit of cooperation in jeopardy. Therefore if they will do this, that is a right step in the right direction. In the Board of Governors last week I said that if this issue is removed from the agenda of the board and if the [IAEA] Safeguards is implemented in a routine manner then Iran will show more flexibility to take voluntary steps such as those which were discussed during the visits of the Director General to Tehran. So we will show [flexibility] and this is part of our Iranian culture with thousands of years of civilisation. We cannot accept threats, intimidation and humiliation but if there is a civilised environment and a language of dialogue and a constructive environment then we will show flexibility in order to make sure that the other side also will have enough confidence. Therefore the building of confidence is a two way process. They make accusations against Iran over some issues or in the past over confidence deficit, while in fact we have a large amount of records regarding confidence deficit vis-Ã -vis Western countries particularly the US and some of the European countries including EU3, specifically the UK and France. They have done much [wrong] against the Iranian nation and this is a time for them to compensate.
MK: The sanctions resolutions passed were initially based on the concern that Iran may divert its nuclear program towards a military goal; but the IAEA has already confirmed that this is not the case. Perhaps that would mean the previous sanctions would have to be removed and future ones should not be passed. Why do you think the Security Council is still willing to accept the US agenda of pushing Iran into isolation? And -I know this may be a difficult question- but do you think that the comments of the Iranian President regarding Israel has helped this process, this push for sanctions against Iran?
AS: Two different things. First of all, on the resolutions they tried to justify it by saying it is because of the "outstanding issues." The Director General has always said that this issue is in New York not because of verification or any problems that Iran has created; Iran is in fact continuing its work and the Director General has continuously reported that the Agency is able to continue its verification. Therefore the involvement of the UNSC in New York is not because of a problem between the IAEA and Iran within the statute of the work. Iran is not like the case of other countries such as North Korea who withdrew from NPT and therefore technically and legally this matter was passed and referred to UN Security Council. We are continuing our work with the IAEA and routine inspections continue. But they then raised the issue of outstanding issues. Now that the outstanding issues are resolved and the Director General has reported in March also that all six outstanding issued are resolved, there is no technical justification and any merit for suspension. Because they asked to suspend enrichment until the Agency and Iran resolved these outstanding issues. That is why the [idea of] suspension has lost its technical and even political merits that the proponents of the resolutions were raising.
Secondly, we have to bear in mind that since the victory of the [1979] revolution, our people have been echoing to the whole world that they oppose any mentality that is against humanity. Genocide, discrimination, aggression, apartheid and Zionism, these are all the categories that the people of Iran have said they are committed not to accept and they will not support this kind of mentality. That is the reason immediately after the revolution, Iran in fact stopped its diplomatic relation with the Apartheid regime of South Africa and the Zionist regime of Israel. After the revolution, we did not even stop our diplomatic relationship with the US which was the first adversary, having many issues with our people from the coup [of 1953] and onward interventions in our country. It means that was our first priority and as soon as the apartheid mentality was removed and a popular government was in place, we supported the South Africans and we now have the best relationship with the South African people and the South African government. Therefore that is the problem and the message of the Iranian officials and the Iranian people is that we cannot accept that a group of people occupy a place and make many innocent people homeless. This is a matter of principle against humanity, that was the whole issue. At the same time we have clearly mentioned and our supreme leader also had a message over four years ago that if people there -in occupied Palestine- Palestinians, Jews, Christians and Muslims, who are all followers of divine religions come together and follow a democratic referendum and choose a democratic government, then we will support that. That is exactly what we want. The homeless Palestinians also have the right to live there and this is the minimum that we expect. Because this is a right of human beings to have a home and to live there in peace and in equal footing. We are always for peace and prosperity in that region, the Middle East and also in the whole world.
MK: Thank you Mr Ambassador for speaking to us.
AS: Thank you indeed.
For further information or to contact CASMII please visit http://www.campaigniran.org
[End]
CASMII Exclusive: Interview with Iran's Ambassador to IAEA
30 June 2007
Mohammad Kamaali, board member of CASMII UK speaks to Iran's Ambassador to the IAEA Dr Ali Asghar Soltanieh who was recently in London to attend an international conference on a Middle East Weapons of Mass Destruction Free Zone, organised by the School of Oriental and African Studies, SOAS.
In this interview Dr Soltanieh explains the reasons behind Iran's determination to develop an indigenous uranium enrichment capability and why Iran believes the countries pursuing or relying on nuclear weapons are making a mistake. He also gives his viewpoint on how international institutions such as the UN Security Council are in practice used as instruments of political pressure by a select few member states, ultimately undermining the authority and credibility of those institutions.
The following is a transcript of the interview with minor editing for clarity.
A Podcast is also available for download from here
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Mohammad Kamaali: Thank you Mr Ambassador for agreeing to talk to us. If you could please briefly explain the history of Iran's nuclear programme, where it started, what stage is it at present and what are your future plans.
Dr Ali Asghar Soltanieh: It is simple, Iran’s nuclear programme did not start yesterday for it to be stopped tomorrow as it is today demanded by some countries like the US. Nuclear activities in Iran go back to half a century ago, before and after the [1979] revolution. In fact, I myself started my work before the revolution in the Atomic Energy Organisation (AEO) and I have witnessed the double standard approach before and after the revolution.
A very simple question that is always addressed to us is what is the justification for Iran to have nuclear energy while it has huge amounts of natural resources of oil and gas. This question was never raised before the revolution when the [oil] resources were much more than today and the population was about half. [Today] the added value of the oil bid for application in our chemical and petrochemical industry is much more because we now have a lot of advancements in this area which we can use for producing a great amount of by-products. So the added value is much more than thirty years ago, in addition to the price of oil which is of course increasing everyday.
Therefore there are good technical and financial justifications for having also nuclear energy as an option. But at the same time we have never envisioned an ambitious programme so as to consider nuclear energy as the only option. We have always thought of the policy of diversifying energy resources. We have used a technical/scientific program in the IAEA namely the VASP programme; with which countries use all their data to find out in a scientific way what share nuclear energy can play for them. Using this programme we have come to the conclusion that in the next twenty years, roughly by 2020, we will have up to 20,000 megawatts from nuclear energy. Right now in our national grid we have about 35,000 megawatts and if Bushehr becomes operational, the share of nuclear energy will be 1,000 out of 35,000 megawatts. But given the constant growth of industry and naturally for many other uses across the country, the energy demand is increasing. Therefore 20,000 megawatts by the year 2020 again will be perhaps a small portion of this sort of energy. It is not 400% therefore it is not that ambitious, it is a more realistic approach so that step-by-step we can have a gradual contribution from nuclear power.
Now the issue which I think has been made so much politicised but is mainly technical is when you have nuclear energy and you want to have nuclear energy for different applications including nuclear power then the issue is that you need reactors and reactors need fuel and the fuel should be assured.
MK: Could you explain what those other purposes might be?
AS: Yes, in fact I have been twice the director of nuclear research centre in Tehran (NRC). One of the main applications of nuclear energy is in producing various radioisotopes for medical, agricultural and industrial purposes. Right now over 200 hospitals and clinics are using the radioisotopes produced in Tehran's 5 megawatts reactor; and of course in addition to these applications the sources also could be used for many leakage applications in industry as well as agriculture of course.
We do have for example a gamma radiation centre in Tehran. Everyday trucks of the chemical by-products and in fact the material used in the medical applications are sterilised by gamma radiation by cold sources there. There are various applications which are increasing everyday not only in Iran but in the whole world.
Therefore for all these we come back to the nuclear material used for that purpose, for either radioactive sources or reactor. But then the question is you need fuel and the fuel should be assured. The main question is why we started to choose our own way for enrichment in order to produce the fuel indigenously.
I explain this to you very briefly; I am sure that your colleagues will be convinced because this is part of history and these are well documented facts. First of all we have a confidence deficit for the last thirty years particularly after the revolution when Western countries immediately stopped their nuclear cooperation [with Iran.] We paid $2m before the revolution in order to have new fuel for the Tehran reactor which produces mainly radioisotopes. The Americans neither gave the fuel nor the $2m that they received. Therefore when I was the Ambassador to the IAEA 26 years ago, I raised the issue of an urgent need for fuel with the Director General at the time, Hans Blix, and asked the IAEA to do something as intermediation for this problem. The IAEA in fact wrote to different potential suppliers, reflecting our request; unfortunately none of them agreed to even give the fuel for Tehran's research reactor which has been under the IAEA's full-scope Safeguards.
MK: Were they obliged to accept Iran's request at all?
AS: Yes, because this is under the IAEA. First of all the US was legally obliged because they had a contract; they received $2m out of $2.3m before the revolution. The fuel was ready to ship and they stopped the shipment of that fuel. Finally when the Argentineans had success in enrichment, they announced their readiness to give fuel to Iran under the auspices of the IAEA and that is what happened. Therefore the Tehran reactor right now is working with Argentinean fuel and this was in fact a good sign of South-South cooperation.
Now I give this as one example and there are many examples both bilaterally and multilaterally that have affected us. I want you to consider these and then everybody could easily judge if they were in Iran's position whether or not they would have taken the same decisions [as we did] . This is one reason. The second reason is this: Iran was part of Eurodif, an enrichment company in France, to which the Shah gave $1bn as a loan thirty years ago. Right now that I am giving this interview, Iran holds 10% of the shares of that company, but we have not even received 1 gram of uranium from that factory, uranium which is being produced under the full-scope of [the IAEA] safeguard. That is also another reason why Iran was disappointed and frustrated, and therefore it had to decide otherwise.
The next issue of course is the Bushehr power plant which is a tragedy in fact among all industrial projects of the world. It was supposed to be in operation almost twenty eight years ago and after thirty years it is still not in operation. We spent another $1bn [in dealing] with the Russians and it is still not in operation. And I want to inform you that, while we thank the Russians for their cooperation, they have only given the fuel so far for the first load and the first year. They have not provided any guarantees on paper for the fuel in the next five or ten years. Therefore there is no guarantee for even the Bushehr power plant.
Having all these in mind and with this background we had no choice but to have our own enrichment and fuel production. However, there was also another important development in the international arena which in fact pushed Iran to make this decision. In the IAEA there was a committee for guaranteeing nuclear supply. That committee collapsed in 1987 after seven years of negotiation. It means that after seven years of negotiation, they were not able to have one piece of paper as a legally binding assurance for guaranteeing nuclear fuel.
MK: Was there any particular reason for that?
AS: The reason was because the industrialized countries did not want to give that assurance and this is their historical mistake. This was 1987 and if you refer to the IAEA website and reports you will see that the IAEA has reported that Iran in fact decided to go after enrichment by coincidence after 1987. It means that when we lost all hope in international arrangements and also the bilateral problems we had after the revolution when [our partners] did not cooperate, altogether pushed Iran and Iranian decision-makers to the position that there is no other choice but to go for indigenous enrichment and fuel production. So we have designed the Natanz nuclear plant so as to produce, if it works annually with 54,000 P1 type centrifuges, the fuel required for the annual consumption of the Bushehr nuclear plant
MK: Is the Natanz nuclear plant under IAEA inspections?
AS: Natanz is under the full-scope of IAEA inspections and beyond . In order to remove any ambiguity and provide 100% transparency guarantee, we agreed and negotiated a legal text with the IAEA and have accepted further legal obligations. These two legal texts are called Facility Attachment and Safeguard Approach for Natanz Enrichment. It means that the operator inspectors do not need to discuss each time what to see, how to see, where to install or not to install cameras.. Therefore this is the legal obligation that Iran has accepted that everything is under the most intrusive and robust inspections. Apart from that we have also agreed that the agency could have short notice snapshot inspections, within two hours or so. This is of course maximum transparency and assurance.
MK: Do these measures apply to other nuclear sites across Iran as well?
AS: Yes, in fact this is the case. Since it was established over 35 years ago, the Tehran research reactor has been under continuous Agency surveillance and there is also a Facility Attachment for Tehran research reactor as well as in Isfahan and other [sites]. Therefore even in Isfahan which is a Uranium conversion [facility] we do have IAEA cameras. In fact I took the ambassadors of the Non-aligned Movement (NAM), G77 and the Arab League to Isfahan and in that visit I invited and permitted over 100 international journalists to also accompany me to visit all parts of the Isfahan [facility]; they were able to see with their own eyes the IAEA cameras installed in different corners of that facility. Similar facilities in other countries do not have these cameras and therefore we have accepted additional measures to make sure that everything is under the full-scope Safeguards.
MK: So what has the IAEA or its Director General expressed concern about, especially in its latest report?
AS: We implemented the Additional Protocol for two and a half years voluntarily but a historical mistake was made by the US and a couple of other Western countries that after so much cooperation and having even suspended these activities, they conveyed this file to New York. Of course it was not officially referred because it was not following the provision of the statute of the IAEA Safeguards.
In fact immediately after the involvement of the UN Security Council in this issue, which is in fact an unlawful involvement, the Iranian Parliament passed a law restricting the government to only accept the Comprehensive Safeguards of the NPT. Therefore we were not going to discuss the issues beyond our legal obligations such as the so called "outstanding issues." However after one year that we stopped these discussions we as a matter of fact showed our maximum flexibility and concession. Under the work-plan which was negotiated and agreed with the IAEA we decided to resolve those issues. But of course the Agency asked not only Iran but many other countries to sign, ratify and implement the Additional Protocol. Because of the unfortunate decision to get the UN Security Council involved and the ongoing resolutions that they are passing against Iran, one can not expect a parliament in a democratic society to ignore this fact and pass and ratify the Additional Protocol. I want to say that the Director General [of the IAEA] has reported that over one hundred countries at present do not implement the Additional Protocol and therefore this is not only about Iran.
MK: The latest report of the IAEA contains some issues mentioned in the media especially with regards to the contents of that particular laptop and there are the explosives and detonator tests, missile re-entry vehicles and the uranium metal document. These are the things that have been raised and branded as outstanding questions with regards to Iran's nuclear programme. Some of it has been answered in the work-plan, some of it even contradicts the actual work-plan. How does Iran view the latest report in particular with regards to the track record of its relationship with the IAEA?
AS: The work-plan, which we agreed with the IAEA [Aug. 07], has resolved all six issues, called the outstanding issues, and the Director General has clearly reported to the whole world that they are resolved in the past reports.
One issue which was not categorized as an outstanding issue was the issue of "alleged studies." That is the allegation by the US that there were some studies on Green Salt, high explosives and re-entry missiles. And as you correctly mentioned it was the issue the so-called “laptop”. After the first process i.e. the six outstanding issues which were all nuclear-related matters and within the domain of the IAEA, was over, in a compromise we accepted to also discuss these matters. Because missiles or explosives are not within the contents of the statute of the IAEA. These are outside the domain of the IAEA. But we showed flexibility and we said OK let us have the documents, we will study them and give our assessment.
In the work-plan it was clearly mentioned that the Agency was obliged to deliver this document and we were only obliged to give our assessment of it. No discussions, no interviews, not even visits. That was the agreement and understanding with the IAEA. The high officials and the head of the legal department, policy making and technical safeguard departments were also present when this text was finalised. It is interesting that in spite of the Americans' march against Mr ElBaradei and the IAEA secretariat about the [IAEA-Iran] work-plan, this document was supported almost unanimously in the IAEA and even in the Board of Governors it was discussed and many European countries and others welcomed the IAEA for having achieved this work-plan.
Therefore this work-plan has an important status and both sides should fulfil their obligations. Unfortunately the Americans prevented the IAEA to fulfil its obligation by not delivering the documents and not permitting the IAEA to deliver the documents to Iran. But again we showed flexibility and we accepted that the documents could only be shown so that we could put an end to this endless process. Finally [the documents] were shown and we explained comprehensively why these papers are forged and baseless. We had many meetings, over 200 pages of explanation have been given in a confidential manner to the IAEA and unfortunately the Americans are still trying to keep this file [open] by continuing to make ceaseless allegations.
MK: How were these documents shown to you? Was it in a paper format? Was it digital? Did they have any confidential seals?
AS: That is an important point you raised. In the first round of our meeting, they simply brought some sheets of papers in hard copy and said that we were not allowed to take them outside the room or make a copy. Then in the second round the secretariat was further embarrassed and they apologised to Iran and said that this time the Americans had not even permitted [the IAEA] to obtain or show hard copies [of the documents]. Therefore they brought us electronic versions, which were shown on a computer laptop screen. This has created a lot of problems for the secretariat and Iran; the Director General has in fact complained about the US actions creating impediments in the work, and in the last report he has indeed criticised this.
MK: Doesn't this play with the credibility of the IAEA as a whole and if it does, is it the case that the IAEA has to do whatever the US asks it to do?
AS: That is exactly the concern reflected in the Non-Alignment Movement statement. Here over one hundred countries expressed their serious concern and dissatisfaction and objection to this status quo. That one country is somehow interfering in the impartial and professional work of the IAEA. It is absolutely a violation of the spirit and the letter of [the IAEA] statute that one state has allegations against another state and gives documents to the IAEA but dictates what to do with it and how to do it and when to do it. This is 100% against the statutory obligations of each member state. That is exactly what happened.
Apart from these issues, among all the documents and material received from the United States against Iran, those essentially forged documents and communications, none of them have any seals of “confidential” or “highly confidential” or “top secret”. How can one imagine that a country has had some sort of a Manhattan nuclear weapon project and all these communications between the Ministry of Defence and all other organisations related to it lack any level of confidentiality on such papers and that this is just normal communication? While they have put some secret codes in order to show that they are some secret projects, at the same time one of the sheets in the third line in parenthesis explains that 111 or 12 or whatever, that this code is about a "nuclear weapon warhead"! This is ridiculous; and there are numerous points like this that we have fully explained to the agency inspectors.
In the meeting we had in Tehran, every problem, every shortcoming and inconsistency was thoroughly discussed and reflected. Therefore this matter is in fact over and I just want to conclude by saying that for the last five years there have been over twenty seven allegations about military sites in Iran and at least 248 samples have been taken from military sites and have been fully analysed which proved that none has any evidence of nuclear weapons or nuclear material. Therefore they have been baseless.
MK: Do you expect any more UN Security Council sanctions against Iran, given that IAEA reports have been in the passed used as justification for UNSC resolutions?
AS: No, in fact there were some attempts in this direction by the US before June in the Board of Governors. For almost two weeks they made much effort to lobby and convince many member states by talking to their capitals. The US mission in Vienna tried hard to convince the member states to have a resolution in the IAEA against Iran. Based even on that report they were unable to succeed. It means that the member states of the IAEA, who are the same members of the United Nations, disagree [with the US] because they do not assess this report as negative, because over ten paragraphs are very positive in the report particularly the paragraphs which repeat that there is no evidence of diversion of nuclear material and facility, towards military nuclear purposes and that all nuclear material are accounted for. This is a very important message.
MK: What about the UN Security Council itself and if another sanctions resolution is passed what would be Iran's likely response?
AS: Well I have to say that these resolutions have been in fact counter-productive. It has in fact undermined to a great extent the authority of the IAEA and it has not had any effect on our nuclear activities. We have even speeded up and tried to show our determination that by sanctions or resolutions or threats of military attack, Iran will not give up its inalienable right for these activities. But at the same time we follow a policy which makes the US administration very disappointed. In spite of the disappointment and frustration about the UN Security Council resolutions which have been in fact very negative on the UN ['s image] and proved that the UNSC is used as an instrument against countries, Iran decided not to react to reduce or halt its cooperation with the IAEA. Therefore despite those resolutions we continue our cooperation with the IAEA within our legal obligations under the Comprehensive Safeguards of the NPT agreement and therefore we neither suspended enrichment nor we suspended [our cooperation with the IAEA]. That is exactly the policy which has upset the US administration. Because they love to hear the news that Iran has decided either to stop or reduce the inspections or to withdraw from NPT and we have not done either.
MK: Does Iran have any incentive to go after Nuclear weapons given Israel's presence and Pakistan's and other countries around Iran?
AS: The answer is very simply, no. It is not a slogan, I have some logic for it. First of all there are religious fatwas or decrees that we are against weapons of mass destruction. We have proved this by our action during the eight years of imposed war by Saddam where Iraq used chemical weapons and over 100,000 people were affected; over 30,000 are still under treatment. Everybody knows that Iran had at that time considerable advanced chemical and petrochemical technology. We could have produced and used [such weapons.] We didn't do that. This is a clear example at a time when we were facing to be or not to be.
The second reason is if a country like Iran or other developing countries decide to have nuclear weapons, how many can they have? Maybe a couple of them? They cannot have 1000s of nuclear bombs in order to compete for example with the United States. Then the quantity would be the crucial factor in competing with the adversaries where they are.
Therefore nuclear weapons create vulnerability for the country. As soon as a country obtains nuclear weapons they will have a problem because they cannot compete in this way. We know in the cold war the Soviet Union and the US were just competing over the number of their warheads because it was this quantity that was playing the role. Therefore this is a historical mistake for any country to go after nuclear weapons. We do not need it.
Apart from this, the [Iranian] revolution for the last 30 years since its triumph has had one simple message; that the Islamic Republic and this democratic system that has been established after the revolution could only be sustained by popular support and the unity of the people who play their role for the sustainable and continuous progress of the country. Therefore this is the main thing the government respects namely to have the popular support and also to make every effort that our cooperation with all countries of the whole world is promoted every day. And that we will always be committed to international laws. That is why you have never heard any news that Iran has had any problems with its neighbours.
MK: Finally I want to touch upon the way forward. How do you see this current crisis -if it is a real crisis, if it is even a nuclear crisis- can be resolved? There are various ideas floating such as a joint consortium [for enrichment], you've got the temporary suspension of enrichment, the Additional Protocol ideas. How do you think this can be resolved?
AS: I will try to be very concise. We are going to continue our cooperation with the IAEA. All our activities are under routine inspection. We have already given our explanations to the IAEA on the last issue of so-called alleged studies; and that if there are any questions or ambiguities for the IAEA or even member states we are well prepared to answer them because we are transparent and we want to make sure that all member states are confident that everything is for peaceful purposes.
At the same time and with the same mentality we welcome all member states in parallel to work with the IAEA to come to the negotiating table. Negotiating table means they can come and we can discuss the common elements about international issues and many things that concern all of us. International security, regional security, international cooperation, energy, energy safety and many other issues. That is why we have given our package which includes all these elements and we were open minded and we have received the 5+1 or the so called 3+3 package. We are studying these carefully. I personally hope and I am optimistic that if the 5+1 showed they have a political will and they want to prove their political and good intention, they should immediately come to the negotiating table without any preconditions and we can have two proposals on the table for discussion.
MK: Would Iran be prepared to accept the Additional Protocol if Iran's file is returned from the UN Security Council to the board of the IAEA?
AS: Well of course this question should be addressed to the Parliament. But I can say that the file has not officially been referred to [the UNSC]. But let's say if the UNSC stopped its illegal involvement, engagement or interference, this of course will help and the environment will be better. Because as long as the UN Security Council is involved and passes resolutions, they just continue to poison the environment and put the spirit of cooperation in jeopardy. Therefore if they will do this, that is a right step in the right direction. In the Board of Governors last week I said that if this issue is removed from the agenda of the board and if the [IAEA] Safeguards is implemented in a routine manner then Iran will show more flexibility to take voluntary steps such as those which were discussed during the visits of the Director General to Tehran. So we will show [flexibility] and this is part of our Iranian culture with thousands of years of civilisation. We cannot accept threats, intimidation and humiliation but if there is a civilised environment and a language of dialogue and a constructive environment then we will show flexibility in order to make sure that the other side also will have enough confidence. Therefore the building of confidence is a two way process. They make accusations against Iran over some issues or in the past over confidence deficit, while in fact we have a large amount of records regarding confidence deficit vis-Ã -vis Western countries particularly the US and some of the European countries including EU3, specifically the UK and France. They have done much [wrong] against the Iranian nation and this is a time for them to compensate.
MK: The sanctions resolutions passed were initially based on the concern that Iran may divert its nuclear program towards a military goal; but the IAEA has already confirmed that this is not the case. Perhaps that would mean the previous sanctions would have to be removed and future ones should not be passed. Why do you think the Security Council is still willing to accept the US agenda of pushing Iran into isolation? And -I know this may be a difficult question- but do you think that the comments of the Iranian President regarding Israel has helped this process, this push for sanctions against Iran?
AS: Two different things. First of all, on the resolutions they tried to justify it by saying it is because of the "outstanding issues." The Director General has always said that this issue is in New York not because of verification or any problems that Iran has created; Iran is in fact continuing its work and the Director General has continuously reported that the Agency is able to continue its verification. Therefore the involvement of the UNSC in New York is not because of a problem between the IAEA and Iran within the statute of the work. Iran is not like the case of other countries such as North Korea who withdrew from NPT and therefore technically and legally this matter was passed and referred to UN Security Council. We are continuing our work with the IAEA and routine inspections continue. But they then raised the issue of outstanding issues. Now that the outstanding issues are resolved and the Director General has reported in March also that all six outstanding issued are resolved, there is no technical justification and any merit for suspension. Because they asked to suspend enrichment until the Agency and Iran resolved these outstanding issues. That is why the [idea of] suspension has lost its technical and even political merits that the proponents of the resolutions were raising.
Secondly, we have to bear in mind that since the victory of the [1979] revolution, our people have been echoing to the whole world that they oppose any mentality that is against humanity. Genocide, discrimination, aggression, apartheid and Zionism, these are all the categories that the people of Iran have said they are committed not to accept and they will not support this kind of mentality. That is the reason immediately after the revolution, Iran in fact stopped its diplomatic relation with the Apartheid regime of South Africa and the Zionist regime of Israel. After the revolution, we did not even stop our diplomatic relationship with the US which was the first adversary, having many issues with our people from the coup [of 1953] and onward interventions in our country. It means that was our first priority and as soon as the apartheid mentality was removed and a popular government was in place, we supported the South Africans and we now have the best relationship with the South African people and the South African government. Therefore that is the problem and the message of the Iranian officials and the Iranian people is that we cannot accept that a group of people occupy a place and make many innocent people homeless. This is a matter of principle against humanity, that was the whole issue. At the same time we have clearly mentioned and our supreme leader also had a message over four years ago that if people there -in occupied Palestine- Palestinians, Jews, Christians and Muslims, who are all followers of divine religions come together and follow a democratic referendum and choose a democratic government, then we will support that. That is exactly what we want. The homeless Palestinians also have the right to live there and this is the minimum that we expect. Because this is a right of human beings to have a home and to live there in peace and in equal footing. We are always for peace and prosperity in that region, the Middle East and also in the whole world.
MK: Thank you Mr Ambassador for speaking to us.
AS: Thank you indeed.
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[End]
Sunday, June 29, 2008
Seymour M. Hersh--The Bush Administration steps up its secret moves against Iran. (New Yorker)
The New Yorker
Annals of National Security
Preparing the Battlefield
The Bush Administration steps up its secret moves against Iran.
by Seymour M. Hersh
July 7, 2008 (released June 29, 2008)
Late last year, Congress agreed to a request from President Bush to fund a major escalation of covert operations against Iran, according to current and former military, intelligence, and congressional sources. These operations, for which the President sought up to four hundred million dollars, were described in a Presidential Finding signed by Bush, and are designed to destabilize the country’s religious leadership. The covert activities involve support of the minority Ahwazi Arab and Baluchi groups and other dissident organizations. They also include gathering intelligence about Iran’s suspected nuclear-weapons program.
Clandestine operations against Iran are not new. United States Special Operations Forces have been conducting cross-border operations from southern Iraq, with Presidential authorization, since last year. These have included seizing members of Al Quds, the commando arm of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, and taking them to Iraq for interrogation, and the pursuit of “high-value targets” in the President’s war on terror, who may be captured or killed. But the scale and the scope of the operations in Iran, which involve the Central Intelligence Agency and the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), have now been significantly expanded, according to the current and former officials. Many of these activities are not specified in the new Finding, and some congressional leaders have had serious questions about their nature.
Under federal law, a Presidential Finding, which is highly classified, must be issued when a covert intelligence operation gets under way and, at a minimum, must be made known to Democratic and Republican leaders in the House and the Senate and to the ranking members of their respective intelligence committees—the so-called Gang of Eight. Money for the operation can then be reprogrammed from previous appropriations, as needed, by the relevant congressional committees, which also can be briefed.
“The Finding was focussed on undermining Iran’s nuclear ambitions and trying to undermine the government through regime change,” a person familiar with its contents said, and involved “working with opposition groups and passing money.” The Finding provided for a whole new range of activities in southern Iran and in the areas, in the east, where Baluchi political opposition is strong, he said.
Although some legislators were troubled by aspects of the Finding, and “there was a significant amount of high-level discussion” about it, according to the source familiar with it, the funding for the escalation was approved. In other words, some members of the Democratic leadership—Congress has been under Democratic control since the 2006 elections—were willing, in secret, to go along with the Administration in expanding covert activities directed at Iran, while the Party’s presumptive candidate for President, Barack Obama, has said that he favors direct talks and diplomacy.
The request for funding came in the same period in which the Administration was coming to terms with a National Intelligence Estimate, released in December, that concluded that Iran had halted its work on nuclear weapons in 2003. The Administration downplayed the significance of the N.I.E., and, while saying that it was committed to diplomacy, continued to emphasize that urgent action was essential to counter the Iranian nuclear threat. President Bush questioned the N.I.E.’s conclusions, and senior national-security officials, including Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, made similar statements. (So did Senator John McCain, the presumptive Republican Presidential nominee.) Meanwhile, the Administration also revived charges that the Iranian leadership has been involved in the killing of American soldiers in Iraq: both directly, by dispatching commando units into Iraq, and indirectly, by supplying materials used for roadside bombs and other lethal goods. (There have been questions about the accuracy of the claims; the Times, among others, has reported that “significant uncertainties remain about the extent of that involvement.”)
Military and civilian leaders in the Pentagon share the White House’s concern about Iran’s nuclear ambitions, but there is disagreement about whether a military strike is the right solution. Some Pentagon officials believe, as they have let Congress and the media know, that bombing Iran is not a viable response to the nuclear-proliferation issue, and that more diplomacy is necessary.
A Democratic senator told me that, late last year, in an off-the-record lunch meeting, Secretary of Defense Gates met with the Democratic caucus in the Senate. (Such meetings are held regularly.) Gates warned of the consequences if the Bush Administration staged a preëmptive strike on Iran, saying, as the senator recalled, “We’ll create generations of jihadists, and our grandchildren will be battling our enemies here in America.” Gates’s comments stunned the Democrats at the lunch, and another senator asked whether Gates was speaking for Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney. Gates’s answer, the senator told me, was “Let’s just say that I’m here speaking for myself.” (A spokesman for Gates confirmed that he discussed the consequences of a strike at the meeting, but would not address what he said, other than to dispute the senator’s characterization.)
The Joint Chiefs of Staff, whose chairman is Admiral Mike Mullen, were “pushing back very hard” against White House pressure to undertake a military strike against Iran, the person familiar with the Finding told me. Similarly, a Pentagon consultant who is involved in the war on terror said that “at least ten senior flag and general officers, including combatant commanders”—the four-star officers who direct military operations around the world—“have weighed in on that issue.”
The most outspoken of those officers is Admiral William Fallon, who until recently was the head of U.S. Central Command, and thus in charge of American forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. In March, Fallon resigned under pressure, after giving a series of interviews stating his reservations about an armed attack on Iran. For example, late last year he told the Financial Times that the “real objective” of U.S. policy was to change the Iranians’ behavior, and that “attacking them as a means to get to that spot strikes me as being not the first choice.”
Admiral Fallon acknowledged, when I spoke to him in June, that he had heard that there were people in the White House who were upset by his public statements. “Too many people believe you have to be either for or against the Iranians,” he told me. “Let’s get serious. Eighty million people live there, and everyone’s an individual. The idea that they’re only one way or another is nonsense.”
When it came to the Iraq war, Fallon said, “Did I bitch about some of the things that were being proposed? You bet. Some of them were very stupid.”
The Democratic leadership’s agreement to commit hundreds of millions of dollars for more secret operations in Iran was remarkable, given the general concerns of officials like Gates, Fallon, and many others. “The oversight process has not kept pace—it’s been coöpted” by the Administration, the person familiar with the contents of the Finding said. “The process is broken, and this is dangerous stuff we’re authorizing.”
Senior Democrats in Congress told me that they had concerns about the possibility that their understanding of what the new operations entail differs from the White House’s. One issue has to do with a reference in the Finding, the person familiar with it recalled, to potential defensive lethal action by U.S. operatives in Iran. (In early May, the journalist Andrew Cockburn published elements of the Finding in Counterpunch, a newsletter and online magazine.)
The language was inserted into the Finding at the urging of the C.I.A., a former senior intelligence official said. The covert operations set forth in the Finding essentially run parallel to those of a secret military task force, now operating in Iran, that is under the control of JSOC. Under the Bush Administration’s interpretation of the law, clandestine military activities, unlike covert C.I.A. operations, do not need to be depicted in a Finding, because the President has a constitutional right to command combat forces in the field without congressional interference. But the borders between operations are not always clear: in Iran, C.I.A. agents and regional assets have the language skills and the local knowledge to make contacts for the JSOC operatives, and have been working with them to direct personnel, matériel, and money into Iran from an obscure base in western Afghanistan. As a result, Congress has been given only a partial view of how the money it authorized may be used. One of JSOC’s task-force missions, the pursuit of “high-value targets,” was not directly addressed in the Finding. There is a growing realization among some legislators that the Bush Administration, in recent years, has conflated what is an intelligence operation and what is a military one in order to avoid fully informing Congress about what it is doing.
“This is a big deal,” the person familiar with the Finding said. “The C.I.A. needed the Finding to do its traditional stuff, but the Finding does not apply to JSOC. The President signed an Executive Order after September 11th giving the Pentagon license to do things that it had never been able to do before without notifying Congress. The claim was that the military was ‘preparing the battle space,’ and by using that term they were able to circumvent congressional oversight. Everything is justified in terms of fighting the global war on terror.” He added, “The Administration has been fuzzing the lines; there used to be a shade of gray”—between operations that had to be briefed to the senior congressional leadership and those which did not—“but now it’s a shade of mush.”
“The agency says we’re not going to get in the position of helping to kill people without a Finding,” the former senior intelligence official told me. He was referring to the legal threat confronting some agency operatives for their involvement in the rendition and alleged torture of suspects in the war on terror. “This drove the military people up the wall,” he said. As far as the C.I.A. was concerned, the former senior intelligence official said, “the over-all authorization includes killing, but it’s not as though that’s what they’re setting out to do. It’s about gathering information, enlisting support.” The Finding sent to Congress was a compromise, providing legal cover for the C.I.A. while referring to the use of lethal force in ambiguous terms.
The defensive-lethal language led some Democrats, according to congressional sources familiar with their views, to call in the director of the C.I.A., Air Force General Michael V. Hayden, for a special briefing. Hayden reassured the legislators that the language did nothing more than provide authority for Special Forces operatives on the ground in Iran to shoot their way out if they faced capture or harm.
The legislators were far from convinced. One congressman subsequently wrote a personal letter to President Bush insisting that “no lethal action, period” had been authorized within Iran’s borders. As of June, he had received no answer.
Members of Congress have expressed skepticism in the past about the information provided by the White House. On March 15, 2005, David Obey, then the ranking Democrat on the Republican-led House Appropriations Committee, announced that he was putting aside an amendment that he had intended to offer that day, and that would have cut off all funding for national-intelligence programs unless the President agreed to keep Congress fully informed about clandestine military activities undertaken in the war on terror. He had changed his mind, he said, because the White House promised better coöperation. “The Executive Branch understands that we are not trying to dictate what they do,” he said in a floor speech at the time. “We are simply trying to see to it that what they do is consistent with American values and will not get the country in trouble.”
Obey declined to comment on the specifics of the operations in Iran, but he did tell me that the White House reneged on its promise to consult more fully with Congress. He said, “I suspect there’s something going on, but I don’t know what to believe. Cheney has always wanted to go after Iran, and if he had more time he’d find a way to do it. We still don’t get enough information from the agencies, and I have very little confidence that they give us information on the edge.”
None of the four Democrats in the Gang of Eight—Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senate Intelligence Committee chairman John D. Rockefeller IV, and House Intelligence Committee chairman Silvestre Reyes—would comment on the Finding, with some noting that it was highly classified. An aide to one member of the Democratic leadership responded, on his behalf, by pointing to the limitations of the Gang of Eight process. The notification of a Finding, the aide said, “is just that—notification, and not a sign-off on activities. Proper oversight of ongoing intelligence activities is done by fully briefing the members of the intelligence committee.” However, Congress does have the means to challenge the White House once it has been sent a Finding. It has the power to withhold funding for any government operation. The members of the House and Senate Democratic leadership who have access to the Finding can also, if they choose to do so, and if they have shared concerns, come up with ways to exert their influence on Administration policy. (A spokesman for the C.I.A. said, “As a rule, we don’t comment one way or the other on allegations of covert activities or purported findings.” The White House also declined to comment.)
A member of the House Appropriations Committee acknowledged that, even with a Democratic victory in November, “it will take another year before we get the intelligence activities under control.” He went on, “We control the money and they can’t do anything without the money. Money is what it’s all about. But I’m very leery of this Administration.” He added, “This Administration has been so secretive.”
One irony of Admiral Fallon’s departure is that he was, in many areas, in agreement with President Bush on the threat posed by Iran. They had a good working relationship, Fallon told me, and, when he ran CENTCOM, were in regular communication. On March 4th, a week before his resignation, Fallon testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee, saying that he was “encouraged” about the situations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Regarding the role played by Iran’s leaders, he said, “They’ve been absolutely unhelpful, very damaging, and I absolutely don’t condone any of their activities. And I have yet to see anything since I’ve been in this job in the way of a public action by Iran that’s been at all helpful in this region.”
Fallon made it clear in our conversations that he considered it inappropriate to comment publicly about the President, the Vice-President, or Special Operations. But he said he had heard that people in the White House had been “struggling” with his views on Iran. “When I arrived at CENTCOM, the Iranians were funding every entity inside Iraq. It was in their interest to get us out, and so they decided to kill as many Americans as they could. And why not? They didn’t know who’d come out ahead, but they wanted us out. I decided that I couldn’t resolve the situation in Iraq without the neighborhood. To get this problem in Iraq solved, we had to somehow involve Iran and Syria. I had to work the neighborhood.”
Fallon told me that his focus had been not on the Iranian nuclear issue, or on regime change there, but on “putting out the fires in Iraq.” There were constant discussions in Washington and in the field about how to engage Iran and, on the subject of the bombing option, Fallon said, he believed that “it would happen only if the Iranians did something stupid.”
Fallon’s early retirement, however, appears to have been provoked not only by his negative comments about bombing Iran but also by his strong belief in the chain of command and his insistence on being informed about Special Operations in his area of responsibility. One of Fallon’s defenders is retired Marine General John J. (Jack) Sheehan, whose last assignment was as commander-in-chief of the U.S. Atlantic Command, where Fallon was a deputy. Last year, Sheehan rejected a White House offer to become the President’s “czar” for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. “One of the reasons the White House selected Fallon for CENTCOM was that he’s known to be a strategic thinker and had demonstrated those skills in the Pacific,” Sheehan told me. (Fallon served as commander-in-chief of U.S. forces in the Pacific from 2005 to 2007.) “He was charged with coming up with an over-all coherent strategy for Iran, Iraq, and Afghanistan, and, by law, the combatant commander is responsible for all military operations within his A.O.”—area of operations. “That was not happening,” Sheehan said. “When Fallon tried to make sense of all the overt and covert activity conducted by the military in his area of responsibility, a small group in the White House leadership shut him out.”
The law cited by Sheehan is the 1986 Defense Reorganization Act, known as Goldwater-Nichols, which defined the chain of command: from the President to the Secretary of Defense, through the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and on to the various combatant commanders, who were put in charge of all aspects of military operations, including joint training and logistics. That authority, the act stated, was not to be shared with other echelons of command. But the Bush Administration, as part of its global war on terror, instituted new policies that undercut regional commanders-in-chief; for example, it gave Special Operations teams, at military commands around the world, the highest priority in terms of securing support and equipment. The degradation of the traditional chain of command in the past few years has been a point of tension between the White House and the uniformed military.
“The coherence of military strategy is being eroded because of undue civilian influence and direction of nonconventional military operations,” Sheehan said. “If you have small groups planning and conducting military operations outside the knowledge and control of the combatant commander, by default you can’t have a coherent military strategy. You end up with a disaster, like the reconstruction efforts in Iraq.”
Admiral Fallon, who is known as Fox, was aware that he would face special difficulties as the first Navy officer to lead CENTCOM, which had always been headed by a ground commander, one of his military colleagues told me. He was also aware that the Special Operations community would be a concern. “Fox said that there’s a lot of strange stuff going on in Special Ops, and I told him he had to figure out what they were really doing,” Fallon’s colleague said. “The Special Ops guys eventually figured out they needed Fox, and so they began to talk to him. Fox would have won his fight with Special Ops but for Cheney.”
The Pentagon consultant said, “Fallon went down because, in his own way, he was trying to prevent a war with Iran, and you have to admire him for that.”
In recent months, according to the Iranian media, there has been a surge in violence in Iran; it is impossible at this early stage, however, to credit JSOC or C.I.A. activities, or to assess their impact on the Iranian leadership. The Iranian press reports are being carefully monitored by retired Air Force Colonel Sam Gardiner, who has taught strategy at the National War College and now conducts war games centered on Iran for the federal government, think tanks, and universities. The Iranian press “is very open in describing the killings going on inside the country,” Gardiner said. It is, he said, “a controlled press, which makes it more important that it publishes these things. We begin to see inside the government.” He added, “Hardly a day goes by now we don’t see a clash somewhere. There were three or four incidents over a recent weekend, and the Iranians are even naming the Revolutionary Guard officers who have been killed.”
Earlier this year, a militant Ahwazi group claimed to have assassinated a Revolutionary Guard colonel, and the Iranian government acknowledged that an explosion in a cultural center in Shiraz, in the southern part of the country, which killed at least twelve people and injured more than two hundred, had been a terrorist act and not, as it earlier insisted, an accident. It could not be learned whether there has been American involvement in any specific incident in Iran, but, according to Gardiner, the Iranians have begun publicly blaming the U.S., Great Britain, and, more recently, the C.I.A. for some incidents. The agency was involved in a coup in Iran in 1953, and its support for the unpopular regime of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi—who was overthrown in 1979—was condemned for years by the ruling mullahs in Tehran, to great effect. “This is the ultimate for the Iranians—to blame the C.I.A.,” Gardiner said. “This is new, and it’s an escalation—a ratcheting up of tensions. It rallies support for the regime and shows the people that there is a continuing threat from the ‘Great Satan.’ ” In Gardiner’s view, the violence, rather than weakening Iran’s religious government, may generate support for it.
Many of the activities may be being carried out by dissidents in Iran, and not by Americans in the field. One problem with “passing money” (to use the term of the person familiar with the Finding) in a covert setting is that it is hard to control where the money goes and whom it benefits. Nonetheless, the former senior intelligence official said, “We’ve got exposure, because of the transfer of our weapons and our communications gear. The Iranians will be able to make the argument that the opposition was inspired by the Americans. How many times have we tried this without asking the right questions? Is the risk worth it?” One possible consequence of these operations would be a violent Iranian crackdown on one of the dissident groups, which could give the Bush Administration a reason to intervene.
A strategy of using ethnic minorities to undermine Iran is flawed, according to Vali Nasr, who teaches international politics at Tufts University and is also a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. “Just because Lebanon, Iraq, and Pakistan have ethnic problems, it does not mean that Iran is suffering from the same issue,” Nasr told me. “Iran is an old country—like France and Germany—and its citizens are just as nationalistic. The U.S. is overestimating ethnic tension in Iran.” The minority groups that the U.S. is reaching out to are either well integrated or small and marginal, without much influence on the government or much ability to present a political challenge, Nasr said. “You can always find some activist groups that will go and kill a policeman, but working with the minorities will backfire, and alienate the majority of the population.”
The Administration may have been willing to rely on dissident organizations in Iran even when there was reason to believe that the groups had operated against American interests in the past. The use of Baluchi elements, for example, is problematic, Robert Baer, a former C.I.A. clandestine officer who worked for nearly two decades in South Asia and the Middle East, told me. “The Baluchis are Sunni fundamentalists who hate the regime in Tehran, but you can also describe them as Al Qaeda,” Baer told me. “These are guys who cut off the heads of nonbelievers—in this case, it’s Shiite Iranians. The irony is that we’re once again working with Sunni fundamentalists, just as we did in Afghanistan in the nineteen-eighties.” Ramzi Yousef, who was convicted for his role in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who is considered one of the leading planners of the September 11th attacks, are Baluchi Sunni fundamentalists.
One of the most active and violent anti-regime groups in Iran today is the Jundallah, also known as the Iranian People’s Resistance Movement, which describes itself as a resistance force fighting for the rights of Sunnis in Iran. “This is a vicious Salafi organization whose followers attended the same madrassas as the Taliban and Pakistani extremists,” Nasr told me. “They are suspected of having links to Al Qaeda and they are also thought to be tied to the drug culture.” The Jundallah took responsibility for the bombing of a busload of Revolutionary Guard soldiers in February, 2007. At least eleven Guard members were killed. According to Baer and to press reports, the Jundallah is among the groups in Iran that are benefitting from U.S. support.
The C.I.A. and Special Operations communities also have long-standing ties to two other dissident groups in Iran: the Mujahideen-e-Khalq, known in the West as the M.E.K., and a Kurdish separatist group, the Party for a Free Life in Kurdistan, or PJAK.
The M.E.K. has been on the State Department’s terrorist list for more than a decade, yet in recent years the group has received arms and intelligence, directly or indirectly, from the United States. Some of the newly authorized covert funds, the Pentagon consultant told me, may well end up in M.E.K. coffers. “The new task force will work with the M.E.K. The Administration is desperate for results.” He added, “The M.E.K. has no C.P.A. auditing the books, and its leaders are thought to have been lining their pockets for years. If people only knew what the M.E.K. is getting, and how much is going to its bank accounts—and yet it is almost useless for the purposes the Administration intends.”
The Kurdish party, PJAK, which has also been reported to be covertly supported by the United States, has been operating against Iran from bases in northern Iraq for at least three years. (Iran, like Iraq and Turkey, has a Kurdish minority, and PJAK and other groups have sought self-rule in territory that is now part of each of those countries.) In recent weeks, according to Sam Gardiner, the military strategist, there has been a marked increase in the number of PJAK armed engagements with Iranians and terrorist attacks on Iranian targets. In early June, the news agency Fars reported that a dozen PJAK members and four Iranian border guards were killed in a clash near the Iraq border; a similar attack in May killed three Revolutionary Guards and nine PJAK fighters. PJAK has also subjected Turkey, a member of NATO, to repeated terrorist attacks, and reports of American support for the group have been a source of friction between the two governments.
Gardiner also mentioned a trip that the Iraqi Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki, made to Tehran in June. After his return, Maliki announced that his government would ban any contact between foreigners and the M.E.K.—a slap at the U.S.’s dealings with the group. Maliki declared that Iraq was not willing to be a staging ground for covert operations against other countries. This was a sign, Gardiner said, of “Maliki’s increasingly choosing the interests of Iraq over the interests of the United States.” In terms of U.S. allegations of Iranian involvement in the killing of American soldiers, he said, “Maliki was unwilling to play the blame-Iran game.” Gardiner added that Pakistan had just agreed to turn over a Jundallah leader to the Iranian government. America’s covert operations, he said, “seem to be harming relations with the governments of both Iraq and Pakistan and could well be strengthening the connection between Tehran and Baghdad.”
The White House’s reliance on questionable operatives, and on plans involving possible lethal action inside Iran, has created anger as well as anxiety within the Special Operations and intelligence communities. JSOC’s operations in Iran are believed to be modelled on a program that has, with some success, used surrogates to target the Taliban leadership in the tribal territories of Waziristan, along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. But the situations in Waziristan and Iran are not comparable.
In Waziristan, “the program works because it’s small and smart guys are running it,” the former senior intelligence official told me. “It’s being executed by professionals. The N.S.A., the C.I.A., and the D.I.A.”—the Defense Intelligence Agency—“are right in there with the Special Forces and Pakistani intelligence, and they’re dealing with serious bad guys.” He added, “We have to be really careful in calling in the missiles. We have to hit certain houses at certain times. The people on the ground are watching through binoculars a few hundred yards away and calling specific locations, in latitude and longitude. We keep the Predator loitering until the targets go into a house, and we have to make sure our guys are far enough away so they don’t get hit.” One of the most prominent victims of the program, the former official said, was Abu Laith al-Libi, a senior Taliban commander, who was killed on January 31st, reportedly in a missile strike that also killed eleven other people.
A dispatch published on March 26th by the Washington Post reported on the increasing number of successful strikes against Taliban and other insurgent units in Pakistan’s tribal areas. A follow-up article noted that, in response, the Taliban had killed “dozens of people” suspected of providing information to the United States and its allies on the whereabouts of Taliban leaders. Many of the victims were thought to be American spies, and their executions—a beheading, in one case—were videotaped and distributed by DVD as a warning to others.
It is not simple to replicate the program in Iran. “Everybody’s arguing about the high-value-target list,” the former senior intelligence official said. “The Special Ops guys are pissed off because Cheney’s office set up priorities for categories of targets, and now he’s getting impatient and applying pressure for results. But it takes a long time to get the right guys in place.”
The Pentagon consultant told me, “We’ve had wonderful results in the Horn of Africa with the use of surrogates and false flags—basic counterintelligence and counter-insurgency tactics. And we’re beginning to tie them in knots in Afghanistan. But the White House is going to kill the program if they use it to go after Iran. It’s one thing to engage in selective strikes and assassinations in Waziristan and another in Iran. The White House believes that one size fits all, but the legal issues surrounding extrajudicial killings in Waziristan are less of a problem because Al Qaeda and the Taliban cross the border into Afghanistan and back again, often with U.S. and NATO forces in hot pursuit. The situation is not nearly as clear in the Iranian case. All the considerations—judicial, strategic, and political—are different in Iran.”
He added, “There is huge opposition inside the intelligence community to the idea of waging a covert war inside Iran, and using Baluchis and Ahwazis as surrogates. The leaders of our Special Operations community all have remarkable physical courage, but they are less likely to voice their opposition to policy. Iran is not Waziristan.”
A Gallup poll taken last November, before the N.I.E. was made public, found that seventy-three per cent of those surveyed thought that the United States should use economic action and diplomacy to stop Iran’s nuclear program, while only eighteen per cent favored direct military action. Republicans were twice as likely as Democrats to endorse a military strike. Weariness with the war in Iraq has undoubtedly affected the public’s tolerance for an attack on Iran. This mood could change quickly, however. The potential for escalation became clear in early January, when five Iranian patrol boats, believed to be under the command of the Revolutionary Guard, made a series of aggressive moves toward three Navy warships sailing through the Strait of Hormuz. Initial reports of the incident made public by the Pentagon press office said that the Iranians had transmitted threats, over ship-to-ship radio, to “explode” the American ships. At a White House news conference, the President, on the day he left for an eight-day trip to the Middle East, called the incident “provocative” and “dangerous,” and there was, very briefly, a sense of crisis and of outrage at Iran. “TWO MINUTES FROM WAR” was the headline in one British newspaper.
The crisis was quickly defused by Vice-Admiral Kevin Cosgriff, the commander of U.S. naval forces in the region. No warning shots were fired, the Admiral told the Pentagon press corps on January 7th, via teleconference from his headquarters, in Bahrain. “Yes, it’s more serious than we have seen, but, to put it in context, we do interact with the Iranian Revolutionary Guard and their Navy regularly,” Cosgriff said. “I didn’t get the sense from the reports I was receiving that there was a sense of being afraid of these five boats.”
Admiral Cosgriff’s caution was well founded: within a week, the Pentagon acknowledged that it could not positively identify the Iranian boats as the source of the ominous radio transmission, and press reports suggested that it had instead come from a prankster long known for sending fake messages in the region. Nonetheless, Cosgriff’s demeanor angered Cheney, according to the former senior intelligence official. But a lesson was learned in the incident: The public had supported the idea of retaliation, and was even asking why the U.S. didn’t do more. The former official said that, a few weeks later, a meeting took place in the Vice-President’s office. “The subject was how to create a casus belli between Tehran and Washington,” he said.
In June, President Bush went on a farewell tour of Europe. He had tea with Queen Elizabeth II and dinner with Nicolas Sarkozy and Carla Bruni, the President and First Lady of France. The serious business was conducted out of sight, and involved a series of meetings on a new diplomatic effort to persuade the Iranians to halt their uranium-enrichment program. (Iran argues that its enrichment program is for civilian purposes and is legal under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.) Secretary of State Rice had been involved with developing a new package of incentives. But the Administration’s essential negotiating position seemed unchanged: talks could not take place until Iran halted the program. The Iranians have repeatedly and categorically rejected that precondition, leaving the diplomatic situation in a stalemate; they have not yet formally responded to the new incentives.
The continuing impasse alarms many observers. Joschka Fischer, the former German Foreign Minister, recently wrote in a syndicated column that it may not “be possible to freeze the Iranian nuclear program for the duration of the negotiations to avoid a military confrontation before they are completed. Should this newest attempt fail, things will soon get serious. Deadly serious.” When I spoke to him last week, Fischer, who has extensive contacts in the diplomatic community, said that the latest European approach includes a new element: the willingness of the U.S. and the Europeans to accept something less than a complete cessation of enrichment as an intermediate step. “The proposal says that the Iranians must stop manufacturing new centrifuges and the other side will stop all further sanction activities in the U.N. Security Council,” Fischer said, although Iran would still have to freeze its enrichment activities when formal negotiations begin. “This could be acceptable to the Iranians—if they have good will.”
The big question, Fischer added, is in Washington. “I think the Americans are deeply divided on the issue of what to do about Iran,” he said. “Some officials are concerned about the fallout from a military attack and others think an attack is unavoidable. I know the Europeans, but I have no idea where the Americans will end up on this issue.”
There is another complication: American Presidential politics. Barack Obama has said that, if elected, he would begin talks with Iran with no “self-defeating” preconditions (although only after diplomatic groundwork had been laid). That position has been vigorously criticized by John McCain. The Washington Post recently quoted Randy Scheunemann, the McCain campaign’s national-security director, as stating that McCain supports the White House’s position, and that the program be suspended before talks begin. What Obama is proposing, Scheunemann said, “is unilateral cowboy summitry.”
Scheunemann, who is known as a neoconservative, is also the McCain campaign’s most important channel of communication with the White House. He is a friend of David Addington, Dick Cheney’s chief of staff. I have heard differing accounts of Scheunemann’s influence with McCain; though some close to the McCain campaign talk about him as a possible national-security adviser, others say he is someone who isn’t taken seriously while “telling Cheney and others what they want to hear,” as a senior McCain adviser put it.
It is not known whether McCain, who is the ranking Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, has been formally briefed on the operations in Iran. At the annual conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, in June, Obama repeated his plea for “tough and principled diplomacy.” But he also said, along with McCain, that he would keep the threat of military action against Iran on the table.
Annals of National Security
Preparing the Battlefield
The Bush Administration steps up its secret moves against Iran.
by Seymour M. Hersh
July 7, 2008 (released June 29, 2008)
Late last year, Congress agreed to a request from President Bush to fund a major escalation of covert operations against Iran, according to current and former military, intelligence, and congressional sources. These operations, for which the President sought up to four hundred million dollars, were described in a Presidential Finding signed by Bush, and are designed to destabilize the country’s religious leadership. The covert activities involve support of the minority Ahwazi Arab and Baluchi groups and other dissident organizations. They also include gathering intelligence about Iran’s suspected nuclear-weapons program.
Clandestine operations against Iran are not new. United States Special Operations Forces have been conducting cross-border operations from southern Iraq, with Presidential authorization, since last year. These have included seizing members of Al Quds, the commando arm of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, and taking them to Iraq for interrogation, and the pursuit of “high-value targets” in the President’s war on terror, who may be captured or killed. But the scale and the scope of the operations in Iran, which involve the Central Intelligence Agency and the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), have now been significantly expanded, according to the current and former officials. Many of these activities are not specified in the new Finding, and some congressional leaders have had serious questions about their nature.
Under federal law, a Presidential Finding, which is highly classified, must be issued when a covert intelligence operation gets under way and, at a minimum, must be made known to Democratic and Republican leaders in the House and the Senate and to the ranking members of their respective intelligence committees—the so-called Gang of Eight. Money for the operation can then be reprogrammed from previous appropriations, as needed, by the relevant congressional committees, which also can be briefed.
“The Finding was focussed on undermining Iran’s nuclear ambitions and trying to undermine the government through regime change,” a person familiar with its contents said, and involved “working with opposition groups and passing money.” The Finding provided for a whole new range of activities in southern Iran and in the areas, in the east, where Baluchi political opposition is strong, he said.
Although some legislators were troubled by aspects of the Finding, and “there was a significant amount of high-level discussion” about it, according to the source familiar with it, the funding for the escalation was approved. In other words, some members of the Democratic leadership—Congress has been under Democratic control since the 2006 elections—were willing, in secret, to go along with the Administration in expanding covert activities directed at Iran, while the Party’s presumptive candidate for President, Barack Obama, has said that he favors direct talks and diplomacy.
The request for funding came in the same period in which the Administration was coming to terms with a National Intelligence Estimate, released in December, that concluded that Iran had halted its work on nuclear weapons in 2003. The Administration downplayed the significance of the N.I.E., and, while saying that it was committed to diplomacy, continued to emphasize that urgent action was essential to counter the Iranian nuclear threat. President Bush questioned the N.I.E.’s conclusions, and senior national-security officials, including Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, made similar statements. (So did Senator John McCain, the presumptive Republican Presidential nominee.) Meanwhile, the Administration also revived charges that the Iranian leadership has been involved in the killing of American soldiers in Iraq: both directly, by dispatching commando units into Iraq, and indirectly, by supplying materials used for roadside bombs and other lethal goods. (There have been questions about the accuracy of the claims; the Times, among others, has reported that “significant uncertainties remain about the extent of that involvement.”)
Military and civilian leaders in the Pentagon share the White House’s concern about Iran’s nuclear ambitions, but there is disagreement about whether a military strike is the right solution. Some Pentagon officials believe, as they have let Congress and the media know, that bombing Iran is not a viable response to the nuclear-proliferation issue, and that more diplomacy is necessary.
A Democratic senator told me that, late last year, in an off-the-record lunch meeting, Secretary of Defense Gates met with the Democratic caucus in the Senate. (Such meetings are held regularly.) Gates warned of the consequences if the Bush Administration staged a preëmptive strike on Iran, saying, as the senator recalled, “We’ll create generations of jihadists, and our grandchildren will be battling our enemies here in America.” Gates’s comments stunned the Democrats at the lunch, and another senator asked whether Gates was speaking for Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney. Gates’s answer, the senator told me, was “Let’s just say that I’m here speaking for myself.” (A spokesman for Gates confirmed that he discussed the consequences of a strike at the meeting, but would not address what he said, other than to dispute the senator’s characterization.)
The Joint Chiefs of Staff, whose chairman is Admiral Mike Mullen, were “pushing back very hard” against White House pressure to undertake a military strike against Iran, the person familiar with the Finding told me. Similarly, a Pentagon consultant who is involved in the war on terror said that “at least ten senior flag and general officers, including combatant commanders”—the four-star officers who direct military operations around the world—“have weighed in on that issue.”
The most outspoken of those officers is Admiral William Fallon, who until recently was the head of U.S. Central Command, and thus in charge of American forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. In March, Fallon resigned under pressure, after giving a series of interviews stating his reservations about an armed attack on Iran. For example, late last year he told the Financial Times that the “real objective” of U.S. policy was to change the Iranians’ behavior, and that “attacking them as a means to get to that spot strikes me as being not the first choice.”
Admiral Fallon acknowledged, when I spoke to him in June, that he had heard that there were people in the White House who were upset by his public statements. “Too many people believe you have to be either for or against the Iranians,” he told me. “Let’s get serious. Eighty million people live there, and everyone’s an individual. The idea that they’re only one way or another is nonsense.”
When it came to the Iraq war, Fallon said, “Did I bitch about some of the things that were being proposed? You bet. Some of them were very stupid.”
The Democratic leadership’s agreement to commit hundreds of millions of dollars for more secret operations in Iran was remarkable, given the general concerns of officials like Gates, Fallon, and many others. “The oversight process has not kept pace—it’s been coöpted” by the Administration, the person familiar with the contents of the Finding said. “The process is broken, and this is dangerous stuff we’re authorizing.”
Senior Democrats in Congress told me that they had concerns about the possibility that their understanding of what the new operations entail differs from the White House’s. One issue has to do with a reference in the Finding, the person familiar with it recalled, to potential defensive lethal action by U.S. operatives in Iran. (In early May, the journalist Andrew Cockburn published elements of the Finding in Counterpunch, a newsletter and online magazine.)
The language was inserted into the Finding at the urging of the C.I.A., a former senior intelligence official said. The covert operations set forth in the Finding essentially run parallel to those of a secret military task force, now operating in Iran, that is under the control of JSOC. Under the Bush Administration’s interpretation of the law, clandestine military activities, unlike covert C.I.A. operations, do not need to be depicted in a Finding, because the President has a constitutional right to command combat forces in the field without congressional interference. But the borders between operations are not always clear: in Iran, C.I.A. agents and regional assets have the language skills and the local knowledge to make contacts for the JSOC operatives, and have been working with them to direct personnel, matériel, and money into Iran from an obscure base in western Afghanistan. As a result, Congress has been given only a partial view of how the money it authorized may be used. One of JSOC’s task-force missions, the pursuit of “high-value targets,” was not directly addressed in the Finding. There is a growing realization among some legislators that the Bush Administration, in recent years, has conflated what is an intelligence operation and what is a military one in order to avoid fully informing Congress about what it is doing.
“This is a big deal,” the person familiar with the Finding said. “The C.I.A. needed the Finding to do its traditional stuff, but the Finding does not apply to JSOC. The President signed an Executive Order after September 11th giving the Pentagon license to do things that it had never been able to do before without notifying Congress. The claim was that the military was ‘preparing the battle space,’ and by using that term they were able to circumvent congressional oversight. Everything is justified in terms of fighting the global war on terror.” He added, “The Administration has been fuzzing the lines; there used to be a shade of gray”—between operations that had to be briefed to the senior congressional leadership and those which did not—“but now it’s a shade of mush.”
“The agency says we’re not going to get in the position of helping to kill people without a Finding,” the former senior intelligence official told me. He was referring to the legal threat confronting some agency operatives for their involvement in the rendition and alleged torture of suspects in the war on terror. “This drove the military people up the wall,” he said. As far as the C.I.A. was concerned, the former senior intelligence official said, “the over-all authorization includes killing, but it’s not as though that’s what they’re setting out to do. It’s about gathering information, enlisting support.” The Finding sent to Congress was a compromise, providing legal cover for the C.I.A. while referring to the use of lethal force in ambiguous terms.
The defensive-lethal language led some Democrats, according to congressional sources familiar with their views, to call in the director of the C.I.A., Air Force General Michael V. Hayden, for a special briefing. Hayden reassured the legislators that the language did nothing more than provide authority for Special Forces operatives on the ground in Iran to shoot their way out if they faced capture or harm.
The legislators were far from convinced. One congressman subsequently wrote a personal letter to President Bush insisting that “no lethal action, period” had been authorized within Iran’s borders. As of June, he had received no answer.
Members of Congress have expressed skepticism in the past about the information provided by the White House. On March 15, 2005, David Obey, then the ranking Democrat on the Republican-led House Appropriations Committee, announced that he was putting aside an amendment that he had intended to offer that day, and that would have cut off all funding for national-intelligence programs unless the President agreed to keep Congress fully informed about clandestine military activities undertaken in the war on terror. He had changed his mind, he said, because the White House promised better coöperation. “The Executive Branch understands that we are not trying to dictate what they do,” he said in a floor speech at the time. “We are simply trying to see to it that what they do is consistent with American values and will not get the country in trouble.”
Obey declined to comment on the specifics of the operations in Iran, but he did tell me that the White House reneged on its promise to consult more fully with Congress. He said, “I suspect there’s something going on, but I don’t know what to believe. Cheney has always wanted to go after Iran, and if he had more time he’d find a way to do it. We still don’t get enough information from the agencies, and I have very little confidence that they give us information on the edge.”
None of the four Democrats in the Gang of Eight—Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senate Intelligence Committee chairman John D. Rockefeller IV, and House Intelligence Committee chairman Silvestre Reyes—would comment on the Finding, with some noting that it was highly classified. An aide to one member of the Democratic leadership responded, on his behalf, by pointing to the limitations of the Gang of Eight process. The notification of a Finding, the aide said, “is just that—notification, and not a sign-off on activities. Proper oversight of ongoing intelligence activities is done by fully briefing the members of the intelligence committee.” However, Congress does have the means to challenge the White House once it has been sent a Finding. It has the power to withhold funding for any government operation. The members of the House and Senate Democratic leadership who have access to the Finding can also, if they choose to do so, and if they have shared concerns, come up with ways to exert their influence on Administration policy. (A spokesman for the C.I.A. said, “As a rule, we don’t comment one way or the other on allegations of covert activities or purported findings.” The White House also declined to comment.)
A member of the House Appropriations Committee acknowledged that, even with a Democratic victory in November, “it will take another year before we get the intelligence activities under control.” He went on, “We control the money and they can’t do anything without the money. Money is what it’s all about. But I’m very leery of this Administration.” He added, “This Administration has been so secretive.”
One irony of Admiral Fallon’s departure is that he was, in many areas, in agreement with President Bush on the threat posed by Iran. They had a good working relationship, Fallon told me, and, when he ran CENTCOM, were in regular communication. On March 4th, a week before his resignation, Fallon testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee, saying that he was “encouraged” about the situations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Regarding the role played by Iran’s leaders, he said, “They’ve been absolutely unhelpful, very damaging, and I absolutely don’t condone any of their activities. And I have yet to see anything since I’ve been in this job in the way of a public action by Iran that’s been at all helpful in this region.”
Fallon made it clear in our conversations that he considered it inappropriate to comment publicly about the President, the Vice-President, or Special Operations. But he said he had heard that people in the White House had been “struggling” with his views on Iran. “When I arrived at CENTCOM, the Iranians were funding every entity inside Iraq. It was in their interest to get us out, and so they decided to kill as many Americans as they could. And why not? They didn’t know who’d come out ahead, but they wanted us out. I decided that I couldn’t resolve the situation in Iraq without the neighborhood. To get this problem in Iraq solved, we had to somehow involve Iran and Syria. I had to work the neighborhood.”
Fallon told me that his focus had been not on the Iranian nuclear issue, or on regime change there, but on “putting out the fires in Iraq.” There were constant discussions in Washington and in the field about how to engage Iran and, on the subject of the bombing option, Fallon said, he believed that “it would happen only if the Iranians did something stupid.”
Fallon’s early retirement, however, appears to have been provoked not only by his negative comments about bombing Iran but also by his strong belief in the chain of command and his insistence on being informed about Special Operations in his area of responsibility. One of Fallon’s defenders is retired Marine General John J. (Jack) Sheehan, whose last assignment was as commander-in-chief of the U.S. Atlantic Command, where Fallon was a deputy. Last year, Sheehan rejected a White House offer to become the President’s “czar” for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. “One of the reasons the White House selected Fallon for CENTCOM was that he’s known to be a strategic thinker and had demonstrated those skills in the Pacific,” Sheehan told me. (Fallon served as commander-in-chief of U.S. forces in the Pacific from 2005 to 2007.) “He was charged with coming up with an over-all coherent strategy for Iran, Iraq, and Afghanistan, and, by law, the combatant commander is responsible for all military operations within his A.O.”—area of operations. “That was not happening,” Sheehan said. “When Fallon tried to make sense of all the overt and covert activity conducted by the military in his area of responsibility, a small group in the White House leadership shut him out.”
The law cited by Sheehan is the 1986 Defense Reorganization Act, known as Goldwater-Nichols, which defined the chain of command: from the President to the Secretary of Defense, through the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and on to the various combatant commanders, who were put in charge of all aspects of military operations, including joint training and logistics. That authority, the act stated, was not to be shared with other echelons of command. But the Bush Administration, as part of its global war on terror, instituted new policies that undercut regional commanders-in-chief; for example, it gave Special Operations teams, at military commands around the world, the highest priority in terms of securing support and equipment. The degradation of the traditional chain of command in the past few years has been a point of tension between the White House and the uniformed military.
“The coherence of military strategy is being eroded because of undue civilian influence and direction of nonconventional military operations,” Sheehan said. “If you have small groups planning and conducting military operations outside the knowledge and control of the combatant commander, by default you can’t have a coherent military strategy. You end up with a disaster, like the reconstruction efforts in Iraq.”
Admiral Fallon, who is known as Fox, was aware that he would face special difficulties as the first Navy officer to lead CENTCOM, which had always been headed by a ground commander, one of his military colleagues told me. He was also aware that the Special Operations community would be a concern. “Fox said that there’s a lot of strange stuff going on in Special Ops, and I told him he had to figure out what they were really doing,” Fallon’s colleague said. “The Special Ops guys eventually figured out they needed Fox, and so they began to talk to him. Fox would have won his fight with Special Ops but for Cheney.”
The Pentagon consultant said, “Fallon went down because, in his own way, he was trying to prevent a war with Iran, and you have to admire him for that.”
In recent months, according to the Iranian media, there has been a surge in violence in Iran; it is impossible at this early stage, however, to credit JSOC or C.I.A. activities, or to assess their impact on the Iranian leadership. The Iranian press reports are being carefully monitored by retired Air Force Colonel Sam Gardiner, who has taught strategy at the National War College and now conducts war games centered on Iran for the federal government, think tanks, and universities. The Iranian press “is very open in describing the killings going on inside the country,” Gardiner said. It is, he said, “a controlled press, which makes it more important that it publishes these things. We begin to see inside the government.” He added, “Hardly a day goes by now we don’t see a clash somewhere. There were three or four incidents over a recent weekend, and the Iranians are even naming the Revolutionary Guard officers who have been killed.”
Earlier this year, a militant Ahwazi group claimed to have assassinated a Revolutionary Guard colonel, and the Iranian government acknowledged that an explosion in a cultural center in Shiraz, in the southern part of the country, which killed at least twelve people and injured more than two hundred, had been a terrorist act and not, as it earlier insisted, an accident. It could not be learned whether there has been American involvement in any specific incident in Iran, but, according to Gardiner, the Iranians have begun publicly blaming the U.S., Great Britain, and, more recently, the C.I.A. for some incidents. The agency was involved in a coup in Iran in 1953, and its support for the unpopular regime of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi—who was overthrown in 1979—was condemned for years by the ruling mullahs in Tehran, to great effect. “This is the ultimate for the Iranians—to blame the C.I.A.,” Gardiner said. “This is new, and it’s an escalation—a ratcheting up of tensions. It rallies support for the regime and shows the people that there is a continuing threat from the ‘Great Satan.’ ” In Gardiner’s view, the violence, rather than weakening Iran’s religious government, may generate support for it.
Many of the activities may be being carried out by dissidents in Iran, and not by Americans in the field. One problem with “passing money” (to use the term of the person familiar with the Finding) in a covert setting is that it is hard to control where the money goes and whom it benefits. Nonetheless, the former senior intelligence official said, “We’ve got exposure, because of the transfer of our weapons and our communications gear. The Iranians will be able to make the argument that the opposition was inspired by the Americans. How many times have we tried this without asking the right questions? Is the risk worth it?” One possible consequence of these operations would be a violent Iranian crackdown on one of the dissident groups, which could give the Bush Administration a reason to intervene.
A strategy of using ethnic minorities to undermine Iran is flawed, according to Vali Nasr, who teaches international politics at Tufts University and is also a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. “Just because Lebanon, Iraq, and Pakistan have ethnic problems, it does not mean that Iran is suffering from the same issue,” Nasr told me. “Iran is an old country—like France and Germany—and its citizens are just as nationalistic. The U.S. is overestimating ethnic tension in Iran.” The minority groups that the U.S. is reaching out to are either well integrated or small and marginal, without much influence on the government or much ability to present a political challenge, Nasr said. “You can always find some activist groups that will go and kill a policeman, but working with the minorities will backfire, and alienate the majority of the population.”
The Administration may have been willing to rely on dissident organizations in Iran even when there was reason to believe that the groups had operated against American interests in the past. The use of Baluchi elements, for example, is problematic, Robert Baer, a former C.I.A. clandestine officer who worked for nearly two decades in South Asia and the Middle East, told me. “The Baluchis are Sunni fundamentalists who hate the regime in Tehran, but you can also describe them as Al Qaeda,” Baer told me. “These are guys who cut off the heads of nonbelievers—in this case, it’s Shiite Iranians. The irony is that we’re once again working with Sunni fundamentalists, just as we did in Afghanistan in the nineteen-eighties.” Ramzi Yousef, who was convicted for his role in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who is considered one of the leading planners of the September 11th attacks, are Baluchi Sunni fundamentalists.
One of the most active and violent anti-regime groups in Iran today is the Jundallah, also known as the Iranian People’s Resistance Movement, which describes itself as a resistance force fighting for the rights of Sunnis in Iran. “This is a vicious Salafi organization whose followers attended the same madrassas as the Taliban and Pakistani extremists,” Nasr told me. “They are suspected of having links to Al Qaeda and they are also thought to be tied to the drug culture.” The Jundallah took responsibility for the bombing of a busload of Revolutionary Guard soldiers in February, 2007. At least eleven Guard members were killed. According to Baer and to press reports, the Jundallah is among the groups in Iran that are benefitting from U.S. support.
The C.I.A. and Special Operations communities also have long-standing ties to two other dissident groups in Iran: the Mujahideen-e-Khalq, known in the West as the M.E.K., and a Kurdish separatist group, the Party for a Free Life in Kurdistan, or PJAK.
The M.E.K. has been on the State Department’s terrorist list for more than a decade, yet in recent years the group has received arms and intelligence, directly or indirectly, from the United States. Some of the newly authorized covert funds, the Pentagon consultant told me, may well end up in M.E.K. coffers. “The new task force will work with the M.E.K. The Administration is desperate for results.” He added, “The M.E.K. has no C.P.A. auditing the books, and its leaders are thought to have been lining their pockets for years. If people only knew what the M.E.K. is getting, and how much is going to its bank accounts—and yet it is almost useless for the purposes the Administration intends.”
The Kurdish party, PJAK, which has also been reported to be covertly supported by the United States, has been operating against Iran from bases in northern Iraq for at least three years. (Iran, like Iraq and Turkey, has a Kurdish minority, and PJAK and other groups have sought self-rule in territory that is now part of each of those countries.) In recent weeks, according to Sam Gardiner, the military strategist, there has been a marked increase in the number of PJAK armed engagements with Iranians and terrorist attacks on Iranian targets. In early June, the news agency Fars reported that a dozen PJAK members and four Iranian border guards were killed in a clash near the Iraq border; a similar attack in May killed three Revolutionary Guards and nine PJAK fighters. PJAK has also subjected Turkey, a member of NATO, to repeated terrorist attacks, and reports of American support for the group have been a source of friction between the two governments.
Gardiner also mentioned a trip that the Iraqi Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki, made to Tehran in June. After his return, Maliki announced that his government would ban any contact between foreigners and the M.E.K.—a slap at the U.S.’s dealings with the group. Maliki declared that Iraq was not willing to be a staging ground for covert operations against other countries. This was a sign, Gardiner said, of “Maliki’s increasingly choosing the interests of Iraq over the interests of the United States.” In terms of U.S. allegations of Iranian involvement in the killing of American soldiers, he said, “Maliki was unwilling to play the blame-Iran game.” Gardiner added that Pakistan had just agreed to turn over a Jundallah leader to the Iranian government. America’s covert operations, he said, “seem to be harming relations with the governments of both Iraq and Pakistan and could well be strengthening the connection between Tehran and Baghdad.”
The White House’s reliance on questionable operatives, and on plans involving possible lethal action inside Iran, has created anger as well as anxiety within the Special Operations and intelligence communities. JSOC’s operations in Iran are believed to be modelled on a program that has, with some success, used surrogates to target the Taliban leadership in the tribal territories of Waziristan, along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. But the situations in Waziristan and Iran are not comparable.
In Waziristan, “the program works because it’s small and smart guys are running it,” the former senior intelligence official told me. “It’s being executed by professionals. The N.S.A., the C.I.A., and the D.I.A.”—the Defense Intelligence Agency—“are right in there with the Special Forces and Pakistani intelligence, and they’re dealing with serious bad guys.” He added, “We have to be really careful in calling in the missiles. We have to hit certain houses at certain times. The people on the ground are watching through binoculars a few hundred yards away and calling specific locations, in latitude and longitude. We keep the Predator loitering until the targets go into a house, and we have to make sure our guys are far enough away so they don’t get hit.” One of the most prominent victims of the program, the former official said, was Abu Laith al-Libi, a senior Taliban commander, who was killed on January 31st, reportedly in a missile strike that also killed eleven other people.
A dispatch published on March 26th by the Washington Post reported on the increasing number of successful strikes against Taliban and other insurgent units in Pakistan’s tribal areas. A follow-up article noted that, in response, the Taliban had killed “dozens of people” suspected of providing information to the United States and its allies on the whereabouts of Taliban leaders. Many of the victims were thought to be American spies, and their executions—a beheading, in one case—were videotaped and distributed by DVD as a warning to others.
It is not simple to replicate the program in Iran. “Everybody’s arguing about the high-value-target list,” the former senior intelligence official said. “The Special Ops guys are pissed off because Cheney’s office set up priorities for categories of targets, and now he’s getting impatient and applying pressure for results. But it takes a long time to get the right guys in place.”
The Pentagon consultant told me, “We’ve had wonderful results in the Horn of Africa with the use of surrogates and false flags—basic counterintelligence and counter-insurgency tactics. And we’re beginning to tie them in knots in Afghanistan. But the White House is going to kill the program if they use it to go after Iran. It’s one thing to engage in selective strikes and assassinations in Waziristan and another in Iran. The White House believes that one size fits all, but the legal issues surrounding extrajudicial killings in Waziristan are less of a problem because Al Qaeda and the Taliban cross the border into Afghanistan and back again, often with U.S. and NATO forces in hot pursuit. The situation is not nearly as clear in the Iranian case. All the considerations—judicial, strategic, and political—are different in Iran.”
He added, “There is huge opposition inside the intelligence community to the idea of waging a covert war inside Iran, and using Baluchis and Ahwazis as surrogates. The leaders of our Special Operations community all have remarkable physical courage, but they are less likely to voice their opposition to policy. Iran is not Waziristan.”
A Gallup poll taken last November, before the N.I.E. was made public, found that seventy-three per cent of those surveyed thought that the United States should use economic action and diplomacy to stop Iran’s nuclear program, while only eighteen per cent favored direct military action. Republicans were twice as likely as Democrats to endorse a military strike. Weariness with the war in Iraq has undoubtedly affected the public’s tolerance for an attack on Iran. This mood could change quickly, however. The potential for escalation became clear in early January, when five Iranian patrol boats, believed to be under the command of the Revolutionary Guard, made a series of aggressive moves toward three Navy warships sailing through the Strait of Hormuz. Initial reports of the incident made public by the Pentagon press office said that the Iranians had transmitted threats, over ship-to-ship radio, to “explode” the American ships. At a White House news conference, the President, on the day he left for an eight-day trip to the Middle East, called the incident “provocative” and “dangerous,” and there was, very briefly, a sense of crisis and of outrage at Iran. “TWO MINUTES FROM WAR” was the headline in one British newspaper.
The crisis was quickly defused by Vice-Admiral Kevin Cosgriff, the commander of U.S. naval forces in the region. No warning shots were fired, the Admiral told the Pentagon press corps on January 7th, via teleconference from his headquarters, in Bahrain. “Yes, it’s more serious than we have seen, but, to put it in context, we do interact with the Iranian Revolutionary Guard and their Navy regularly,” Cosgriff said. “I didn’t get the sense from the reports I was receiving that there was a sense of being afraid of these five boats.”
Admiral Cosgriff’s caution was well founded: within a week, the Pentagon acknowledged that it could not positively identify the Iranian boats as the source of the ominous radio transmission, and press reports suggested that it had instead come from a prankster long known for sending fake messages in the region. Nonetheless, Cosgriff’s demeanor angered Cheney, according to the former senior intelligence official. But a lesson was learned in the incident: The public had supported the idea of retaliation, and was even asking why the U.S. didn’t do more. The former official said that, a few weeks later, a meeting took place in the Vice-President’s office. “The subject was how to create a casus belli between Tehran and Washington,” he said.
In June, President Bush went on a farewell tour of Europe. He had tea with Queen Elizabeth II and dinner with Nicolas Sarkozy and Carla Bruni, the President and First Lady of France. The serious business was conducted out of sight, and involved a series of meetings on a new diplomatic effort to persuade the Iranians to halt their uranium-enrichment program. (Iran argues that its enrichment program is for civilian purposes and is legal under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.) Secretary of State Rice had been involved with developing a new package of incentives. But the Administration’s essential negotiating position seemed unchanged: talks could not take place until Iran halted the program. The Iranians have repeatedly and categorically rejected that precondition, leaving the diplomatic situation in a stalemate; they have not yet formally responded to the new incentives.
The continuing impasse alarms many observers. Joschka Fischer, the former German Foreign Minister, recently wrote in a syndicated column that it may not “be possible to freeze the Iranian nuclear program for the duration of the negotiations to avoid a military confrontation before they are completed. Should this newest attempt fail, things will soon get serious. Deadly serious.” When I spoke to him last week, Fischer, who has extensive contacts in the diplomatic community, said that the latest European approach includes a new element: the willingness of the U.S. and the Europeans to accept something less than a complete cessation of enrichment as an intermediate step. “The proposal says that the Iranians must stop manufacturing new centrifuges and the other side will stop all further sanction activities in the U.N. Security Council,” Fischer said, although Iran would still have to freeze its enrichment activities when formal negotiations begin. “This could be acceptable to the Iranians—if they have good will.”
The big question, Fischer added, is in Washington. “I think the Americans are deeply divided on the issue of what to do about Iran,” he said. “Some officials are concerned about the fallout from a military attack and others think an attack is unavoidable. I know the Europeans, but I have no idea where the Americans will end up on this issue.”
There is another complication: American Presidential politics. Barack Obama has said that, if elected, he would begin talks with Iran with no “self-defeating” preconditions (although only after diplomatic groundwork had been laid). That position has been vigorously criticized by John McCain. The Washington Post recently quoted Randy Scheunemann, the McCain campaign’s national-security director, as stating that McCain supports the White House’s position, and that the program be suspended before talks begin. What Obama is proposing, Scheunemann said, “is unilateral cowboy summitry.”
Scheunemann, who is known as a neoconservative, is also the McCain campaign’s most important channel of communication with the White House. He is a friend of David Addington, Dick Cheney’s chief of staff. I have heard differing accounts of Scheunemann’s influence with McCain; though some close to the McCain campaign talk about him as a possible national-security adviser, others say he is someone who isn’t taken seriously while “telling Cheney and others what they want to hear,” as a senior McCain adviser put it.
It is not known whether McCain, who is the ranking Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, has been formally briefed on the operations in Iran. At the annual conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, in June, Obama repeated his plea for “tough and principled diplomacy.” But he also said, along with McCain, that he would keep the threat of military action against Iran on the table.
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