Dealing with Iran
The Washington correspondent of The Sunday Times, Sarah Baxter, writes illuminatingly today on the urgency in the Bush administration's consideration of Iran. I've written in the past year or so about my concerns over Iranian policy. I had the curious experience yesterday of taking part in a debate about these issues on Press TV, which is the Iranian state-run English-language broadcaster. The programme - a weekly debate called Forum, whose chairman is the former BBC journalist Andrew Gilligan - was pre-recorded, and I believe it's shown on Tuesdays, though I don't know the time and it doesn't appear to be on the station's website. Here are my impressions of the outlet and the issue.
I'm usually minded to accept, if I can and within reason, an invitation to debate a highly charged issue before a hostile audience. The title of this debate was "Is Iran inviting attacks?" This seems to me in principle, and if framed in a more balanced way, an unexceptionable proposition even to those who do not share my inclination to Militant Blairism. But I began to wonder whether the debate was a useful exercise when Andrew Gilligan, whom I found an affable and fair moderator, suggested to one of my fellow panellists why some might find Iran a threatening power. To illustrate his question, Gilligan quoted one of the more chilling imprecations of President Ahmadinejad against the Zionist entity - a statement that promptly elicited vigorous applause from the audience.
We shall see. My main concern was to state on Iranian-run television that, so far as I'm aware, not a single serious analyst at any reputable university or NGO in Europe and North America believes Iran's nuclear programme is intended for purely non-military purposes. The other panellists were Jeremy Corbyn, Labour MP and a member of the steering committee of the Stop the War Coalition; and Abbas Edalat, founder of something called the Campaign Against Sanctions and Military Intervention in Iran. Corbyn is a known quantity (but quite a nice man in private). Edalat came to my attention last August when he wrote an article for The Guardian maintaining that the US was considering pre-emptive nuclear strikes against Iran. His prime suspect was not a statesman or politician, or even an American at all, but - seriously - me. And his sole evidence was an article by me that had nothing to do with Iran and did not mention that country. (My article, which The Guardian carried on the anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima, argued that recent historical research confirms the traditionalist interpretation of President Truman's decision to use the A-bomb.) I assumed that Edalat must be either a mindreader of prowess, able to divine in an argument a "subtext" unknown even to its author; or a feeble hack propagandist unable to construct even a minimally rational case. Having now met him, I'm able to discount the more interesting explanation.
The proper question seems to me not whether Iran is inviting attacks but whether Iran is threatening them. The answer, to any prudent observer of the Middle East, is surely yes, in which case the onus is on the UN Security Council and its member states to counter those threats.
Iran's proxies and client state give a consistent message. Hamas is launching rockets into Israel from the Gaza Strip. Hezbollah has rebuilt its weaponry with Iranian rockets shipped through Syria. Syria itself is plainly engaged in a murder campaign directed against non-compliant politicians in Lebanon. Iran's Revolutionary Guards are equipping and training Shi'ite groups in Iraq to attack US and Iraqi forces with improvised explosive devices. (I'm sure I do not need to remind my readers, as I did Jeremy Corbyn, that US troops are in Iraq under a UN mandate.) All of this activity is coincident with Iran's nuclear diplomacy, the purposes of which are implicit but not obscure, and are rightly described by President Sarkozy as "unacceptable". (I've found the technical details of Iran's nuclear programme particularly well expounded in a scrupulously balanced book by Shahram Chubin, Iran's Nuclear Ambitions, 2006, published by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.)
Nobody - excepting, oddly enough, the recently defeated Socialist candidate for the French Presidency - disputes Iran's right to a civil nuclear power programme. A problem arises because Iran insists on access to the full fuel cycle, including uranium enrichment and plutonium reprocessing. A capability of this order would be very hard to distinguish from one designed to develop a nuclear bomb. The regime has consistently lied about its activities, which include the illicit production of a small amount of fissionable material. Its nuclear developments to date also suggest a military programme. Enrichment facilities at Natanz and a heavy water plant at Arak - before a single reactor has come into service - make little sense in the context of a civil nuclear programme. Other countries with reactors don't seek enrichment capabilties. Sweden has ten reactors; it simply buys fuel on the open market, which is cheaper. Moreover, there are no circumstances, even with a full fuel cycle and even assuming that energy self-sufficiency were a sensible aim, in which Iran would be able to avoid the need to import uranium. It hasn't got enough of the stuff.
President Ahmadinejad's insistence that Iran is being discriminated against isn't strictly true either. Some pro-Western countries do have access to a full fuel cycle, but not all - South Korea, which isn't allowed to possess reprocessed plutonium, is a case in point. Those countries that do have access to a full fuel cycle (such as Japan) are, moreover, not those characterised by a history of lying on the subject.
Iran's President is a messianic crank belonging to an end-of-times cult (at the Jamkaran mosque near Qum). He is a racist who denies the historicity of the Holocaust and cheerfully anticipates the extinction of the Jewish state. The revolutionary regime supports terrorist groups financially and with materiel. It spurned attempts of the EU-3 to negotiate over a nuclear programme, despite the fact that even the Bush administration was prepared to accept a compromise proposal from Russia that Iran could have access to the full cycle provided that enrichment took place in Russia rather than Iran. When in September 2005 the IAEA belatedly recognised that Iran was in breach of its responsibilities under the Non-Proliferation Treaty, Iran kept on being obstructive such that the matter was referred to the UN Security Council six months later (a move that - astonishingly for an organisation nominally opposed to nuclear weapons - was "regretted" by CND).
This is a threat, deriving from the character of the Iranian regime. The question whether military action against Iran is justified has a context, namely this appalling history of duplicity and threat. What we do about it ought to be a matter of consensus on the UNSC but isn't, owing principally to the obstructionism of President Putin. It ought also to be a matter of consensus among those of us who supported military intervention in Iraq and those such as Bernard Kouchner who stood for "Ni la guerre ni Saddam".
Admittedly, the odds on a military strike on Iran's nuclear programme have probably shortened lately owing to what appears to have been - judging by newspaper accounts, as there is no official confirmation from any source - a successful Israeli strike against a Syrian nuclear facility last month. What was most interesting about Israel's action was indeed the lack of diplomatic condemnation, excepting only the predictable parties of Syria, Libya, Russia, Turkey (which Israeli pilots presumably overflew with the knowledge of the country's military but not government) and North Korea (presumably the origin of Syria's facility). It is in nobody's interests that Iran become a nuclear-armed power, and countries within range of Iran's missiles (Turkey and India) have reportedly made inquiries to Israeli sources about that country's ballistic missile defences. In short, it's obvious there's a problem, and it's obvious the problem is widely recognised.
But it would be a great mistake to allow the Islamist/Leninist alliance that now speaks for CND as well as the Stop the War Coalition to define this issue as one of potential Western military action. I noted in my debate yesterday that the usual suspects maintain - as if Iran had done nothing wrong and were acting reasonably - that observations of the type I'd deployed and have written here increase the pressure for war. The opposite is true. Avoiding military action against Iran requires that - as did not happen with Saddam Hussein's barbarous regime - the UN and its principal member states seriously pressure Iran to abide by its international obligations as a signatory of the NPT. It's admittedly difficult to see that happening with the current stance of Russia and China, but I'm hopeful that the prospects are better than they were with Iraq.
Iran is an extremist and theocratic polity but not a totalitarian state. It has a civil society to an extent that was not known in Baathist Iraq (and that plainly can't exist in the nightmare-state of North Korea). That civil society contains, according to anecdotal evidence from journalists and academics, much latent sympathy to the US. The very fact that we know far more about Iran's nuclear programme - where it is on the map, to state the matter minimally - than we did about Saddam's WMD is testament that there is a flow of information of some kind. It's a shame, for many reasons, that Tony Blair is no longer in office, as his diplomatic and expository gifts, allied to his understanding of the threat of Islamist extremism, would have conveyed the right message in the right way. Let us hope that Iran's leadership gets the message even without him.
