More on Iran

There are some comments worth noting in the press today about the National Intelligence Estimate on Iran, and some not but I'll note them anyway. The Times has a wise leader today, with which I agree. There is, says the paper, merit in the report's publication but dangers too:

The danger of the NIE report, however, is that it will be misused. In America, Democrats will seize on it to try to ridicule warnings of the threat posed by Iran. That would be a serious misreading of the report - which suggests that the nuclear programme has been delayed, not abandoned - and ignores the widespread concerns among Iran's Gulf neighbours at its aggressively nationalist policies. At the United Nations, China and Russia, which have vetoed proposals for tougher sanctions, will argue that the report has undermined the West's case. On the contrary, it has made plain how international pressure can influence policy in Tehran. It is therefore no time to relax that pressure.

That's the case I argue. The way to forestall military action later is to exert pressure now, as did not happen in the case of Iraq under Saddam Hussein. Similarly, Bronwen Maddox, in the same newspaper, rightly points out that the report "supports fears that Iran could soon have nuclear weapons [and] argues that Iran has been deterred from pursuing them mainly by the fear of US military action, a fear that has now faded".

What is most disturbing is that the report is indeed being misused, in the first instance by the most malign as well as buffoonish actor in the affair. The Guardian reports:

The report was greeted as a vindication by supporters of Iran's radical president, who has fought a bruising battle for control over nuclear policy with pragmatists who have accused him of pushing Iran towards a military confrontation with the US.

Ahmadinejad's spokesman, Gholamhossein Elham, said: "Americans should pay the price for their words."

It is no suprise to find President Ahmadinejad talking as if he were writing a letter to The Guardian, which is where you'll find similar disingenuity. Two letters today take issue with me. Here's one:

Oliver Kamm writes: "Avoiding military action requires that the UN pressure Iran to abide by its international obligations as a signatory to the NPT". Which NPT obligations is Iran not obeying? Access to nuclear technology for peaceful purposes, including uranium enrichment, is Iran's "inalienable right" under the NPT. Other states, for example Japan and Brazil, have uranium-enrichment facilities and it is never suggested that they are in breach of the NPT.

That's an easy one. The problem is not Iran's having a civil nuclear programme, but its insistence on access to the full fuel cycle. It's true that Japan has such access, but then it doesn't have a history of fraud on the issue. Other non-nuclear states do not necessarily have such access, even if they're US allies - South Korea, for example, which is not allowed to possess reprocessed plutonium. Most pertinent in this context is Iran's concealed activities. When its construction of enrichment facilities at Natanz and a heavy water plant at Arak was exposed in 2002, Iran was shown to be in breach of the NPT by not declaring these activities. How often does this need to be said? The regime lies and conceals. Why do anti-war campaigners imagine that by whitewashing such behaviour they're doing anything for the cause of peace?

The second letter maintains that I argue that Iran is is "seeking to build a nuclear arsenal", and that my judgement, unlike that of the NIE, "is an opinion rooted in neither evidence nor reality". This is a serious misrepresentation of my argument, which with no great hope of denting this correspondent's certainties I'll restate. There is a problem with Iran's insistence on access to the full fuel cycle. I do not believe that Iran's nuclear programme is intended purely for the generation of electricity, because much of the nuclear programme makes no sense in that context and much sense in the context of a military programme. The most likely explanation is that - and I quote once again Shahram Chubin's study of Iran's nuclear programme - Iran has been "'playing it by ear', with no irreversible decisions taken and these sensitive to the costs associated with proceeding". To argue that Iran seeks an option to develop a nuclear weapon, and is sensitive to the costs of doing so, seems to me borne out by the evidence and confirmed by the NIE report, and is what I've maintained both in print and on television. That evidence is - to repeat - that Iran's clandestine facilities make scant sense for a civil programme. Why establish those facilities at Natanz and Arak, and conceal them, if you have no intention of ever developing nuclear weapons?

If Iran has put a moratorium on its nuclear weapons programme after being caught cheating, then it does suggest that Iran's behaviour can be moderated by concerted international pressure of the type that the UK government has agitated for. I've maintained consistently (I had the same accusations made against me on Iranian television, and believe I disappointed my interlocutors by my response) that conditions are sufficiently different from Iraq under Saddam that we should not in current circumstances entertain the option of military strikes on Iran. We can hope for better things by a combination of diplomatic and economic pressure, and appealing to Iranian civil society. This is clearly too subtle an argument for a Guardian letter writer, as this one continues with the idle and ignorant charge that "Kamm's article acts as a reminder that the neoconservative case for military strikes on Iran is not dependent on a nuclear weapons programme". Well, at least my article did include the word "Iran"; previously I've been accused in The Guardian of campaigning for a nuclear strike on Iran, by writing an article about the conclusion of the Pacific War in 1945.