by Eric Martin
Daniel Larison on assumptions about Iran and its "pursuit" of nuclear weapons:
It is worth noting here that Ahmadinejad recently repeated his government�s formal opposition to the possession and use of nuclear weapons. Obviously, no one takes this at face value, and most of us assume that Iranian officials must be lying whenever they say this. Nonetheless, it could be useful to consider the possibility that what we assume about Iranian intentions is simply wrong. Just as �everyone� agreed that Iraq had WMD programs (even though there were actually quite a few vocal skeptics), practically everyone in the U.S. is quite sure that Iran is working on building a bomb. In almost everything I have written on Iran for the last five years, I have taken this for granted, but as more time passes the claim that Iran is eagerly working toward a bomb and will have a nuclear weapon very soon becomes less and less credible. Everything else in the debate on Iran policy centers around what is a fairly questionable assumption. If it is wrong, we are all making sanctions vs. containment vs. military strike arguments about something that may not be happening at all, and we are throwing away any chance of opening up normal relations with Iran on account of what could be a fantasy.
As if on cue, Muhammad Sahimi does yeoman's work chronicling the past 30 years of experts predicting that Iran is just a few years away from acquiring a nuclear weapon:
For nearly three decades we have been hearing or reading dire predictions by the officials of the United States, Israel, and their allies that Iran is on the verge of developing nuclear weapons. Such �warnings� have been common, but none has come true. Now that the talk of imposing �crippling sanctions� on or even attacking Iran is heating up again, it is instructive to take a look at the history of such false prophecies.
The most astonishing aspect of the predictions about Iran�s �imminent� nuclear bomb is that, when Iran actually declared in the 1970s that it was indeed pursuing nuclear weapons, the West and Israel were absolutely silent, but Iran�s declarations since the mid-1980s that it is not seeking nuclear weapons have been greeted with disbelief and mockery. [...]
First, in April 1984, Jane�s Defense Weekly reported that West German intelligence believed that Iran could have a nuclear bomb within two years. Twenty-six years later, that bomb has not been produced.
On June 27, 1984, the late Sen. Alan Cranston was quoted by The Age, a broadsheet daily newspaper published in Melbourne, Australia, claiming that Iran was seven years away from being able to build its own nuclear weapon. When Cranston passed away in 2000, Iran�s nuclear bomb was nowhere to be found.
On April 12, 1987, David Segal published a piece in the Washington Post titled �Atomic Ayatollahs: Just What the Mideast Needs � an Iranian Bomb,� sounding the alarm about Iran�s forthcoming nuclear weapon.
The next year, in 1988, it was America�s reliable ally Saddam Hussein who put the world on notice that Tehran was already at the nuclear threshold.
In late 1991, in congressional reports and CIA assessments, the first Bush administration estimated that there was a �high degree of certainty that the government of Iran has acquired all or virtually all of the components required for the construction of two to three nuclear weapons.� In 1992, the CIA changed its mind and predicted that Iran would have nuclear arms by 2000, then pushed that back to 2003.
A February 1992 report by the House of Representatives suggested that Iran would have two or three operational nuclear weapons by February-April 1992.
And, of course, David Albright, the all-world nuclear expert, also weighed in in March 1992. In an article written with Mark Hibbs in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientist, he claimed that the spotlight had shifted to Iran and its nuclear program. [...]
Things got more interesting in early March 1992 when The Arms Control Reporter reported that by December 1991 Iran had four (not two) nuclear weapons, which it had obtained from the former Soviet Union, including a nuclear artillery shell, two nuclear warheads that could be launched on Scud missiles, and one nuclear weapon that could be delivered by a MiG-27 aircraft.
1993 was a very busy year for making grim predictions about Iranian nuclear weapons. On Jan. 23, 1993, Charles Radin of the Boston Globe quoted Gad Yaacobi, then Israel�s envoy to the United Nations, claiming that Iran was devoting $800 million per year to the development of nuclear weapons.
A month later on Feb. 24, new CIA Director James Woolsey (who would later play a leading role in the propaganda for invading Iraq) said that the U.S. was concerned about Iran�s nuclear potential, even though �Iran is still eight to ten years away from being able to produce its own nuclear weapon.�
Then, on March 21, 1993, U.S. News and World Report reported that North Korea and Iran had an agreement to develop nuclear weapons. On April 8, Douglas Jehl of the New York Times reported that the Clinton administration claimed that Iran had paid North Korea $600 million for further development of the Nodong missile to deliver nuclear or chemical warheads.
The list goes on and on like that for more than a dozen paragraphs citing examples of dire predictions, and deadlines come and gone.
Unfortunately, the Obama administration has picked up the baton from prior administrations and has, again, repeated with certainty that Iran intends to build a nuclear weapon, that it is rapidly approaching the date of acquisition and, thus, that the UN should impose "crippling sanctions" that themselves will be counterproductive and unduly punitive. Not to mention futile should Iran actually decide to develop a nuclear weapon at long last, or at least develop the capacity to create one which is what I believe they are after.
That, and a valuable, legitimate civilian power source and victory in a larger symbolic struggle, with nuclear power becoming a source of national pride and an affirmation of Iran's sovereignty, its status as a regional power and its sense of deserved respect. For much of the Iranian population, the nuclear power issue is viewed through the prism of Iran's recent history of subjugation by Western powers (colonized, exploited and interfered with).
Against that backdrop, from the Iranian perspective, the West is now seeking to deny Iran the right that it has as a signatory to the NPT, and as a powerful nation, to develop domestic nuclear power, whereas other states allied with the US (Israel, India, etc.) are given a pass as non-signatories, while others still are allowed to push ahead with full nuclear programs (and near weapons capacity) as signatories without the harrassment and scrutiny (Japan, South Korea).
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