Det danske Fredsakademi
Kronologi over fredssagen og international politik 25. April 2006 / Time Line April 25, 2006
Version 3.024. April 2006, 26. April 2006
04/25/2006
What We Know About Iran
By: David Isenberg
http://www.tompaine.com/articles/2006/04/25/what_we_know_about_iran.php
Is Iran's nuclear program really an immediate threat? There is reason to be
doubtful. In fact, the entire debate over the prospect of Iran getting
nuclear weapons has been unduly alarmist, if not outright hysterical. Recent
media reports indicate that the Bush administration has gone beyond mere
saber-rattling and is now deep into contingency planning for military
strikes against Iran.
But the evidence, even from within Bush's own administration, doesn't
support the claim that Iran poses any imminent threat. For example, on April
20, 2006, Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte testified before
Congress that, "even though we believe that Iran is determined to acquire or
obtain a nuclear weapon, we believe that it is still a number of years off
before they are likely to have enough fissile material to assemble it into,
or to put it into, a nuclear weapon-perhaps into the next decade, so that I
think it's important that this issue be kept in perspective."
The Bush administration is making noises that if the U.N. Security Council
doesn't give it authorization for a military strike, it might just ignore
it, proceed unilaterally and do it anyway. That might sound like bluster,
but again, remember Iraq. Nobody knows for certain whether these threats are
sincere or just psychological pressure from an administration that thinks
talking tough is the only way to go.
But the recent news reports, such as the April 9 Washington Post report that
Pentagon and CIA planners are considering a strike on the uranium enrichment
plant at Natanz and the uranium conversion facility at Isfahan, coupled with
the media drumbeat from the usual war hawks at The Weekly Standard, Wall
Street Journal and Fox News, are alarming enough to consider the pros and
cons of military action. And by any objective standard the liabilities
outweigh the benefits. The negatives include the likelihood of alienating
most of the world-which is already out of patience with the United States
after Iraq-and inciting additional terrorist attacks, all for the hope of
setting back Iran's nuclear program by a few years.
Consider the recent New Yorker article by Seymour Hersh claiming that some
military planners are considering the use of tactical nuclear weapons to
target deeply hardened underground Iranian nuclear facilities. Putting aside
for a moment the enormous moral and legal concerns that breaking the nuclear
weapons taboo would involve, the simple truth is that even using so-called
nuclear bunker busters are no guarantee. Successful use of such weapons
depends on a number of variables: the depth at which the facility is buried,
the composition of the ground and rock, the manner in which the bunker is
built, the expected yield of the weapon and the depth to which the weapon
could penetrate before it detonates.
While Hersh's article has attracted the most attention, an equally
compelling source of information has been the commentary by noted military
affairs analyst William Arkin. In a series on his Washington Post blog , he
has detailed U.S. military planning for the past few years-since before the
invasion of Iraq-and the development of specific contingency planning for
military operations against Iran. Arkin notes that this "adaptive" system
promotes "the particular Rumsfeld style of war, which is light and fast and
blind to the demands of the real world."
Even if all the questions are answerable, much would still depend on having
excellent intelligence. And our intelligence on Iran, to put it politely,
stinks. U.S. News & World Report recently reported that Senate Select
Intelligence Committee Chairman Pat Roberts, R-Kan., said that, "we have not
made the progress on our oversight of Iran intelligence, which is critical."
Last year, the report of the Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of
the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction stated, "From Iran's
pursuit of nuclear weapons to the inner workings of al-Qaida, the
intelligence community frequently admitted to us that it lacks answers."
Similarly, a new Center for Strategic and International Studies report
released earlier this month said, "[T]here are still major gaps and
uncertainties about the knowledge of Iran's nuclear programs, facilities and
weapons development efforts."
About the reliability of U.S. intelligence on Iran, Martin van Creveld, a
prominent Israeli military historian, recently wrote:
Last but not least, before deciding to bomb Iran's nuclear installations the
Bush administration must seriously question whether the intelligence on
which its decision is based is reliable. Those of us who have followed
reports on the development of Iran's nuclear program know that the warnings
from American and other intelligence agencies about Tehran building a bomb
in three and five years have been made again and again-for more than 15
years.
For 15 years, the intelligence agencies have been proven dead wrong. And to
this gross exaggeration of Iran's true intentions and capabilities must be
added the fairy tales the same intelligence agencies have been feeding the
world regarding Saddam Hussein's alleged weapons of mass destruction.
Indeed, there was something surreal regarding Iranian President
Ahmadinejad's recent claim that Iran has successfully enriched uranium,
using a 164-centrifuge cascade "We are a nuclear country!" he said. Even if
his claim were true, he still needs tens of thousands of additional
centrifuges to enrich enough uranium for a nuclear weapon. Yet here in the
United States this unverified claim has been taken as gospel. Currently Iran
has only set up that one cascade , and plans to install another 3,000 later
this year as the government works toward its goal of 54,000. Even if it does
install those additional 3,000 that would mean it has 6 percent of its goal;
hardly a dire threat. Furthermore, the Iranian claim says nothing about how
efficient the claimed use of a small 164-centrifuge chain was, what its life
cycle and reliability is, and about the ability to engineer a system that
could approach weapons-grade material.
The hawks in both the Republican and Democratic Parties must understand that
invading and occupying Iran is simply not an option-for starters, it has
three times the size and population of Iraq, where a substantial portion of
the U.S. military's combat units remain occupied-which leaves an air attack
as the only feasible option. But such an option is a quick fix, not a
solution. Israel's air strike on Iraq's Osirak reactor in 1981 made the
limitations of such an option clear, as evidenced by the fact that 10 years
later, the IAEA found Iraq far more advanced in its covert bomb program than
anyone had thought possible.
The U.S. military also understands that attacking Iran would almost
certainly shore up the power of the regime by inciting nationalist sentiment
and massively tilt internal debates in favor of its most hard-line
element-exactly the worst result the United States could want. Iran would
not be without options to respond, and those, in turn, would force the U.S.
to escalate its own response, thus escalating the limited strike the
neo-conservatives claim to want into a full-fledged war.
The end result is lots of pain for no gain. The cons outweigh the pros and
everyone, except for neo-conservatives, should understand this.
David Isenberg is a senior research analyst at the British American Security
Information Council, a member of the Coalition for a Realistic Foreign
Policy, and an adviser to the Straus Military Reform Project of the Center
for Defense Information. The views expressed are his own.
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