The unanimous report of no fewer than 16 US intelligence agencies, made public on December 3/07, that Iran had frozen its nuclear project in 2003 and had not yet restarted it, has perhaps come as an exceptionally hard punch for the Bush administration.
The National Intelligence Council, formed in 1973 and comprising all 16 US intelligence agencies ranging from the CIA to the Treasury Department, prepared the report called National Intelligence Estimates (NIE). In its introduction to the portion on Iran, the Council says that in the last 18 months it has laid down more rigorous standards in order to ensure against the type of faulty intelligence that had provided the cause belli for the US and allied forces to invade Iraq.
“We do not know whether it (Iran) currently intends to develop nuclear weapons”, the report says and maintains that Iran appears “less determined” to develop nuclear weapons than the US intelligence had previously thought. The earliest date by which Iran could make a nuclear weapon even if it launched the project now would be late 2009, that is two years from now, but it would be “very unlikely”.
Iran continues enrichment of uranium but to the very low level required as fuel for its civil nuclear power project and that too under the inspection of UN’s watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Under the NPT that Iran has already signed, it has the right to such enrichment. But, it had an enrichment program that it did not disclose for 18 years. That gave rise to the suspicion that Iran was striving to acquire a nuclear bomb. Hence the UN Security Council’s demand that Iran suspend all nuclear activities to establish its bona fides on the peaceful nature of its nuclear program and on the absence of undeclared nuclear material. The Council has already passed two resolutions placing various sanctions on Iran.
Before a much harsher third resolution could be tabled by US, UK and France, the Intelligence assessment was made public undercutting the rationale for such a resolution.
The administration had all along been presenting Iran as a rogue state and arguing for harsher measures to stop it from acquiring nuclear weapons capability. Some of the reasons that may have gone in the formulation of such a stance are given below:
- Since the Feb. 1979 Iranian revolution that brought Ayatollah Khomeni and his clerics to power, relations between the US and Iran have remained strained and informed by strong mutual suspicions. The Ayatollah had even branded the US as “the Great Satan”.
- In the decade long Iran-Iraq war, the US supported Iraq against Iran.
- President Ahmadinejad has publicly stated that holocaust was a myth and that Israel should be wiped off the world map. This has offended the US too in view of the close relations between Israel and the US.
- The Israeli lobby in the States, being the wealthiest of all and having significant representations in all walks of life, has been persistently canvassing the Administration to deliver a crushing blow to Iran.
- Iran is the fourth biggest producer of oil, and it has been accepting payments for its oil in Euro instead of the US dollars, undermining the status of dollar an the international currency.
- Iran’s Revolutionary Guards are suspected of having supplied men and arms to the Shiite faction of Iraq against the Sunnis. The US has charged the Guards of being a terrorist organization. Some Guards had been arrested in Iraq, according to a January 2007 statement of Charles Burn, Under Secretary of State.
- Iran has been accused of supplying arms, ammunition and funds to not only the Iraqi Shiite community but also the Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Hamas in Palestine.
- As far back as January 2002, Bush came out with his famous Axis of Evil statement that included Iran in the axis.
No wonder the statements on Iran of President Bush, his Vice-President, Dick Cheney - the chief hawk of the Administration - and the Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, had been growing in bitterness and bellicosity with the passage of time.
President Ahmadinejad, on the other hand, appeared to be enjoying the provocations he had been causing by his ill-conceived sarcasm towards Washington. Since the sanctions imposed on Iran were hurting the people, his popularity graph had been going south. The Intelligence report has pulled some of his chestnut out of the fire. But, as pointed out by the Intelligence report, Iran’s “decisions are guided by a cost-benefit approach rather than a rush to a weapon irrespective of the political, economic and military costs.” Ahmadinejad, in any case, is not the chief policy maker, but a spokesperson of the clerical council.
As for the US, we may take the March 2006 statement of the Secretary of State as representative of the feelings within the Administration in which she has categorically claimed that the US faced “no greater challenge” than Iran’s nuclear program.
Only two months back, President Bush warned in a public statement that the tussle with Iran over the nuclear issue might lead to World War III. To hear him issue the warning, you would think that Iran was putting finishing touches to its first nuclear warhead!
The Intelligence report must have cast buckets of cold water on the US jingoists. No wonder some Administration officials expressed skepticism about the conclusions reached in the report, saying that they doubted that American Intelligence agencies had a firm grasp of the Iranian government’s intentions.
Ironically, the Intelligence community might have composed the report strictly in an objective vein. Although its thrust is against the government stance, it would draw further attention to the integrity of the beleaguered Intelligence agencies. Was its 2005 assessment warning unambiguously of Iranian nuclear plans, that is being reversed by the new report, the result of sheer incompetence or the outcome of political pressure? What was the nature of the Intelligence failure behind the war in Iraq?
The Intelligence community might have attempted to whitewash its tarnished image through this report which clearly rubs the Administration on the wrong side but which appears, for that very reason, to have been dictated by unflinching integrity and objectivity. Yet, outside that community it should not expect many admirers.
Israeli sympathizers would have liked the US entangled in a conflict with Iran before President Bush bowed out of office. The oil corporation hawks would have captured the oil wells, like in Iraq, and would have turned the country, again like Iraq, into rubble. That would have also put an end to the offensive and derogatory statements of people like Ahmadinejad.
But, that was not to be; the report has undercut all such schemes. President Bush totally ignored the unprecedented worldwide protests against the war in Iraq. He launched the war as he had been authorized much earlier by the Congress to do so, mainly because of the faulty Intelligence report claiming that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. He might not be able to do an Iraq in Iran. Neither the people at large, nor their representative are in a mood for it.
