Asia Times Online :: Middle East News, Iraq, Iran current affairs

 

As United States president-elect Barack Obama prepares to take over the White House two months from now, the mainstream US media have been awash reports about Iran's nuclear "threat" that will likely influence the coming Obama administration away from introducing any major change in the US's hitherto coercive Iran policy.
The latest anti-Iran spin is that Tehran has accumulated enough nuclear fuel for one nuclear bomb and that given Iran's rapid progress in installing more centrifuges at its uranium enrichment facility in Natanz, Iran's nuclear bomb-making capability will substantially increase in the near future.
Leading the pack in this media endeavor for a Chomskyian

"manufactured consensus" on Iran's nuclear threat is the nation's leading newspaper, the New York Times. Although known as the voice of the liberal "eastern establishment", the Times is perceived by many as a pillar of support for pro-Israel global public diplomacy and, therefore, it comes as little surprise that the respected newspaper may have been churning out alarmist and misleading articles about Iran's purported nuclear threat.
Case in point, in a high-profile article by two veteran reporters, William Broad and David Sanger, the paper claimed as per the expert opinion of various nuclear scientists, that Iran had already amassed "nuclear fuel for one weapon", to paraphrase the article's catchy title, and that, naturally, would be a serious problem for the upcoming Obama administration.
But does it? The article does not mention the following important, and highly relevant facts: 1. Iran's nuclear fuel is kept in containers sealed by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
2. As stated by Iran's envoy to the IAEA, Ali Asghar Soltanieh, the Natanz facility is under the surveillance of IAEA cameras 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
3. Contrary to misleading claims by various US nuclear experts such as David Kay, a former weapons of mass destruction inspector, there is no evidence that Iran has gone beyond low-grade enrichment of uranium to the point of "weapons-grade" enrichment. In fact, the various IAEA reports confirm the fallacy of such unsubstantiated claims, routinely featured in Israeli papers' biased reports on Iran.
4. Nor do the reporters give more than cursory attention to the content of recent IAEA reports on Iran, which confirm the agency "has been able to continue to confirm the non-diversion of declared nuclear material in Iran".
5. Another major flaw in Broad and Sanger's piece is that they deliberately underestimate the technical challenge of leaping from low-level enrichment to weapons-grade to a simple matter of "further purification".
6. The fact that the IAEA is well-equipped to uncover any attempt by Iran to engage in weapons-grade enrichment activities is mentioned only in passing, without influencing the gist of the article and the planned paranoia lurking behind it.
7. Finally, the whole argument that Iran's ability to produce nuclear fuel represents a "threat" warranting sanctions and other coercive counter-measures by the world community falls by the wayside in light of the legal framework of Iran's nuclear activity under the articles of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), and Iran's nuclear transparency mentioned above.
Instead of focusing on the objective guarantee of Iran's peaceful uranium enrichment activities, the reporters deliberately hyped up the perceived threat of a "nuclear breakout" via future scenario-setting of "if" Iran exits the NPT and terminates its cooperation with the IAEA, as if the US and other Western governments should engage in "pre-emptive" policy vis-a-vis Iran on the basis of such theoretical guesswork. Of course, the absurdity of the "inevitability of a nuclear weapon capable Iran" speaks for itself. Nothing is inevitable in world affairs and such deterministic analysis are inherently wedded to dogmatic assumptions about what is otherwise a highly fluid situation.
Given Iran's possession of dual purpose nuclear technology, although the potential for a future break out is inherently nested in this technology, there are several important intervening variables missing, without which this potential would not be actualized - one being the absence of a nuclear threat to Iran warranting Iran's reaction to go nuclear.
Sure Russia, Pakistan, India, China, and Israel have nuclear weapons, but none poses a nuclear threat to Iran, not even "out of area" Israel. If anything Iran's main fear today is the future break-up of Pakistan and the threats of Sunni extremism in Pakistan, but this is a low to medium level concern and not by any means blown out of proportion. Tehran remains confident about the ability of Pakistan's government to fight off the extremists and prevent them from accessing its nuclear arsenal.
With respect to Israel, some 1,500 kilometers distant from Iran's national borders, it is hard to digest the argument that Iran needs nuclear bombs to counter Israel's nuclear arsenal, principally because as Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad himself has repeatedly stated, Israel's bombs did not help it win the latest war in Lebanon nor have they been a factor in its previous wars with its Arab neighbors. So why should they be a factor of concern for Iran now? The absence of a credible answer is, in fact, one main reason why Iran is not racing to manufacture nuclear warheads today.
As for the US military threat against Iran, in light of the US military quagmire in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the overstretched nature of the US military. Tehran does not foresee an imminent threat of confrontation with the US, despite the occasional tensions over the "turf war" in Iraq and elsewhere in the region.
On the contrary, the mere post-9/11 proximity of US forces with Iran has translated into a qualitative deepening of diplomatic and security dialogue and interactions between the two countries and, henceforth, with the help of more Cold War style confidence-building measures, the tensions between Washington and Tehran can be lessened considerably.
What both Washington and Tel Aviv fail to realize is that their own action, of constantly threatening Iran with nuclear attacks, is tantamount to playing with fire. Such threats heighten Iran's sense of national security vulnerability and chip away at the latency of Iran's nuclear potential. In other words, the perceived remedy of issuing threats in the hope of thwarting Iran's march toward nuclear bombs has the exact opposite effect of poisoning the climate where Iran feels safe enough not to go beyond its reliance on conventional arms and acquire the actual bombs.
To return to the New York Times, a number of its columnists, such as Thomas Friedman and David Brooks, have also been fully involved in cultivating the perception of an "Iran threat". In Friedman's recent column titled "Show me the money" he takes this for granted and takes European, and the Russian and Chinese governments to task to prove their support for Obama by imposing tougher sanctions on Iran.
This aside, in light of the news of the impending selection of the ardently pro-Israel senator from New York, Hillary Clinton, as Obama's secretary of state, we are unlikely to witness any moderation of anti-Iran bias in Washington, influenced as it is by the incessant wheels of the "Fourth Estate".
Needless to say, hardly enough of this is encouraging and, indeed, is rather depressing and despairing of the hope that true change is coming to the practice and orientation of US foreign policy. The sheer speed of "over-Clintonization" of the Obama administration, reflected in the selection of so many officials linked to the Clinton "circle", none of whom can be regarded as agents of change, alone indicates that the hope for an Obama-led change in US foreign policy may be a hope against hope.
Kaveh L Afrasiabi, PhD, is the author of After Khomeini: New Directions in Iran's Foreign Policy (Westview Press) . For his Wikipedia entry, click here. His latest book, Reading In Iran Foreign Policy After September 11 (BookSurge Publishing , October 23, 2008) is now available.
(Copyright 2008 Asia Times Online (Holdings) Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us about sales, syndication and republishing.)

Asia Times Online :: Middle East News, Iraq, Iran current affairs