Iran

A reader asks whether a nuclear Iran can be contained. That is, what does Iran want? You will find various opinions about this, or course; and it is often difficult to separate the political agendas of a commentator from his/her analysis. But this op-ed from yesterday's Boston Globe, gives one perspective:

Threats vs. diplomacy

By Ray Takeyh | February 14, 2005

AS IRAQI elections recede into memory, a new threat is emerging on the global horizon, namely the efforts by Iran to acquire nuclear weapons. Vice President Cheney has placed Iran at the ''top of the list" of the world's trouble spots while Secretary State Condoleezza Rice once more castigated Iran as an ''outpost of tyranny." Behind such strident rhetoric, there are ominous warnings of military strikes, with Seymour Hersh's New Yorker article describing preparations for such an attack. However, the only durable solution to Iran's nuclear imbroglio is a diplomatic one. To avert yet another proliferation crisis in the Middle East, Washington would be wise to join the on-going EU-Iran negotiations.

The question that is often neglected in such deliberations is why does Iran want nuclear weapons? Far from being an irrational state seeking nuclear arms as a means of intimidating and invading its neighbors, Iran wants the bomb for the purpose of deterrence against a range of external actors -- most notably today, the United States. At a time of massive projection of American power on all of Iran's periphery and the Bush administration's declared and persistent hostility to Iran, nuclear weapons make a degree of strategic sense. Washington's incendiary rhetoric and talk of military preparation only reinforce the cause of Iranian politicians who suggest the only manner of preserving Iran's territorial integrity and regime security is to acquire the ''strategic weapon."

However, all is not lost. Through an effective combination of carrots and sticks, the much-maligned Europeans have managed to obtain far-reaching concessions from Iran. It was, after all, EU diplomacy, not American belligerence that compelled Tehran to accept the Additional Protocol with its intrusive inspection regime and at least temporarily suspend attempts to enrich uranium.

Despite the effectiveness of EU diplomacy, so long as Iran's core security concerns are not ameliorated, it is unlikely to permanently dispense with its nuclear program. The critical player remains the United States, whose military borders Iran today and has displaced two of Iran's neighbors. The Europeans and the international community have been vocal in their call for constructive US participation if the negotiations are to succeed. The French Foreign Minister, Michel Barnier, conceded this point, stressing, ''Without the United States, we run the risk of failure." In a similar vein, Mohammad El Baradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, noted, ''This is not a process that is going to be solved by Europeans alone. The United States needs to be engaged."

In an ironic twist of events, should the United States embrace the diplomatic option, it is likely to have receptive interlocutors in Iran. An important and influential segment of Iran's ruling elite is seemingly embracing a variation of the North Korean strategy, namely using the nuclear card as a means of extracting security and economic concessions from the United States. The economic dimension is particularly important as Tehran has grudgingly realized that tense relations with the United States preclude an effective integration into the global economy and access to institutions such as the World Trade Organization. The path of Iran's economic rejuvenation may yet entail a degree of restraint on the nuclear issue.

The new Iranian strategy was dangled by Iran's powerful secretary to the Supreme National Security Council, Hassan Rowhani, when he stipulated, ''If the United States is after solving the nuclear problem, definitely there would be a way." Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi also noted, ''If negotiations are on the basis of equality and mutual respect in the same way we are talking to Europeans now, there is no reason not to talk to others." The significance of these declarations is that there exists in Iran's official circles a propensity to .

The Bush administration is correct in noting the dangers of proliferation and the importance of preventing Iran from crossing the nuclear threshold. However, Washington's strategy of inflammatory rhetoric, threats, and refusal to join the European states in crafting a viable diplomatic package undermines it own declared objectives. The best manner of dissuading Tehran is to confront it with an international consensus and rewards that it will gain should it comply with its treaty obligations and the sanctions it will face should it prove recalcitrant. As Iran charts its nuclear course, it is imaginative diplomacy, not unilateral threats of force, that may succeed in getting it to abandon its nuclear ambitions.

Ray Takeyh is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

A report from Reuters last week should also give us pause when listening to the neocons threaten Iran:

U.S. intelligence on Iran seen lacking - experts

WASHINGTON, Feb 9 (Reuters) - U.S. intelligence is unlikely to know much about Iran's contentious nuclear program and could be vulnerable to manipulation for political ends, former intelligence officers and other experts say.

Amid an escalating war of words between Washington and Tehran, the experts say they doubt the CIA has been able to recruit agents with access to the small circle of clerics who control the Islamic Republic's national security policy.

Serious doubts also surround the effectiveness of an expanded intelligence role for the Pentagon, which former intelligence officials say is preparing covert military forays to look for evidence near suspected weapons facilities.

"I will be highly remarkably surprised if the United States has (intelligence) assets in the organs of power," said Ray Takeyh, an Iran expert at the Council on Foreign Relations.

"They don't even know who the second-tier Revolutionary Guards are," he added.

Doubts about U.S. intelligence on Iran have arisen amid talk of possible military strikes by the United States or Israel against suspected nuclear weapons facilities.

Former chief weapons inspector David Kay, the first to declare U.S. intelligence on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq a failure, warned that the Bush administration is again relying on evidence from dissidents, as it did in prewar Iraq.

"The tendency is to force the intelligence to support the political argument," Kay said in a CNN interview on Wednesday.

He added that the CIA has yet to give U.S. policymakers an up-to-date comprehensive intelligence assessment on Iran.

NATIONAL INTELLIGENCE ESTIMATE

"We're talking about military action against Iran and we don't have a national intelligence estimate that shows what we do know, what we don't know and the basis for what we think we know," Kay said.

Problems arose for U.S. intelligence in Iran a quarter of a century ago after the Islamic revolution, when Washington cut diplomatic ties following the seizure of the American embassy by student radicals.

Richard Perle, the influential neoconservative thinker who was a driving force behind the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, said intelligence suffered a major setback in Iran with the arrest of about 40 agents in the mid-1990s.

"As I understand it, virtually our entire network in Iran was wiped out," Perle recently told the House of Representatives intelligence committee.

"I think we're in very bad shape in Iran," he said.

Some intelligence analysts argue a preemptive strike is the only way to delay Iranian nuclear-weapons production, despite the Bush administration's public emphasis on diplomacy.

Tehran denies U.S. charges that it is seeking nuclear weapons and has warned that a U.S. or Israeli strike would only accelerate its legal uranium enrichment activities.

U.S. intelligence has had a huge credibility problem over reports that prewar Iraq possessed large stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons and was pursuing nuclear arms.

The assertions were a main justification for the 2003 U.S. invasion, but no such weapons have been found.

"If U.S. intelligence was bad in Iraq, and it was atrocious, it's probably going to be worse vis-a-vis Iran," said Richard Russell, a former CIA analyst who teaches at the National Defense University.

The task of recruiting useful agents in Iran faces immense hurdles posed by a secretive decision-making hierarchy and widespread mistrust of the U.S. government, experts said.

"People have worked their whole lives on the 'Iran problem' and they'll finish their lives with a huge 'A' for effort and probably a 'C' in terms of recruited human sources," said a former senior intelligence official who asked not to be named.

Not even covert forays into Iran by U.S. military units would likely bear much fruit, the former official added.

"They're never going to find anything out of substance except that there's some mysterious place in the desert with barbed wire and mines around it," he said.