In My View

Iran: A voice to be heard

Iranian President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, told a group of Iranian war veterans recently, "The UNSC (United Nations Security Council) resolutions need to be issued with high precision, while speaking in vain should be refrained in their texts." He was speaking in the wake of the George W Bush government declaring in a much-touted US National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) that Iran “stopped” all nuclear weapons development plans after 2003 in earlier part of the first week of December. Clearly, Iran needs to be heard more carefully in the future.

Crucially, this was also the week India was debating in its Parliament whether the civilian nuclear agreement it was about to conclude with the USA was really in its interest. The Left parties argued that the agreement was a sell-out to the US establishment for a few pieces of silver and becoming a surrogate power. Bharatiya Janata Party wants to renegotiate the deal so that they could have their own loaves and fishes out of it. Meanwhile, the Indian people have suspended their judgment whether they would like to live in Uncle Moe’s Cabin. (Uncle Moe’s neo-slave variant of the original Uncle Tom!)

Meanwhile, it will remain on record that India voted in the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) demanding Iran to subsume its sovereign choice about subscribing to international safeguards and fulfill an agenda set in Washington and the other western capitals, going in the name of the “international community.”

The USA has more experience in playing a major power. So it tried to make the best of a bad deal. The NIE was a classic case of a Washington compromise. The Bush administration was aware that it could not drive the country to another war with Iran after the Iraq fiasco with false intelligence. American intelligence community knew that it could not serve up another platter of “designer” intelligence to suit the palate of their consumers in the White House without the American people, and some remaining parts of the world losing all faith in their professionalism.

The political class in the USA was so busy dissembling on the Iran issue during an election season that they needed a respite. And the war mongers in the Pentagon, after losing their chief votaries like Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz, knew the reality – that they were overstretched to the extreme.

Hence, the NIE was dressed up actually as a triumph of American policies of constraining, containing and threatening the only reasonably democratic country in the North-West and West Asian world. Some portions of the NIE have real fictive value. For example it says, “Our assessment that the program probably was halted primarily in response to international pressure suggests Iran may be more vulnerable to influence on the issue than we judged previously.”

Now, this great sense of overwhelming influence is not justified in the succeeding paragraphs of the declassified copy of the NIE about how this policy legerdemaine took place. Importantly, this is the paragraph in the published text that does not have any classifying remark like “low confidence,” “moderate comnfidence,” or “high confidence” appended to it.

Yet, the US National Security Adviser, Stephen J Hadley, who has the thankless job defending a war-crime prone Bush administration’s policies, told Washington-based reporters that the new conclusions validate the administration's long efforts to pressure Iran, most recently through economic sanctions. The level of confidence in the effects of US policy was certainly not evident when the American president, Bush had declared that the world would countenance a “World War III” if Iran were to arm itself with nuclear weapons, barely a month ago.

As is the case with Bush, he spoke with a forked tongue – not a trait that goes down well with the rest of world especially from the supreme leader of a country that considers itself the sole standard bearer for “democracy” and “freedom.” For Bush knew in August what his intelligence people told him: that in their finding Iran is not arming itself with nuclear weapons. That conclusion ultimately led to the current NIE.

But not all the conclusions of the NIE need to be taken as cast in stone. For humanity nuclear weapons history records that the ‘ultimate weapon’ is not liable to any external machination if a nation believes that its ownership is its supreme national interest. The Chinese, Indians, Pakistanis, Israelis have proven that rule again and again. Most of them had gone through a process of intense mobilisation of public opinion where the “costs and benefits” – as the NIE discovers to be guiding Iranian calculations – were enunciated.

Iranians know more than most what the costs are. If they have chosen to not walk the nuclear weapons path, they might have judged differently. In the words of Ahmadinejad, "The Iranian nation's victory (stemming from the NIE disclosure) is indebted to this nation's spirit of resistance and their national unity, whose blessings would be hundreds of times greater in the future."

Clearly, this realisation is embedded in the knowledge on what impact the findings of the NIE would have on the UNSC coalition that is driving the ‘sanctions’ agenda. What impact the NIE would have on New Delhi would be interesting to watch.

Pinaki Bhattacharya, currently located in Kolkata, is a Special Correspondent with the Mathrubhum, Kerala. He writes on Strategic Security issues. He can be contacted at pinaki63@dataone.in . He is presently in Hawai’i, the USA at the East West Centre as a Student Fellow of the Asia Pacific Leadership Programme at the Centre.