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Wed 15 Feb, 2006 11:21 am
WASHINGTON, Feb 7 (IPS)
Fear of U.S. Drove Iran's Nuclear Policy
by Gareth Porter, historian and national security policy analyst. His latest book, "Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam", was published in June 2005.
The George W. Bush administration's adoption of a policy of threatening to use military force against Iran disregarded a series of official intelligence estimates going back many years that consistently judged Iran's fear of a U.S. attack to be a major motivating factor in its pursuit of nuclear weapons.
Two former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officials who were directly involved in producing CIA estimates on Iran revealed in separate interviews with IPS that the National Intelligence Estimates (NIEs) on Iran have consistently portrayed its concerns about the military threat posed by the United States as a central consideration in Tehran's pursuit of a nuclear weapons capability.
Paul Pillar, who managed the writing of all NIEs on Iran from 2000 to 2005 as the national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia, told IPS that all of the NIEs on Iran during that period addressed the Iranian fears of U.S. attack explicitly and related their desire for nuclear weapons to those fears.
"Iranian perceptions of threat, especially from the United States and Israel, were not the only factor," Pillar said, "but were in our judgment part of what drove whatever effort they were making to build nuclear weapons."
Pillar said the dominant view of the intelligence community in the past three years has been that Iran would seek a nuclear weapons capability, but analysts have also considered that a willingness on the part of Washington to reassure Iran on its security fears would have a significant effect on Iranian policy.
Pillar said one of the things analysts have taken into account is Iran's May 2003 proposal to the Bush administration to negotiate on its nuclear option and its relationship with Hezbollah and other anti-Israel groups as well as its own security concerns.
"It was seen as an indicator of Iran's willingness to engage," he said.
A second theme in the NIEs, alongside the emphasis on Iranian fears of U.S. military intentions, was Iran's aspiration to be the "dominant regional superpower" in the Persian Gulf.
However, the estimates suggested that the Iranian regime would not pursue that aspiration through means that would jeopardise the possibility of a relationship with the United States.
Ellen Laipson, now president of the Henry L. Stimson Centre in Washington, managed three or four NIEs on Iran as national intelligence officer for the Near East from 1990 to 1993, and closely followed others as vice chair of the National Intelligence Council from 1997 to 2002.
In an interview with IPS, she said the Iranian fear of an attack by the United States has long been "a standard element" in NIEs on Iran.
Laipson said she was "virtually certain the estimates linked Iran's threat perceptions to its nuclear programme". She added, however, that she was not directly involved in preparation of NIEs that focused exclusively on Iran's nuclear programme, as distinct from overall assessments of Iranian intentions and capabilities.
Laipson said the intelligence analysts had a "fairly consistent understanding" of Iranian perceptions of threat. "We could tell they were afraid of the U.S. both from their behaviour and from their public statements," Laipson recalled. The acuteness of those Iranian fears of U.S. attack fluctuated over time, she said, in response to different developments.
The 1991 Gulf War, in which U.S. forces destroyed most of the Iraqi army, caused the Iranians to become much more concerned about U.S. military intentions, according to some scholarly analyses of Iranian thinking, because of the awareness that the same thing could happen to Iran.
The aggressive stance of the Bush administration toward Iran again increased Iranian fears of a U.S. attack. In early 2002, a secret Pentagon report to Congress on its "Nuclear Posture Review" named Iran as one of seven countries against which nuclear weapons might be used "in the event of surprising military developments". The report was obtained by defence analyst William Arkin, who revealed its contents in the Los Angeles Times on Jan. 26, 2002.
Five days later, Pres. Bush referred to Iran in his State of the Union address as being part of an "axis of evil", along with Iraq and North Korea. "By seeking weapons of mass destruction," he said, "these regimes pose a grave and growing danger."
Although it did not refer directly to fears of the United States, a declassified letter from the CIA to Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Bob Graham on Apr. 8, 2002 alluded to the linkage between Iranian perceptions of threats and its pursuit of nuclear weapons.
The letter stated, "There appears to be broad consensus among Iranians that they live in a highly dangerous region and face serious external threats to their government, prompting us to assess that Tehran will pursue missile and WMD technologies indefinitely as critical means of national security."
The letter then suggested that the external threats were focused largely on the United States, adding that "persistent suspicion of U.S. motives will help preserve the broad consensus among Iran's political elite and public for the pursuit of missile and WMD technologies as a matter of critical national security".
After the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, the spokesman for the Iranian government stated that, in a "unipolar world", Iran had to have policy that would avoid war with the United States.
That preoccupation with averting a U.S. attack cut both ways: it forced the Iranian leaders to seek a political-diplomatic accommodation with the United States, as illustrated by its cooperation with the United States in Afghanistan after 9/11, and its offer of broad negotiations on all major issues between the two countries in 2003. But when the United States failed to respond to those efforts, it also strengthened the argument for pressing ahead with a nuclear option.
Joseph Cirincione, a non-proliferation specialist at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, told IPS that an analysis that links Iran's security concerns about the United States have driven its quest for nuclear weapons would be consistent with the history of other nations' policies toward acquiring nuclear weapons.
"No nation has ever been coerced into giving up a nuclear programme," he said, "but many have been convinced to do so by the disappearance of the threat."
Cirincione cited three former Soviet republics, Argentina and Brazil, South Africa and Libya as examples of countries that decided to give up nuclear weapons only after fundamental international or internal changes eliminated the primary security threat driving their nuclear programmes.
US Tries to Pressure Iran with Attack Stories
US Tries to Pressure Iran with Attack Stories
Analysis by Gareth Porter*
WASHINGTON, Jan 25 (IPS)
Recent reports in the Turkish and German press of the U.S. asking the Turkish government to support a possible attack on Iran and alerting allied countries of preparations for such an attack appear to be part of a strategy to pressure the Iranian regime rather than the result of a new policy to strike Iran.
The stories appeared in Turkish and German newspapers after a Dec. 12 meeting between U.S. Central Intelligence Agency Director Porter Goss and his Turkish counterpart. The Turkish centre-left newspaper Cumhuryet reported that Goss had warned the Turkish government to be ready for possible U.S. use of airpower against both Iran and Syria.
On Dec. 23, the German news agency DDP quoted "Western security sources" as saying that Goss had asked the Turkish prime minister to support a possible strike against Iranian nuclear and military facilities. And the Berlin daily Der Tagesspiegal cited NATO intelligence sources as saying that the United States had informed NATO allies that it was studying the military option against Iran.
The reports, which have not been picked up in U.S. news media, seemed to suggest that the George W. Bush administration was now closer to war against Iran. But the circumstantial evidence points to strategic disinformation planted by the administration -- perhaps with help from friendly officials in NATO -- to ratchet up the pressure on Iran over its position on nuclear fuel enrichment.
The reports are unlikely to be effective in getting Iran to be more forthcoming, however. None of the stories suggested that the military option was anything more than a possibility. That would not represent anything new, because the administration's public posture since August 2005 had been that the "military option" was on the table.
The press reports do refer to possible air attacks on Iran, but since fall 2004, Bush administration planning for possible military action against Iranian nuclear facilities appears to have focused on commando operations to sabotage them rather than on air attacks.
Jushua Kurlantzick of The New Republic wrote in Gentleman's Quarterly last May that top officials had adopted a new strategy of "deterrence and disruption" toward Iran in the fall of 2004 that was aimed ultimately at covert operations by special forces to damage nuclear sites, according to a government official.
Kurlantzick's source confirmed, in effect, an earlier report by Seymour Hersh in the New Yorker that the administration had approved conducting covert probes by reconnaissance missions in Iran to identify potential nuclear sites as targets for later military strikes. But it suggested any such strikes would be by commando teams rather than from the air.
"You'll start seeing reports of an 'accidental gas leak' at Natanz [an Iranian nuclear facility]," the official was quoted as saying.
The choice of covert operations instead of airstrikes in administration planning reflected the serious downside associated with an overt attack on Iran. Administration policymakers were concerned about the likelihood of Iranian retaliation -- in Iraq, Afghanistan or elsewhere in the Middle East -- for an open military air attack against Iranian targets.
Nor did they regard Israeli air strikes as any more likely to avoid Iranian retaliation against the United States, since they would require U.S. support. In a book recently published by the National Defence University's Institute of Strategic Studies, Thomas Donnelly, a stalwart defender of administration policy at the American Enterprise Institute, noted that if Israeli planes stuck Iranian nuclear targets, "The Iranians would surely hold us responsible and target U.S. interests in retaliation."
Administration policymakers apparently hoped that the United States and Israel could deny responsibility for a covert operation, thus reducing the likelihood or intensity of Iranian responses to the strikes, as well as opposition from allies around the world.
Patrick Clawson, deputy director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), which is close to both Bush administration and Israeli policy makers, suggested in an interview with Hersh in late 2004 that if military action was to be carried out against Iran, it would be "much more in Israel's interest -- and Washington's -- to take covert action".
The U.S. military option remained in the background as the second Bush administration began in January 2005. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told a London news conference in early February that an attack on Iran over its nuclear programme was "not on the agenda at this point".
But after Iran indicated its intention to go ahead with uranium enrichment in August 2005, the administration reversed that declaratory policy. On Aug. 11, Bush declared in a press conference that "all options are on the table".
>From then the "military option" was an integral part of the U.S. strategy of diplomatic pressure on Iran. But that policy decision sharpened a conflict between the Bush administration and its three European allies -- especially the British, French and Germans -- over the issue of the use of military force against Iran.
It took Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder only a few hours to respond to Bush's move to put the military option ostentatiously on the table by declaring that the alliance should "take the military option off the table".
In September, however, Schroeder's Social Democrats were defeated by the opposition Christian Democrats, as the administration had hoped, and by early October Angela Merkel was on her way to forming a new government. Undersecretary of State R. Nicholas Burns was then dispatched to meet with representatives of Britain, France and Germany to "begin discussing ways to ratchet up the pressure on Tehran", according to a report by the Wall Street Journal's Carla Anne Robbins on Oct. 6.
Burns' top priority was certainly to get the European allies to integrate the idea that the military option is "on the table" into its negotiating stance on Iran's nuclear policy. Subsequently, Britain's Tony Blair began to echo Bush's position on the military option, presumably at U.S. insistence, but Merkel and French President Jacques Chirac avoided any endorsement of that posture.
Having failed to get agreement by the European three to exploit the military option in the diplomatic maneuvering with Iran, the Bush administration apparently felt that it needed to take other steps to increase the pressure on Tehran, including arranging for sensational newspaper articles to appear in the Turkish and German press.
It would not have been the first time a U.S. administration had used such leaks about a possible military action as part of a campaign to put pressure on foes to make diplomatic concessions.
President Dwight D. Eisenhower and his Secretary of State John Foster Dulles feinted toward a military intervention in Indochina at the time of the 1954 Dienbienphu crisis and the start of the Geneva Conference on a settlement of the war.
Privately, however, both men opposed U.S. intervention in Indochina and hinted that the suggestions of intervention were a bluff to influence Soviet and Chinese diplomacy at Geneva.
The ruse worked in 1954, inducing the Soviets and Chinese to put pressure on their Vietnamese allies to make far-reaching concessions in negotiating the Geneva accords. It is far less likely that such tactics will succeed with Iran, which is being asked to sacrifice its own central security interests rather than those of an ally.
*Gareth Porter is an historian and national security policy analyst. His latest book, "Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam", was published in June 2005.
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