I am not without sympathy for Dennis Ross’ position on Iranian uranium enrichment. Ross makes many good points. But he’s not putting the focus in the correct place. For Ross, the issue isn’t whether or not Iran is working on a military nuclear program. The risk is still there from Iran mastering uranium enrichment for nuclear power plants.

Weaponizing is not the issue, developing fissionable materials is. Because compared with producing fissionable material, which makes up the core of nuclear bombs, weaponizing it is neither particularly difficult nor expensive.

In other words, the hard part of becoming a nuclear power is enriching uranium or separating out plutonium. And guess what? Iran is going full-speed ahead on both. With over 3,300 operating centrifuges for spinning uranium gases at its facility at Natanz (and more centrifuges on the way) and the building of a heavy water plant for plutonium separation at Arak, the Iranians will be able to master both by 2010 at the latest.

Moreover, Ross is concerned about the mere perception that Iran has a nuclear weapon capability. It’s informative to see why.

Perhaps that’s why, in 2005, former Iranian president Hashemi Rafsanjani told a visiting group of American experts, including George Perkovich of the Carnegie Endowment, that Iran had halted its nuclear weapons research. According to Perkovich, Rafsanjani said: “Look, as long as we can enrich uranium and master the fuel cycle, we don’t need anything else. Our neighbors will be able to draw the proper conclusions.”

Maybe, as Rafsanjani was suggesting, the Iranians will be satisfied only to foster the appearance of having nuclear weapons without actually producing them; for Rafsanjani, so long as Iran’s neighbors assume it has nuclear weapons, they’ll become responsive to Iran’s wishes. But can we count on Iran’s maintaining such a posture indefinitely? And even if we could, what would the Middle East look like if Iran gained far greater coercive leverage over all its neighbors? Wouldn’t oil production policies be used to separate us from our allies or further manipulate the world’s economy? Wouldn’t we face a region increasingly hostile to our interests? Wouldn’t we see the prospect of Arab-Israeli peace diminish as Iran worked to weaken, isolate, and demoralize the Jewish state? And to avoid being at the mercy of Iran, wouldn’t the Saudis decide to go nuclear–and wouldn’t that impel the Egyptians to do the same?

As reader dada points out, Iran is already using “oil production policies…to separate us from our allies or further manipulate the world’s economy.”

Iran signed a $2bn oil contract with Sinopec of China on Sunday, sending a signal to western companies that they might miss out on potentially lucrative contracts with one of the world’s biggest energy exporters if they continued to heed US-inspired sanctions against Tehran.

“If other countries who like to invest in oil and gas hesitate, they will lose opportunities,” said Gholam-Hossein Nozari, Iran’s oil minister.

And it’s beyond silly at this point to blame Iran for the fact that we “face a region increasingly hostile to our interests.” Our invasion of Iraq combined with our conflation of Islam with terrorism combined with our hands-off policy towards the Israel-Palestine question have created this hostile environment. A strong Iran is as likely to work in our favor as it is to further alienate us. Yes, there is a risk that Saudi Arabia and Egypt will pursue their own nuclear weapons capability in response to Iran…but they could just as easily align themselves more closely to the United States and, yes, even Israel.

Ross is correct to note:

One can criticize the intelligence community for framing the NIE around the wrong issue, but the intelligence community was not responsible for the public roll-out of its estimate. President Bush and those around him made the decision to publicize it–after all, NIEs are not typically publicized. No doubt, the president and his advisors understood that once the NIE was briefed to the congressional oversight committees on the Hill that its findings would leak, and they wanted to get out in front of the leaks.

Fair enough. Unfortunately, their presentation was not only poor in terms of framing, but also because it blindsided our allies. The British, French, and Germans have led the diplomatic efforts at the U.N. and in the E.U. on Iran; it was important for them not to be exposed on this issue since each country’s population holds such grave doubts about anything the Bush Administration portrays as threat. How could we not go to them in advance of the release of the NIE, explain the key judgments, and work out a common public approach?

Here’s what Ross is missing. There has been report after report about Dick Cheney and the neo-conservatives’ determination not to leave office without having attacked Iran. If the Intelligence Community judged that such an attack would be catastrophic to our national interests and their assessments were ignored and suppressed, it makes sense that their judgments would eventually leak. Patriotism demands it.

Ross says:

The National Intelligence Estimate on Iran presents an interesting paradox: Though almost certainly the product of rigorous assessment and questioning, it may actually leave us less secure over time.

If it prevented an ill-advised attack on Iran, it could not have done more to make us secure. It’d be nice if the IC could create an NIE that didn’t leak. It wasn’t really in our interests to tell the world (and Iran) what we knew about their nuclear program. It only became necessary because of the recklessness and radicalism of the administration. Policy makers, including Congress, had to know the truth. And given the deceit perpetrated by the administration, the public needed to know, as well.

If you want to point fingers, point them at the lunatics, not the patriots that may have saved our country from disaster.

Even so, Ross and the rest of the anti-Iran hawks have to wrap their minds around a simple fact. Iran is within their rights to enrich uranium for nuclear power plants. If we don’t want them to do that we have to convince them it isn’t worth their while. Threatening them with attack is not a good way to convince them they don’t need a deterrent. We can’t just slap sanctions on people for any old reason, much less launch military strikes.

And while we’re on the subject, it’d be nice if just once in a while we could discuss what our presence in the Middle East is all about…especially from a neo-conservative perspective. America never signed up for this.