The New York Times has a five-page article presenting in detail the Bush claims that Iran is trying to design a nuclear weapon. However, the claims they are making are very similar to the claims they made to justify the invasion of Iraq — without solid evidence, based on flimsy sources, and simply not credible.
The case is based on a computer seized by the US and based on testimony from an informant. But the problem is, they will not say who the informant is or produce the evidence so that people can review it. In other words, they are making the same faith-based case for Iarn having nuclear weapons that they did when making the faith-based case that Iraq did. So, why should we believe them any more now that the Iraq claims have been shown to be false?
Given the poor credibility that the US has over this issue, it is little surprise that they are having difficulty selling their case to other countries:
The documents, the Americans acknowledged from the start, do not prove that Iran has an atomic bomb. They presented them as the strongest evidence yet that, despite Iran’s insistence that its nuclear program is peaceful, the country is trying to develop a compact warhead to fit atop its Shahab missile, which can reach Israel and other countries in the Middle East.
The briefing for officials of the United Nations’ International Atomic Energy Agency, including its director Mohamed ElBaradei, was a secret part of an American campaign to increase international pressure on Iran. But while the intelligence has sold well among countries like Britain, France and Germany, which reviewed the documents as long as a year ago, it has been a tougher sell with countries outside the inner circle.
What they are making is an argument from ignorance. In other words, they don’t know that Iran has nukes or is even developing them. So, therefore, they know that Iran is developing them and thus should be stopped. Some neocons would even support going to war with them, given their past support for their doctrine of preemptive strikes.
And such data is easily forgable:
The computer contained studies for crucial features of a nuclear warhead, said European and American officials who had examined the material, including a telltale sphere of detonators to trigger an atomic explosion. The documents specified a blast roughly 2,000 feet above a target – considered a prime altitude for a nuclear detonation.
Nonetheless, doubts about the intelligence persist among some foreign analysts. In part, that is because American officials, citing the need to protect their source, have largely refused to provide details of the origins of the laptop computer beyond saying that they obtained it in mid-2004 from a longtime contact in Iran. Moreover, this chapter in the confrontation with Iran is infused with the memory of the faulty intelligence on Iraq’s unconventional arms. In this atmosphere, though few countries are willing to believe Iran’s denials about nuclear arms, few are willing to accept the United States’ weapons intelligence without question.
“I can fabricate that data,” a senior European diplomat said of the documents. “It looks beautiful, but is open to doubt.”
So, who created this computer program, and how do we know that this is not just some opportunist trying to make a bunch of money off the US, knowing their willingness to believe anything about Iran?
I suggest the Bush administration is doing this out of hatred and revenge. Hatred, based on their willingness to believe anything about Iran. Revenge, out of Iran’s humiliation of us on the international stage for the second time in 25 years. The Iranian influence behind the current Iraqi government is clear, given that the late Ayatollah Khomeini is popular among Shiite circles in Iraq and the membership of Jaafari and many prominent Shiite clerics in the Khomeini-formed Supreme Council for the Revolution in Iraq.
An intelligence official who looked at the program had this to say:
In an interview, Dr. ElBaradei, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in October, declined to discuss the secret briefing.
Assessing just how far the Iranians have gone from plan to product is difficult. “It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that beautiful pictures represent reality,” a senior intelligence official said. “But that may not be the case.”
The US briefing is full of doublethink like this:
The briefing asserted that Iran did not have enough proven uranium reserves to fuel its nuclear power program beyond 2010. But it does have enough uranium, the report added, “to give Iran a significant number of nuclear weapons.”
The briefing landed with something of a thud. Some officials found its arguments superficial and inconclusive. “Yeah, so what?” said one European expert who heard the briefing. “How do you know what you’re shown on a slide is true given past experience?”
On the one hand, the briefing says that there is not enough for Iran to maintain a nuclear energy program past 2010. On the other hand, it says they can yield nuclear weapons. I have a hard time believeing that both of these assertions are true. And the skeptical quotes interspersed in the article show that the US has a credibility problem, given that the claims about Iraq turned out not to be true.
One of the main reasons for skepticism is that the US refuses to share their intelligence “find” with the IAEA, so they can evaluate it for themselves. This suggests that there is not enough evidence to conclude that Iran is developing a program that would involve the use of nuclear weapons. If there was, I am sure the US would have no problem sharing it with the IAEA.
We all agree on the need to hold other countries accountable for their use of Uranium. But the problem is that we need to convince the world that we are interested in peaceful intentions by unilaterally dismantling our own nuclear arsenal.
A large part of the problem is that nations like Iran do not see us as credible, because they feel we are simply trying to maintain the balance of power and remain the strongest nation in the world. Therefore, in order to build any kind of credibility, we need to unilaterally dismantle some of our own nukes, so that other countries will see us as serious when it comes to stopping Nuclear proliferation.
