Iran--Myth and Reality

In This Edition:

- Top Things you Think You Know about Iran that are not True
- No Credible Evidence' of Iranian Nuclear Weapons
- US Jews back military strike on Iran
-UN Says Israel Triples Poverty in Gaza

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Top Things you Think You Know about Iran that are not True
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article23601.htm

By Juan Cole

October 01, 2009 "Information Clearing House" --- Thursday is a fateful day for the world, as the US, other members of the United Nations Security Council, and Germany meet in Geneva with Iran in a bid to resolve outstanding issues. Although Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had earlier attempted to put the nuclear issue off the bargaining table, this rhetorical flourish was a mere opening gambit and nuclear issues will certainly dominate the talks. As Henry Kissinger pointed out, these talks are just beginning and there are highly unlikely to be any breakthroughs for a very long time. Diplomacy is a marathon, not a sprint.

But on this occasion, I thought I'd take the opportunity to list some things that people tend to think they know about Iran, but for which the evidence is shaky.

Belief: Iran is aggressive and has threatened to attack Israel, its neighbors or the US

Reality: Iran has not launched an aggressive war modern history (unlike the US or Israel), and its leaders have a doctrine of "no first strike." This is true of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, as well as of Revolutionary Guards commanders.

Belief: Iran is a militarized society bristling with dangerous weapons and a growing threat to world peace.

Reality: Iran's military budget is a little over $6 billion annually. Sweden, Singapore and Greece all have larger military budgets. Moreover, Iran is a country of 70 million, so that its per capita spending on defense is tiny compared to these others, since they are much smaller countries with regard to population. Iran spends less per capita on its military than any other country in the Persian Gulf region with the exception of the United Arab Emirates.

Belief: Iran has threatened to attack Israel militarily and to "wipe it off the map."

Reality: No Iranian leader in the executive has threatened an aggressive act of war on Israel, since this would contradict the doctrine of 'no first strike' to which the country has adhered. The Iranian president has explicitly said that Iran is not a threat to any country, including Israel.

Belief: But didn't President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad threaten to 'wipe Israel off the map?'

Reality: President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad did quote Ayatollah Khomeini to the effect that "this Occupation regime over Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time" (in rezhim-e eshghalgar-i Qods bayad as safheh-e ruzgar mahv shavad). This was not a pledge to roll tanks and invade or to launch missiles, however. It is the expression of a hope that the regime will collapse, just as the Soviet Union did. It is not a threat to kill anyone at all.

Belief: But aren't Iranians Holocaust deniers?

Actuality: Some are, some aren't. Former president Mohammad Khatami has castigated Ahmadinejad for questioning the full extent of the Holocaust, which he called "the crime of Nazism." Many educated Iranians in the regime are perfectly aware of the horrors of the Holocaust. In any case, despite what propagandists imply, neither Holocaust denial (as wicked as that is) nor calling Israel names is the same thing as pledging to attack it militarily.

Belief: Iran is like North Korea in having an active nuclear weapons program, and is the same sort of threat to the world.

Actuality: Iran has a nuclear enrichment site at Natanz near Isfahan where it says it is trying to produce fuel for future civilian nuclear reactors to generate electricity. All Iranian leaders deny that this site is for weapons production, and the International Atomic Energy Agency has repeatedly inspected it and found no weapons program. Iran is not being completely transparent, generating some doubts, but all the evidence the IAEA and the CIA can gather points to there not being a weapons program. The 2007 National Intelligence Estimate by 16 US intelligence agencies, including the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency, assessed with fair confidence that Iran has no nuclear weapons research program. This assessment was based on debriefings of defecting nuclear scientists, as well as on the documents they brought out, in addition to US signals intelligence from Iran. While Germany, Israel and recently the UK intelligence is more suspicious of Iranian intentions, all of them were badly wrong about Iraq's alleged Weapons of Mass Destruction and Germany in particular was taken in by Curveball, a drunk Iraqi braggart.

Belief: The West recently discovered a secret Iranian nuclear weapons plant in a mountain near Qom.

Actuality: Iran announced Monday a week ago to the International Atomic Energy Agency that it had begun work on a second, civilian nuclear enrichment facility near Qom. There are no nuclear materials at the site and it has not gone hot, so technically Iran is not in violation of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, though it did break its word to the IAEA that it would immediately inform the UN of any work on a new facility. Iran has pledged to allow the site to be inspected regularly by the IAEA, and if it honors the pledge, as it largely has at the Natanz plant, then Iran cannot produce nuclear weapons at the site, since that would be detected by the inspectors. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton admitted on Sunday that Iran could not produce nuclear weapons at Natanz precisely because it is being inspected. Yet American hawks have repeatedly demanded a strike on Natanz.

Belief: The world should sanction Iran not only because of its nuclear enrichment research program but also because the current regime stole June's presidential election and brutally repressed the subsequent demonstrations.

Actuality: Iran's reform movement is dead set against increased sanctions on Iran, which likely would not affect the regime, and would harm ordinary Iranians.

Belief: Isn't the Iranian regime irrational and crazed, so that a doctrine of mutally assured destruction just would not work with them?

Actuality: Iranian politicians are rational actors. If they were madmen, why haven't they invaded any of their neighbors? Saddam Hussein of Iraq invaded both Iran and Kuwait. Israel invaded its neighbors more than once. In contrast, Iran has not started any wars. Demonizing people by calling them unbalanced is an old propaganda trick. The US elite was once unalterably opposed to China having nuclear science because they believed the Chinese are intrinsically irrational. This kind of talk is a form of racism.

Belief: The international community would not have put sanctions on Iran, and would not be so worried, if it were not a gathering nuclear threat.

Actuality: The centrifuge technology that Iran is using to enrich uranium is open-ended. In the old days, you could tell which countries might want a nuclear bomb by whether they were building light water reactors (unsuitable for bomb-making) or heavy-water reactors (could be used to make a bomb). But with centrifuges, once you can enrich to 5% to fuel a civilian reactor, you could theoretically feed the material back through many times and enrich to 90% for a bomb. However, as long as centrifuge plants are being actively inspected, they cannot be used to make a bomb. The two danger signals would be if Iran threw out the inspectors or if it found a way to create a secret facility. The latter task would be extremely difficult, however, as demonstrated by the CIA's discovery of the Qom facility construction in 2006 from satellite photos. Nuclear installations, especially centrifuge ones, consume a great deal of water, construction materiel, and so forth, so that constructing one in secret is a tall order. In any case, you can't attack and destroy a country because you have an intuition that they might be doing something illegal. You need some kind of proof. Moreover, Israel, Pakistan and India are all much worse citizens of the globe than Iran, since they refused to sign the NPT and then went for broke to get a bomb; and nothing at all has been done to any of them by the UNSC.
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'No credible evidence' of Iranian nuclear weapons, says UN inspector

Mohamed ElBaradei says Iran was 'on the wrong side of the law' but rejects British intelligence claims

Julian Borger and Richard Norton-Taylor

guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 30 September 2009 18.51 BST
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/sep/30/iranian-nuclear-weapons-mohamed-elbaradei

Mohamed ElBaradei, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said British claims of an Iranian nuclear weapons programme were unfounded. Photograph: Roland Schlager/EPA

The UN's chief weapons inspector, Mohamed ElBaradei, said today he had seen "no credible evidence" that Iran is developing nuclear weapons, rejecting British intelligence allegations that a weapons programme has been going on for at least four years.

The claims and counter-claims came on the eve of a potentially decisive meeting in Geneva between diplomats from six world powers and an Iranian delegation about Tehran's nuclear ambitions.

Iran insists its programme is for peaceful purposes, and that there is nothing illegal about a uranium enrichment plant under construction near the city of Qom, the existence of which was revealed last week. Iranian leaders say they did not have to inform the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) until six months before the first uranium was processed.

But ElBaradei, the outgoing IAEA director general, publicly disagreed today, saying Iran had been under an obligation to tell the agency "on the day it was decided to construct the facility". He said the Iranian government was "on the wrong side of the law".

However, ElBaradei rejected British intelligence claims that Iran had reactivated its weapons programme at least four years ago. By making the claims the UK broke with the official US intelligence position that Iranian work on developing a warhead probably stopped in 2003. They said that even if there was a halt, as reported in a US National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) two years ago, the programme restarted in late 2004 or early 2005.

British officials had been privately sceptical about the NIE finding since its publication in 2007, but this was the first time they had made detailed allegations about Iran's weapons programme.

BND, the German intelligence organisation, this year provided evidence in a court case saying it believed weapons work in Iran had continued after 2003. A leaked internal memo written by the IAEA also found that Iran probably had "sufficient information" to build a bomb, and that it had "probably tested" a high-explosive component of a nuclear warhead.

ElBaradei has angrily rejected claims from Israel, France and the US that he had suppressed the internal IAEA report, saying all relevant and confirmed information had been presented to member states.

Tomorrow's talks will take place in a secluded villa on the edge of Geneva. The Iranian delegation will be led by its chief nuclear negotiator, Saeed Jalili, who at a similar meeting in Switzerland last year delivered a lecture more than two hours long about recent Iranian history and the global balance of power. But he refused to discuss Iran's nuclear programme.

Iranian officials say its programme remains non-negotiable, despite five UN security council resolutions calling for Iran to suspend enrichment. Western negotiators say they will push for a date for an IAEA inspection of the Qom uranium plant, and further concrete steps from the Iranian government to restore international confidence in the peaceful purpose of its programme. Failing that, multilateral talks will start on the imposition of more sanctions.

The Kremlin said today that the Russian position on sanctions would depend on the degree of Iranian cooperation with the IAEA. However, Russia and China are expected to resist the far-reaching measures aimed at Iran's energy sector being promoted by the US, Britain and France.
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'US Jews back military strike on Iran'
Sep. 30, 2009
Haviv Rettig Gur , THE JERUSALEM POST
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1254163553245&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FPrinter

A majority of American Jews support military action against Iran to prevent the Teheran regime from obtaining nuclear weapons, a new study claims.

Asked if they would support American military action, 56% of American Jews said they would, while just 36% opposed it, according to the American Jewish Committee's 2009 Annual Survey of American Jewish Opinion.

An even greater number support Israeli military action against the Iranian nuclear program, with 66% in favor and just 28% against.

The survey, which polled 800 representative American Jews and was conducted by Synovate between August 30 and September 17, also dealt with US-Israeli relations, worries over anti-Semitism and identity.

It found that a majority of American Jews oppose the Obama administration's recent policy of demanding a total Israeli settlement freeze, but this did not translate into support for keeping these settlements in the long term.

While 51% oppose the American freeze demand (though a substantial 41% agree with it), fully 60% said Israel should dismantle all (8%) or some (52%) of the West Bank settlements in the context of a permanent settlement with the Palestinians.

Despite any criticism, however, American Jews believe that Israeli-American relations were being handled well by the two country's leaders. The Obama administration received 54% approval, compared to 32% disapproval, in its handling of this relationship while Netanyahu garnered a slightly better 59%-23%.

In general, the vast majority of respondents believe US-Israeli relations are strong, with 81% saying they were either "very" or "somewhat" positive and just 16% disagreeing.

Asked about the prospects for peace, three-quarters of the respondents expressed profound skepticism over Arab intentions, saying they agreed with the statement "The goal of the Arabs is not the return of occupied territories but rather the destruction of Israel." Just 19% disagreed.

Thus it is perhaps not surprising that 51% do not believe there will ever "come a time when Israel and its Arab neighbors will be able to settle their differences and live in peace." That pessimism rises substantially, to 79%, when the Palestinian side of the equation is Hamas. Just 17% think peace is achievable between Israel and Hamas.

But the pessimism is not reflective of their hopes. American Jews favor a Palestinian state, even "in the current situation," by a factor of 49-41, through they are opposed (58 to 37) to compromising on Israeli jurisdiction over Jerusalem.

The survey briefly delved into questions of identification.

Asked for their political affiliations, respondents revealed the expected overwhelming identification with the Left and Center. Fully 53% said they were Democrats, 30% Independent and just 16% Republicans.

As for religious affiliation, 27% said they were Reform, 24% Conservative, 9% Orthodox and 2% Reconstructionist. But the most popular answer, at 36%, was "just Jewish."

Jewishness was important to the respondents, with 51% saying it was "very important" in their lives, 33% "fairly important" and just 15% "not very important."

This Jewish identification, however, did not necessarily translate into a feeling of connection with Israel. Just 28% said they felt "very close," 41% "fairly close," and fully 30% were either "fairly distant" or "very distant."

The survey had a margin of error of 3%.
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UN: Poverty tripled in Gaza

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 01, 2009
20:47 MECCA TIME, 17:47 GMT
http://english.aljazeera.net/news/middleeast/2009/10/200910116312269658.html

The UN provides food aid to nearly one
million Gazans [AFP]

Poverty in the Gaza Strip has tripled this year under the Israeli blockade, according to the UN agency helping refugees living there.

John Ging, the head of the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) in Gaza, told reporters on Thursday that the number of Gazans considerered "abject poor" had tripled to 300,000 this year, equal to one in five Gazans.

Ging described the situation in the narrow and overcrowded Palestinian territory as "unbearable" and as a "man-made crisis", calling on Israel to ease its siege immediately.

"The humanitarian situation here in Gaza continues to deteriorate at an alarming rate for the ordinary poor citizens," Ging said.

He reported that 80,000 families, representing 400,000 Palestinian refugees, had applied to UNRWA for extra assistance.

"We now have three times more hardship cases. People cannot feed their families even with our assistance.

"At the start of this year, there were 100,000 people that were in our special hardship category, now we have another 200,000 added to that,

"Of course, sadly, this is the predictable consequence of the blockade and of the siege on Gaza. We want, once again, to call for the lifting of the siege on Gaza."

Gaza's economy has foundered under the blockade Israel imposed after the Hamas movement took control of the territory in 2007.

The UN provides food aid to nearly one million Gazans. It defines "abject poor" as those who cannot feed their families, even with UN assistance.

Ging said his agency urgently requires greater funding to fill the growing need.