Bush Administration admits Iran is probably not pursuing a Nuclear Weapons Program

[stevenleser]

http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_steven_l_071204_bush_administration_.htm

December 4, 2007

By Steven Leser


If you had been following press releases and statements from Mohamed ElBaradei and the International Atomic Energy Agency, you knew at least a year ago what it has taken the Bush administration until yesterday to learn (or to admit, given your perspective). Iran is not pursuing a Nuclear weapons program.


This http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20071204/ap_on_go_pr_wh/us_iran_analysis article yesterday by Associated Press White House Correspondent Terence Hunt raised what I am sure is going to be a common theme in the news over the next few days and that is the striking similarity between the incorrect statements and assessments from the White House on both Iraqi and Iranian weapons programs. Hunt and AP had these choice quotes in the article:


National Intelligence Director John Negroponte told Congress in January. "Our assessment is that Tehran is determined to develop nuclear weapons."


Just last month, President Bush, at a news conference with French President Nicolas Sarkozy, said, "We talked about Iran and the desire to work jointly to convince the Iranian regime to give up their nuclear weapons ambitions, for the sake of peace."


More ominously, Bush told a news conference Oct. 17, "I've told people that if you're interested in avoiding World War III, it seems like you ought to be interested in preventing them from having the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon."


Asked then if he definitely believed that Iran wanted to build a nuclear bomb, Bush said, "Yeah, I believe they want to have the capacity, the knowledge, in order to make a nuclear weapon."
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All Bush and the administration had to do to get a clear picture on Iran was to listen to statements coming from IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei. The IAEA and ElBaradei have had trained nuclear inspection teams on site examining every aspect of the Iranian nuclear program for the better part of four years. The Financial Times published an interview http://www.iaea.org/NewsCenter/Transcripts/2007/ft190207.html with ElBaradei in February of 2007 where ElBaradei explained the situation with Iran’s nuclear program. Here are relevant excerpts:


FT: If you define industrial capacity as a cascade of 3,000 centrifuges or more, since if that was fully functioning it would take a year to get enough fissile material for a bomb, how far away do you think they are at the current stage of progress?


ELBARADEI: I think they are still far away.


FT: A year, two years?


ELBARADEI: It´s difficult, I really like not to take numbers, to speculate, but away from what, from developing the three thousand ?


FT: From getting three thousand functioning smoothly.


ELBARADEI: I don´t know, it could be a year, it could be six months. It could be a year, but we need to remember but as long as even they have 3,000 , as long as these 3,000 are under safeguards, they cannot go beyond five per cent, people forget that... it´s really a risk assessment more of tomorrow more than it is of today...

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Yes, they might acquire a little bit more, perfecting the knowledge, but to aim at denying a country knowledge is almost impossible, to say the least. And there´s a big difference between acquiring the knowledge for enrichment and developing a bomb. It is almost impossible for a country to, particularly because this right is quoted under the NPT , and the difference between acquiring knowledge and having a bomb is at least five to ten years away.
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Even beyond the above Financial Times article, one can go to the IAEA Website and find documents like this one http://www.iaea.org/NewsCenter/News/2003/iranap20031218.html , which details Iran’s signing in December of 2003 of the Additional Protocol on Nuclear Safeguards which formally granted the IAEA the right to perform more aggressive onsite inspections of Iranian nuclear sites, inspections which in fact had been ongoing since February of 2003. Ever since that time, the IAEA has been issuing regular reports on the progress of their inspections. One doesn’t come away from reading the last four years of reports with any suggestion that Iran is hurtling toward full development of a nuclear weapon.


The Bush Administration is probably going to blame its incorrect position and previous bellicose posturing regarding Iran on the CIA. History will probably judge that the CIA has been this administration’s favorite whipping boy from the very beginning. Anytime the administration has made incorrect judgments, it was the CIA’s fault. Then, of course, the administration gave another body blow to the agency when it outed one of its undercover agents in a juvenile, cowardly and underhanded act of political revenge.


It is not the CIA’s fault. No matter what the administration tries to do, if in about 20 minutes of research I can pull up the evidence I included in this article to refute the idea that Iran was pursuing nukes, how can the administration blame the CIA and the rest of the US Intelligence community for its foibles? Again, as with Iraq, relevant UN Weapons inspection agencies were on the ground at the sites in question and performing inspections and taking samples and their assessments were ignored by the administration. I think the American people have a right to know why that was so.


I think the answer is that like with Iraq, this administration wanted/wants to invade and occupy Iran and is willing to selectively interpret intelligence estimates to do justify doing so. I don’t know for sure why, it is probably a number of things. Of course one cannot ignore the oil aspect. I think that Ahmadinejad’s antagonistic attitude was also a contributing factor. But we should not ignore that there are still a lot of former PNAC members and their acolytes in the administration. PNAC or People for a New American Century have been advocating since 1998 for more aggressive and militaristic US policies in the Middle East. PNAC has asserted that all the US had to do was invade a few Middle Eastern countries to show the US means business and the rest of the region would fall into line. These folks aren’t satisfied with the catastrophe of the Iraq war and want to try again with Iran.


This admission by the administration may be their way of signaling their giving up on their grand scheme to invade Iran. Bush is a lame duck with little more than a year in office and has a hostile Democratic congress to deal with who do not even want to fund the current conflict in Iraq yet alone a new one in Iran. Perhaps that has been the new Democratic Congress’ greatest triumph even as they have thus far failed to end the war in Iraq. They have succeeded; it seems, in stopping a war with Iran. We should all stay vigilant. If the administration somehow gets a reason for war with Iran that it things is compelling enough to sell, whether it is true or not, they will attempt to use it.