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The Iran bombshell

Two years after escalating its confrontation with Iran over the nuclear issue, the United States has conceded that Tehran does not have a nuclear weapons programme today and has not had one since at least 2003. This assessment, contained in the latest National Intelligence Estimate produced collectively by Washington’s numerous intelligence agencies, knocks the stuffing out of the Bush administration’s alarmist policies towards Iran. But it is also an object le sson to all those countries — including India, France, and Germany — that uncritically accepted the doomsday allegations peddled by American officials about Iran and backed the drive to condemn and sanction the Islamic Republic at the International Atomic Energy Agency and the United Nations. As in the case of Iraq and its non-existent weapons of mass destruction, it is the IAEA and its Director-General, Mohammed el-Baradei, who stand vindicated once again for their methodical and professional approach. Over the past two years, the IAEA has consistently maintained that there was no evidence of Iran running a clandestine nuclear weapons programme. The agency’s latest report, in fact, suggests that a breakthrough in clearing the lingering doubts about earlier Iranian activities in the nuclear field is in sight. Despite these findings, hawks in the Bush administration led by Vice-President Dick Cheney sought to build a case for punitive action against Iran, including the use of force. The fact that the U.S. intelligence community refused to tailor its findings on Iran to suit this political agenda indicates that opposition to the Cheney line runs deep within the American establishment itself.

Even as ordinary Americans digest the latest bombshell and ponder over what this means for the credibility of President George Bush, the Manmohan Singh government needs to engage in some introspection about how it failed to make an independent assessment of the Iranian question. Whenever the Prime Minister was asked to explain the logic of his government’s vote against Iran at the IAEA Board of Governors in September 2005, his standard response has been to say it was not in India’s interest for Iran to develop nuclear weapons. On what basis was he so apprehensive about Iran actually going down that path? Did New Delhi make its own independent assessment or was it simply echoing the motivated propaganda of the Bush administration? The latest NIE opens a path for the UPA government to once again step on the gas — by all accounts, negotiations on the Iran-Pakistan-India pipeline project have reached the stage where a deal is fully within grasp, provided Dr. Singh is willing to invest the kind of political capital with the Iranians that he so readily deploys with the U.S. Two years ago, India scored a politically costly own goal to appease the Bush administration’s drive to sanction and isolate Iran. It is now time to repair the damage.

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