I am no wiser Saturday than I was Wednesday about the motives behind the Bush administration’s publication and embrace of what could soon prove one of the stupidest intelligence assessments in history. This is the National Intelligence Estimate on Iran, which even Mohamed ElBaradei, the United Nations’ nuclear watch-puppy, has dismissed as naive. By declaring with incomprehensible certainty, about a country whose inner workings are a mystery, that Iran gave up its plan to build nuclear weapons in 2003, the report has released all the pressure on Iran—not only from America, but from the rest of the civilized world.
While not known for their sense of humour, the ayatollahs must surely be laughing at this one. They have 3,000 gas centrifuges operating openly in their plant at Natanz, creating enriched uranium that is entirely redundant for civilian uses—since the Russians are contracted to supply all the enriched uranium for nuclear energy generation. The ayatollahs are building a heavy water reactor at Arak, to produce plutonium not even needed in the power plants. Et cetera.
They say they are pursuing nuclear energy. This can only be done at ruinous capital cost for a country whose economy is raised above Third World levels only by oil. For, excepting crude oil production, that Iranian economy has actually moved backwards since the Shah was overthrown in 1979.
But even supposing charitably that the mad mullahs had a plausible scheme for industrial expansion up their capacious sleeves, why nuclear energy? When the country has all this crude at hand, sans the considerable cost of shipping it abroad to be refined, then shipping it back to fuel imported cars? Why not invest in building the oil infrastructure? Why, instead, opt for a power source technologically above the country’s reach, the components for which must be almost entirely imported?
Granted, dictators of the Third World are given to megalomaniacal schemes. This is what has kept the poor poor in Africa and Asia—despotic rulers who would rather have an airliner than a bridge, and a palace than a flour mill; and who skim for their wants from foreign aid programs, cynically using their starving on billboards to sucker money out of the West.
But the pursuit of nuclear energy by means that entail redundant production of enriched uranium, and plutonium, at fabulous expense, goes beyond even the Congo standard. And Iran’s ambitious missile-building program goes beyond the aspirations of any Third World airline.
For to what has been mentioned above we must now add the long-range Shahab missiles the ayatollahs are developing, that make little sense without nuclear warheads. And extensive trade with North Korea, a demonstrated rogue nuclear state. And revelations, even in the media, of illicit congress with Pakistan’s nuclear engineers. And the rhetoric with which President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and colleagues fantasize about the incineration of Israel.
At what point in this chain of observations—not of subtle things, but of obvious things; not of secret things, but of public things—does your Harvard-educated intelligence analyst conclude there is a “reasonably high probability” that the Iranian regime is trying to become a nuclear power? And at what point does the Yalie in the State Department then notice what the consequences would be if Iran indeed became a nuclear power?
Now the strange thing is, from my own humble life experience, I’m prepared to believe they genuinely don’t get it. People believe what they want to believe, and I have found that the best-educated tend to believe in words instead of things, which makes them very easy to fool. The mystery to me is rather why the earthier types in the White House and elsewhere are prepared to stand for all this drivel. Unless, of course, as I speculated Wednesday, George W. Bush has thrown in the towel on Iran, and opted for a quieter last year in office—perhaps in the hope that some Republican will be in with a chance in next November’s presidential election.
Meanwhile, back in Pyongyang, or rather from Washington reading the distant signals, we learn that North Korea will—please, try to act surprised—fail to meet any of its year-end deadlines to dismantle its admitted nuclear facilities. In response to which, the U.S. has reiterated its commitment to the six-party talks.
Iran is hardly the only piece on the chess table of the world, and in the larger view, the West appears increasingly resigned to just throwing the match.
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