Tuesday, July 30, 2013

Ex-Envoy’s Account Clarifies Iran’s 2003 Nuclear Decision--Porter (IPS)

http://www.ipsnews.net/2013/07/ex-envoys-account-clarifies-irans-2003-nuclear-decision/

Ex-Envoy’s Account Clarifies Iran’s 2003 Nuclear Decision

By Gareth PorterReprint |       |  Print | Send by email
WASHINGTON, Jul 30 2013 (IPS) - Newly published recollections by the former French ambassador to Iran suggest that Iran was not running a covert nuclear weapons programme that it then decided to halt in late 2003, as concluded by U.S. intelligence in 2007.
Ambassador Francois Nicoullaud recounted conversations with high-ranking Iranian officials indicating that Tehran’s then nuclear policy chief – and now president-elect – Hassan Rouhani did not know what research projects relating to nuclear weapons had been carried out over the years.
“I guess that most people, [Supreme Leader Ali] Khamenei included, were surprised by the extent of the activities." -- former French ambassador to Iran Francois Nicoullaud
The conversations described by Nicoullaud in a Jul. 26 New York Times op-ed also portray Rouhani as having difficulty getting individual researchers to comply with an order to halt all research related to nuclear weapons.
The picture of Iranian nuclear policy in 2003 drawn by Nicoullaud is different from the one in the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate, which concluded that Iran had halted “its nuclear weapons program”. That conclusion implied that Iranian government leadership had organised a programme of research and development aimed at producing a nuclear weapon.
Nicoullaud recalled that a high-ranking Iranian official confided to him in late October 2003 that Rouhani had just “issued a general circular asking all Iranian departments and agencies, civilian and military, to report in detail about their past and ongoing nuclear activities.”
The conversation came immediately after Rouhani had concluded an agreement with the foreign ministers of the UK, France and Germany on Oct. 21, 2003, Nicoullaud recalled.
The same official explained that “the main difficulty Rouhani and his team were encountering was learning exactly what was happening in a system as secretive as Iran’s,” wrote Nicoullaud.
A few weeks after, the French ambassador learned from a second official, whom he described as “a close friend of Rouhani”, that Rouhani’s nuclear policy team had issued instructions to halt projects relating to nuclear weapons.
The Iranian official said the team was “having a hard time”, because, “[p]eople resist their instructions,” according to Nicoullaud. The official remarked that it was difficult to “convince researchers to abruptly terminate projects they had been conducting for years”.
In an e-mail to IPS, Nicoullaud said he did not believe the Iranian government had ever approved a nuclear weapons programme. “The first challenge for Rouhani when he took hold of the nuclear,” said Nicoullaud, “must have been to get a clear picture of what was going on in Iran in the nuclear field.”
Rouhani had been the secretary of the Supreme National Security Council (SNSC) since 1989 and would not only have known about but would have been involved in any government decision to establish a nuclear weapons programme.
“I guess that most people, [Supreme Leader Ali] Khamenei included, were surprised by the extent of the activities,” Nicoullaud told IPS.
Nicoullaud’s recollections are consistent with published evidence that nuclear weapons-related research projects had begun without any government authorisation.
Despite an Iranian policy that ruled out nuclear weapons, many Iranian officials believed that a nuclear weapons “capability” would confer benefits on Iran without actually having nuclear weapons.
But the meaning of such a capability was the subject of ongoing debate. Nasser Hadian, a well-connected Tehran University political scientist, wrote in late 2003 about two schools of thought on the option of having a “nuclear weapons capability” but not the weapons themselves. One definition of that option was that Iran should have only the capability to produce fuel for nuclear reactors, Hadian explained, while the other called for Iran to have “all the necessary elements and capabilities for producing weapons”.
That debate had evidently not been officially resolved by a government decision before Rouhani’s appointment. And in the absence of a clear statement of policy, figures associated with research centres with military and defence ministry ties began in the latter of the 1990s to create their own nuclear weapons-related research projects without the knowledge of the Supreme National Security Council (SNSC).
Such projects were apparently begun during a period when the Supreme National Security Council was not exercising tight control over the Atomic Energy Organisation of Iran (AEOI), the Ministry of Defence or the military industrial complex controlled by Defence Industries Organisation related to nuclear weapons.
By the mid-1990s, AEOI was already taking advantage of the lax supervision of its operations to take actions that had significant policy implications without authorisation from the SNSC.
Seyed Hossein Mousavian, then the spokesman for Iran’s nuclear negotiating team, recalls in his memoirs that in January 2004, Rouhani revealed to him that AEOI had not informed the SNSC about a policy-relevant matter as important as the purchase of the P2 centrifuge designs from the A. Q. Khan network in 1995. AEOI officials had misled him, Rohani said, by claiming that “they had found some information about P2 centrifuges on the Internet and are studying it!”
When Rouhani was named to take over as nuclear policy coordinator in early October 2003, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) was demanding a full accounting by Iran of all of its nuclear activities. Rouhani’s circular to all civilian and military offices about nuclear work came soon after he had promised the IAEA that Iran would change its policy to one of full cooperation with the IAEA.
At the same time, Rouhani moved to tighten up the policy loophole that had allowed various entities to start weapons-related nuclear research.
Rouhani anticipated resistance from the bureaucratic entities that had nuclear weapons-related research projects from the beginning. He recalled in a later interview that he had told President Mohammad Khatami that he expected that there would be problems in carrying out the new nuclear policy, including “sabotage”.
The sequence of events surrounding Rouhani’s new nuclear policy indicates that he used Khamenei’s public posture that nuclear weapons were forbidden according to Islamic law to ensure compliance with the ban on such research projects.
Around the same time that Rouhani ordered the bureaucracy to report on its nuclear-related activities and to stop any research on military applications of nuclear power in late October, Khamenei gave a speech in which he said, “In contrast to the propaganda of our enemies, fundamentally we are against any production of weapons of mass destruction in any form.”
Three days later, Rouhani told students at Shahrud Industrial University that Khamenei considered nuclear weapons as religiously illegal.
That same week, in an interview with San Francisco Chronicle correspondent Robert Collier, Hossein Shariatmadari, the editor of the conservative newspaper Kayhan and an adviser to Khamenei, alluded to tensions between the Rouhani team and those researchers who were not responding to or resisting the Rouhani circular.
Khamenei was forcing those working on such projects to “admit that it is forbidden under Islam”, Shariatmadari said. He also suggested that the researchers resisting the ban had been working “clandestinely”.
After the U.S. intelligence community concluded in November 2007 estimate that Iran had halted a “nuclear weapons program”, a U.S. intelligence official said key pieces of evidence were intercepted communications from at least one senior military officer and others expressing dismay in 2007 that nuclear weapons-related work had been shut down in 2003.
But U.S. intelligence officials said nothing about what kind of work was being shut down, and revealed no further evidence that it was a “nuclear weapons program” under the control of the government.
Nicoullaud’s recollections suggest that the 2007 estimate glossed over a crucial distinction between an Iranian “nuclear weapons program” and research projects that had not been authorised or coordinated by the Iranian regime.
Nicoullaud told IPS he believes the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), which controls Iran’s ballistic missile programme, was also carrying out a clandestine nuclear weapons programme. The IRGC’s own ministry had been merged, however, with the old Ministry of Defence to form a new ministry in 1989, which implies that any such clandestine programme would have necessarily involved a wider military conspiracy.
*Gareth Porter, an investigative historian and journalist specialising in U.S. national security policy, received the UK-based Gellhorn Prize for journalism for 2011 for articles on the U.S. war in Afghanistan

Monday, July 01, 2013

Re: Fwd: Why is Iran so difficult to get right in Washington?

There is zero evidence of election fraud in 2009, nor woulf there have been any need for fraud, since the losing candidates were all regime-insiders who had been vetted and cleared to run.



Subject: Fwd: Why is Iran so difficult to get right in Washington?

Why is Iran so difficult to get right in Washington?

July 1, 2013
Al Jazeera
Reza Marashi and Trita Parsi
http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2013/06/2013630111133190971.html


Trying to predict political developments in Iran can be a humbling experience, even for the most seasoned students of Iranian politics. The unexpected electoral victory of centrist Hassan Rouhani serves as a reminder of this stark reality. The Washington Post editorial board boldly proclaimed before the elections that Rouhani "will not be allowed to win".

Some said the elections were irrelevant because whatever the outcome, Khamenei would be the winner. Yet the frequency with which conventional wisdom in Washington gets Iran wrong is striking. Why is that? And how can Washington's ability to read Tehran be improved?

Rouhani's resounding victory sheds light on at least three factors contributing to a systemic misreading of Iran.

Conventional thinking in Washington regularly suffers from three critical flaws. The first, assumption blindness, is the inability to recognise the implicit assumptions underlying one's analysis, which leads to a failure to reassess those assumptions when the analysis is proven wrong.

Washington is seemingly unaware of the deterministic power of its assumptions. This assumption blindness prevents consideration of alternative scenarios, which helps explain why Washington is so often surprised by Tehran. There is a strongly held view, for instance, that Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei wields complete power. Working backward, many Iran analysts argued the candidate perceived to be Khamenei's favourite - Saeed Jalili - would win.

But once the unexpected occurred and Rouhani's victory was a reality (and Jalili came in a distant third), the faulty assumption of Khamenei's power was not questioned. Belief in his omnipotence remained strong. Instead, the following question was asked: Why did Khamenei "permit" Rouhani to win? Assumption blindness prevented the confidence in Khamenei's power to be reviewed and instead led the analysis in an almost conspiratorial direction: Whatever happens, it's because Khamenei wills it.

While there is no doubt that the supreme leader wields the highest individual authority, it is equally clear that he relies on a number of councils as well as formal and informal institutions to advise him on foreign policy and national security.  As a result, most decisions are made in a permanent interaction between diverse and sometimes competing power centres.

Perhaps more importantly, conventional thinking in Washington did not provide room to consider the idea that the Iranian people understood the power dynamics in their own country better than anyone abroad. Few believed that Iranians could outmanoeuvre Khamenei, leaving him with no choice but to succumb to their wishes. Since these outcomes didn't fit the assumption about Iran, they couldn't be envisioned.

Assumption confusion

Whereas assumption blindness prevents the reassessment of assumptions, the second flaw, "assumption confusion", is the treatment of untested assumptions as empirically proven conclusions. In the above case, it stems from the treatment of Khamenei's omnipotence as a foregone conclusion from the outset. His unchallenged power is treated as a fact rather than a supposition.

Finally, the Iran discourse in Washington also suffers from "variable blindness". Valuable information about Tehran's decision-making, internal deliberations and reasoning is scarce. Since the factors shaping Tehran's calculation are unknown "unknowns"- to paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld - Washington tends to attribute all developments in Iran to the few variables it can observe.

The "smoking gun"

For instance, Obama administration officials have said that sanctions should be credited for Rouhani's victory. The "smoking gun" is the observable pain inflicted by sanctions, which then is implicitly assumed to have convinced Iranians to cast their votes for a centrist candidate. Of course, nobody in Washington argued before the election that the logic of sanctions was to pressure people to vote for different leadership. After all, that couldn't be possible according to Washington's belief system since Khamenei determines the outcome of the elections, not the people.

With little access to data describing and explaining the play-by-play political developments around the elections, Washington's variable blindness led it to explain the election outcome through the one variable it knew: US sanctions.

Washington's assertions regarding sanctions and the elections have baffled analysts and civil society actors in Iran. To them, the fundamental difference between the elections in 2013 and 2009 is that Khamenei couldn't cheat this time, lest he risk the collapse of his regime. Not because of the sanctions, but because the rifts within the regime from the disputed reelection of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad remain deep and unhealed.

Reformist strategists told us of this reality more than two years before the elections - and before the imposition of Obama's "crippling" sanctions. And we pointed it out a few days before the elections as an argument as to why cheating could be suicidal for Khamenei this time around.

Indeed, the Iranian people had plenty of reasons to vote against the conservatives, and didn't need sanctions to convince them to do so. What was lacking was the push to persuade them that their votes wouldn't be ignored as they were in 2009. That push was provided only a few days before the elections - not by sanctions - but by the campaigning of former Presidents Mohammad Khatami and Hashemi Rafsanjani.

Variable blindness

The variable blindness leading to over-reliance on sanctions as a catch-all explanation of favourable developments in Iran produces two counter-factual scenarios: First, absent sanctions, the logic reads, Iranians would have happily voted for the conservatives, blissfully unaware of the disaster that eight years of Ahmadinejad had brought unto them. And secondly, had Washington imposed even more sanctions on Iran, an even greater election outcome would have been produced.

Perhaps the Iranians would have elected Mother Teresa rather than Hassan Rouhani.

As a friend in Tehran pointed out, the variable blindness that credits Rouhani's victory to sanctions is ironically the latest installment of the conspiracy theories of Daei Jan Napoleon, one of Iran's most important and beloved works of modern fiction: Everything that happens in Iran and to Iranians is because of the machinations of others.

Perhaps nothing demonstrates the Washington establishment's distance from the realities on the ground in Iran more than its belief that no force could bring about this unexpected result other than the US itself. The actions of the Iranian people appear not to figure into Washington's analysis at all.

The election of Hassan Rouhani has provided both sides an opportunity to pause and rethink their approach to each other. This may prove to be crucial in bringing an end to a looming lose-lose confrontation. But before the US and Iran can change how they behave towards each other, they have to change how they think about and analyse one another.

Reza Marashi is Director of Research at the National Iranian American Council.

Trita Parsi is President of the National Iranian American Council and author of A Single Roll of the Dice: Obama's Diplomacy with Iran.

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--
William O. Beeman 
Professor, Department of Anthropology 
University of Minnesota 
395 HHH Center 
301 19th Avenue S.  
Minneapolis, MN 55455 
(612) 625-3400 

academic website: http://www.williambeeman.com 

During 2013-2014 I will be Visiting Professor at the Department of Anthropology, Stanford University. 


Fwd: NYTimes.com: London. Tokyo. Athens. Tulsa?



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Date: Mon, Jul 1, 2013 at 10:24 AM
Subject: NYTimes.com: London. Tokyo. Athens. Tulsa?
To: wbeeman@umn.edu


Sent by wbeeman@umn.edu:

London. Tokyo. Athens. Tulsa?

By MARY PILON

Tulsa, Okla., saying it can offer plenty of room, wants to host the 2024 Summer Games and join the likes of Athens, Beijing and London in Olympic history.

Or, copy and paste this URL into your browser: http://nyti.ms/1cGfLzM
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--
William O. Beeman 
Professor, Department of Anthropology 
University of Minnesota 
395 HHH Center 
301 19th Avenue S.  
Minneapolis, MN 55455 
(612) 625-3400 

academic website: http://www.williambeeman.com 

During 2013-2014 I will be Visiting Professor at the Department of Anthropology, Stanford University. 

Fwd: Why is Iran so difficult to get right in Washington?



---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Trita Parsi, PhD <Tp@tritaparsi.com>
Date: Mon, Jul 1, 2013 at 9:18 AM
Subject: Why is Iran so difficult to get right in Washington?
To: wbeeman@umn.edu


Good morning,

So the below piece may ruffle some feathers in Washington, but it's written in the spirit of helping fix a systemic problem in the collective Beltway read on Iran whose existence few would or could deny.

It is written by Reza Marashi and myself for Al Jazeera English, published today.

Your comments are most welcome.

Sincerely,
Trita Parsi, PhD



Why is Iran so difficult to get right in Washington?

July 1, 2013
Al Jazeera
Reza Marashi and Trita Parsi
http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2013/06/2013630111133190971.html


Trying to predict political developments in Iran can be a humbling experience, even for the most seasoned students of Iranian politics. The unexpected electoral victory of centrist Hassan Rouhani serves as a reminder of this stark reality. The Washington Post editorial board boldly proclaimed before the elections that Rouhani "will not be allowed to win".

Some said the elections were irrelevant because whatever the outcome, Khamenei would be the winner. Yet the frequency with which conventional wisdom in Washington gets Iran wrong is striking. Why is that? And how can Washington's ability to read Tehran be improved?

Rouhani's resounding victory sheds light on at least three factors contributing to a systemic misreading of Iran.

Conventional thinking in Washington regularly suffers from three critical flaws. The first, assumption blindness, is the inability to recognise the implicit assumptions underlying one's analysis, which leads to a failure to reassess those assumptions when the analysis is proven wrong.

Washington is seemingly unaware of the deterministic power of its assumptions. This assumption blindness prevents consideration of alternative scenarios, which helps explain why Washington is so often surprised by Tehran. There is a strongly held view, for instance, that Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei wields complete power. Working backward, many Iran analysts argued the candidate perceived to be Khamenei's favourite - Saeed Jalili - would win.

But once the unexpected occurred and Rouhani's victory was a reality (and Jalili came in a distant third), the faulty assumption of Khamenei's power was not questioned. Belief in his omnipotence remained strong. Instead, the following question was asked: Why did Khamenei "permit" Rouhani to win? Assumption blindness prevented the confidence in Khamenei's power to be reviewed and instead led the analysis in an almost conspiratorial direction: Whatever happens, it's because Khamenei wills it.

While there is no doubt that the supreme leader wields the highest individual authority, it is equally clear that he relies on a number of councils as well as formal and informal institutions to advise him on foreign policy and national security.  As a result, most decisions are made in a permanent interaction between diverse and sometimes competing power centres.

Perhaps more importantly, conventional thinking in Washington did not provide room to consider the idea that the Iranian people understood the power dynamics in their own country better than anyone abroad. Few believed that Iranians could outmanoeuvre Khamenei, leaving him with no choice but to succumb to their wishes. Since these outcomes didn't fit the assumption about Iran, they couldn't be envisioned.

Assumption confusion

Whereas assumption blindness prevents the reassessment of assumptions, the second flaw, "assumption confusion", is the treatment of untested assumptions as empirically proven conclusions. In the above case, it stems from the treatment of Khamenei's omnipotence as a foregone conclusion from the outset. His unchallenged power is treated as a fact rather than a supposition.

Finally, the Iran discourse in Washington also suffers from "variable blindness". Valuable information about Tehran's decision-making, internal deliberations and reasoning is scarce. Since the factors shaping Tehran's calculation are unknown "unknowns"- to paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld - Washington tends to attribute all developments in Iran to the few variables it can observe.

The "smoking gun"

For instance, Obama administration officials have said that sanctions should be credited for Rouhani's victory. The "smoking gun" is the observable pain inflicted by sanctions, which then is implicitly assumed to have convinced Iranians to cast their votes for a centrist candidate. Of course, nobody in Washington argued before the election that the logic of sanctions was to pressure people to vote for different leadership. After all, that couldn't be possible according to Washington's belief system since Khamenei determines the outcome of the elections, not the people.

With little access to data describing and explaining the play-by-play political developments around the elections, Washington's variable blindness led it to explain the election outcome through the one variable it knew: US sanctions.

Washington's assertions regarding sanctions and the elections have baffled analysts and civil society actors in Iran. To them, the fundamental difference between the elections in 2013 and 2009 is that Khamenei couldn't cheat this time, lest he risk the collapse of his regime. Not because of the sanctions, but because the rifts within the regime from the disputed reelection of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad remain deep and unhealed.

Reformist strategists told us of this reality more than two years before the elections - and before the imposition of Obama's "crippling" sanctions. And we pointed it out a few days before the elections as an argument as to why cheating could be suicidal for Khamenei this time around.

Indeed, the Iranian people had plenty of reasons to vote against the conservatives, and didn't need sanctions to convince them to do so. What was lacking was the push to persuade them that their votes wouldn't be ignored as they were in 2009. That push was provided only a few days before the elections - not by sanctions - but by the campaigning of former Presidents Mohammad Khatami and Hashemi Rafsanjani.

Variable blindness

The variable blindness leading to over-reliance on sanctions as a catch-all explanation of favourable developments in Iran produces two counter-factual scenarios: First, absent sanctions, the logic reads, Iranians would have happily voted for the conservatives, blissfully unaware of the disaster that eight years of Ahmadinejad had brought unto them. And secondly, had Washington imposed even more sanctions on Iran, an even greater election outcome would have been produced.

Perhaps the Iranians would have elected Mother Teresa rather than Hassan Rouhani.

As a friend in Tehran pointed out, the variable blindness that credits Rouhani's victory to sanctions is ironically the latest installment of the conspiracy theories of Daei Jan Napoleon, one of Iran's most important and beloved works of modern fiction: Everything that happens in Iran and to Iranians is because of the machinations of others.

Perhaps nothing demonstrates the Washington establishment's distance from the realities on the ground in Iran more than its belief that no force could bring about this unexpected result other than the US itself. The actions of the Iranian people appear not to figure into Washington's analysis at all.

The election of Hassan Rouhani has provided both sides an opportunity to pause and rethink their approach to each other. This may prove to be crucial in bringing an end to a looming lose-lose confrontation. But before the US and Iran can change how they behave towards each other, they have to change how they think about and analyse one another.

Reza Marashi is Director of Research at the National Iranian American Council.

Trita Parsi is President of the National Iranian American Council and author of A Single Roll of the Dice: Obama's Diplomacy with Iran.

You are subscribed to this mailing list as wbeeman@umn.edu. Please click here to modify your message preferences or to unsubscribe from any future mailings. We will respect all unsubscribe requests.





--
William O. Beeman 
Professor, Department of Anthropology 
University of Minnesota 
395 HHH Center 
301 19th Avenue S.  
Minneapolis, MN 55455 
(612) 625-3400 

academic website: http://www.williambeeman.com 

During 2013-2014 I will be Visiting Professor at the Department of Anthropology, Stanford University.