< Changing Worldviews.Commentary >

Words are powerful - Thoughts shape - Ideas have consequences

Sean Gannon

Journalist - Irish & Israeli Affairs
Posted July 12, 2004

Time for 'destructive engagement'
Iran Still Pursuing it's 20-year old Policy

It appears that nothing short of a nuclear test will push the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) into declaring Iran in breach of the Non-Proliferation Treaty and referring the issue to the Security Council for international sanctions. Despite the fact that its own report of February 24th last was described by the Wall Street Journal as “as close as could be expected to smoking-gun proof” of a weapons’ program, the UN nuclear watchdog, at a meeting to discuss its findings the following month perversely stopped short of accusing the Khamenei regime of building a bomb and reporting it to the Security Council for sanctions. Instead, it opted to issue yet another toothless resolution urging co-operation with IAEA inspectors and deferring a final decision on the matter until a follow-up meeting in June.

That meeting took place last week and again the IAEA, ignoring the evidence of its last three quarterly reports on the issue, refused to take substantive action against the emerging threat posed by an atomic Iran. True, the now routine condemnatory resolution was stronger than those passed previously and was even sponsored by Tehran’s European friends. But true to their policy of ‘constructive engagement’ with the Tehran mullahcracy, France, Germany and Britain once more united to scupper U.S-led efforts to impose a timetable for Iranian co-operation backed by a table of UN Security Council sanctions. Instead the mullahs have been given yet more time to comply.

But as Kevin Brill, the American IAEA representative pointed out after the meeting, “the passage of time is not a neutral factor in proliferation cases” and to give Tehran more time to comply with IAEA demands is to give it more time to construct nuclear weapons. For, despite claims of success by its European sponsors, 'constructive engagement' with Tehran has been a manifest failure, its trumpeted achievements such as Iran's suspension of uranium enrichment and signing of the Additional Protocol to the NPT, shown to be shams. Not only did Iran violate the spirit of the enrichment agreement by continuing to assemble P-1 centrifuges, it was last February found to have acquired designs for the more advanced P-2 model which can produce weapons-grade material at double the speed. According to the latest IAEA report published June 1st, P-2s, with traces of enriched uranium, have since been discovered at the nuclear facility at Natanz.

Tehran’s April 6th announcement that it would “voluntarily” cease centrifuge construction within a week was somewhat undermined by it simultaneous disclosure of a start-date for the building of a 40 megawatt reactor capable of producing enough plutonium for a bomb a year. The discovery of evidence of experimentation with polonium-210, a radioactive substance which can act as trigger for chain reaction in an atomic bomb, and of what the New York Times described as "extremely highly-enriched uranium, of a purity reserved for use in a nuclear bomb" further serve to underline that, far from providing the full and frank account of its activities promised last October, Tehran is continuing its 20-year policy of elusiveness and lies.

Also accumulating steadily is the evidence that Iran is still pursuing its other 20-year old policy – the use of international terrorism as an instrument of foreign policy. A number of investigations last year confirmed its suspected responsibility for some of the worst terrorist atrocities of the last two decades. For instance, in March 2003 Argentina formally accused the mullahs of masterminding the 1994 bombing of the Buenos Aires Jewish community center which killed 86 people and injured 200. According to the testimony of an Iranian defector which formed part of the evidence, the attack was planned at a meeting of the Iranian Supreme Council for National Security at which Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was present. He also stated that they were behind the earlier bombing of the city’s Israeli Embassy in which 29 people died. The following May, ex-FBI chief Louis Freeh revealed in the Wall Street Journal that his investigation into the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing found that “the entire operation was planned, funded and coordinated by Iran's security services, the IRGC and MOIS, acting on orders from the highest levels of the regime in Tehran” while, ten days later, an American Federal judge found Iran liable for the deaths of 241 marines killed when Hizbullah suicide terrorists blew up their Beirut barracks in October 1983, saying that it was “beyond question” that they “received massive material and technical support from the Iranian Government.” In fact, prior to 9/11, Hizbullah was responsible for more American deaths than any other terrorist organisation.

While there have been credible reports of al-Qaeda associations and documented cases of Iranian involvement in the anti-coalition violence in Iraq, Tehran’s present-day terrorist efforts are, of course, focussed mainly on Israel. Its political establishment may be deeply divided on the country’s domestic agenda but on the issue of the “Zionist occupation regime of al-Quds,” the conservatives and ‘reformists’ are one. For example, Ali Akbar Velayati, a senior advisor Ayatollah Khamenei, said last October that the mere existence of Israel was contrary to Iran's national interests while three months later, the celebrated ‘moderate’ President Khatami reiterated on German TV his view that “historically as well as morally Israel is not a legitimate state.” Buoyed up by the perceived victory of its terrorist proxies in south Lebanon, Iran has stepped up its sponsorship of Palestinian terrorist gangs. Not content with continuing its long-term support for Islamic Jihad and Hamas, the Tehran regime has now begun taking over Arafat’s Fatah militias which it began financing when the PA coffers ran dry. According to a security source quoted recently by Ma’ariv, “Hizbullah has become an employment agency for the Tanzim” with the result that today, almost 100% of Al-Aqsa Brigades’ operations are financed and directed through it by Iran. And terrorism expert Matthew Levitt told a conference in Washington on June 8th last that "there is a Hizbullah fingerprint on 80 percent of Hamas attacks.”

Iran therefore represents what Tony Blair defined in his speech to the American Joint Houses of Congress in July 2003 as the greatest threat faced by the twenty-first century world, the alliance of “terrorism and states developing weapons of mass destruction.” And nowhere is at more risk than Israel. If, as is now widely believed, the Iranian bomb is an inevitability, then so too is some sort of future radiological or nuclear attack on Israeli interests either by the mullahs’ terrorist proxies or by the Islamic Republic itself, a fact underlined by the Chairman of the powerful Expediency Council, Akbar Hashemi-Rajsanjani, who in December 2001 stated: “If a day comes when the world of Islam is duly equipped with the arms Israel has in possession, the strategy of colonialism would face a stalemate because application of an atomic bomb would not leave anything in Israel but the same thing would just produce damages in the Muslim world.”

The Tehran threat is well-recognised by the Israel’s state security services. In October 2003, Moshe Ya’alon described Iran as Israel’s foremost existential threat, a view in which Mossad chief Meir Dagan supported him one month later. As the man charged with the mission to frustrate the mullahs’ nuclear ambitions, Dagan is reported to have delivered to the IAF “complex, yet manageable” plans for the destruction of Iran’s known nuclear infrastructure something to which, according to the Jerusalem Post, the IAF “has devoted the bulk of its procurement funds in the past decade.” Given the March 9th claim of Alireza Jafarzadeh, an Iranian defector who has in the past furnished reliable information on Iran’s nuclear activities, that Ayatollah Khamenei had recently decided, whatever the cost, to acquire atomic weapons by the end of 2005 (a date in line with the long-made predictions of Israel intelligence), and the recently repeated Iranian threats to resume uranium enrichment and withdraw from the NPT, the time for ‘destructive engagement’ is now.

© Sean Gannon 2004 Reprinted with Permission

Seán Gannon received his degree in history from University College Dublin and works as a freelance writer and researcher on Irish and Israeli affairs, publishing mainly in Ireland, Britain and Israel. He is currently preparing a book on Ireland's fraught relationship with the state of Israel since 1948 examining the influence of Catholic theological concerns on the controversy over Ireland’s recognition of Israel as a State in the 1940s and 1950s. He is also writing - Ireland for A New Extremism: The politics of anti-Americanism, anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism, which is a forthcoming study by the Institute for Jewish Policy Research in London. He is a prominent advocate for Israel, being a featured writer with the Israel Hasbara Committee and chairman of the Irish Friends of Israel, a media response group which endeavors to correct the bias and error in the reporting of the Middle East conflict in Ireland.