Why can’t Iran get the feel for nukes?

THE TALKS TO revive the Iran nuclear deal will resume “soon …within an acceptable period of time,” Joseph Borrell has announced. The deal was about curbing Iran’s nuclear program in return for lifting U.S. and U.N. sanctions on that country.

Borrell, the European Union foreign policy chief, had been coordinating negotiations between the last Iranian administration and six world powers in Geneva until the process was stopped in June to allow the new Iranian government of President Ebrahim Raisi to get on board.

Raisi, his Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian and some others around them are known to be “hardliners”; and the Americans and Europeans expect the new regime to drive a hard bargain over the revival of the deal, officially known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). Apparently pessimistic about the outcome of the upcoming negotiations,  President Biden has announced that he could resort to “other options” should the talks fail. And the State Department has disclosed that it already is working on “contingency plans” in case the upcoming Geneva talks fall through.

Those “options” and “plans” haven’t been defined, but I tend to rule out warfare because after America’s disastrous wars with Iraq and Afghanistan, and especially the humiliating U.S. troop pullout from Afghanistan, I don’t think Americans have the stomach to start a conflict with Iran, which is a much more powerful nation than either Iraq or Afghanistan.

The Israelis are making noise about attacking Iran’s nuclear facilities because Tehran has been accelerating uranium enrichment. Well, Israel could strike at some of Iran’s nuclear facilities – as it has done before. But the Iranians have so dispersed and secured their nuclear program that there is a consensus among experts that even heavy bombardment can at best set the program back for two to three years but can’t destroy it. And, of course, a ground war with Iran, either by America or Israel, is almost out of the question. Israel doesn’t have the wherewithal to do it, and America just can’t stick it out: The Iranians are a deeply patriotic, battle-hardened nation of 85 million, and 500 body bags at Dover airport would spur an American national upheaval against the war.

Yet the urgency of doing something about Iran’s nuclear program is felt deeply in Washington and European capitals. Some experts are saying that Iran is already on the verge of becoming a “threshold nuclear state” — a state that has acquired or is acquiring the components of a nuclear device but has stopped short making or testing one.

America has only itself to blame for it. The JCPOA, signed in 2015, had limited Iran’s uranium enrichment to 3.67 percent purity in return for lifting the debilitating U.S. and UN sanctions on Iran. In 2018 President Donald Trump, prodded by the Israelis, ripped up the accord, restored the old sanctions on Iran and slapped a raft of new ones, hoping to put “maximum pressure” on the Iranians to bring them to their knees and make them sign a revised agreement, limiting their regional activities that threatened Israel and Arab states friendly to the United States. Those activities were Iran’s support for anti-Israeli Shiite militias in several Arab countries and its ballistic missile program.

The Achilles heel in America’s foreign relations, especially its relations with countries across the Mediterranean, has always been its policy makers’ ignorance about the cultural values and social dynamics of those countries. The Americans view Iran like some of their vassal states such as Israel or Jordan or the United Arab Emirates, which are malleable to their pressures. Iran is a different kind of a place – a 9,000-year-old civilization and nation, enigmatically proud of its national honor and dismissive of upstart nations flaunting their material wealth or military might. Tehran was little impressed by Trump’s “maximum pressure,” even though it wreaked havoc to the Iranian economy.

Instead of buckling under Trump’s brutal sanctions, Tehran ratcheted up its nuclear program, beginning to enrich its uranium to 20 percent and then 60 percent purity. Even though the production of a nuclear bomb requires uranium enriched to 93 percent, with its advanced centrifuges, Iran looked capable of reaching that level within months. The experts calling Iran a “threshold nuclear state” believe that status is well within its reach. That’s what has strengthened the Iranian hand, prompting the Americans to mull “other options” in case of a failure of the Geneva negotiations.

I believe, though, that Iran is not really after making the bomb. The Americans and their Western allies are operating from a starkly different assumption of what the Iranians are up to than what they actually are up to. It’s a classic dichotomy between the moralist and rationalist outlook on life and politics. Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has been saying over and over that the use or possession of a nuclear device, a weapon of mass murder, in “un-Islamic.” The other day Raisi underscored that point. Nuclear weapons, he said, “have no place in our defense doctrine and deterrence policy.”

The Americans’ and other Westerners’ view of nuclear weapons is free of any moral content. They see them purely as tools of slaughter and coercion.  On July 24, 1945, U.S. President Harry S. Truman approached Soviet Prime Minister Joseph Stalin in the concourse of Cecilienhof Palace in Potsdam, Germany, where they and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill were negotiating the terms of the end of World War II. Without an interpreter with him, Truman told the Soviet leader “as casually as he could” that the United States had made a “new weapon of unusual destructive force.”  Stalin feigned indifference to Truman’s announcement, but realized that the U.S. president was using the device as a bargaining chip for the postwar territorial settlement with the Soviets. Back in Moscow the Communist dictator ordered his spies and physicists to get on with the production of the device that America had acquired. Thus began the nuclear arms races around the world.

Later the Chinese acquired nukes as deterrent against America’s (and the Soviets’) nuclear and conventional arsenals. Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, a disciple of Mahatma Gandhi, initially did not endorse the weaponization of the Indian nuclear program, but began considering it after the Sino-Indian war of 1962 in which India suffered a devastating defeat, making Nehru cry openly.

And impoverished Pakistan, India’s archenemy, became desperate to acquire te bomb after New Delhi invaded and conquered its eastern province, helping it emerge as independent Bangladesh.  Pakistani President Zulfikar Ali Bhutto announced to his utterly demoralized nation: “We will eat grass, make the bomb and fight India for a thousand years.”

On a Saturday day in the late 1980s my wife and I had an outing at the National Arboretum park in Washington with our two little kids. We had settled on a bedsheet under a tree: I was reading the Washington Post while Patricia browsed through a book of Renaissance paintings while watching the children. At one point our baby boy, Jamal, crowled out of the bedsheet. By the time my wife picked up the child, he had managed to get two grass blades into his mouth.

“Hey,” Pat hollered at me, “what is the status of Pakistan’s nuclear program?”

“Going full speed ahead,” I said. “Why?”

“It figures,” she replied. “Your son is eating grass!”

I had come to America as a Pakistani citizen and had told my wife about my covering Bhutto as a journalist and his vow to make Pakistanis “eat grass” to make the nuclear bomb.

Beginning with the Americans, most nations in the nuclear club have got the bombs with the rationalist logic of using or threatening to use them against their adversaries, if necessary.

Despite what you’re used to hearing about Iran, the Islamic Republic tries to follow Islamic moral principles in its domestic and foreign affairs. I believed the Iranian leaders when they said they didn’t want to make, let alone use, nukes because they are against the principles of Islam. The question, though, is why are they so relentlessly enriching uranium beyond the levels usually required for medical and other civilian purposes?

Ever since 1953 when the CIA in the Eisenhower administration overthrew the democratically elected Iranian government of Prime Minister Mohammed Mosaddeq and replaced him with the pro-American tyrant Muhammad Riza Pahlavi, Iranians don’t trust the Americans, who they believe are unscrupulous and murderous by nature. Despite its strict prohibition against harming innocent lives, Islam prescribes self-preservation and the preservation of one’s community as obligatory (fardh), and it enjoins Muslims to make independent judgment (ijtihad) to adapt Islamic principles to new exigencies. Many Iranians believe the biggest of their new exigencies is defending themselves against their archenemy: the Americans. The Iranians’ acceleration of uranium enrichment indicates that they have made a calculated decision to get to the threshold of a nuclear power or close to it – but still not make the bomb -to be able to deter an American (or Israeli) misadventure.

I had known Nizar Hamdoon, the flamboyant Iraqi ambassador to the United Nations in the 1990s. He died of cancer on July 4th 2003, barely three months after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in Manhattan. A week before his death an Iraqi acquaintance of mine went to see the former Iraqi diplomat.

“Saddam Hussein’s biggest failure in life,” Hamdoon said, “was not being able to get the bomb.” Iraq would have been spared “the catastrophe” of the U.S. war if he could.

If Iran can gain a deterrent against a U.S. invasion by enriching uranium to near-weapons grade level, a “catastrophe” could be avoided not just by Iran but by America, too. And Islamic ijtihad would, I am sure, approve of that activity. I agree with the International Crisis Group’s Ali Vaez that Iran won’t cross the nuclear threshold it may reach unless and until it’s attacked.

Western negotiators at the upcoming Geneva talks would do well to acknowledge this reality.

~Mustafa Malik is an international affairs commentator, living in Bangladesh.