Think about it: if the United States really believed Iran had nuclear defense capability, would we be so belligerent and overbearing toward it? Or, as with North Korea, would we call upon others to help us take the diplomatic route? Our behavior tells me we’re lying.
A story in the L.A. Times reports that with regard to Iran, everyone else thinks we’re lying too.
“Since 2002, pretty much all the intelligence that’s come to us has proved to be wrong,” a senior diplomat at the IAEA [International Atomic Energy Agency] said. Another official here described the agency’s intelligence stream as “very cold now” because “so little panned out.”
…American officials privately acknowledge that much of their evidence on Iran’s nuclear plans and programs remains ambiguous, fragmented and difficult to prove.
The IAEA has its own concerns about Iran’s nuclear program, although agency officials say they have found no proof that nuclear material has been diverted to a weapons program.
Another way of stating that last sentence is, “The objective international agency that has been investigating Iran for five years has never found a single thing to indicate the country is building nukes.”
On the other hand, there’s plenty of evidence the United States is making crap up again.
Diplomats here were less convinced by documents recovered by U.S. intelligence from a laptop computer apparently stolen from Iran. American analysts first briefed senior IAEA officials on the contents of the hard drive at the U.S. mission here in mid-2005.
The documents included detailed designs to upgrade ballistic missiles to carry nuclear warheads, drawings for subterranean testing of high explosives, and two pages describing research on uranium tetrafluoride, known as “green salt,” which is used during uranium enrichment. IAEA officials remain suspicious of the information in part because most of the papers are in English rather than Persian, the Iranian language.
Oh please! They were written in English? Does that not have the mark of Rover and Dirty Dick all over it?
Iran’s representative to the IAEA, Ali Asghar Soltanieh, dismissed the laptop documents as “fabricated information.” Iran, he said, has produced 170 tons of “green salt” at a uranium conversion facility in Esfahan that is monitored by the IAEA.
“We are not hiding it,” he said in an interview. “We make tons of it. These documents are all nonsense.”
All anyone can prove the Iranians guilty of is the same thing Hussein actually did — scoffing at inspectors and resisting cooperation with what they view as coercion. And while I wish no one had nuclear weapons — including us, Russia, China, Israel, and North Korea — I can’t follow our reasoning about who can and who can’t.
Where is this all going, anyway? The countries that do not today have nuclear weapons can easily have them tomorrow. The only way we’ll ever be safe is if we focus on moving the world away from conflict, not on stacking the deck so we can always win the wars we keep starting. That strategy hasn’t worked in Iraq or Afghanistan and it’s doubtful it will work in Iran. It’s time to try something else.
