KEY allegations in a US congressional report into Iran’s nuclear fuel enrichment program have been denied outright by the International Atomic Energy Agency. The UN body charged with monitoring Iran’s nuclear activities has protested that important details of its own investigations have been completely misrepresented by US legislators.
There is something oddly familiar about these latest bogus conclusions from Washington concerning a country the Americans seem determined to assault — diplomatically if not militarily. The most glaring falsehood was that the IAEA inspectors had concluded that Iranian scientists had come close to producing the high level of enriched uranium necessary to produce a nuclear weapon. The Vienna-based IAEA has protested that it had decided no such thing. Indeed, Iranian technicians are still struggling to do better than produce more than mildly enriched uranium.
A spokesman for the House Intelligence Committee which created the report has now said that the document was never intended for release. It was merely a first take on the evidence for Iran’s nuclear activities. Yet even if that was all it was, why did the initial analysis manage to completely ignore the far less dramatic conclusions of the IAEA experts whose day-to-day job is to monitor the Iranian program? Was this sloppy work by the committee’s counselors and aides or was it a deliberate attempt to ratchet up the confrontation with Iran?
There are good grounds for suspecting the White House’s fingerprints all over this report. The similarities with the run-up to the Iraq invasion, when the IAEA were also protesting that so-called intelligence about Saddam’s bomb program was plain wrong, are too striking to believe otherwise. It is already being hinted around the Capitol that the committee had other sources than the IAEA. These will no doubt be sources of the same sterling quality as those which reported that Saddam was busy importing uranium from Niger and that his biological WMD systems could be readied for firing within a mere 20 minutes.
Did the Americans really imagine that the IAEA management a would remain quiet when such lies were told in their name? It is even worse that once again the Bush administration seems to be gearing itself up for another dangerous adventure when it can hardly handle the consequences of its Iraq blunder. Surely, someone in Washington should have worked out by now that the lies used to justify the Iraq invasion alienated not only world opinion but also caused the postwar occupation to be handled wrongly from step one. While American Army units charged around Iraq looking for evidence of weapons programs that no longer existed, the Baathist insurgents were re-organizing and the cold-hearted killers of Al-Qaeda were quietly filtering over the borders. The capacity for self-delusion is one of the Bush administration’s most outstanding qualities, one for which unfortunately tens of thousands of ordinary people, especially in Iraq, have paid with their blood.
