Previous IAEA assessments were very cautious on that claim and mainly pointed out that there were still a lot of uncertainties concerning Iran’s real intentions. The latest report represents the strongest judgment the UN’s nuclear watchdog has issued in its decade-long struggle to pierce the secrecy surrounding the Iranian program. The weapons inspectors express “serious concerns” about research and development work by Iran and claim that they have found new evidence that they say makes a “credible case that Iran has carried out activities relevant to the development of a nuclear device” and that the project may still be under way.
The reactions to the report underline the deep divisions in how to evaluate Iran’s nuclear program. Forget about the extremes. Of course, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad lashed out at the IAEA, called them American stooges and told the world that there are no reasons to doubt Tehran’s sincerity. On the other side of the spectrum, as expected, the Israeli government and some American hard-liners stressed that this report confirms their worst fears and that military action to stop Iran might be necessary soon.
I tend to agree with the sober analysis of Trita Parsi, president of the National Iranian American Council (NIAC) and a strong opponent of the theocrats ruling Iran. He said: “Contrary to speculation, the report largely reinforced the reigning assessment of the Iranian nuclear program: Tehran is, and has been for decades, seeking nuclear latency -- the capacity to make nuclear weapons -- but the IAEA does not conclude that it currently has an active program to build nuclear weapons.”
For non-specialists it is very hard to fully understand and judge all the details in the IAEA report and the reservations tabled by Parsi and others. Developing nuclear weapons is not that simple, and it is easy to confuse and deceive even informed experts, especially when they do not have full access to Iranian facilities, as has been the case for a long time now. In that sense another Iran expert, Karim Sadjadpour of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, was probably right when he concluded that “ultimately, mutual distrust may render the evidence largely irrelevant. For those who are cynical about Iranian intentions, any amount of proof is sufficient and for those who are cynical about US intentions, no amount of proof is enough.”
After all this speculation, the most important question is what to do now. For good reasons many observers reject the idea of an attack on Iranian nuclear facilities, based on the argument that a military strike would not set back Iran’s program for very long and it would rally Iranians around their illegitimate government.
Personally, I think the best line of action is to keep on pushing to significantly enhance the IAEA’s ability to inspect and verify the nature of the Iranian program, as Parsi suggests. More transparency will yield better results than sanctions that have not been able to stop Iran up until now anyway.
On top of that, I strongly agree with a recommendation made by Freedom House officials on the website of the American magazine Foreign Affairs. Instead of solely focusing on Iran’s contentious nuclear program, the renowned human rights watchers propose to undermine the present regime in Tehran by exposing Iran’s horrible human rights record. According to them, the regime’s main vulnerability is its false claim to legitimacy. Since staging a rigged election in 2009 to keep Ahmadinejad in power, the ayatollahs have been relying on repression and brutality to silence the opposition, jailing journalists, torturing detainees and executing critics. Focusing on these gross human rights violations, Freedom House suggests, would expose the hypocrisy of the regime and remind Iran of its domestic troubles as it tries to expand its power and influence.
This strategy should also appeal to Turkey, never keen on sanctions and, as Turkish Foreign Minister Davutoğlu expressed it recently, always “standing with the people.” In Iran, many democrats wonder whether these good intentions include them as well. The time for an unambiguous answer from Ankara has come.
