by Dore Gold
In a rare admission two
weeks ago, the head of Iran's Atomic Energy Organization, Fereydoon
Abbasi, was quoted in al-Hayat saying the Iranian government had
provided false information in the past to protect its nuclear program.
Abbasi accused Britain's foreign intelligence service, MI-6, of spying
on Iran to justify the fact that it had decided to lie to the
international community. To further confuse analysts in the West, Abbasi
said that sometimes the Iranians had presented certain weaknesses that
they did not have, and alternatively they presented themselves as having
strengths they did not possess.
By admitting that their
diplomacy was based on a system of lies, the Iranians further put into
question whether any of their statements to the International Atomic
Energy Agency could be relied upon in any way. The monitoring of nuclear
programs around the world has always been based on their transparency
and the confidence that international inspectors could have in the
declarations of countries with nuclear technology that had signed the
Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. The result of what Abbasi was saying
was that the IAEA should have serious doubts about what Iran was
officially reporting.
Abbasi's admission
should not have come as a surprise considering that deception has long
played a critical role in Iranian diplomacy. It was Ayatollah Khomeini,
the founder of the Islamic Republic, who wrote in his book, "Islamic
Government," published in Najaf in 1970, that "the preservation of Islam
and the Shi'i school" required that its adherents observe the
"principle of taqiya" — a term which means "deception" though it is
taken from the Arabic root "to shield."
Using taqiya, Middle
Eastern historians have written that Iranian Shiites facing oppression
were able to protect their community from external dangers from the
Sunni world. What Khomeini did was to make a virtue out of what had once
been a necessity. Thus Abbasi had essentially applied what was part of
Khomeini's ideological legacy for the Islamic republic to protect its
nuclear program. He must have known that Iran's use of lies in its
diplomacy in the past had been surprisingly effective. For one of the
great problems with Iran's use of deception as a part of state policy is
that many in the West refused to accept that they have been deceived.
Just before Ayatollah
Khomeini arrived in Tehran in 1979, he lived outside of Paris and met
with Western academics and journalists and told them that he wasn't
interested in exercising personal power and that he would seek to
advance the protection of human rights. His deception campaign worked
with gullible Westerners. Professor Richard Falk, who today attacks
Israel regularly as a U.N. official, at the time wrote an op-ed in The
New York Times entitled "Trusting Khomeini." An analysis in The
Washington Post suggested that Khomeini would set up a western
parliamentary democracy.
The Iranians have been
using the same techniques for years to weaken Western resolve to deal
effectively with them. There was the case of a message to the Bush
administration through the Swiss ambassador to Iran in 2003, with a
supposed roadmap for a "grand bargain" normalizing U.S.-Iranian
relations, the authenticity of which was denied by those closest to the
supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Then there was the Iranian claim
that Khamenei issued a fatwa saying that nuclear weapons were contrary
to Islam. Yet in 2005 when the deputy director-general of the IAEA asked
for a copy of Khamenei's fatwa from the Iranian ambassador, Tehran
never supplied anything in writing.
The main reason why the
Iranians use diplomatic deceptions of this sort is that they keep
getting away with them. In this specific case on Abbasi's statement to
al-Hayat, there may be an additional factor. In the past, Iran has
exposed aspects of its nuclear program, like in 2009 when it exposed its
enrichment plant in Fordow, when it feared it was in danger of getting
caught. Sometimes, the Iranians unilaterally change the rules of
inspections, like when they declared in 2007 that they only have to
admit to the existence of nuclear facilities once they receive nuclear
material, rather than when their construction is started. This way the
Iranians try to sneak out of their commitments rather than break out
dramatically like the North Koreans.
Because of the use of
techniques of this sort, the U.S. and its allies still suspect that Iran
has nuclear facilities which it has failed to declare. It cannot be
ruled out that Abbasi has tried to set up an excuse for why Iran has not
accurately presented to the IAEA aspects of its nuclear program that it
is required to open up to inspections. The motivation of the Iranians
is ultimately unimportant. What is significant is that any future
arrangement between the West and Iran must be based on an ironclad
system of inspections, if such understandings are ever reached, given
the role that outright deception continues to play in Iran's diplomatic
relations with the West.
Dore Gold
Source: http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=2644
Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.
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