{news} MERIP REPORT: Iran's Nuclear Posture and the Scars of War

[Justine McCabe]

Dear All,

FYI: Backround info on Iran as regime-change talk by Bush grows.

Peace, 
Justine 
 
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Iran's Nuclear Posture and the Scars of War
 
Joost R. Hiltermann
 
January 18, 2005
 
(Joost R. Hiltermann, Middle East Project director for the International
 Crisis Group in Amman, is completing a book on chemical weapons use during
 the Iran-Iraq war and consequences of international silence. He wrote this
 article in his personal capacity. He can be reached at
 joosthiltermann at yahoo.com.)
 
In waging war on Iraq, one of the points the Bush administration sought to
 prove was that President Bill Clinton's policy of dual containment had
 failed -- that despite a decade of threats, sanctions, military action and
 UN-led disarmament, Iraq had continued to develop weapons of mass
 destruction (WMD). Iraq, of course, was not the only target of dual
 containment. So was neighboring Iran, which likewise was suspected of having
 secret programs for building weapons of mass destruction and was seen as a
 destabilizing force hostile to US interests.
 
If dual containment failed, it is not because Iraq managed to escape from
 its strictures. Iraq, it turned out, had no WMD in March 2003, and probably
 did not have any for most of the preceding decade. Dual containment failed
 because mounting evidence suggests that Iran is the country that has made
 significant advances in developing non-conventional weapons, so much so that
 some experts see the country's emergence as the Middle East's second nuclear
 power (after Israel) as likely within two or three years.
 
It is even likely that Saddam Hussein was so acutely aware of the gathering
 danger across the border that for purposes of deterrence he kept up the
 pretense of hiding WMD, while declaring formally -- and truthfully -- that
 his arsenal had been dismantled by UN inspectors. The comprehensive report
 on Iraq's WMD "program-related activities," filed on September 30, 2004 by
 former inspector Charles Duelfer, certainly suggests as much. Iran, too, has
 issued repeated denials that it is pursuing WMD, demonstrating its innocence
 by placing its signature beneath all the key multilateral restraints the
 world has designed to put a brake on the development of such weapons: the
 Chemical Weapons Convention, the Biological Weapons Convention, the nuclear
 Non-Proliferation Treaty and others.
 
Following revelations about its clandestine nuclear research in 2002, Iran
 pledged to allow UN inspections of the research facilities, then denied
 access to undeclared sites. In October 2003, Iran promised the trio of
 Britain, France and Germany that it would cease enriching uranium, only to
 resume enriching it less than a year later. Under another deal with the
 "European Three," concluded in November 2004, Tehran again agreed to suspend
 uranium enrichment, while continuing to insist that any such activity would
 aim only at a peaceful nuclear program. The most recent deal has held so
 far, but Iran's behavior has failed to allay international suspicions,
 particularly those of the United States.
 
Whether Iran's nuclear program is strictly peaceful or intended for military
 purposes has not yet been established, but the program's potential is beyond
 doubt. Why is Iran engaged in this apparently dogged pursuit of WMD
 concealed by an endless series of dodges, half-truths and quasi-concessions
 it fails to implement?
 
INSULT TO INJURY
 
To understand the psychology of Iran's behavior, we have to look back to the
 1980s, when Iran and Iraq fought a bloody eight-year war, initiated by a
 reckless Saddam Hussein, perpetuated futilely by a vengeful Khomeini regime
 and ending in a stalemate with neither having scored territorial gain but
 both having suffered staggering losses of life. By conservative estimates,
 some 400,000 Iraqis and Iranians were killed in the war. What finally
 compelled the Iranians to sue for peace was Iraq's escalating resort to ever
 more lethal chemical weapons as a means of subduing relentless Iranian
 "human wave" assaults that threatened to overwhelm its heavily fortified
 positions.
 
Chemical weapons are first and foremost weapons of terror, causing mass
 panic instead of inflicting huge casualties. Unequipped and untrained,
 Iran's ragtag army of "volunteer" foot soldiers was easy prey for poison
 gases, which dispatched them in flight. In the final years of the war,
 Iraq's chemical bombardment of Kurdish civilian areas, both in Iran and
 Iraq, and the threat to similarly target Tehran eroded the popular morale
 that had underpinned the war effort of both Iranian military forces and
 Iraqi Kurdish insurgents.
 
Iraq's non-conventional capabilities exposed a near fatal vulnerability in
 Iran's defenses. What was almost worse was that Tehran's repeated
 remonstrations with the United Nations fell virtually on deaf ears. For six
 years, Iranian diplomats wrought ever more sophisticated legal arguments to
 persuade the UN that it should have an institutional interest in upholding
 the relevant precepts of international humanitarian law. In particular, the
 1925 Geneva Protocol, which prohibits "the use in war of asphyxiating,
 poisonous or other gases, and of all analogous liquids, materials or
 devices," was directly on point. The UN's failure to uphold such precepts,
 the Iranians said, would undermine its credibility and impartiality, while
 giving rise to a regional arms race.
 
Not only were Iranian claims of Iraqi chemical weapons use largely ignored
 at the time, Iran was declared a liar and a hypocrite (not entirely without
 justification, as both sides committed atrocities during the war).
 Eventually -- adding insult to injury -- the chemical charges were turned on
 the Iranians themselves, even if no convincing evidence of Iranian chemical
 weapons use was ever produced. The United States, initially neutral in the
 conflict, increasingly tilted toward Iraq, preferring a drawn-out stalemate
 between the two belligerents (who thus no longer would pose a threat to
 either Israel or the West's access to reasonably priced Gulf oil) or perhaps
 a victory by a weakened Iraq, but under no circumstances an Iranian one. Yet
 Iraq's growing resort to poison gas on the battlefield as well as against
 civilians became somewhat of an embarrassment to the Reagan administration.
 
DISINFORMATION CAMPAIGN
 
At first, when journalists stood on the verge of exposing Iraq's wartime use
 of chemical weapons in the spring of 1984, Washington moved preemptively to
 condemn the Iraqis, slapping a ban on the export of chemical precursors to
 both Iraq and Iran. Internal documents show that US officials had been aware
 of Iraq's conduct for at least six months. Their condemnation came not a
 moment too late, because Iraq stood accused of the first recorded use of a
 nerve agent (tabun) on the battlefield. Then Donald Rumsfeld, President
 Ronald Reagan's special envoy to the Middle East, undercut this stern
 message when he traveled to Baghdad to explain that Washington's position
 had been merely one of principle. Rumsfeld assured Iraq's foreign minister,
 Tariq Aziz, that the Reagan administration's support for the war against
 Iran and normalization of relations remained "undiminished." On November 26,
 1984, the Iraqis were rewarded with the resumption of the diplomatic ties
 that had been severed since the June 1967 war. During Iran's next "final"
 offensive, in the spring of 1985, Iraq proved undeterred, deploying more
 sophisticated chemical weapons delivery systems in countering the enemy.
 
By 1987, when the Iraqi regime started attacking Kurdish civilians (in both
 Iran and Iraq) with gas, Iraq's sponsors in Washington were forced to engage
 in further damage control. Buoyed by the defeat of their bureaucratic
 opponents in the Iran-contra scandal, they had stepped up their support of a
 regime that most agreed was unsavory but saw as a necessary bulwark against
 the spread of Islamist radicalism in the sensitive Gulf region. They plied
 the Iraqis with satellite intelligence of Iranian troop movements and
 encouraged allied Arab states to provide them with military hardware. These
 measures led the Iraqis to believe that they enjoyed Washington's benign
 tolerance of their war effort, whatever the means deployed. The result was
 more lethal chemical agents, used more massively than before, targeting now
 also civilian populations. The policy reached its apex with the wholesale
 gassing of the large Iraqi Kurdish town of Halabja in March 1988, an attack
 in which several thousand civilians perished.
 
When evidence of civilian chemical casualties first emerged in April 1987,
 the Reagan administration moved from preemptive condemnation to active
 disinformation in an effort to diffuse Iraq's responsibility for waging
 chemical warfare. By blaming both sides equally, Iraq would effectively be
 let off the hook. By the fall of 1987, word was out that Iran had begun to
 respond to Iraqi chemical weapons outrages in kind. Baghdad repeatedly made
 such claims, and now Washington chimed in. Iran thus had to fight off
 accusations of perpetrating precisely the kinds of atrocities from which it
 had always claimed it had refrained out of deference to moral principles
 rooted in humanity and religion (not to mention that it lagged years behind
 Iraq in developing these weapons). Whatever voice it had on chemical
 warfare -- the only rhetorical edge it had enjoyed over Iraq in the war --
 was now drowned out by contrary claims that directly challenged the moral
 high ground it had professed to be taking. Iran's own admonitions that it
 might eventually have no choice but to wage chemical warfare of its own
 certainly did not help.
 
NAKED DECEPTION
 
Initially, Iraqi claims that Iran was using chemical weapons had no
 empirical basis, and so they set about creating one. This was simple, since
 Iraq had a ready supply of chemical casualties of its own. These derived
 from two sources: gas dispersed incompetently by its own forces, and poorly
 manufactured, leaking munitions. There is substantial evidence that Iraqi
 airplanes routinely but unintentionally gassed their own ground forces.
 These self-inflicted casualties were often due to shifting winds, and they
 were especially likely to occur along the front lines where both sides'
 troops were entrenched in close proximity. The problem became more acute
 when Iran acquired American Hawk anti-aircraft missiles as part of the
 Iran-contra deals. Iran's new missile capability forced Iraqi bombers to fly
 at much higher altitudes, which greatly enlarged the field of dispersal of
 the various gases dropped.
 
A post-war CIA report confirms the blowback problem. In attacking Iranian
 troops with chemical weapons, the CIA said, Iraq demonstrated "relatively
 little regard for the safety of Iraq's own troops who were in or near the
 chemically contaminated area.... Regardless of Iraq's rationale, large
 numbers of Iraq's own troops were killed or injured during Iraqi chemical
 attacks." Iraqi soldiers and pilots, interviewed in Iraq and elsewhere over
 the past four years, corroborate this conclusion. One pilot asserted that
 Iraqi planes accidentally bombed their own forces on many occasions with
 both conventional and chemical weapons. These mistakes, he said, caused many
 casualties. Moreover, he said, "Saddam Hussein was able to use the Iraqi
 victims as evidence of Iranian chemical weapons use."
 
Iraq's chemical casualties were served up to visiting UN chemical experts in
 1987 and 1988. Although the latter stated they were unable to establish that
 these were the victims of Iranian gas attacks, the public impression was
 left that indeed they were; in private conversations in the UN corridors in
 New York, however, the experts made clear that in their minds these soldiers
 were victims of Iraq's careless use of its own chemical munitions.
 
When Iraqi planes gassed Halabja, the embarrassment potential was such that
 Washington went into disinformation overdrive. It took a week before the
 rhetorical counter-attack was ready for public display, but it was
 spectacularly successful. By suggesting deviously and on the basis of the
 flimsiest evidence that not only Iraq but also Iran had used gas in Halabja,
 State Department spokesmen lifted the onus off the Iraqis. Declassified
 cables show that US diplomats were then instructed to propagate this myth
 and dodge the "What's the evidence" question with the stock "Sorry, but
 that's classified information" response. They found a receptive audience.
 After all, why should anyone care? By taking American hostages, sponsoring
 the bombings and kidnappings carried out by Hizballah, and threatening the
 Middle East with an Islamic makeover on the Khomeini model, Iran had found
 itself in the international doghouse. Security Council Resolution 612 (May
 3, 1988) condemning the Halabja atrocity came a long two months after the
 event and cast its disapproval on both governments in equal measure. In the
 final analysis, the only evidence for the convenient claim that Iran used
 chemical weapons during the war is that the US government said so. Somehow,
 this sufficed.
 
The naked deception over Halabja, received with hosannas in Baghdad, gave
 the Iraqis the green light they needed to gas the war to an end. In a series
 of lightning counter-assaults against Iranian troops and Iraqi Kurdish
 guerrillas they used chemical weapons on the first day of each offensive to
 terrorize their adversaries, then pummeled the demoralized and retreating
 forces with tons of conventional munitions. They also threatened to place
 chemical payloads on the long-range missiles with which they had started
 bombarding Tehran, prompting a mass evacuation of civilians. Within three
 months, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini acquiesced to drinking from the "cup of
 poison," acknowledging Iran's inability to carry on and agreeing to a
 humiliating ceasefire.
 
"DROPS OF INK ON PAPER"
 
Iran and Iraq emerged from the war badly scarred, but to the Iranians the
 profound feeling of having been virtually alone, and -- at least on the
 chemical weapons issue -- of having been right and yet scorned, left perhaps
 the deepest scar. The young and inexperienced Islamic Republic learned two
 important lessons from its experience: first, never again allow yourself to
 be in a position of such strategic vulnerability and second, when you are
 facing the world's superpower, multilateral treaties and conventions are
 worthless. They decided to act on these insights.
 
It is generally accepted that toward the end of the war Iran had gained the
 capability to field its own chemical weapons. Parliamentary speaker (and
 future president) Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani declared two months after
 war's end that "chemical bombs and biological weapons are poor man's atomic
 bombs and can easily be produced. We should at least consider them for our
 defense.... Although the use of such weapons is inhuman, the war taught us
 that international laws are only drops of ink on paper." In the 1990s Iraq
 was removed as a strategic threat, and Iran became an enthusiastic
 participant in international negotiations aimed at banning chemical weapons.
 In due course, after ratifying the Chemical Weapons Convention in 1997, Iran
 complied with its obligation under the convention to report its possession
 of chemical weapons, and these were subsequently destroyed under
 international supervision. Nevertheless, there are persistent suspicions
 that Iran continues to have an active chemical weapons program.
 
If the suspicions are correct, the program would be an indisputable legacy
 of Iraq's repeated use of gas during the war and the failure of the
 international community to put an end to it. Moreover, the world's ability
 to challenge Iran on any programs it may have today is reduced dramatically
 by the Iranian perception that it has nothing to protect it from WMD in the
 hands of a regional power, such as Israel, but its own WMD deterrent. The
 current standoff over Iran's alleged nuclear weapons program is a graphic
 illustration of the problem.
 
Where to from here? How the nuclear question plays out will depend in part
 on how the internal debate unfolds inside Iran. One option that should be
 given serious consideration is the idea of a "grand bargain," whereby Iran
 would give up its nuclear weapons program, cease its military support of
 Palestinian and Lebanese militant groups, and desist from running
 interference in Iraq in exchange for international support for its peaceful
 nuclear industry, guarantees of protection from regime change and other
 hostile military endeavors, and full reintegration into the community of
 nations. The Bush administration, whose accusations about Iran's nuclear
 weapons program are undermined by its track record of WMD claims in the
 run-up to the war in Iraq, would be prudent to work toward this goal before
 the nuclear genie successfully springs its confines.
 
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A footnoted version of this article is available online at:
 http://www.merip.org/mero/mero011805.html
 
For background on Iran's nuclear program, see Kaveh Ehsani and Chris
 Toensing, "Neo-Conservatives, Hardline Clerics and the Bomb," in Middle East
 Report 233 (Winter 2004). To order back issues of Middle East Report or to
 subscribe, visit MERIP's home page: http://www.merip.org
 
 
 
 
Middle East Report Online is a free service of the Middle East Research
 and Information Project (MERIP).
 
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