Contrary to the claim by Washington's latest National Intelligence Estimate (NIE)on Iran, accepted by President George Bush, that Tehran's decision to end itsmilitary-weapons program resulted primarily due to "international scrutinyand pressure," the predominant factor was the pressure from its rival,Iraq. The chronology of events and the predilections of Ayatollah RuhollahKhomeini, the founder of the Islamic Republic, suggest that initiating andhalting of Iran's atomic-bomb project was related to Saddam Hussein's nuclearplans.
It all started with Saddam's invasion of Iran in September 1980, which resultedin an eight-year war. The events in that conflict determined Tehran's defensepolicy, decided in doctrinal terms by Khomeini, the arbiter of final authority,from 1979 until his death 10 years later.
Khomeini gave paramount importance to the preservation of the Islamic Republic,treating all else, including some basic tenets of Islam, as subsidiary.
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When faced with the prospect of Iran's military disintegrating in the face ofa series of Iraqi offensives, using chemical weapons on a massive scale,Khomeini reversed his position in the spring of 1988 and accepted the year-oldUN Security Council's ceasefire resolution. He described his decision astantamount to drinking hemlock.
On the nuclear issue, Khomeini took a stand early on. He stopped the building ofa civilian nuclear power plant near Bushehr, started by Siemens of West Germanyin 1974 – because he viewed it as a project inspired by US President RichardNixon and his Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who had persuaded the Shah tobuild up to 22 nuclear-power plants.
It was Saddam's deployment of non-conventional weapons – also called weaponsof mass destruction, or WMD – during the Iran-Iraq War that compelled Khomeinito rethink his stance on the nuclear option as part of a defense strategy.
From October 1983 onward, Saddam resorted to deploying chemical weapons, bannedby the Geneva Convention of 1925, on the battlefields. Once his engineers hadextended the range of the Soviet-supplied surface-to-surface Scud missiles, hemounted the "War of Cities," targeting heavily populated areas inMarch 1985. This phase lasted about a month.
The episode left a deep mark on Iran's leaders. They feared that Saddam's nextstep would be to deploy poison-gas bombs as payloads for his extended Scudmissiles.
Since it is comparatively easy to convert pesticide factories to produce poisongases like Sarin and nerve agents, Iran had the option of retaliating in kind.But Khomeini excluded it. That would have meant Iran losing the moral highground it had secured as a victim of poison-gas attacks.
Still there were two other WMDs: biological agents and nuclear arms. ThoughSaddam was believed to have a biological-weapons program, he had not deployedthem.
That reduced Khomeini's option to nuclear arms. Committed to preserving theIslamic Republic in the future, he seems to have given a go-ahead to hisgovernment to explore the nuclear option to safeguard the republic. Such weightydecisions in Iran were and still are taken in strictest secrecy. Khomeini knewwell that this was to be a complicated, expensive process, stretching over manyyears.
Iranian officials secretly contacted Pakistan's leading nuclearscientist-engineer, Abdul Qadeer Khan, in May 1987. He sold them the design forcentrifuges to enrich uranium. He also "voluntarily" gave them thetechnology of how to mold highly enriched uranium into two hemispheres as apreamble to assembling an atom bomb, so the Iranians now claim.
Iran's move had not come a day too soon. In February 1988, Iraq attacked Tehranand other cities with its boosted Scud missiles, called Al Hussein, with a rangeof 370 miles. Its poison-gas attack on its own Kurdish citizens of Halabja inMarch alarmed Tehran's residents. They feared a similar fate. A third of thecapital's population fled to the countryside.
This seems to have given impetus to Iran's leaders to pursue its atom-bombproject with added vigor and urgency.
What appears to have given further impetus to the Iranian enterprise was thediscovery by International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspectors, made in theaftermath of the 1991 Gulf War between Iraq and the US-led coalition, that Iraqhad a fairly advanced, clandestine nuclear-arms program.
When the IAEA and other international inspectors noticed discrepancy betweenwhat WMD materials they found and destroyed, and what the official documentsshowed to be in Iraq's inventories at the start, Saddam claimed that he hadordered the destruction of some WMD materials himself. The documentation gotlost in the mayhem, caused by the uprisings in Iraq in the aftermath of the 1991Gulf War, he explained.
The purpose of Saddam's cat-and-mouse game with international inspectors was tomake the leaders of the neighboring states feel that he possessed WMDs or couldproduce them at short notice, and thus gain their respect out of fear. Indeed,he said as much in his interviews with the US intelligence agents during histhree-year incarceration. Saddam was particularly keen to foster such anassessment among the ruling mullahs of Iran, whom he detested for being ethnicPersian and Shiite.
The mystique of Saddam having a clandestine WMD was so strong that even hisgenerals believed it. On the eve of the Anglo-American invasion in March 2003,however, he admitted to them that he had nothing of the sort. So, many of hisgenerals failed to turn up for their jobs once the invasion got going. They knewthat without chemical weapons and without air cover, they had no chance ofresisting the invading forces.
Saddam's overthrow in April was not enough to reassure Iran's leaders to abandontheir nuclear-arms option. What made the critical difference was the statementby David Kay, leader of the US-led Iraq Survey Group. At the end of aninvestigation costing $300 million, he said on October 2, 2003, "We havenot yet found stocks of [non-conventional] weapons." Earlier, thePentagon's 75th Exploitation Force too had discovered nothing.
This reassured Iran's leaders, including Hassan Rouhani, its chief nuclearnegotiator with foreign governments and international agencies.
On October 21, 2003, Rouhani held several hours of talks with the visitingforeign ministers of Britain, France and Germany. At the end, Iran agreed,"Voluntarily to suspend all uranium enrichment and reprocessing activitiesas defined by the International Atomic Energy Agency" and to resolvesatisfactorily all the IAEA's remaining questions.
In return, the foreign ministers promised in writing that the EU would go alongwith whatever the IAEA decided, that Tehran could expect easier access to moderntechnologies and supplies in a range of areas from the EU, and that the EU andIran would work for regional security and by implication examine Israel'snuclear program.
This seems to have led the authors of the latest NIE to conclude that Iran'sleaders stopped the atomic bomb project in "the fall of 2003," andthat the primary reason was international pressure. No, the primary reason wasthe overthrow of Saddam and the absence of any WMD projects in Iraq; all elsewas secondary.
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Dilip Hiro is the author of The Iranian Labyrinth and Secretsand Lies: Operation 'Iraqi Freedom' and After and, most recently, Bloodof the Earth: The Battle for the World's Vanishing Oil Resources, allpublished by Nation Books, New York. Rights: © 2007 Yale Center forthe Study of Globalization.
