Juan Cole throws cold water on Iran nuke threat; police chief warns protesters

Over at Informed Comment, Juan Cole wants everyone to breathe deeply and think about whether Iran's latest nuclear announcement is really that threatening. Cole called "bizarre" remarks made on Sunday by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who equated Iran and North Korea as both being "nuclear-armed" and "a real or a potential threat":

The US intelligence establishment continues to doubt that Iran has or wants a nuclear weapons program. Tehran does have a nuclear enrichment program, which is permitted by the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Iran allows United Nations inspections of it nuclear facilities. Although Iran is not as transparent as the UN International Atomic Energy Agency would like, there is no dispositive evidence of a weapons program. For the Secretary of State to frame Iran as she did is just muddled or dishonest.

Cole proceeds to poke holes in some of the major arguments for Iran's having a nuclear weapons program, or an ambition for one.

The "secret" facility at Qom? IAEA Chief Mohammed Elbaradei visited it and "found a 'hole in a mountain' with no equipment or uranium on-site."

Iran's desire to enrich its uranium to near 20 percent? Fifteen other countries already have that ability, including North Korea and Pakistan. Argentina reached higher levels of enrichment in the 1970s and 1980s and was not sanctioned; neither was South Korea when it secretly reached the ability to enrich to 77 percent, Cole says.

And then there's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's Sunday announcement itself: Iran followed up on Monday with an official letter to the IAEA, all in compliance with the Non-Proliferation Treaty.

I'm glad Cole is out there making these arguments, because they are not often heard in mainstream news stories about the Iranian nuclear program. I wrote on Sunday that Iran has seemed intransigent in its recent bargaining with the West over shipping low-enriched uranium out of the country for refinement. I still think that's true. But the larger point, the one that Cole makes and that I agree with, is that we all need to remember that Iran hasn't actually broken any treaties or international laws, at least not as far as I know. The country's nuclear program is not as transparent as the IAEA, United States or others would like, but does that justify sanctions and harsh rhetoric, including the kind of saber rattling that foreshadows armed conflict?

It's quite possible that Iran is simply telling the truth: It needs to have the ability to enrich uranium to the near-20-percent level to supply its medical Tehran Research Reactor. (To support that argument, Cole links to a short article, written by Geoffrey Forden and posted back in October on Arms Control Wonk, that explains the TRR and its cancer-research services in more detail.)

The one area where I disagree with Cole is his belief that the American military and intelligence apparatuses are powerful enough to render near zero the chance of Iran secretly reaching a weapons-capable level of enrichment. The United States is powerful, yes, but I have an everlasting faith in the ineptitude of our bureaucracies, and I don't think we can just count out the possibility of Iran evading detection: after all, these same U.S. military and intelligence apparatuses have failed to catch Osama bin Laden or Ayman al-Zawahiri for going on nine years.

In other Iran news, the clock ticks closer to Thursday, Feb. 11, the official 31st anniversary of the 1979 revolution in Iran, and the country's police chief is sounding the drumbeat of violence.

From CNN:

Ismail Ahmadi Moghaddam told semi-official news agency ILNA that it is "natural" that security forces carry out what he called their responsibility if security is threatened or if "sacred morals" are insulted on the "pretext" of criticism and protest.

CNN says that Green Movement leaders Mehdi Karroubi and Mir Hossein Mousavi have called on their followers to protest.

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