A revised version of an essay from a long time ago. It didn’t need much revision.
Belief: Iran is aggressive and has threatened to attack Israel, its neighbors or the US
Reality: Iran has not launched an aggressive war in modern history (unlike the US or Israel), and its leaders have a doctrine of “no first strike.” This is true of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, as well as of Revolutionary Guards commanders.
Belief: Iran is a militarized society bristling with dangerous weapons and a growing threat to world peace.
Reality: Iran’s military budget in recent years has expanded from $10 billion a year around $15 billion annually, making it 25th in the world for such expenditures and putting it in the same range as Singapore and Uruguay. Algeria and Turkiye spend more, and Israel spends twice as much. Even if the war causes Iran to double its spending, it would still only match the United Arab Emirates and Israel, and would not reach the level of Saudi Arabia. Moreover, Iran is a country of 92 million, so that its per capita spending on defense is tiny compared to some of these others, since they are much smaller countries with regard to population.
Belief: Iran has threatened to attack Israel militarily and to “wipe it off the map.”
Reality: Iran’s leaders have often warned Israel that an attack would be met with a strong response. No Iranian leader in the executive had threatened a first-strike, aggressive act of war on Israel, since this would contradict the doctrine of ‘no first strike’ to which the country has adhered.
Belief: But didn’t President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (in office 2005-2013) threaten to ‘wipe Israel off the map?’
Reality: President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad did quote Ayatollah Khomeini (d. 1988) to the effect that “this Occupation regime over Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time” (in rezhim-e eshghalgar-i Qods bayad as safheh-e ruzgar mahv shavad). This was not a pledge to roll tanks and invade or to launch missiles, however. It is the expression of a hope that the regime will collapse, just as the Soviet Union did. It is not a threat to kill anyone at all.
Belief: But aren’t Iranians Holocaust deniers?
Actuality: Some are, some aren’t. Former president Mohammad Khatami has castigated Ahmadinejad for questioning the full extent of the Holocaust, which he called “the crime of Nazism.” Many educated Iranians in the regime are perfectly aware of the horrors of the Holocaust. In any case, despite what propagandists imply, neither Holocaust denial (as wicked as that is) nor calling Israel names is the same thing as pledging to attack it militarily.
Belief: Iran is like North Korea in having an active nuclear weapons program, and is the same sort of threat to the world.
Actuality: Iran has long had a nuclear enrichment site at Natanz near Isfahan where it said it was producing fuel for its Bushehr nuclear energy plant and for future civilian nuclear reactors to generate electricity. All Iranian leaders denied that this site was for weapons production, and the International Atomic Energy Agency repeatedly inspected it over the decadesand found no weapons program. Iran is not being completely transparent, generating some doubts, but all the evidence the IAEA and the CIA can gather points to there not being a weapons program. As recently as March Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard reaffirmed that US intelligence has no evidence for a weapons program. She recently backtracked, saying that Iran has the elements to launch a weapons program, but you could say that about Japan, South Korea, and the Netherlands, too. These longstanding US intel assessments have been based on debriefings of defecting nuclear scientists, as well as on the documents they brought out, in addition to US signals intelligence from Iran and numerous inspections by the UN The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). While the IAEA criticized aspects of Iran’s civilian enrichment program, Rafael Grossi, its head, recently reaffirmed,
““We did not have any proof of a systematic effort to move into a nuclear weapon.”
Belief: Isn’t the Iranian regime irrational and crazed, so that a doctrine of mutally assured destruction just would not work with them?
Actuality: Iranian politicians are rational actors. If they were madmen, why haven’t they invaded any of their neighbors? Saddam Hussein of Iraq invaded both Iran and Kuwait. Israel has invaded its neighbors more than once, most recently Syria. In contrast, Iran has not started any wars. Demonizing people by calling them unbalanced is an old propaganda trick. The US elite was once unalterably opposed to China having nuclear science because they believed the Chinese are intrinsically irrational. This kind of talk is a form of racism.
Photo of Tehran by hosein charbaghi on Unsplash
Belief: The U.S. would not have put sanctions on Iran, and would not be so worried, if it were not a gathering nuclear threat.
Actuality: The centrifuge technology that Iran is using to enrich uranium is open-ended. In the old days, you could tell which countries might want a nuclear bomb by whether they were building light water reactors (less suitable for bomb-making) or heavy-water reactors (could be used to make a bomb in short order, as in North Korea). But with centrifuges, once you can enrich to 5% to fuel a civilian reactor, you could theoretically feed the material back through many times and enrich to 90% for a bomb. However, as long as centrifuge plants are being actively inspected, they cannot be used to make a bomb. The two danger signals would be if Iran threw out the inspectors or if it found a way to create a secret facility. The latter task would be extremely difficult, however, as demonstrated by the CIA’s discovery of the Qom facility construction in 2006 from satellite photos. Nuclear installations, especially centrifuge ones, consume a great deal of water, construction materiel, and so forth, so that constructing one in secret is a tall order. In any case, you can’t attack and destroy a country because you have an intuition that they might be doing something illegal. You need some kind of proof. Moreover, Israel, Pakistan and India are all much worse citizens of the globe than Iran, since they refused to sign the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and then went for broke to get a bomb; and nothing at all has been done to any of them by the United Nations Security Council.
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