The Guardian and the Iranian WMD Narrative

There's been a fair bit of talk in blogtopia today about a Guardian report entitled "Secret services say Iran is trying to assemble a nuclear missile" - and pretty much all of that talk has been reinforcing the official narrative that Iran is becoming a "clear and present danger" to the West and that military action is becoming unavoidable. The Guardian says:

The Iranian government has been successfully scouring Europe for the sophisticated equipment needed to develop a nuclear bomb, according to the latest western intelligence assessment of the country's weapons programmes. Scientists in Tehran are also shopping for parts for a ballistic missile capable of reaching Europe, with "import requests and acquisitions ... registered almost daily", the report seen by the Guardian concludes.

...But it is the detailed assessment of Iran's nuclear purchasing programme that will most most alarm western leaders, who have long refused to believe Tehran's insistence that it is not interested in developing nuclear weapons and is trying only to develop nuclear power for electricity.

Scary stuff, but let's look a bit closer, as so few of those opinionating have done, and see where it takes us.

The report, which was "leaked" to the Guardian, "draws upon material gathered by British, French, German and Belgian agencies" and seems not to be all that secret after all - it's been used "to brief European government ministers and to warn leading industrialists of the need for vigilance". So who actually produced this report and who has seen it already? The main story doesn't say - but the companion story that few bothered to look at does. Entitled "Intelligence report claims nuclear market thriving", this story says the report is "from a leading EU intelligence service" - which is never actually named but could as easily be Jane's Intelligence Digest as MI6 - and describes it as "confidential", not "secret". In fact, it's already had a wide circulation among businesses, politicians and academics. According to the companion story, the report is:

intended as an alarm bell sounding in the boardrooms of western Europe's leading engineering companies as well as the common rooms of campuses and cutting-edge science labs. It is also a wake-up call to EU governments, spy agencies and customs officials struggling to keep the ingredients for weapons of mass destruction (WMD) out of the hands of some of the most unsavoury regimes in the Middle East and the far east.

The idea is to publicly "name and shame," to warn off EU companies from doing business with the listed organisations.

Not exactly a small circulation of intelligence insiders or a huge scoop of a leak, then.

(It's also worth noting that the companion story also quibbles a bit about where the detail came from, saying that the report seems to represent the combined knowledge of the four already mentioned nation's intelligence agencies, but not stating that it actually does so.)

So what about the actual claims? Stripped of the rhetoric, there are few. Both stories combined, in actual reference to Iran, contain the following real content - none of it new:

Iran has a vast network of middlemen and front companies dedicated to procuring information on all kinds of weapons projects, conventional and unconventional, as well as civil scientific knowledge useful to Iran's needs. A lot of this procuring is done secretly and by "black market" channels. Big hairy deal - name a country that doesn't do this and I will name you a country that needs to sack it's entire intelligence establishment.

Iran is very active in procuring missile technology, especially technology capable of reaching orbit. Because of the West's reactions, it does so mainly from Russia, China and North Korea. Iran has a satellite-launching program, it sees itself earning mucho loot from being an Islamic entrant to the space race. All this stuff has dual use and I defy anyone to say for sure which use it's intended for.

Iran and Syria have an agreement to co-operate in all parts of the arms sector, not just WMD's. If you and your neighbour both had the biggest, toughest guy on the block breathing heavily at you, wouldn't you consider co-operating? Wasn't that what NATO was about?

That's it - that's the lot. In other words, the bulk of the story from this leftwing paper carries water for George Bush and Tony Blair's agenda on Iran by substituting a narrative for actual facts. Depressingly familiar, eh?

Iran is an unsavoury place and it's current (elected) leader is a nasty type, of that there is no doubt. But there are worse unelected dicks in the world in charge of nations that already have nukes. Pakistan and North Korea spring readily to mind. Plus, there's a lot of uncertainty among experts about just how long-term the current Iranian President's prospects are - people who don't think much of him include the Grand Ayatollah. Then there's the various assessments that say Iran is years from a nuke and the reports that Iran has problems with Al Qaida attacks as well as a growing amount of unrest in the minority Sunni population. Put them together and you have a picture that says invasion or airstrikes are overkill - that a Libyan model is more likely the correct response than an Iraqi one.

(Of course, the one thing we can be fairly sure of is that if they ever manage to enrich enough weapons-grade uranium the Iranians know how to make a nuke. The CIA gave them the plans.)

But add all the misleading stories and highly-enriched rhetoric to the simple fact that most people don't know the difference between enriched uranium for power use (about 2-3% U235) and weapons-grade enrichment (at least 90% U235 and a much more complicated and time-consuming technical feat) and what you have is a narrative that supports a rush to war.

Given the way the politicians, the intelligence agencies and the mainstream media all messed up or misled us last time, you would think bloggy pundits and the general populace would be a bit more sceptical this time around.

'Fraid not.