Keeping a watch on Iran

Pakistan needs to watch carefully as significant changes are taking place all along its borders. One of those relate to Iran that seems to be in the process of reconfiguring its relations with the Arab world and also building its capacity to counter the increased aggressive play by Israel.

According to Thomas L Freedman, The New York Times’ columnist, “President Trump’s decision to tear up the Iran nuclear deal in 2018 – a decision urged on by his Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu – was one of the dumbest, most poorly thought out and counterproductive U.S. national security decisions of the post-Cold War.” Friedman was not alone in criticising the Trump move

Moshe Ya’alon, former Israeli defense minister who held that position when Trump moved, said at a conference in late December 2021 that “as bad as that deal was Trump’s decision to withdraw from it – with Netanyahu’s encouragement was even worse.” The IAEA reported that Iran had amassed enough enriched uranium hexafluoride to make a bomb within weeks. Iran’s breakout time under the deal signed by President Obama was one year. The time for going nuclear was reduced to a few weeks.

President Biden wanted to change the course and persuaded Iran to return to the negotiating table in Vienna with the parties that had walked out of JCPOA – China, France, Germany, Russia and Britain – sitting down with Tehran at the same table but the Americans sitting in an adjoining room. The new conservative government in Tehran wanted all sanctions imposed on Iran to be removed. The Tehran regime was particularly interested in the removal of sanctions on the Revolutionary Guards Corps.

According to Friedman, Biden was dealing with a poor hand. With its focus on getting out of the Middle East – starting with Afghanistan – Biden did not strike fear into the hearts of the Iranian. The Israelis were afraid that the American President would strike a weak deal; instead, they would have liked to put on the table the GBU-57A/B Massive Ordinance Penetrator which is a 30,000-pund bomb that could blow up any mountain hiding Iranian nuclear facilities. But any such hit would have an impact on the price of oil.

There were several voices in the United States that were urging Biden to conclude a nuclear deal with Tehran. One of them was that of Peter Beinart, professor of journalism and political science at the Newmark School of Journalism at the City University of New York and more importantly editor of Currents, a large Jewish magazine that spoke for one segment of the Jewish community in the US. “President Biden has the chance to avert a nuclear crisis that could push the United States to the brink of war and threaten the coalition he has built to counter Russia,” he wrote in an opinion piece for The New York Times. A deal with Iran is vital, since Tehran freed from the deal’s constraints, has been racing toward the ability to build a nuclear bomb. What was holding back the Biden administration from redoing the deal from which Trump walked out was the previous administration’s designation of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard as a foreign terrorist organisation. Tehran wanted the designation removed. The Biden administration refused to meet that condition. Congress did not make that step easier. On May 4, 2022, as many as 62 senators, including 16 Democrats, passed a nonbinding motion opposing removing the Revolutionary Guard from the terrorism list. The corps was already under multiple sanctions. This was not the only promise Biden made during the campaign that he had not fulfilled. He had not moved on Cuba and Palestine and not reversed the tariffs imposed on imports from China by the Trump administration. Ali Vaez, an Iran expert at the International Crisis Group, predicted that if the nuclear deal was not revived and Iran continued to enrich uranium at its current pace, by the fall of 2022, it will be mere days from the capacity to build a nuclear bomb. Concluded Beinart: “On Iran, the Biden administration wants to play safe. It can’t. It’s better off simply doing what is right.”

On 17 June, 2022 The New York Times reported that Israeli and American intelligence agencies were closely watching construction activity south of the Natanz nuclear site where the Iranians seemed to be working on building tunnels in the mountains. “By most accounts, Iran is closer to being able to produce a bomb today than at another point in the two-decade saga of its nuclear programme – even if it’s planning, as many national security officials believe, to stop short of producing an actual weapon,” wrote the newspaper in its coverage. The US and Israeli intelligence agencies were able to develop the outline of nuclear development programme that Iran appeared to be pursuing. There were several steps the country was taking.

The programme began after the Israelis were able to recruit Iranians who were prepared to work for them. They planted explosive devices to blow up an important site. Since then, the Iranians have worked on a site called Fordow, built under a mountain on a base run by the Revolutionary Guards. There are plans to install 1,000 advanced IR6 centrifuges at the new site, adding to those that were already working. What was worrying for the Iran watchers was the revelation by the International Atomic Energy Commission that Tehran switched off 27 cameras that gave its inspectors a view into the country’s production facilities. The deal negotiated by President Obama, of which his successor Donald Trump pulled his country out, limited Tehran’s ability to install new centrifuges and forced it to ship 97% of its nuclear fuel out of the country. What was clear to intelligence experts was Tehran’s intention to use the new facility to construct the centrifuges and rebuild the facilities the Israelis have destroyed. Iran had pushed ahead with its enrichment of uranium to achieve a level of 60% which is just short of what is needed to produce a weapon.

The Israelis had used assassination of Iranian scientists as a weapon against Iran’s nuclear programme. The targets were less well-known than Mohsen Fakhrizadeh who was believed to be the guiding intellect behind Iranian nuclear weapons programme and was killed in an automated ambush Israel conducted in late 2020. According to Gen Kenneth F McKenzie, who before retiring was the head of the US Central Command, the real crown jewels for Iran are ballistic missiles, cruise missiles and drones.

Israel’s attempt to hurt Iran on many fronts gathered momentum as Tehran showed reluctance to reenter the deal signed with President Obama. On June 23, 2022 news came out that Iran had dismissed Hossein Taeb, the longstanding intelligence chief of the Revolutionary Guards, considered one of the country’s most powerful figures. The government seemed to have responded to Israel’s covert war on Iran’s defence systems and its nuclear programme. The removal of Taeb after 13 years in the post was seen as a major step taken by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. “He had failed to stop Israel’s infiltration and wasn’t very successful in retaliation operations outside the borders,” said Seyed Peyman Taheri, an analyst close to Iran’s government. “His removal is to bring in new blood and get both of these things under control.”

Published in The Express Tribune, July 4^th, 2022.

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