TigerHawk

Monday, June 12, 2006

Zirzamin 27 and the fog of non-war

By TigerHawk at 6/12/2006 12:25:00 AM

Monday's Telegraph serves up more evidence (CWCID: Lucianne) that Iran has pushed its nuclear program beyond the boundaries of the law.

Nuclear experts working for the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna are pressing the Iranians to make a full disclosure about a network of research laboratories at a secret military base outside the capital Teheran.

The project is codenamed Zirzamin 27, and its purpose is to enable the Iranians to undertake uranium enrichment to military standard. Zirzamin means “basement” in Farsi, which suggests the laboratories are underground and 27 refers to the 27-year-old Iranian revolution....

Although IAEA officials do not know the precise location of Zirzamin 27, they have comprehensive details of its activities.

“This is a truly alarming development,” said a senior western diplomat working with the IAEA. “This evidence indicates that the Iranians remain committed to developing nuclear weapons, despite their claims to the contrary that their nuclear ambitions are entirely peaceful.”

The evidence that Iran is building an ayatollah bomb keeps piling up. There will be those who argue, of course, that the "evidence" kept piling up that Iraq had WMD, too, and it turned out that it did not. Well, perhaps we are applying the wrong standard. Perhaps the test for intervention should not be whether a dangerous regime actually has WMD -- they are too easy to conceal, or store in all-but-assembled form -- but whether it acts as though it does. No non-proliferation program can survive the unprosecuted bluffing of rogue regimes -- non-proliferation requires candor. Iraq acted as though it had WMD to the point that as late as December 2002 Iraq's own top generals were "stunned" to learn that it had discontinued its program after it had served up its absurd "declaration" to Hans Blix. Iran is either bluffing to an even greater degree than Iraq did under Saddam, or it actually has a weapons program. Either way, Iran's geopolitical adversaries have to do something about it.

Meanwhile, the doves are arguing that the Iranian regime is not so bad as hawks allege. Specifically, various academics are arguing that President Ahmadinejad's promise, prediction, or suggestion that Israel be "wiped off the map" was all a misunderstanding -- bad translation.

Ever since he spoke at an anti-Zionism conference in Tehran last October, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran has been known for one statement above all. As translated by news agencies at the time, it was that Israel "should be wiped off the map." Iran's nuclear program and sponsorship of militant Muslim groups are rarely mentioned without reference to the infamous map remark.

Here, for example, is R. Nicholas Burns, the under secretary of state for political affairs, recently: "Given the radical nature of Iran under Ahmadinejad and its stated wish to wipe Israel off the map of the world, it is entirely unconvincing that we could or should live with a nuclear Iran."

But is that what Mr. Ahmadinejad said? And if so, was it a threat of war? For months, a debate among Iran specialists over both questions has been intensifying. It starts as a dispute over translating Persian but quickly turns on whether the United States (with help from Israel) is doing to Iran what some believe it did to Iraq — building a case for military action predicated on a faulty premise.

"Ahmadinejad did not say he was going to wipe Israel off the map because no such idiom exists in Persian," remarked Juan Cole, a Middle East specialist at the University of Michigan and critic of American policy who has argued that the Iranian president was misquoted. "He did say he hoped its regime, i.e., a Jewish-Zionist state occupying Jerusalem, would collapse."

This time, the "faulty premise" is not that the target isn't building illegal weapons -- too many countries believe that it is -- but that the regime is not as dangerous as advertised. The proof of the conspiracy to demonize Iran is apparently going to be that there is a legitimate debate over the quality of the translation of a single statement of that country's president. Never mind that even the Iranian government translates the statement differently than Juan Cole:

If Mr. Steele and Mr. Cole are right, not one word of the quotation — Israel should be wiped off the map — is accurate.

But translators in Tehran who work for the president's office and the foreign ministry disagree with them. All official translations of Mr. Ahmadinejad's statement, including a description of it on his Web site (www.president.ir/eng/), refer to wiping Israel away. Sohrab Mahdavi, one of Iran's most prominent translators, and Siamak Namazi, managing director of a Tehran consulting firm, who is bilingual, both say "wipe off" or "wipe away" is more accurate than "vanish" because the Persian verb is active and transitive.

The question, in any case, is not whether the translation is unambiguous, but whether Israel can afford to ignore the possibility that the plain meaning of the words supplied by the government of Iran are a warning of war. Surely it cannot, however much Juan Cole might wish to argue away any casus belli. What if, Allah forfend, Juan Cole is wrong? He has been before. In fact, he is in the same article!

Since Iran has not "attacked another country aggressively for over a century," Professor Cole said in an e-mail exchange, "I smell the whiff of war propaganda."

Oh? In 1979 and 1980, the Iranian government sanctioned the storming of the American embassy and then directly held American diplomats hostage for 444 days. Under any conception of international law, that was an aggressive attack on another country. On October 23, 1983, Iran arranged for its proxy, Hezbollah, to murder 241 American servicemen in their barracks. The same day, Hezbollah attacked the French, killing 58 paratroopers. All the dead were in Lebanon on a peacekeeping mission. If you don't believe United States Federal District Court Judge Royce Lamberth, read Robert Baer's excellent book See No Evil. Baer spent thousands of hours investigating the embassy bombing in Lebanon, and provides enough evidence to persuade all but the most persistent ostrich. Finally, in 1996, Iranian agents blew up the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia, killing 19 American airmen. All of these are acts of war by any measure of the term, and they represent only the most high profile attacks. Iranian proxies continue to this day to attack American and British troops in Iraq and Israelis in their own country and the Palestinian Authority. By any historical measure, at least the countries of Iraq, Israel, the United States and the United Kingdom have just cause to go to war against Iran right now. That does not mean it would be wise to do so, but that is a practical argument, not a moral one.

Of course, people who oppose American military action campaign to hold only proxies responsible, not the sponsors, so that we may pretend that no retaliation is called for. Why do people ignore attacks through proxies such as Hezbollah? When they are not being disingenuous to make a political point, they are following the habits of the Cold War. During that sorry period when the rival superpowers had thousands of warheads aimed at each other and no plans for "limited" nuclear war, any direct confrontation might have led to the destruction of the planet. Both the United States and the Soviet Union honored the fiction that attacks through proxies warranted a direct military response against the proxy but not against the sponsor. This fiction is now obsolete. The convention that only proxies are fair game had its rationale before the fall of the Soviet Union, but there is no surviving reason to ignore the culpability of the sponsor, even if Juan Cole wishes that we would. Every time Iran ships a weapon into Iraq or sends money to Hezbollah, it has "attacked another country aggressively" by any normal meaning of those words.