Iran's nuclear plan stirs US rancour

A recent article contends that the best assessment of US intelligence is that Iran gave up pursuing a nuclear weapons programme in 2003.

WASHINGTON // Challenge Washington orthodoxy at your peril, at least when it comes to an issue such as Iran, where opinions have mostly solidified. That seems to be the lesson gleaned from the outsized reaction to an article in last week's edition of The New Yorker on Iran's nuclear ambitions.

In it, Seymour Hersh, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, argued there was a discrepancy between the official position of the Obama administration on whether Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons and the available intelligence.

Hersh wrote that best assessment of the US intelligence community is that Iran gave up pursuing a nuclear weapons programme in 2003. That was the judgement of the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), a collective analysis of intelligence gathered by several US intelligence services. And there is no new evidence to suggest that such a programme has been taken up again.

To back up this claim, he cited unnamed senior security officials who have seen a 2011 update of the NIE.

It is therefore alarming that official US policy appears to consider that Iran is only a matter of time away from nuclear weapons capability and must be prevented from getting there at any cost, Mr Hersh contended."There is a large body of evidence … suggesting that the United States could be in danger of repeating a mistake similar to the one made with Saddam Hussein's Iraq eight years ago - allowing anxieties about the policies of a tyrannical regime to distort our estimations of the state's military capacities and intentions."

Mr Hersh did not suggest a wholesale change in US policy toward Iran. Anxiety about the Iranian regime is "firmly grounded", he wrote. He did not rule out that Tehran might some day pursue nuclear weapons. He only argued that facts and current policy diverged.

What might have sparked a fruitful debate over a remaining foreign policy issue, instead met with outrage. Administration officials reacted with a "collective eye-roll", reported Jennifer Epstein in Politico. Two senior administration officials rejected Mr Hersh's premise and said Iranian obfuscation over its nuclear programme did not suggest that the US was overstating the threat.

Hersh's article was, one of the officials said, "a slanted book report on a long narrative that's already been told many times over." But where administration officials were dismissive, media commentators were appalled. An article by John Tabin in the conservative American Spectator, suggested Mr Hersh's Iran "fantasies" were fiction. Over at the neoconservative Commentary Magazine, Jonathan Tobin said Mr Hersh was "blowing smoke" on Iran, which he attributed to the writer's "bias against Israel and any effort to restrain anti-American Islamists".

In the Wall Street Journal, Bret Stephens was so incensed that he essentially asked Mr Hersh to step outside. In a piece entitled, "Iran, Syria—and Seymour Hersh: Why won't the New Yorker reporter debate me?" Mr Stephens accused Mr Hersh of penning "a half-cooked notion, a conspiracy theory or a tissue of vaguely sourced and improbable claims".

Afshin Molavi, a senior fellow with the New America Foundation, a Washington think tank, said there was a tendency for opinions to be "hysterical" on the topic of Iran.

Reputations are not the only thing at stake. The reference to Mr Hersh's "bias against Israel" was no simple attack. Israel has repeatedly identified a nuclear-armed Iran as a threat and would take unilateral military action against any suspected Iranian nuclear weapons sites, as it did in Iraq and Syria.

In his article, however, Mr Hersh cited another US intelligence official as saying that the programme Iran abandoned in 2003 was aimed at Iraq, rather than Israel. Absent hard evidence of Iranian designs to build nuclear weapons, the official told Mr Hersh, the "Israelis have no reason to threaten imminent military action". That would undermine years of efforts by the influential pro-Israel community in the US to put Iran front and centre of policy priorities in the region.

The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac), the most powerful pro-Israel lobby in America, has been instrumental in lobbying the US administration and Congress to take a harder line with Tehran. At last month's Aipac convention, for instance, delegates were tasked to go to Capitol Hill to lobby American legislators for yet harsher sanctions on Iran.

"Once a heavy hitting lobby like this enters the fray, a lot of people in Congress and in government will pay attention," said Mr Molavi. "But it is the kind of attention you pay when you don't want to be seen as being on the wrong side of an argument."