Iran Without Nukes

THE NEW YORK TIMES

Remember Iran?

I do. It's been two years since the Iranian people rose up to protest a stolen election with a bravery that stirred the world and presented Americans with a truer image of a young and highly educated nation than the old specter of the bearded Islamic zealot. The Green Movement was suppressed through barbaric violence but its example helped kindle the Arab Spring.

As Hamid Dabashi of Columbia University wrote in July, 2009: "Tehran, I believe, is ground zero of a civil rights movement that will leave no Muslim or Arab country, or even Israel, untouched." He added, "The moving pictures of Iranians flooding colorfully into the streets have forever altered the visual vocabulary of the global perception of the Middle East."

Seldom were there more prescient words.

They were quoted by Nader Hashemi of the University of Denver in a recent talk on Iran, in which he noted shared Iranian and Arab aims: "Democracy and dignity, the rule of law and respect for basic human rights, political transparency and an end to corruption."

That urge is still powerful in Iran beneath the opaque, directionless apparatus of the Islamic Republic. Iran is weak now, its ideology as tired as Osama Bin Laden's, as marginal to peoples questing to reconcile their Muslim faith and modernity in new ways.

I would probe this weakness through new approaches. But we are stuck still with the world's most paranoid relationship: the American-Iranian relationship.

That's largely because there's another way to remember Iran as the Godot of nuclear threats, the country always on the verge of producing a nuclear weapon or acquiring the "breakout capacity" to make one, but never, despite the dire warning of Israeli leaders dating back to the 1990s, doing either, preferring to dwell in the Islamic Republic's favored zones: ambivalence and inertia.

As one awaits this tortuous Godot, one might recall a forecast of a bomb by 1999 (Shimon Peres) or 2004 (Ehud Barak), or Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's talk of "a messianic apocalyptic cult controlling atomic bombs," or my friend Jeffrey Goldberg's allusion in The Atlantic last year to a "consensus" that there is "a better than 50 percent chance that Israel will launch a strike by next July." That would be next month.

It might also be worth recalling that Meir Dagan, the former head of Israel's Mossad spy agency, declared last month that attacking Iran would be "a stupid idea." He suggested his main worry was not Iran itself but Netanyahu's susceptibility to "dangerous adventure."

Dagan's concerns have surfaced as Seymour Hersh concludes in a New Yorker article this month that, as he put it in one interview, "There's just no serious evidence inside that Iran is actually doing anything to make a nuclear weapon."

His reporting reveals that the U.S. National Intelligence Estimate (N.I.E.) of 2007 which concluded "with high confidence" that Iran had halted a nuclear-weapons program in 2003 still pertains in the classified N.I.E. of 2011. As a retired senior intelligence official put it to Hersh, there's nothing "substantially new" that "leads to a bomb."

In other words, Iran, epicenter of inefficiency, unable to produce a kilowatt of electricity through its Bushehr nuclear reactor despite decades of effort, is still doing its old brinkmanship number.

Remember, Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader, is the guardian of the revolution. That is a conservative business. Breakout, let alone a bomb, is a bridge too far if the Islamic Republic is what you've vowed to preserve. Much better to gain leverage by producing low-enriched uranium far from weapons grade under International Atomic Energy Agency inspection and allow rumors to swirl.

So Iran, long at the top of the Washington agenda, has slid down. It's partly the Arab Spring. It's partly that you can't keep saying the same thing. People do begin to remember the refrain, although nobody in the large Iran-the-clear-and-present-danger school ever seems to get called to account.

They should be. The nuclear bogeyman obsession has been a distraction from the need to try to tease out a relationship with Tehran, see Iran as it is. Only the most flimsy efforts have been made, insufficient to test the waters.

Those waters are troubled. The Islamic Republic has not recovered from its convulsion of 2009. It is sickly, consumed by hypocrisy as it cheers on some brave Arabs (but not those in Syria) while brutalizing its own seekers of the freedom promised in 1979. Arabs aren't buying Iranian hypocrisy. Only Iran's command of Revolutionary Guard force and the opposition's lack of a shared goal salvage it.

Khamenei is at loggerheads with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who got into such a sulk recently that he took 11 days off work, infuriating everybody. The Majlis, or parliament, is investigating Ahmadinejad for various alleged frauds including, of all things, vote-buying in 2009! Ahmadinejad was booed during his June 3 speech commemorating Ayatollah Khomeini's death. Iran is characterized by what Farideh Farhi of the University of Hawaii recently termed "administrative chaos."

That's not how you make a nuke. When remembering Iran and it must be remembered call the fear-mongers to account.