Iran’s
Nuclear Posture and the Scars of War
Joost R. Hiltermann
January 18,
2005
(Joost
R. Hiltermann, Middle East Project director for the International
Crisis Group in Amman, is completing a book on chemical weapons
use during the Iran-Iraq war and consequences of international
silence. He wrote this article in his personal capacity. He can
be reached at joosthiltermann@yahoo.com.)
| For
background on Iran’s nuclear program, see Kaveh Ehsani and
Chris Toensing, “Hardliners, Neo-Conservatives and the Bomb,”
in Middle East Report 233 (Winter 2004). To order back issues
of Middle East Report or to subscribe, visit MERIP’s home
page. |
In waging
war on Iraq, one of the points the Bush administration sought
to prove was that President Bill Clinton’s policy of dual containment
had failed -- that despite a decade of threats, sanctions, military
action and UN-led disarmament, Iraq had continued to develop weapons
of mass destruction (WMD). Iraq, of course, was not the only target
of dual containment. So was neighboring Iran, which likewise was
suspected of having secret programs for building weapons of mass
destruction and was seen as a destabilizing force hostile to US
interests.
If dual containment
failed, it is not because Iraq managed to escape from its strictures.
Iraq, it turned out, had no WMD in March 2003, and probably did
not have any for most of the preceding decade. Dual containment
failed because mounting evidence suggests that Iran is the country
that has made significant advances in developing non-conventional
weapons, so much so that some experts see the country’s emergence
as the Middle East’s second nuclear power (after Israel) as likely
within two or three years.
It is even
likely that Saddam Hussein was so acutely aware of the gathering
danger across the border that for purposes of deterrence he kept
up the pretense of hiding WMD, while declaring formally -- and
truthfully -- that his arsenal had been dismantled by UN inspectors.
The comprehensive report on Iraq’s WMD “program-related activities,”
filed on September 30, 2004 by former inspector Charles Duelfer,
certainly suggests as much.[1]
Iran, too, has issued repeated denials that it is pursuing WMD,
demonstrating its innocence by placing its signature beneath all
the key multilateral restraints the world has designed to put
a brake on the development of such weapons: the Chemical Weapons
Convention, the Biological Weapons Convention, the nuclear Non-Proliferation
Treaty and others.
Following
revelations about its clandestine nuclear research in 2002, Iran
pledged to allow UN inspections of the research facilities, then
denied access to undeclared sites. In October 2003, Iran promised
the trio of Britain, France and Germany that it would cease enriching
uranium, only to resume enriching it less than a year later. Under
another deal with the “European Three,” concluded in November
2004, Tehran again agreed to suspend uranium enrichment, while
continuing to insist that any such activity would aim only at
a peaceful nuclear program. The most recent deal has held so far,
but Iran’s behavior has failed to allay international suspicions,
particularly those of the United States.
Whether Iran’s
nuclear program is strictly peaceful or intended for military
purposes has not yet been established, but the program’s potential
is beyond doubt. Why is Iran engaged in this apparently dogged
pursuit of WMD concealed by an endless series of dodges, half-truths
and quasi-concessions it fails to implement?
INSULT TO
INJURY
To understand
the psychology of Iran’s behavior, we have to look back to the
1980s, when Iran and Iraq fought a bloody eight-year war, initiated
by a reckless Saddam Hussein, perpetuated futilely by a vengeful
Khomeini regime and ending in a stalemate with neither having
scored territorial gain but both having suffered staggering losses
of life. By conservative estimates, some 400,000 Iraqis and Iranians
were killed in the war.[2]
What finally compelled the Iranians to sue for peace was Iraq’s
escalating resort to ever more lethal chemical weapons as a means
of subduing relentless Iranian “human wave” assaults that threatened
to overwhelm its heavily fortified positions.[3]
Chemical
weapons are first and foremost weapons of terror, causing mass
panic instead of inflicting huge casualties. Unequipped and untrained,
Iran’s ragtag army of “volunteer” foot soldiers was easy prey
for poison gases, which dispatched them in flight. In the final
years of the war, Iraq’s chemical bombardment of Kurdish civilian
areas, both in Iran and Iraq, and the threat to similarly target
Tehran eroded the popular morale that had underpinned the war
effort of both Iranian military forces and Iraqi Kurdish insurgents.
Iraq’s non-conventional
capabilities exposed a near fatal vulnerability in Iran’s defenses.
What was almost worse was that Tehran’s repeated remonstrations
with the United Nations fell virtually on deaf ears. For six years,
Iranian diplomats wrought ever more sophisticated legal arguments
to persuade the UN that it should have an institutional interest
in upholding the relevant precepts of international humanitarian
law. In particular, the 1925 Geneva Protocol, which prohibits
“the use in war of asphyxiating, poisonous or other gases, and
of all analogous liquids, materials or devices,” was directly
on point. The UN’s failure to uphold such precepts, the Iranians
said, would undermine its credibility and impartiality, while
giving rise to a regional arms race.
Not only
were Iranian claims of Iraqi chemical weapons use largely ignored
at the time, Iran was declared a liar and a hypocrite (not entirely
without justification, as both sides committed atrocities during
the war). Eventually -- adding insult to injury -- the chemical
charges were turned on the Iranians themselves, even if no convincing
evidence of Iranian chemical weapons use was ever produced. The
United States, initially neutral in the conflict, increasingly
tilted toward Iraq, preferring a drawn-out stalemate between the
two belligerents (who thus no longer would pose a threat to either
Israel or the West’s access to reasonably priced Gulf oil) or
perhaps a victory by a weakened Iraq, but under no circumstances
an Iranian one. Yet Iraq’s growing resort to poison gas on the
battlefield as well as against civilians became somewhat of an
embarrassment to the Reagan administration.
DISINFORMATION
CAMPAIGN
At first,
when journalists stood on the verge of exposing Iraq’s wartime
use of chemical weapons in the spring of 1984, Washington moved
preemptively to condemn the Iraqis, slapping a ban on the export
of chemical precursors to both Iraq and Iran. Internal documents
show that US officials had been aware of Iraq’s conduct for at
least six months.[4]
Their condemnation came not a moment too late, because Iraq stood
accused of the first recorded use of a nerve agent (tabun) on
the battlefield. Then Donald Rumsfeld, President Ronald Reagan’s
special envoy to the Middle East, undercut this stern message
when he traveled to Baghdad to explain that Washington’s position
had been merely one of principle. Rumsfeld assured Iraq’s foreign
minister, Tariq Aziz, that the Reagan administration’s support
for the war against Iran and normalization of relations remained
“undiminished.”[5]
On November 26, 1984, the Iraqis were rewarded with the resumption
of the diplomatic ties that had been severed since the June 1967
war. During Iran’s next “final” offensive, in the spring of 1985,
Iraq proved undeterred, deploying more sophisticated chemical
weapons delivery systems in countering the enemy.
By 1987,
when the Iraqi regime started attacking Kurdish civilians (in
both Iran and Iraq) with gas, Iraq’s sponsors in Washington were
forced to engage in further damage control. Buoyed by the defeat
of their bureaucratic opponents in the Iran-contra scandal, they
had stepped up their support of a regime that most agreed was
unsavory but saw as a necessary bulwark against the spread of
Islamist radicalism in the sensitive Gulf region. They plied the
Iraqis with satellite intelligence of Iranian troop movements
and encouraged allied Arab states to provide them with military
hardware. These measures led the Iraqis to believe that they enjoyed
Washington’s benign tolerance of their war effort, whatever the
means deployed. The result was more lethal chemical agents, used
more massively than before, targeting now also civilian populations.
The policy reached its apex with the wholesale gassing of the
large Iraqi Kurdish town of Halabja in March 1988, an attack in
which several thousand civilians perished.[6]
When evidence
of civilian chemical casualties first emerged in April 1987, the
Reagan administration moved from preemptive condemnation to active
disinformation in an effort to diffuse Iraq’s responsibility for
waging chemical warfare. By blaming both sides equally, Iraq would
effectively be let off the hook. By the fall of 1987, word was
out that Iran had begun to respond to Iraqi chemical weapons outrages
in kind. Baghdad repeatedly made such claims, and now Washington
chimed in.[7] Iran thus had to fight off accusations
of perpetrating precisely the kinds of atrocities from which it
had always claimed it had refrained out of deference to moral
principles rooted in humanity and religion (not to mention that
it lagged years behind Iraq in developing these weapons). Whatever
voice it had on chemical warfare -- the only rhetorical edge it
had enjoyed over Iraq in the war -- was now drowned out by contrary
claims that directly challenged the moral high ground it had professed
to be taking. Iran’s own admonitions that it might eventually
have no choice but to wage chemical warfare of its own certainly
did not help.
NAKED DECEPTION
Initially,
Iraqi claims that Iran was using chemical weapons had no empirical
basis, and so they set about creating one. This was simple, since
Iraq had a ready supply of chemical casualties of its own. These
derived from two sources: gas dispersed incompetently by its own
forces, and poorly manufactured, leaking munitions. There is substantial
evidence that Iraqi airplanes routinely but unintentionally gassed
their own ground forces. These self-inflicted casualties were
often due to shifting winds, and they were especially likely to
occur along the front lines where both sides’ troops were entrenched
in close proximity.[8]
The problem became more acute when Iran acquired American Hawk
anti-aircraft missiles as part of the Iran-contra deals. Iran’s
new missile capability forced Iraqi bombers to fly at much higher
altitudes, which greatly enlarged the field of dispersal of the
various gases dropped.
A post-war
CIA report confirms the blowback problem. In attacking Iranian
troops with chemical weapons, the CIA said, Iraq demonstrated
“relatively little regard for the safety of Iraq’s own troops
who were in or near the chemically contaminated area…. Regardless
of Iraq’s rationale, large numbers of Iraq’s own troops were killed
or injured during Iraqi chemical attacks.”[9] Iraqi soldiers and pilots, interviewed in Iraq
and elsewhere over the past four years, corroborate this conclusion.
One pilot asserted that Iraqi planes accidentally bombed their
own forces on many occasions with both conventional and chemical
weapons. These mistakes, he said, caused many casualties. Moreover,
he said, “Saddam Hussein was able to use the Iraqi victims as
evidence of Iranian chemical weapons use.”[10]
Iraq’s chemical
casualties were served up to visiting UN chemical experts in 1987
and 1988. Although the latter stated they were unable to establish
that these were the victims of Iranian gas attacks, the public
impression was left that indeed they were[11]; in private conversations in
the UN corridors in New York, however, the experts made clear
that in their minds these soldiers were victims of Iraq’s careless
use of its own chemical munitions.[12]
When Iraqi
planes gassed Halabja, the embarrassment potential was such that
Washington went into disinformation overdrive. It took a week
before the rhetorical counter-attack was ready for public display,
but it was spectacularly successful. By suggesting deviously and
on the basis of the flimsiest evidence that not only Iraq but
also Iran had used gas in Halabja, State Department spokesmen
lifted the onus off the Iraqis.[13]
Declassified cables show that US diplomats were then instructed
to propagate this myth and dodge the “What’s the evidence” question
with the stock “Sorry, but that’s classified information” response.[14]
They found a receptive audience. After all, why should anyone
care? By taking American hostages, sponsoring the bombings and
kidnappings carried out by Hizballah, and threatening the Middle
East with an Islamic makeover on the Khomeini model, Iran had
found itself in the international doghouse. Security Council Resolution
612 (May 3, 1988) condemning the Halabja atrocity came a long
two months after the event and cast its disapproval on both governments
in equal measure.[15] In the final analysis, the only evidence for
the convenient claim that Iran used chemical weapons during the
war is that the US government said so. Somehow, this sufficed.
The naked
deception over Halabja, received with hosannas in Baghdad, gave
the Iraqis the green light they needed to gas the war to an end.
In a series of lightning counter-assaults against Iranian troops
and Iraqi Kurdish guerrillas they used chemical weapons on the
first day of each offensive to terrorize their adversaries, then
pummeled the demoralized and retreating forces with tons of conventional
munitions. They also threatened to place chemical payloads on
the long-range missiles with which they had started bombarding
Tehran, prompting a mass evacuation of civilians. Within three
months, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini acquiesced to drinking from
the “cup of poison,” acknowledging Iran’s inability to carry on
and agreeing to a humiliating ceasefire.
“DROPS OF
INK ON PAPER”
Iran and
Iraq emerged from the war badly scarred, but to the Iranians the
profound feeling of having been virtually alone, and -- at least
on the chemical weapons issue -- of having been right and yet
scorned, left perhaps the deepest scar. The young and inexperienced
Islamic Republic learned two important lessons from its experience:
first, never again allow yourself to be in a position of such
strategic vulnerability and second, when you are facing the world’s
superpower, multilateral treaties and conventions are worthless.
They decided to act on these insights.
It is generally
accepted that toward the end of the war Iran had gained the capability
to field its own chemical weapons. Parliamentary speaker (and
future president) Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani declared two months
after war’s end that “chemical bombs and biological weapons are
poor man’s atomic bombs and can easily be produced. We should
at least consider them for our defense…. Although the use of such
weapons is inhuman, the war taught us that international laws
are only drops of ink on paper.”[16]
In the 1990s Iraq was removed as a strategic threat, and Iran
became an enthusiastic participant in international negotiations
aimed at banning chemical weapons. In due course, after ratifying
the Chemical Weapons Convention in 1997, Iran complied with its
obligation under the convention to report its possession of chemical
weapons, and these were subsequently destroyed under international
supervision. Nevertheless, there are persistent suspicions that
Iran continues to have an active chemical weapons program.[17]
If the suspicions
are correct, the program would be an indisputable legacy of Iraq’s
repeated use of gas during the war and the failure of the international
community to put an end to it. Moreover, the world’s ability to
challenge Iran on any programs it may have today is reduced dramatically
by the Iranian perception that it has nothing to protect it from
WMD in the hands of a regional power, such as Israel, but its
own WMD deterrent. The current standoff over Iran’s alleged nuclear
weapons program is a graphic illustration of the problem.
Where to
from here? How the nuclear question plays out will depend in part
on how the internal debate unfolds inside Iran. One option that
should be given serious consideration is the idea of a “grand
bargain,” whereby Iran would give up its nuclear weapons program,
cease its military support of Palestinian and Lebanese militant
groups, and desist from running interference in Iraq in exchange
for international support for its peaceful nuclear industry, guarantees
of protection from regime change and other hostile military endeavors,
and full reintegration into the community of nations. The Bush
administration, whose accusations about Iran’s nuclear weapons
program are undermined by its track record of WMD claims in the
run-up to the war in Iraq, would be prudent to work toward this
goal before the nuclear genie successfully springs its confines.
