The United Nations security council deadline for Iran to stop producing enriched uranium expired on August 31, and UN secretary Kofi Annan arrived in Tehran on September 2. Washington demands UN sanctions against Iran if it doesn’t stop, and hints at air strikes against Iranian nuclear installations if sanctions don’t happen or don’t work. Welcome to the crisis.

The media love a crisis, but this one lacks credibility. In June, John Negroponte, US director of national intelligence, said that Iran could have a nuclear bomb ready between 2010 and 2015. But he said “could”, not “will”, and only in five or ten years’ time. So why are we having a crisis this autumn?

The US’s explanation is that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad threatened in May to “wipe Israel off the map,” and that nuclear weapons are the way he plans to do it. As proof of Iran’s evil ambitions, it points to the fact, revealed in 2003, that Iran had been concealing some parts of its so-called peaceful nuclear energy programme from the International Atomic Energy Agency for 18 years.

Empty threats

But there are a number of holes in this narrative, and the first is that Ahmadinejad never said he wanted to “wipe Israel off the map.” This is a deliberate mistranslation of his actual words, a direct quote from the late Ayatollah Khomeini, who said some 20 years ago that “this regime occupying Jerusalem... must vanish from the page of time.”

It was a statement about the future as ordained by God. It was not a threat to destroy Israel. Attacking Israel has never been Iranian policy, and the man who really runs Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, publicly stated that Iran “will not commit aggression against any nation.” While Ahmadinejad continues to say nasty things about Israel, he too has explicitly rejected accusations that Iran plans to attack it.

If Iran doesn’t have a serious nuclear weapons programme, why did it hide two of its nuclear facilities from the IAEA for 18 years? Eighteen years before 2003 was 1987, at the height of Saddam Hussein’s US-backed war against Iran, with Iraqi missiles falling daily on Iranian cities. They had conventional explosive warheads, but the Iranians rightly suspected that Saddam was working on nuclear weapons as well.

Dangerous encore

So the Iranians probably decided to revive the Shah’s old nuclear weapons programme, and hid the plans for the new facilities to keep them off Saddam’s target list and to avoid a confrontation with the IAEA. Then the war ended, and work on Iranian nuclear weapons stopped too, after UN inspectors dismantled Saddam’s nuclear programme. We can be sure of this because Iran would have had nuclear weapons long ago if it had wanted them badly enough.

The undeclared nuclear facilities remained secret because it was embarrassing to admit that Iran had concealed them, but no great effort went into finishing them. But the fact that Iran hid them for so long is the only reason that anybody has for doubting the legitimacy of its current actions, since it is quite legal for a signatory of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty to develop technologies for enriching nuclear fuels for power plants.

Iran’s reply to the security council offered further negotiations on the issue, though it will not agree to stop enriching uranium as a precondition for talks. Neither Russia nor China, two veto-holding powers, will vote to impose sanctions on Iran, nor will a number of the non-permanent members of the security council. So if the Bush administration believes that this is urgent, it will have to act alone and outside the law. Would it really do such a foolish thing again after the Iraq fiasco? Unfortunately, it might.