The latest American intelligence estimate on Iran has provoked an emotional response in Europe reminiscent of the euphoria inspired by Chamberlain's words on Sept. 30, 1938, as he appeared before the throng in front of 10 Downing Street and announced that he had achieved "peace in our time." Even if many commentators warn not to reduce the pressure on Tehran, the dominant sentiment is a feeling of relief: a sentiment to which the German weekly Die Zeit, for example, gave expression with the headline "Phew! There'll Be No World War Then!" The focus of the coverage in the media is not on the bitter realization that until 2003 the Iranian military apparatus was explicitly pursuing the development of an atomic weapon, but rather on the "good news" in the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE): namely that this military program "was halted primarily in response to international pressure," which is supposed to prove that "Iran may be more vulnerable to influence on the issue than we judged previously." If Iran gave in to international pressure in 2003, the implicit reasoning of the report runs, then it will certainly do so as well in the future. Thus, summarizing the implications of the NIE report, the author of the article in Die Zeit can conclude that "the Iranian regime does not so much conduct its foreign policy according to ideological criteria, but rather according to a lucid cost-benefit analysis."
In such reflections, wishful-thinking has anesthetized rational thought. The last five years of Iranian diplomacy have demonstrated beyond doubt that the Mullah dictatorship does not work like other states. Tehran has ignored both the "carrots" of economic incentives and the "sticks" of international isolation and has pursued a weapons-related nuclear program at all cost. The intelligence report does not even tangentially touch upon this experience. Instead, it tries to hide the rubble of the failed diplomatic initiatives behind a pleasing new image of Iran: Tehran, the report affirms, "is less determined to develop nuclear weapons than we have been judging since 2005." The intelligence agencies adduce only a single proof of this supposed new attitude: in fall 2003, Tehran is alleged to have halted its nuclear weapons program "in response to increasing international scrutiny and pressure." But precisely this assertion -- the core finding of the report, from which all its other conclusions follow -- is obviously unfounded.
'International Pressure'
At the time, some six months after the start of the Iraq War, the discord between American and European Iran policy had reached a high point. The United States was not prepared to concede a nuclear program to a regime like that of Iran, since such a program would inevitably be used for military purposes. Working through the U.N. Security Council, the U.S. hoped to be able to bring the illegally developed Iranian nuclear program to a stop.
France and Germany, on the other hand, were attempting to show that a patient dialogue on matters of nonproliferation could achieve better results than the strategy of disarmament by force pursued by the Americans in Iraq. In August 2003, against the massive opposition of the United States, they offered Iran conditional recognition of its nuclear program.
The European approach won out. In fall 2003, the "EU-3" -- Germany, France and Great Britain -- acknowledged Iran's "right to use atomic energy peacefully and in conformity with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty," as a German government press release from Oct. 22, 2003, puts it. In return, the Iranian regime agreed to make two pseudo-concessions: It signed a new oversight treaty with the IAEA -- without, however, ever ratifying it -- and it voluntarily suspended uranium enrichment for a few weeks. The agreement "demonstrates the success of a strategy of cooperation," then-German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder enthused. And for Germany, it was a success, as German exports to Iran increased by 20 percent in 2003 and another 33 percent in 2004. After 18 years of incessant violations of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, this deal was surely the best thing that could have happened for Tehran.
It is not impossible that Tehran in fact suspended its work on nuclear warheads at the time. But it was under no pressure to do so: The "international pressure" of which the NIE speaks did not exist. In any case, the core of its nuclear weapons program -- uranium enrichment and plutonium production -- remained intact. The surrender of American diplomacy to the European strategy permitted the regime now openly to pursue its hitherto secret program for the production of enriched uranium and plutonium under the comforting mantle of the Non-Proliferation Treaty.
In the intervening years as well, there has never been any serious "international pressure" applied to the Iranian regime. Thus, between 2003 and 2005 the EU succeeded in preventing the Iranian nuclear question from being referred to the U.N. Security Council. During all this time, work on Iran's nuclear program continued at an accelerated pace. Germany's then-Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer found the most fitting expression to describe the parallel activism of Iran and the Europeans. A Sept. 7, 2004, report in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung notes: "Fischer said that in the negotiations on the Iranian nuclear program, the Europeans had always let it be known that the Iranians should regard Europe as a 'protective shield' as far as their strategic interests are concerned." A "protective shield": The principal aim of German policy consisted not in stopping Iran from enriching uranium, but rather in stopping the United States from stopping Iran.
At the same time, Germany and other European states increased their export guarantees for enterprises doing business with Iran. The 2004 annual report on Germany's program of so-called Hermes export credits [Hermes-Bürgschaften] waxes positively rapturous on the subject of German-Iranian trade: "The export guarantees provided by the federal government played a major role in German exports to Iran. The volume of coverage in relation to Iranian orders increased by nearly three and a half times to around €2.3 billion. Thus the federal government guaranteed 65 percent of all German exports to the country. Iran enjoyed the second-highest level of coverage for 2004, only slightly behind China." In addition, on June 23, 2005 -- only days after the election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as Iranian President -- a German-Iranian Investment Agreement came into force. The "Red-Green" government of Gerhard Schröder and Joschka Fischer signed the agreement in August 2002, in order "to deepen the economic cooperation between the two states for their mutual benefit" (German Bundestag, Drucksache 15/1055).
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