Many Western governments insist that Iran’s nuclear program is aimed at creating weapons, a charge Iran denies. The accusation [...]]]> Ali Asghar Soltanieh, Iran’s envoy to the United Nations’s nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, told a press conference that an Iranian nuclear bomb would be a “strategic mistake” and create a “disadvantageous situation” for Iran.

Many Western governments insist that Iran’s nuclear program is aimed at creating weapons, a charge Iran denies. The accusation also misses some of the nuance between an Iranian “breakout capability” — the ability to quickly weaponize a fully-realized peaceful nuclear program — and an actual nuclear weapon.

Reuters has the report on Soltanieh’s comments:

Ali Asghar Soltanieh, Iran’s ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), suggested the Islamic Republic could never compete in terms of the numbers of warheads possessed by the nuclear-armed major powers.

It would therefore be at a disadvantage in relation to these countries if it developed atomic bombs, Soltanieh said.

“That is the reason we will never make this strategic mistake,” he told a conference at IAEA headquarters in Vienna. “We are as strong as those countries without nuclear weapons.”

Iran’s revolutionary leader and subsequently, first Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, reportedly used to say that nuclear weapons are evil and kill innocent civilians, which is prohibited by Islam. Therefore, nuclear weapons are un-Islamic.

But a letter from Khomeini, released in 2006 by former Iranian President Hashemi Rafsanjani, has challenged this assertion.

The 1988 letter reportedly said that Iran would need nuclear weapons to end the then-long-running war with Iraq, according to the BBC.

Soltanieh’s position gets some support from former Australian foreign minister Gareth Evans. In the latest Reuters report, Evans implies that Iran merely seeks a breakout capability:

Gareth Evans, co-chair of an international commission which last year issued a report on eliminating nuclear threats, told the same gathering he believed Iran “is to be taken seriously when it says it will not actually weaponize.”

There are “a number of reasons for thinking that Iran will … stop well short of actually making nuclear weapons that it may soon have the capability to produce,” the former Australian foreign minister said in a speech.

They included the risk of an Israeli attack, zero Russian and Chinese tolerance for an Iranian bomb, even tougher international sanctions and the fact that Islam does not accept weapons of mass destruction, he said.

“This is not a factor to which Western cynics would give much credence but I have to say it is echoed very strongly in every private conversation I’ve ever had with Iranian officials,” Evans, a veteran diplomatic trouble-shooter, said.

Harrop, a faculty expert on Iran at [...]]]> W. Scott Harrop has an interesting piece on the Iranian Review of Foreign Affairs. In “Obama’s Iran Policy: Mutual Respect Matters,” (pdf), he traces President Barack Obama’s rhetoric about mutual respect with Iran, starting from the campaign, through the famous Norouz message, and up to the present.

Harrop, a faculty expert on Iran at the University of Virginia, also searches out the idea of “mutual respect” in Obama’s personal biography and even its appearances in  his writings. Harrop notes the use of the phrase throughout the history of the Islamic Republic, from the leader of the revolution, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to current president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

But Harrop concludes that the policies pursued by the administration don’t match up with Iranian expectations of “mutual respect” (my emphasis):

In his Administration’s zeal to obtain greater international support for further sanctions, President Obama vowed to ensure that the “international message” to Iran was unified and unmistakable. Yet he was apparently tone deaf about how that message of pressure was actually received inside Iran. Obama might rationalize that “biting” Iran economically is better than military force, but he disregards how such pressures will be deemed by Iran as contradicting professions of respect. More likely, they are driving Iran away from the table, or at best, making it more difficult.

The key problem reduces to not comprehending what “mutual respect” means to Iran. Sanctions, pressures, and threats are inimical to the ideal of mutual respect — a sure fire way to demonstrate that seemingly pleasing words to a Western ear will be rendered as a trick, a disrespectful deceit, to an Iranian ear.

Here’s the abstract and here’s the PDF of the whole article.