The subtitle of Gareth Porter’s new book, “The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare,” is well-chosen. Large parts of “A Manufactured Crisis” are indeed untold till now. They amount to what the author terms an “alternative narrative”.

Courtesy of Gareth Porter.

But don’t be misled by “alternative”. This is not the work of some crank who imagines conspiracies where none exist. One senses, rather, from the author’s meticulous sourcing and the extent of his research that what motivates him is a fierce hunger for truth and aversion to deceit.

Porter has been investigating the Iranian nuclear case for the best part of a decade. The result of his researches is both a fascinating addition to a growing corpus, unlike any previous work on the issue, and a disturbing indictment of U.S. and Israeli policies.

One central theme is that hidden motives have coloured these policies. On the U.S. side, Porter explains, the end of the Cold War led to a federal bureaucratic interest in exaggerating the WMD and missile threat posed by Iran (and other emerging countries) to justify funding bids.

During the presidency of George W. Bush, some senior administration members also sought to exploit nuclear fears to “delegitimise” the Iranian government and engineer a pretext for enforced regime change.

On the Israeli side, every government since 1992 – both Likud and Labour – has seen advantage in dramatising the Iranian threat and in demonising Iran’s leaders.

“Iran and Shi’a fundamentalism are the greatest threats to global peace,” proclaimed one Israeli document. The purpose has been to maintain the value of Israel to the U.S. as a “strategic ally”, to distract global unease from Israel’s nuclear weapons arsenal, and to create excuses for remaining in occupation of Palestinian territory.

Porter concludes: “U.S. and Israeli policies have been driven by political and bureaucratic interests, not by a rational, objective assessment of available indicators of the motives and intentions of Iranian leaders.”

Another central theme, one that complements the hidden motive theme, is that intelligence material and intelligence assessments have played a baleful part in this saga.

Faulty interpretation of intelligence in the early 1990s led U.S. analysts to believe in a full-scale, clandestine nuclear weapons programme, according to Porter, whereas, in his view, the weapons programme never amounted to more than some weapons-related research between the late 1990s and 2003.

Faulty interpretations can be forgiven. More seriously, Porter’s researches suggest that in the first half of the last decade, U.S. analysts ignored or discounted evidence that called into question the assessments made in the 1990s.

A CIA contract officer who transmitted human reporting that Iran did not intend to “weaponise” the product of its enrichment plants was ordered to cease contact with the source. Those within the CIA who pointed out the absence of evidence that Iran’s leaders had decided to make a nuclear weapon were unable to get this reflected in assessments.

Analysts refused to give weight to the outlawing of nuclear weapons on religious grounds, although by then it was clear that Iranians had respected a similar religious ban on chemical weapons. Iranian assurances of peaceful intent, or at least of an intention to go no further than mastering the fuel cycle, “to enable neighbours to draw the necessary inference”, were disregarded.

A still more serious charge is that Israel has engaged in the forgery and fabrication of intelligence.

Since early 2008 the case against Iran has rested mainly on material stored on a laptop. The material came into U.S. hands in 2004, and was passed to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in 2005. For two and a half years, IAEA officials regarded the material as dubious and made no use of it. It was only in 2008 that they started to press Iran to answer for it. Porter implies that their initial scepticism was justified by laying out extensive grounds to believe that Israel fabricated this crucial material.

Porter is also convinced that Israel fabricated two other documents that have kept the Iranian case alive, despite a U.S. National Intelligence (NIE) finding in late 2007 that Iran had abandoned its nuclear weapons programme in 2003, and despite the IAEA reporting in early 2008 that Iran had resolved all the concerns that had arisen out of IAEA investigations in the preceding years.

In 2008, Israel passed to the IAEA intelligence suggesting that, years earlier, Iran had conducted nuclear weapon detonation tests at its Parchin military site. Then in 2009 Israel supplied “evidence” that Iran had resumed weapons-related research post-2003.

If Porter is right, and if all three of these grounds for pursuing the case against Iran were fabricated, that is a very serious matter. The U.S. and its European allies, assuming this intelligence to be reliable, have rejected Iranian protests to the contrary. Indeed, they have interpreted the Iranian response as a refusal to cooperate with the IAEA, and on that basis they have mobilised international support for sanctioning Iran to the hilt. Those sanctions have hurt Iranians and have damaged European and Asian economies.

The supposed refusal to cooperate has also served to justify maintaining U.N. demands that were first made of Iran before the 2007 NIE, when it seemed reasonable to consider Iran’s nuclear programme a threat to peace, but which became inappropriate after the 2007 NIE and once the IAEA had reported the resolution of all its pre-2008 concerns.

No doubt some readers will prefer to continue believing in the authenticity of this Israeli intelligence material. That may or may not turn out to be the right call.

One inference, though, from “Manufactured Crisis” looks inescapable. There has never been conclusive evidence that Iran’s Islamic leaders want to have or to use nuclear weapons. All talk of an “Iranian nuclear threat” is therefore premature. Consequently, the draconian measures implemented by the U.S. and its allies to avert that threat are unreasonable and unwarranted.

*Peter Jenkins was a British career diplomat for 33 years following studies at the universities of Cambridge and Harvard. He served in Vienna (twice), Washington, Paris, Brasilia and Geneva. His last assignment (2001-06) was that of UK Ambassador to the IAEA and UN (Vienna). Since 2006 he has represented the Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency Partnership.

A Dangerous Delusion is the work of one of Britain’s most brilliant political commentators, Peter Oborne, and an Irish physicist, David Morrison, who has written powerfully about the misleading of British public and parliamentary opinion in the run-up to the 2003 Iraq War.

This book will infuriate neoconservatives, Likudniks and members of the Saudi royal family but enlighten all who struggle with what to think about the claim that Iran’s nuclear programme threatens the survival of Israel, the security of Arab states in the Persian Gulf, and global peace.

Writing with verve and concision as well as with the indignation that has been a feature of good criticism since the days of Juvenal, the authors spare the reader potentially tedious detail so that the book can be devoured in a matter of hours.

Their purpose, stated early in the work, is to argue that U.S. and European confrontation with Iran over its nuclear activities is unnecessary and irrational. Insofar as some concern about Iranian intentions has been and is justified, that concern can be allayed by measures that Iran has been ready to volunteer since 2005 and by more intrusive international monitoring.

An international legal instrument, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), has a starring part in the story. This treaty, one of the fruits of the détente following the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, has been remarkably successful in discouraging the spread of nuclear weapons. Iran has been a party since the NPT entered into force in 1970. "It's time we [in the West] asked why we have felt such a need to stigmatise and punish Iran."
-- A Dangerous Delusion

In 1968 a senior U.S. official testified before the Senate that the newly drafted NPT did not prohibit the acquisition of nuclear technologies that could be used for military as well as civil purposes (dual-use).

It was assumed that parties would have an interest in complying with a treaty designed to limit the spread of devastating weapons and that those tempted to stray would be deterred by frequent international monitoring of the use of nuclear material.

Iran’s troubles began with India’s 1974 nuclear test. Although India had not signed, let alone ratified, the NPT and had used plutonium to fuel its device, the United States and Europe interpreted the explosion as evidence that the NPT’s drafters had blundered in failing to prohibit have-nots from acquiring dual-use technologies such as uranium enrichment.

They formed the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) and set about making emerging states’ acquisition of such technologies progressively harder – in a sense, amending the NPT without the consent of most of its parties.

Then, in the 1990s, Israeli politicians began to claim publicly that Iran had a nuclear weapons programme and was only a few years away from producing warheads.

As a result, when Iranian opponents of the Islamic Republic claimed in 2002 that Iran was secretly building a uranium enrichment plant, many U.N. members were ready to believe that Iran was violating or was about to violate the NPT. Such was the sense of danger generated by the United States and some of its allies that people overlooked the absence of evidence that Iran had even intended the enrichment plant to be secret.

Instead, Iranian admission that scientists and engineers had engaged in undeclared nuclear research led people to assume that Iran’s obligation to declare the enrichment plant 180 days before the introduction of nuclear material (and not earlier) would have been ignored had it not been for the opposition group’s whistle-blowing.

Iran’s travails since 2004 – condemnation by the IAEA Board of Governors and the U.N. Security Council, ever harsher sanctions, U.S. and Israeli military threats in violation of the U.N. Charter – would have been both logical and rough justice if there had been evidence that Iran was intent on acquiring nuclear weapons.

That is not the case, however, as Oborne and Morrison make plain. On the contrary, since 2007 U.S. intelligence estimates have stressed the absence of an Iranian decision to use its enrichment plants to make fuel for nuclear weapons; the IAEA has repeatedly stated that Iran’s known nuclear material remains in civil use; and the only nuclear weapon activity in Iran for which there is evidence is the kind of research that many NPT parties are assumed to have undertaken.

Trying to account for this irrational handling of the Iranian case, the authors posit a U.S. determination to prevent Iran from becoming a major Middle East power.

That view may be the most questionable of their judgements, as possible explanations exist elsewhere: intensive lobbying in Washington, London and Paris by Israel and Saudi Arabia, which see Iran as a regional rival and need to justify the strategic demands they make of the United States, the influence of counter-proliferation experts obsessed with closing an imagined NPT loophole, the Islamic Republic’s terrorism and human rights record, and antagonisms born of bitter memories.

The hypocrisy of politicians is, rightly, a target of the authors’ indignation. In 2010 then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, defending the imposition of sanctions, proclaimed: “Our goal is to pressure the Iranian government… without contributing to the suffering of ordinary Iranians.”

In 2012 President Obama, seeking re-election, boasted: “We organised the strongest sanctions in history and it is [sic] crippling the Iranian economy.”

But the authors’ fiercest indignation is reserved for the mainstream media, whom they indict for embedding in public discourse the idea that Iran has or is seeking nuclear weapons by ignoring facts and serving as a conduit for anti-Iranian propaganda.

By endorsing the proposition that Iran’s nuclear ambitions must be curbed by sanctions or the use of force, the mainstream media risk repeating their past mistake of failing to question the Bush/Blair case for war on Saddam Hussein.

A Dangerous Delusion was written before Iran’s June presidential election, begging the question of whether the re-emergence of pragmatic diplomatists in Tehran will encourage Western politicians to heed the “plea for sanity” with which Oborne and Morrison close.

“It’s time we [in the West] asked…why we have felt such a need to stigmatise and punish Iran….Once we do that…we may find it surprisingly easy to strike a deal which can satisfy all sides.”

*Peter Jenkins was a British career diplomat for 33 years following studies at the universities of Cambridge and Harvard. He served in Vienna (twice), Washington, Paris, Brasilia and Geneva. His last assignment (2001-06) was that of UK Ambassador to the IAEA and UN (Vienna). Since 2006 he has represented the Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency Partnership, advised the Director of IIASA and set up a partnership, ADRgAmbassadors, with former diplomatic colleagues, to offer the corporate sector dispute resolution and solutions to cross-border problems.