The Year in Ideas: It’s all about Iran

Towards the end of 2007, in the Iranian city of Kermanshah, the authorities put to death a young man of 21 for the crime of sodomy. The importance of this act of judicial murder was not primarily that the man had been a boy of 13 when the “crime” had been committed, nor that had Makvan Mouloodzadeh been born a citizen of most other countries in the world he would still be alive. It was that a nullification of the sentence as unIslamic by the Iranian Chief Justice was then overturned by a group of judges convened as the Special Supervision Bureau of the Iranian Justice Department.

In 2008, this divided administration, with its wildly competing understandings of what is and isn’t Islamic, will be continuing a programme of enriching the uranium necessary for the creation of a nuclear weapon while continuing to refuse access to the inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency. In the same year, the international community will have to decide whether it wants to intensify its attempts to prevent this, or to give up and allow the gradual development of an Islamist bomb – 2008 will be the year of Iran.

As the execution arrangements were being finalised in Kermanshah prision, the finishing touches were being made in Washington to the National Intelligence Estimates report of 16 US security agencies on the state of the Iranian nuclear programme. This report concluded that Iran continued its policy of uranium enrichment and also the development of missiles and other delivery systems. But what caught most international attention was the conclusion that Iran had abandoned weaponisation of a device back in 2003, around the time of the invasion of Iraq and the abandonment by Libya of its own nuclear programme. The NIE report estimated that the Iranian weaponisation was “halted primarily in response to international pressure [which] suggests Iran may be more vulnerable to influence on the issue than we judged”.

The NIE report, or, rather, a highly selective version of it, has been greeted with an exaggerated relief from those who have not only opposed any possibility of military action against Iran – not unreasonably – but also by those who have not really wanted any action whatsoever against Iran. As a report in The New York Times put it, not only does war appear to be “off the agenda”, but “It will be difficult to persuade the international community to approve harsher United Nations sanctions against Iran.”

The trouble in 2008 is that the reality facing our leaders and others – including any Democrat who might be elected in November – still consists of the probable progress of Iran towards the development of its own nuclear device. Also, back in 2003, the Iranian government agreed with Britain, France and Germany to stop uranium enrichment, but then reneged on its agreement. Weaponisation of a device, as Pakistan proved in the Nineties, is a relatively simple business once you have sufficient enriched uranium. Only intrusive international inspection can tell for sure whether or not this transition is under way. At the moment Iran does not allow such inspection.

The NIE’s earliest estimate for sufficient uranium enrichment to produce an Iranian bomb is 2010. Unless international pressure results in agreement this year, Iran’s neighbours must live with the prospect that the medievalists who execute gay boys could soon have the bomb. And some of them may not be able to.