Adrian Hamilton: Forget any idea of a military strike on Iran

Whatever its reasons, the American intelligence community's volte face on Iran's nuclear weapons programme is a political bombshell.

You can still argue about where it places Iran as a potential "nuclear proliferator", as the Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, still prefers to see it. Or you can use the report as further proof of the effectiveness of the West's hard-cop, soft-cop approach to negotiation, as President Bush has done. But what you can't say is that a report which says Iran is no longer pursuing a programme of nuclear weapons, and hasn't since 2003, does not alter the terms of the political debate, within America and outside.

Barely had Monday's National Intelligence Estimate landed on a largely unsuspecting public than the Chinese were arguing that it undermined the case for further United Nations sanctions against Iran, the US Democrats were hailing it as a fatal blow to Bush's policy of confrontation with Tehran, and the British and American governments were easing away from an emphasis on punishment by sanctions to a belief in the virtues of diplomacy.

Consider that only a week ago Britain and America had thought they had tougher measures in the UN Security Council in the bag, that talks between the European Union and Tehran had ended with a general air of despondency at Iran's new obduracy, that Hillary Clinton was putting herself on the side of the Washington hawks where Iran was concerned, and that President Bush was highlighting the threat of a nuclear Iran as the greatest danger to world peace, and you can see just what a huge impact the report is having.

At the most basic level, the report should have put paid for the moment at least to any idea of a military strike. That was probably true even without the intervention of the intelligence community, given the increasingly public opposition of the US military in recent months. But it now makes that opposition politically persuasive, not least for the Democrat contenders for the presidency.

Of course you can argue, as the White House and British government now do, that this still leaves the problem of Iran's determination to press ahead with uranium enrichment. The Iranians claim it is for peaceful purposes and is allowed under the Nuclear Proliferation Treaty. Its critics say the programme could be just as easily applied to produce weapons-grade material, by the middle of the next decade according to the US report, earlier in the view of others.

But if this report could achieve anything really positive it should surely be to end this barren debate, and the policy of punishment and threat against Iran which the White House and the Foreign Office still seem determined to pursue regardless. In 2005, US intelligence concluded in a report that Iran was intent on a clandestine policy of nuclear weaponry. This was used repeatedly by the White House and London to denigrate the work of the International Atomic Energy Agency in supervising Iran's programmes, and to buttress the case of heavy sanctions and threatened military strikes against the country.

The facts as now presented by the US intelligence community and they seem very certain of them is that in 2003 Iran gave up directly pursuing nuclear weaponry. The report puts it down to Western pressure. But there is another, even more plausible reason. In 2003, Saddam Hussein fell. Up until then, he was Iran's main enemy, a dictator who had used chemical weapons extensively against them and seemed determined to up his weapons if he could. It made sense for Iran to prepare for the worst.

Relieved of this danger by the fall of Saddam, and the defeat of its other foe to the east, the Taliban, Tehran hastened to offer help and partnership to the West and to participate in the post-war reordering of the region. It also started a two-year suspension of its uranium-enrichment plan. To no avail. The enrichment suspension gained it nothing other than the offer of alternative uranium supplies from the West. The US rebuffed its overtures, worked to exclude it from Iraq and Afghanistan and then demonised it as the single most dangerous source of instability in the Middle East. With or without the election of a new, more radical President in Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, it made sense for Iran to keep its options open, build up its nuclear knowledge and start preparing for assault again.

The lesson of this week's Washington report is not that Iran has given up on nuclear technology with a possible military use in mind. It may well want that knowledge in its locker for future action. But so far it isn't actually diverting the materials or technology for weapons use. If we want to prevent that, we could do no better than return to 2003, and proper IAEA inspections, before fear, distrust and Bush and Blair's Manichaean vision of the world put the West on a collision course with Iran, brandishing a 2005 Intelligence Estimate which America's own security agencies have now disowned.

a.hamilton@independent.co.uk

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