This follows Google’s 2008 decision to include the historically inaccurate and politically charged name “Arabian Gulf” alongside “Persian Gulf” in their Google Earth application.

The name “Persian Gulf” is historically accurate, legally acknowledged, apolitical and internationally recognized.  But in the past century, and particularly at times of escalating tensions, there have been efforts to exploit the name of the Persian Gulf as a political tool—including by the likes of Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden.

In 2004, NIAC successfully worked with National Geographic to correct its maps that used the erroneous title for the Persian Gulf.  Now, we need to act to make sure Google is not a tool of historical revisionism that sows ethnic and political divisions.

Sign your name on our open letter to Google’s CEO Larry Page to call on Google to stop playing name games with the Persian Gulf and to use the correct name.  We will send the letter out on Monday, May 14, so make sure that you, your friends, and your family sign on to the letter before then.

NIAC will protect your privacy and keep you informed about this and similar campaigns. 

Latest Signatures

The tweets were directed at me by neoconservative upstarts Sohrab Ahmari and Peter Kohanloo in response to comments I tweeted (here and here) regarding an article written by Ahmari demonizing American academics who had recently travelled to Iran.

At the time, I was completely unaware of the author’s ideological affiliation and only later was it revealed to me that Ahmari is a fellow at the Henry Jackson Society, a neocon think tank in London. In a recent article, MJ Rosenberg provides a wonderful exposé revealing the agendas of Ahmari and some of his associates:

“Ahmari, the neocons’ favorite Iranian, is very much in the mold of the neocons’ favorite Iraqi. During the run-up to the 2003 invasion Ahmed Chalabi was their darling because, as an Iraqi émigré, he was thought to have unique credibility. Neocons loved hearing an Iraqi say that invading Iraq would not only prove successful but would be welcomed by his fellow Iraqis. Unfortunately, he turned out to be a fake, whose agenda was almost entirely personal. The war he and his friends promoted was an infamous catastrophe. And, to put it mildly, the invasion he told us that Iraqis would welcome was not welcomed.”

To neoconservatives’ disappointment, Iranian Americans, including myself, are unlikely to be familiar with the names of Ahmari or Kohanloo, let alone give those who argue for war on their motherland any credibility. As Rosenberg correctly observers, “Neither of these spokesmen [Ahmari and Kohanloo] have a following, either among Iranian Americans or Iranians, a fact that probably makes them deeply resentful of the Iranian-American organization that does, the National Iranian American Council (NIAC).”

It is no wonder Ahmari was so quick to take my personal tweets and turn them into a diatribe against NIAC. I simply assumed he was either an angry neo-royalist or an amateur journalist fixed on very superficial notions of liberty which, as an Iranian American, I felt compelled to confront. Therefore my comments were and proudly remain to be a reflection of my own views, not NIAC’s or anyone else.

In his article, Ahmari condemns three American professors, stating that “all three should be ashamed” for participating in a conference on the Occupy Wall Street movement held at Tehran University in Iran. “The mere presence of intellectuals from the free world,” Ahmari says “allows tyrants to burnish their otherwise stained reputations and overcome their sense of isolation.”

Arguments of this nature which seek to limit the scope of academic freedom are very familiar to me. As a graduate student at Columbia University, I recall similar arguments made by various conservative groups against the University’s decision to invite Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, to speak at a public forum in 2007. I was appalled by these arguments, not because I supported what President Ahmadinejad had to say, but because I did not think merely listening to ideas we deplore translated to our endorsement of those ideas. Similarly, I do not condemn these professors for maximizing on the academic freedom granted to them in this country, which in fact sets America’s democracy apart from Iran’s authoritative theocracy. Unlike Ahmari, I have faith in the strength of the American democratic resolve to resist even the most warped ideas.

Among the professors that partook in the conference was Dr. Heather Gautney, an assistant professor of sociology at Fordham University, and steadfast supporter of the Occupy Wall Street movement, who upon returning from the conference, published a piece on CNN.com recounting her experience in Iran.

In her piece, Dr. Gautney breaks many of the anti-American stereotypes attributed to Iranians and conveys a nuanced account of her experience in Iran. She portrays academics and students at Tehran University in a pro-American light with “desires to know America, study in its universities, and experience its unique culture.”

In reproaching her article, Ahmari claims, “Prof. Gautney betrayed not the slightest suspicion that the rosy picture of Iran she absorbed may have been stage-managed by her regime handlers.” In fact, in reflecting on whether to accept the invitation from Tehran University, Dr. Gautney wrote she was, “naturally filled with suspicion” but with encouragement from her friends and academic colleagues, she decided to accept the invitation.

Dr. Gautney also acknowledged that the short 100 hours she spent in Tehran, did not foster enough understanding to give her agency into deeper issues; such as the election fraud, the repression and the lack of freedom imposed by the Iranian regime. But Ahmari ignores this and continues with absurd reductionism to assert that “mere naivete cannot account for how these gruesome realities eluded professors Gautney, Hammond, and Vitae, or how they allowed themselves and their institutions to be co-opted by a theocratic regimes PR campaign.”

Ahmari gives much credit to the Islamic Republic’s power of persuasion and propaganda and deliberately ignores the basic reasoning power and liberties that America’s academics and citizens have to accept or reject the knowledge that they consume. If it were left to Ahmari, he would extend the “No Contact Policy”of the State Department that bars U.S. diplomats from communicating with their Iranian counterparts to the academic arena.

Three decades of growing strife in U.S.-Iran relations is a testament that our current silent treatment has failed as a tool of statecraft, yet Ahmari wishes to contaminate our academic institutions with similar dubious limitations that would restrict the free flow of information and make vigorous debate and exchange of ideas impossible. His imperious remarks are a reminder that our academic institutions are under grave threat from neoconservative forces that wish to impose political constraints on freedom of academic inquiry. Mindful of Ahmari’s desire to limit academic freedom, I don’t see why he left Iran in the first place; for that is where such repressive measures are welcomed, yet Ahmari is here, promoting them in America.

Constrained by the White House’s resolve to find a diplomatic solution, the neocons have resorted to using whatever coercive means available to intimidate and discourage any level of engagement, including greater academic exchange, between Iran and the U.S. for fear that such exchanges will foster a more human perspective of Iranians, which is exactly what Dr. Gautney does at the end of her article: “After we said goodbye to our new friends in Iran, Glenn [her husband] said, ‘We can’t go to war with this country. We just can’t.’”

It is precisely this message the neocons fear will be conveyed to the American public and threaten the potent political climate conducive to their war-driven agenda, and replace it with a nuanced understanding that just might pave the path for a peaceful resolution.

Dr. Gautney’s message is clear — it is one of peace and those who are displeased with it are not of the same view as those peace-loving Iranians, film director Asghar Farhadi refers to in his victory speech at the Oscars.

In a recent Zogby poll views of Iranians useful to the neoconservative cause, like Ahmari and Kohanloo, placed well outside the fringes of mainstream Iranian-American thinking. To the neocons’ disappointment, the polls showed that the majority of Iranian Americans prefer to see a diplomatic and peaceful resolution to hostilities between the U.S. and Iran, while only 3% of Iranians would like to see military action taken against Iran. Ahmari is clearly part of these three-percenters who desire attacking Iran, as he himself admits in an issue of Commentary:

“The likelihood of an all-out Western land invasion aimed at toppling the mullahs is low. But a limited military intervention aimed at destroying their nuclear facilities may nevertheless precipitate regime collapse. Iran’s nuclear sites are spread out over a wide geographic area; an intervention aimed at disabling them must be wider in scope than the Israeli strikes that destroyed Iraq’s facilities in 1981 and Syria’s in 2007. A successful strike will require destroying much of the country’s national defense and security architecture. Having invested so much prestige, moreover, in one signature national project — the nuclear program — the regime stands to lose what little legitimacy it has left should a week-long airstrike rubble its nuclear sites.”

Later in a podcast, Ahmari’s lackey, Peter Kohanloo, was asked how he, as an Iranian American, can support a war that will hurt Iranians. Kohanloo responded: “I would say the Iranian American community is not in any position to initiate or prevent a war, that is up to the president and the U.S. government.”

It is evident that the ultimate objective here is to silence the voice of Iranian Americans and smear those who attempt to fairly represent them. In this regard, Ahmari and Kohanloo serve as useful tools in promoting the neoconservative war agenda against Iran. As ‘native informants’, they shamelessly exploit serious issues of human rights as a lubricant to promoting their employers’ broader agenda.

In the markets of opinions, ethnic heritage can easily be conflated with expertise, and it is not surprising that these Iranian American outliers have chosen to sell their heritage to causes unpopular to the community they purport to represent. By employing these native outliers as ‘analysts,’ the neocons present the illusion of credibility in order to diffuse representative voices and slowly inject divisive war hawk jargon into the debate.

Be it the voice of Iranian Americans, the freedom of academics, or the decision of diplomats, neoconservatives will attempt to set fire to any bridge that attempts to mend the people of Iran and America. American academia is only the latest victim of this wicked witch hunt.

Congress created this dilemma when it passed draconian sanctions on Iran’s financial system and oil exports, but failed to give the President the power to repeal those sanctions under any conditions, regardless of whether Iran makes major concessions. Unlike all previous Iran sanctions, Congress did not make these new sanctions conditional on Iran’s behavior. If Iran agrees to certain criteria at the negotiating table, the President does not have the power to lift the sanctions. Now, only Congress can lift the most severe sanctions ever imposed on Iran.

As long as only Congress can lift the sanctions, the chances for securing a lasting diplomatic solution shrink dramatically. Any far-reaching solution would have to overcome electoral politics, deep Congressional antipathy towards Iran, the filibuster, the anonymous hold, and Republican leaders determined to prevent President Obama’s reelection.

Worse yet, if Iran’s leaders do not believe the U.S. Congress will ever repeal the sanctions, they will be less likely to take the risky step of even offering the major concessions these sanctions are supposed to produce. Iran’s conspiratorially-minded supreme leader is highly unlikely to give up his main source of leverage – Iran’s nuclear capabilities and uranium stockpile – without receiving similarly meaningful and immediate concessions from the United States.

That is not to say Iran will not attempt to manage the conflict through negotiations. Already, Iran has hinted that it may offer concessions to head off sanctions imposed by Europe. But there is a major difference between managing the conflict and attempting to resolve it.

Iran’s focus on Europe’s sanctions is no accident. The European Union can lift its sanctions more easily than the United States since they were imposed at the executive level and don’t require legislative action to lift. Meanwhile, President Obama can only suspend the implementation of sanctions in 120 day increments, which isn’t as powerful a tool as it sounds. Suspending the sanctions only somewhat mitigates their economic effect. As the past few months have shown, the mere threat of impending sanctions is enough to scare away most businesses, and those businesses are extremely unlikely to return until that threat is gone.

Furthermore, the upcoming U.S. presidential election means that Iran will discount the value of any U.S. offer to temporarily suspend sanctions in exchange for Iranian concessions since that could be undone by a President Romney with a single pen stroke if Obama isn’t reelected.

The sanctions imposed on Iran’s central bank should be a major source of leverage for the President in negotiations with Iran. They have inflicted serious damage on the Iranian economy and clearly have gotten the attention of the Iranian leadership. But as long as the President cannot actually remove the sanctions, they will simply become a new fact of life for a regime that has faced sanctions and economic challenges since its inception. At best, the President could use the limited waiver authority in the sanctions bill in exchange for confidence building measures from Iran, but it is probably insufficient to help bring about a more significant agreement.

Thus, for diplomacy to have the greatest chance to succeed in averting both a nuclear Iran and a catastrophic war, Congress needs to empower the President to lift the central bank sanctions in exchange for concrete actions by Iran to addresses the international community’s concerns about its nuclear program. Iran would have to finally resolve the IAEA’s concerns about potential past weaponization work and adopt the Additional Protocol for more robust nuclear inspections to prove to the world that it is telling the truth when it says it does not want nuclear weapons.

This would not be selling out other issues of concern, like human rights. Other sanctions, such as those targeting Iranian human rights abusers and the sanctions imposed as a result of Iran’s designation as a state sponsor of terrorism would remain until those issues are addressed. Furthermore, any nuclear agreement would make it easier to explore areas of potential mutual interest, such as Afghanistan, and would remove the threat of war that has undermined the struggle for human rights in Iran.

America simply cannot afford another war of choice in the Middle East. But the reality is that it is slowly but surely headed towards exactly that. So while Congress fights over tax policy and the budget, it should take a moment to fix its sanctions legislation and return the power to make peace back to the President. Many in Congress may not like President Obama, but most would agree that it is much is better to have the Commander in Chief overseeing diplomats in Tehran rather than deploying troops there.

Hawks in Congress have gone so far as to attempt to institutionalize the U.S. “no-contact” policy with Iran.  Bibi Netanyahu has in many ways so effectively perpetrated the post-Cold War reorientation of Israel against Iran as to take his country to the brink of war.

But in pushing the policies of no-contact and permanent hostilities with Iran, while at the same time ruling out the very policy of containment, the hawks have taken a failed paradigm to its logical, unsustainable conclusion.  Having brought Israel and the rest of the world to the fork in the road, we are faced with either choosing war or shifting to a new paradigm.

Netanyahu’s war threats were supposed to pressure the international community to expand Iran’s isolation and to further institutionalize Iran’s non-relationship with the United States.  The war threat, faithfully amplified by willing stenographers in the U.S., has been aimed more at the U.S. and international community than at the Iranians.

But the security establishment in the U.S. is firmly against the idea of war with Iran.  And, we are now finding out, Israel’s security establishment agrees and is deeply concerned about the potential of Netanyahu taking Israel into the abyss.  In just the past few weeks, the current IDF chief and the former heads of Shin Bet and Mossad, not to mention Netanyahu’s political opponents, have joined a building chorus of voices in Israel who have pounced on an opening to confront Netanyahu over his dangerous war posturing.

Meanwhile, because other means have failed to mitigate the side-effects of looming war—namely record high oil prices—diplomacy may be exactly what the saber rattling has unintentionally forced current United States political leadership into pursuing, despite the political costs. 

In an election year, it is perhaps strange that President Obama has decided to reinvest in diplomacy that he himself has characterized as a political liability.  But the political costs for the President of being maligned as “soft” on Iran because of daring to negotiate have been eclipsed by the even bigger liability of high gas prices.  And the real costs of war with Iran simply do not add up when you consider that anything short of a full-scale occupation (which experts say would require around one million troops) would be more likely to deliver an Iranian nuclear weapon than doing nothing at all.

Doing nothing at all, however, is not an option.  Hawks criticize the President as being more concerned with preventing Israeli from bombing Iran than with preventing an Iranian nuke.  This silly notion assumes we can’t do both.  It misunderstands that both challenges are endemic of the same flawed and untenable paradigm that Obama pledged to shift by pursuing direct negotiations.

The President, I think, is indeed more concerned at the moment with the need to prevent a potentially imminent war than he is with the distant threat of Iranian building a weapon—a decision they have yet to even make that would likely take years for them to actually achieve.  But above all, his Administration may be most focused on dealing with what is already here—an escalating cold war with Iran that could not just spiral into real war, but which has helped produce high gas prices that are hurting the economic recovery and pissing off voters.   And, while it may be the economic threat that helped spur the new U.S. willingness to engage, ultimately a shift away from the absurd paradigm of trying to turn Iran into another Cuba is the only solution for all of the above threats (and more–including meaningfully dealing with Iran’s repression of human rights, democracy, and civil society).

While the U.S. is talking directly to Iran, Israel is unlikely to bomb.  Those talks can, hopefully, yield immediate Iranian concessions to cap its nuclear program and produce a diplomatic process that puts us on track for a peaceful resolution, shifting us off of the current war trajectory.  Talks can also, hopefully, yield reciprocal moves by Europe and possibly even the United States to hold off on implementing oil sanctions that would not just punish Iran, but would further squeeze the oil market and punish ourselves.

So, thank you to Netanyahu and the neocons and the hawks in Congress for taking us to the brink and forcing some tough decisions.  Now it’s time to find out if we will be able to make the right one.

Arizona Republican Paul Gosar has dropped what is now the third resolution in the 112^th Congress providing Congressional cover for Israeli strikes—which the Pentagon has warned would drag the U.S. into war.

Signaling unconditional support for Israeli strikes significantly undercuts U.S. efforts to avoid war; it politicizes Israeli security (which is supposedly sacrosanct); and it provides political leverage against the U.S. administration for hawks in Israel (a group which, by the way, apparently doesn’t include Israel’s military chief).

Gosar’s resolution, H.Res.630, has no cosponsors.  But between his new measure, a “happy birthday Israel, now go bomb Iran” resolution, and the one that started it all–the Gohmert resolution, there are now 120 House Members who have endorsed Israeli preventive war in the current Congress.

The full list is below–I wonder how many of these Members have repeated the line that we must “listen to our generals”?  All the while, they disregard the overwhelming opposition to war with Iran expressed by the U.S. military, and instead follow the AIPAC-Netanyahu line (although AIPAC has been careful to not publicly endorse these measures, yet).

Gosar’s resolution also, tellingly, plays fast and loose with the facts, repeating the dangerous meme that Iran is actively building a nuclear weapon.  This misstatement has been repeatedly shot down by top officials, including in testimony before Congress.  They have made clear that, while Iran’s nuclear program is a serious concern that must be addressed, Iran’s leadership has not decided to actively pursue a nuke.  U.S. intelligence agrees.  Israeli intelligence agrees.  The IAEA agrees.  Congressional hawks, however, have their own set of facts.

The resolution also comes at a time when the U.S is finally gaining diplomatic traction in sensitive negotiations with Iran. Progress on the diplomatic front is critical to resolve the nuclear standoff, prevent war, and finally directly address the neglected issue of human rights in Iran.

Whether political opportunism or policy ignorance, it is unconscionable for elected officials to play games when the lives of U.S. servicemembers–not to mention civilians in Iran and Israel–are on the line.  Yes, the question of nuclear weapons-acquisition versus capability is complicated.  Yes, diplomacy is tough.  But war is not simple nor easy.  And we deserve for our representatives in Congress to do their homework instead of paving a path through falsehoods to another war of choice.

Representatives who have signed onto resolutions endorsing Israeli preventive strikes on Iran (113 Republicans in bold, 7 Democrats in italics:

The crux of negotiations between the U.S. and Iran is that, at some point, in order to succeed, each side will have to take a deep breath and shake hands on a deal. But thirty years of mutual demonization and fear mongering, means it takes serious political courage to come to the table, and even more courage—and a major investment of political capital—to actually accept a deal and sell it at home.

One way each side builds such political capital is to spin the talks as favoring the home team. This zero-sum approach—building capital at the expense of the other side—is dangerous and can create a precarious back and forth.

After modest success in Istanbul this past weekend, we’re seeing this back and forth play out as the sides prepare for the next round of talks in five weeks in Baghdad. Tehran has portrayed Washington as having softened its position and backed down from previous demands—particularly on the issue of whether Iran has the right to enrichment.

As Robert Wright speculates in the Atlantic, “If Iran’s leadership thinks it may do a deal with a government it has long framed as the great Satan, it needs to tell the Iranian people that it’s bringing Satan to his knees.” He points out that, as Tehran spins one way to build domestic support and to perhaps insulate the negotiations from political backlash at home, the opposite happens among opportunists in the U.S.

The Washington Times, for instance, takes Fars News at its word that the U.S. is granting Iran concessions, seizing on Tehran’s domestic spin to attack the talks. The very same groups that dismiss positive news like Khamenei’s fatwah against nuclear weapons as religious dissembling are, ironically, the most eager to treat Iran’s anti-U.S. spin as gospel–so long as it can be used to attack the Obama Administration’s diplomacy.

For its part, the U.S. is doing the exact same kind of spinning. In Haaretz yesterday, an unnamed U.S. official pushed back against criticism from Bibi Netanyahu that the Istanbul talks were a “freebie” for Tehran. Such an attack from Netanyahu–delivered with Senator Joe Lieberman at the Prime Minister’s side–is politically damaging for the White House and for the talks. Bibi may not technically be a domestic political opponent of the President, but nobody has bothered telling that to Congress.

So, the U.S. and European officials spin Haaretz, essentially saying they manhandled Iran:

“The senior U.S. official emphasized that an agreement is in place between the six world powers that even if Iran carries out trust-building steps and suspends uranium enrichment to 20 percent, it will not receive anything in return.”

Not exactly a face saving proposition for the Iranians. The report continues:

“He added that it was made clear to the Iranians in these discussions that there would be no suspension of sanctions on the part of the United States and the European Union, nor would there be a postponement of the European oil embargo, which will come into effect on July 1.”

Political interests inside of Iran could very well employ the same opportunism as the Washington Times and seize on these “official” comments to attack the talks.

We saw this happen during the October 2009 diplomatic dance, when Iran agreed to a confidence building deal with the U.S. and others in principle, but then backed away when the deal was attacked by Ahmadinejad’s political opponents of all stripes in Iran.

One of the reasons ultimately cited by Tehran for scuttling the deal was the way the agreement was portrayed in Western media outlets. Officials suggested it was a major coup for the U.S. at Iran’s expense. The Iranians implied they could not sell such an agreement once it was perceived as being so unbalanced against Iran—no matter how appealing it may have initially looked on paper.

This time around however, there is the apparent imprimatur of the Supreme Leader for continued negotiations. For Iran, this represents the strongest form of “political capital” to insulate the talks, for the time being.

But there is a long road ahead, and many issues to address—including not just nukes, but the even more difficult challenge of addressing Iran’s human rights situation. If the two sides are able to get through the initial bumps on this long road, and establish a true diplomatic process that is insulated from domestic politics, there is hope the talks can be broadened and sustained to achieve tangible success. But if not—if the two sides are unable to build positive sum political space and the mutual spin becomes a vicious cycle—the negotiations could easily spin into failure.

So why do some on the hawkish side of the debate dispense with assessments that an Iranian nuclear weapon is by no means imminent and instead wrongly assume Iran is racing invariably towards a weapon?

This assumption fundamentally misunderstands that the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) maintains inspections in Iran. While secret intelligence sources are a big part of the assessments of Iran’s program, the other main component is from the IAEA monitoring and inspections of over 15 declared facilities and locations, which are conducted regularly on the ground.The logistical and technical reality is that, despite U.N. Security Council Resolutions telling Iran to suspend enrichment and to fully comply with the IAEA, Agency safeguards measures are still largely in place. There are disagreements on what level of information Iran must provide and what version of safeguard provisions are relevant but safeguards and inspections are clearly in place.

IAEA safeguards generally entail verification through the surveillance and containment of nuclear material and declared nuclear facilities plus nuclear material accountancy.

Because round-the-clock human surveillance is prohibitively expensive, a range of optical surveillance systems (types of cameras) are used to monitor safeguarded materials. Nowadays these digital cameras transmit either the direct images or data about the camera’s operation to the IAEA. Containment refers to tamper-indicating seals, which can be used on both specific safeguarded materials/devices and IAEA equipment. These seals are not meant to physically prevent the unauthorized access to something, but merely to provide easy evidence of such attempts.

Nuclear material accountancy means the IAEA checks the host country’s accounting record of materials, measurements, measuring calibrations, and takes independent samples. These efforts are enhanced by three sets of inspections: ad hoc, routine, and special. Ad hoc inspections verify a country’s initial report of nuclear materials or changes to them as well (and nuclear material involved in international transfers). Routine inspections, the most common, may be carried out according to a schedule (the number is based on the amount of safeguarded material) or can be unannounced/short-notice. These inspections are limited to locations in a facility containing nuclear material. Finally, special inspections are carried out under separate defined procedures. Special inspections may occur if the IAEA considers the information from the state government not adequate to fulfill the Agency’s responsibilities under the country’s Safeguards Agreement.

Despite these consistently applied measures, the IAEA does have concerns about “possible military dimensions to Iran’s nuclear program” and intelligence partially provided by several member states indicates Iran carried out “activities relevant to the development of a nuclear explosive device.” However, as the Arms Control Association explains, this is not new information, but provides greater detail than previous public reports. According to experts, Iran is unlikely to attempt to break-out at its declared facilities because with the safeguards it would almost certainly be exposed. Additionally, the United States and its allies have been adept at detecting significantly smaller clandestine nuclear sites that are more likely to be used for a potential break out scenario, like Fordow. Therefore, the international community would have a long lead time between detecting Iranian moves towards a weapon and any eventual production. Even using the largest facilities as Natanz, it would take Iran upwards of one year to produce enough bomb-grade material for one weapon and begin to install it in an explosive device. It would take several more years to combine a completed device with Iranian missiles.

There is also the issue of Iran pushing back against inspections at the Parchin facility, but there are a few issues to consider. Iran isn’t keen on any inspections at the facility because it is ostensibly a conventional military site, not a declared nuclear facility that the IAEA has access to under the Safeguards Agreement. Also, Iran previously permitted the Agency to visit Parchin in 2005 as a “measure of transparency.” At the time, the IAEA was allowed to visit any one of four areas of concern and within that area they had unfettered access to five buildings. This limitation and negotiation on what can be inspected is familiar to those who understand the history of arms control inspections. The United States, Russia, and others have used these kinds of ad hoc negotiations for decades.

A report later noted no unusual activities were found and “environmental samples did not indicate the presence of nuclear material.” Presently, the IAEA would like to visit a different part of the facility because of suspicions (from foreign intelligence services) these sites may have had a large containment chamber used for hydrodynamic tests. In a nutshell, this kind of testing involves exploding a sphere of explosives to see if the arrangement has the desired effect on a dense metal core, as in testing the conventional explosives that help drive an implosion-type nuclear weapon. However, some doubt an inspection could even find anything incriminating even if this activity did go on at all.

Considering Parchin is a very large military complex with no declared nuclear activities taking place, few countries would allow the IAEA to have access to such a facility. But safeguards shortcomings, such as concerns about Parchin and other locations, certainly do exist and need to be addressed by expanding safeguards to undeclared facilities which could host a clandestine enrichment program. Charles Ferguson, President of the Federation of American Scientists, has explained possible steps to enhance this and assure the international community that Iran is not pursuing a weapons capability. One especially important component is getting Iran to ratify an Additional Protocol with the IAEA. Signed, but not yet ratified, this addition to the Safeguards Agreement gives the Agency access to inspect undeclared nuclear facilities on short notice.

All of this points to the conclusion that although the IAEA has had issues trying to inspect potential weapons-relevant research at the Parchin facility plus in the past Iran has been found to be in non-compliance of specific safeguards issues, this is not indicative that Iran is on the cusp of gaining nuclear weapons. The Agency’s presence severely limits Iran’s most likely avenues for cheating and secretly producing nuclear weapons. Even if the safeguarded facilities would not be used, intelligence agencies and analysts do not see an easy, quick route towards weapons. Once you understand these factors at play, there is no reason to advocate for a military strike. If a real, concerted effort at diplomacy is given a chance, there are options to resolve the nuclear issue which can satisfy all parties.