Experts see little risk of the West blundering into conflict with Iran through a fog of flawed intelligence despite fresh word of differences between Western espionage assessments of alleged Iranian nuclear arms work. Western governments are acutely sensitive to the dangers of revisiting with Iran Washington's experience with Iraq in 2003, when a US-led invasion was justified by what turned out to be wrong information about weapons of mass destruction. Yet differences in foreign assessments of Iran's nuclear work have surfaced increasingly in recent weeks, prompting concern about the effectiveness and possible politicization of Western intelligence coordination. In the run-up to Thursday's Geneva talks between Iran and six powers, British and US officials appeared to differ over Iran's nuclear capability in what some saw as an uncomfortable echo of differing assessments of Iraq in 2002 and 2003, when France and Germany rejected US and British arguments for war. A British security source said London suspected Iran had been seeking nuclear weapons for the past few years, in contrast to a US view published in 2007 that Tehran halted work on design and weaponisation in 2003. French and German intelligence assessments of the Iranian weaponization issue appear closer to Britain's view than America's, diplomats say. Last week's revelation of a second nuclear plant in Iran only served to support international suspicions about an Iranian cover-up to mask nuclear weapons designs, the UK source said. High risk of escalation Anthony Glees, director of Britain's Buckingham University Center for Security and Intelligence Studies, said that in light of the Iraq episode in 2003 it would be “extremely discouraging” if there turned out to be substantial divergences in military intelligence assessments of Iranian nuclear activities. Dan Plesch, an international affairs expert at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, said he saw a high risk of an escalation between the West and Iran because a compliant Western media was uncritically recycling charges of Iranian wrongdoing and this was reminiscent of Iraq coverage in 2002/03. “Anyone who thinks intelligence is not politicized is living in cloud-cuckoo land,” he said. But many analysts argue that good faith differences in the estimates of Western intelligence services are common where data is incomplete. And on the diplomatic front, they say, Iran in 2009 is not a simplistic mirror image of Iraq in 2003. Malcolm Chalmers, a Professorial Fellow in British Security Policy at Britain's Royal United Services Institute, said: “Different people put different probabilities on the same data.” Former UN weapons inspector Terence Taylor said a big difference between the Iran situation now and the Iraq episode in 2003 was that Western countries and the UN nuclear watchdog were united in their overall view that Iran had a case to answer. “We're not on the brink of military intervention, something that was coloring everything back in 2002 and 2003,” he said. “What we're seeing now is more openness about things that used to be discussed in camera. It is a healthy sign of debate.” Mohamed ElBaradei, Director-General of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), said he had no evidence to back up the UK assessment, but Tehran had broken a transparency law by failing to disclose much earlier its second enrichment site. Iran says all its nuclear-related activity is aimed solely at producing civilian electrical power. After the Iraq crisis, when IAEA evidence countering the US and British view was disregarded, Western espionage coordination with the IAEA had come under greater scrutiny. Nigel Inkster, an expert on transnational threats at London's International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) and a former director in Britain's secret intelligence service, said Western services and IAEA now worked together better. He said: “Iraq is not a useful guide to the Iranian nuclear program. Close co-ordination with the IAEA dates back some time, and was significantly strengthened by the way in which the IAEA was given the lead in formally closing the Libyan file.”No western service “has any doubt” on Iran Bruno Tertrais, a Senior Research Fellow at the Foundation for Strategic Research think tank in France, said he suspected the Iraq 2003 assessment may have been a reaction to what he said was a US underestimation of Iraqi capabilities in the Iraq-Kuwait crisis of 1990-91. Similarly, the erroneous US and British view of Iraq in 2003 may have colored Washington's 2007 assessment of Iran, “an exceedingly optimistic view of the Iranian nuclear program.” But the fact that different spy services had different assessments on Iranian weaponization was not exceptional. “The big difference with Iraq is that no Western intelligence service has any doubt that Iran is at least seeking a weapon option, if not a bomb. That's the main difference.” All Western agencies had learned from the Iraq episode in terms of the need for greater prudence and rigor, he said. Mark Fitzpatrick, senior non-proliferation scholar at IISS, said the Iran intelligence assessments did not seem politicized. “The intelligence agencies have made independent judgments,” he said, pointing out that the U.S. assessment in 2007 badly undermined the then Bush administration policy toward Tehran.” He said the German intelligence assessment appeared “so different from the German policy inclination to be the least harsh on Iran, in comparison with France and Great Britain.”
