Subcommittee on International Human Rights Committee on April 23rd, 2009

[The Chair, Conservative, Scott Reid]

Maybe I'll intervene at this time. Normally I don't get the opportunity to ask questions; however, your testimony has been both very interesting and very well timed, which leaves us with a few minutes. With the indulgence of the rest of the committee, I'd like to ask a few questions myself.

A few things relating to their nuclear and missile programs strike me as being problems that ought to be of concern to the Iranian leaders themselves; certainly they would be of concern to the rest of us if they miscalculated on these things. You mentioned working on a bomb similar to the bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima, the Little Boy bomb. That bomb, to my understanding, was an extremely unstable bomb, and this raises the whole question of a nuclear program designed largely with considerations other than safety at the forefront, such as hiding it from public view as much as possible.

Maybe I'm worried about something that we need not be worried about, but the thought occurs to me that there may be a danger of the nuclear materials in some way being a threat to public safety within Iran. Does that danger exist?

[Patrick Clawson]

I'm not an expert on these matters, but there certainly are some people who are very concerned that the drive for both nuclear power and nuclear enrichment has led Iran to make some decisions that were environmentally unwise and that raise real dangers of accidents.

It is the case that Iran does not have in place a regulatory framework, a system of monitoring, and a system of responding to accidents. The kinds of steps that the IEA encourages countries embarking on nuclear power, much less nuclear enrichment, to take, Iran has not taken.

The IEA has a whole program that's designed to help a country. For instance, the United Arab Emirates is working with the IEA to develop a model program for regulating, monitoring, and responding to accidents. Iran has done extremely little in this regard.

[The Chair, Conservative, Scott Reid]

Right.

I have a second question. There exists already a missile system that has the capacity to carry a non-existent but potentially existent nuclear warhead to Tel Aviv. Tel Aviv is actually a relatively small target. Israel is a small target when compared to the kinds of targets the United States and the U.S.S.R. were dealing with. It's hard to miss the U.S.S.R. and land on some friendly neighbour, but it's not hard to miss Tel Aviv and land somewhere where there are people who are presumably not intended targets.

To what degree is Iran in possession of a sophisticated guidance system?

[Patrick Clawson]

The missiles Iran is using have guidance systems that make these missiles of very little use if the warhead is a conventional warhead, because a conventional warhead does damage that's limited to the tens of metres or perhaps, possibly, the hundreds of metres. However, when it comes to nuclear weapons, then an accuracy of a couple of kilometres is good enough. And while Tel Aviv is small, even if you miss by a few kilometres, you can still do a tremendous amount of damage.

The accuracy of the missile that Iran has been testing is such that more than half of the missiles would fall within a circle of somewhere between two and three kilometres.

[The Chair, Conservative, Scott Reid]

So we ought not to be then comparing these to the kinds of missiles that Iraq was firing at Israel in the Gulf War in 1990--the Scuds? They're superior in accuracy to that?

[Patrick Clawson]

In fact they're a little less accurate than the Scuds, but the Scuds were carrying a conventional warhead. And because the Scuds were carrying a conventional warhead, they didn't cause much damage outside of the immediate area where they landed.

In fact, I would be more reassured if Iran were spending its time and effort perfecting the accuracy of its warhead, because then I would think that in fact perhaps Iran intends to put a conventional explosive on this warhead and wants to be sure that it can deliver it directly on the one building that it's targeting in Tel Aviv. But instead, Iran has devoted its efforts to developing longer range for these same inaccurate missiles, missiles that really don't make much sense, unless you plan to put in them some kind of unconventional weapon.

[The Chair, Conservative, Scott Reid]

If I could just pursue that a tiny bit further, I'm just thinking that from the perspective of a country that has a limited number, in the foreseeable future, of actually deliverable warheads, the accuracy you're describing would leave me with some alarm if I were then considering using these missiles for a target where..... Tel Aviv is, after all, only nine kilometres from the West Bank.

Obviously, this is all outside the moral calculations. It's all repugnant. But you'd be now dealing with a severe public relations problem if you were trying to demonstrate that you're the leaders of the Muslim world and you were putting Muslim populations at risk of—I don't know what you'd call it—a kind of friendly fire. That's just a thought.

The other question I had, and this was raised a bit in one of the earlier questions, is about the fear of a Velvet Revolution. I had the thought that even paranoids have real enemies. One thought that has occurred to me as we've gone through these hearings and listened to our witnesses is that there are a large number of groups of people--most of the surrounding countries, most of the linguistic minority populations within Iran, the religious minorities, be they non-Muslim or non-Shia minorities, intellectuals, students, those who are not the beneficiaries of corruption--who have reason to want the regime to be replaced or who would legitimately expect that they would benefit if a regime other than the current one were in place.

Given that situation—again, I'm editorializing more than asking a question, but you can comment on my editorial--it strikes me that there actually is reason for someone who is in a position of power in Iran to worry not only that they might find themselves out of power, but that a Velvet Revolution would be a very desirable outcome, as compared to, say, the outcome of the Ceausescu regime in Romania, which fell equally swiftly but also met with a rather dire end.

[Patrick Clawson]

The Iranian regime is not in power because it enjoys popular support. It does not. It's in power because it has a dedicated minority, which is probably more than 10% of the population, who are prepared to kill the others in order to keep God's government in place. As long as that continues to be the case, as long as there continues to be a minority--a pretty sizable minority--that is prepared to kill the rest of the population in order to keep God's government in place, it's going to be hard to make a Velvet Revolution.

[The Chair, Conservative, Scott Reid]

Right.

We have a few more minutes. Does anybody else want to raise any further questions?

Mr. Kennedy.

[Gerard Kennedy, Liberal, Parkdale—High Park, ON]

Just in terms of the human rights aspect, there are numerous things that are objectionable about the Iranian regime from the standpoint of a western democratic country. You just finished describing something we find hard to relate to in the sense of that abusive type of power by which they are sustaining themselves.

But the connection between the nuclear weapons.... I'm just wondering if you could locate that a little more precisely. I think your broad thesis was that it acts not so much as a distraction but as an actual deterrent to their having to contend with other international norms. Is that correct, that they hope it will draw people away? Do you actually believe it has that effect of drawing people away from some of the things they might otherwise have to contend with that could lead to--whether it's a Velvet Revolution or some other kind of disturbance--that very rigid kind of control that they've elected to follow in the current regime?

For a while, I guess you could realistically have talked about some reformist trends. I don't know that you can now.

That's the main thing I'd like to ask. If we have a minute after that, I'd like to hear your response to Mr. Reid in terms of the blunt thing, whether there's any prospect of something else arising from what we know are factors in place.

I really wanted to try to get directly at your thesis of nuclear weapons and the status of human rights. In other words, if Iran were persuaded to drop the nuclear weapons program, how would that benefit all these other outstanding problems?

[Patrick Clawson]

The Iranian dissidents and human rights activists are firmly convinced that the nuclear program is an essential part of the regime's survival strategy. Nobel Peace Prize winner Shirin Ebadi co-authored an article entitled “Link Human Rights to Iran's Nuclear Ambitions”, and the main theme of the article was that the regime sees these nuclear ambitions as the best way to get the international community to back off on the things the regime really worries about, which is reporters, such as all of these reporters they throw in jail or, in Ms. Kazemi's case, kill, and also people-to-people exchanges.

It's very discouraging to think that this is a regime that sees the free flow of information and the exchange of people-to-people contacts as a vital threat to it. It's so foreign to our way of looking at this matter, where we see those as things that can help build confidence and trust among people. It's not how the Supreme Leader and the Revolutionary Guard Corps view this. They're firmly convinced that there's a grand western plot to overthrow them. When an American academic, Haleh Esfandiari, was in jail, a 67-year-old grandmother, 22 governments around the world marshalled, asking the Iranians for her release, and the Iranian television put on a show in which they explained that George Soros and George Bush meet each week to coordinate their activities, promoting a Velvet Revolution inside Iran. It was on nationwide television in Iran. Most of us who are observers of the American political scene do not think that Mr. Soros or Mr. Bush actually get along that well.

The Iranian dissidents are firmly convinced that this nuclear program is designed for regime security and not for national security.

[Gerard Kennedy, Liberal, Parkdale—High Park, ON]

Okay, I--

[The Chair, Conservative, Scott Reid]

We have enough time for only one more question before our time expires, and Mr. Sweet actually gave his time to....

Mr. Sweet, please.

[David Sweet, Conservative, Ancaster—Dundas—Flamborough—Westdale, ON]

You mentioned the Iranian model being like the Chinese model. I thought that was quite good.

One of the things I understand is that unlike China, Iran has not been able to have control over its electronic media. Am I correct, or have they actually developed a sophistication as far as monitoring their media is concerned, limiting their media more than what I'm knowledgeable of?

[Patrick Clawson]

The Iranian government puts some considerable effort into monitoring Internet and other media outlets. But it also long ago decided that it's advantageous to the regime to allow intellectuals to say whatever they want in journals that nobody reads. Therefore, the Iranian regime concentrates on state-run television and other mass media, while leaving alone literary journals, obscure artistic presentations, and movies and so on.

We in the west may be impressed that there are these remarkable pro-human rights, pro-democracy articles written in Iran, but that's because nobody gets to read them. What everybody sees in Iran is the very rigidly controlled state-run television and the very widely available newspapers, and those are very tightly controlled.

The government has a problem with the Internet, and they're working very hard on that. But with modern technology advances, text messaging has become a popular way to spread news in Iran, and the government now has to figure out how to do something about that. The intelligence minister announced last week that he has to have a big new program to control text messaging, but so far it hasn't really come into effect.

[David Sweet, Conservative, Ancaster—Dundas—Flamborough—Westdale, ON]

Thankfully.

[The Chair, Conservative, Scott Reid]

Our time has expired.

We're very grateful to you for your testimony. It was really very interesting and educational for all of us.

At this moment, it being 2 p.m., I will adjourn this meeting.