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

[Wayne Marston, NDP, Hamilton East—Stoney Creek, ON]

I'll try to beat the fire alarm, if I can.

[The Chair, Conservative, Scott Reid]

Hopefully that's just a dinner bell or something.

[Wayne Marston, NDP, Hamilton East—Stoney Creek, ON]

And our debate didn't even got heated today, so I don't understand it.

I was pleased to hear a number of your comments, especially when you talked about the exaggeration of the WMD in Iraq and the understanding that the world now has of that actually taking place in the fashion it did.

You spoke of Mr. Bush's tone, and it's easy to point a finger at Mr. Bush. I wouldn't have wanted to be in his shoes following 9/11, but I also don't think we would go the same route.

I spent some time in the Middle East in 1979. Saving face is a very crucial, important thing to the culture there, and I think this move of the Obama administration is offering that to some people.

We've had testimony here before from a gentleman whose name, I think, was Mr. Gordon, who told us that they've developed to the point of having yellowcake in their weapons--well, we don't know that it's a weapons program, but certainly the fear is there.

Your comments about the nuclear program made me wonder if it's an effort, in a way, to provoke the secret deal that you were saying people feared, and also if the capacity isn't there yet to deliver nuclear weapons. It's not even clear that the capacity is there to complete the construction of nuclear weapons, but he certainly is waving that as a flag, as a continuous threat, and using his rhetoric on the world stage. I can't help but have the word “megalomania” come to mind. I never thought I'd say this, but it might be very good that there is a supreme leader behind this man, because I think the potential is there for him to be reined in at some point if a deal is made.

What do you think is the possibility of some kind of deal actually being formulated at this point?

[Patrick Clawson]

Unfortunately, so far we haven't heard any indications on the Iranian side of what it is they would want in return for a deal.

We're in fact further behind with Iran than we are with North Korea. The North Koreans at least say that if we provide them with this, this, and this, then we can have a deal. The North Korean list seems to be ever-growing, and there are lots of problems in negotiations with them, but at least the North Koreans say that if we give them enough, and make things sufficiently attractive, we can do a deal.

With Iran, we haven't heard that. And that's very discouraging. It reflects the extraordinary confidence that Iranian leaders have had in recent years that their country's geostrategic situation is so good that they don't need to think about a compromise.

The pattern of negotiating with Iran on any issue, whether it's a business deal or a political deal, has been stalemate, stalemate, stalemate--until breakthrough. In many of the negotiations, what Iran ended up agreeing to was much less attractive for Iran than what they could have gotten at an earlier stage. So they are tough, but they are not particularly effective at negotiating.

Some in Iran have suggested that this is what's going on with this nuclear issue. Iran could get a lot out of a bargain with the international community about the nuclear program--now--but if they drag on the discussions for a long time, the world may decide that Iran is such a difficult partner country, we're prepared to offer them less.

[Wayne Marston, NDP, Hamilton East—Stoney Creek, ON]

You mentioned in your comments the billions of dollars going into arms in the Middle East. How do you see that distributed across the Middle East; what countries?

There was an eight-year war between Iraq and Iran. Right now, because there are non-believers occupying Iraq, from the perspective of the Muslim world they're kind of a brotherhood for the moment. But once the Americans do leave Iraq, what's the potential for Iran to resume hostilities toward Iraq?

[Patrick Clawson]

The Iraqi military--and Iraqi government--is being very insistent in the negotiations with the United States that it wishes to purchase 96 F-16 fighter planes. It has already purchased 120 M1A1 tanks and been given 20 more. It wants to buy another 120. That's 240 tanks and 96 aircraft--more than you need to defeat al Qaeda in Iraq.

Some Iraqi officials are on the record as saying that the principal purpose of these armaments is to defend Iraq's borders. This is a good example, to my mind, of how Iran's nuclear program only creates suspicions in the region and leaves Iran's security worse off.

We should remind ourselves that the reason most countries don't pursue nuclear weapons is not because they're pacifist at heart but because they do not want to start arms races. Iran seems to have forgotten that lesson. Iran is starting an arms race--which, frankly, it is going to lose. It has neither the money nor the powerful friends that some of its neighbours do.

So I think we can make a good case that nuclear weapons are not in Iran's security interest. These arms purchases in the Middle East that I spoke of are overwhelmingly for systems that seem well suited to dealing with the threat from Iran, or well suited to responding to Iranian provocation, but not well suited to other defence needs.

[Wayne Marston, NDP, Hamilton East—Stoney Creek, ON]

In terms of the F-16, though, you'll get a fair range with that particular weapon. But I think I follow you to the same conclusion, that they are focused very much on Iran at this point.

One thing we heard about the human rights violations in Iran was the fact that the governing body--the powers that be--represents about 30% of the population. How much of this is just bravado to keep their folks in line? How much of the systemic human rights violations and the international chest-pounding--as you say, they talk about being the most powerful country in the world—do you think is actually aimed at the Iranian people to keep the actual majority in place?

[Patrick Clawson]

President Ahmadinejad believes his chest-thumping. I don't think Supreme Leader Khamenei does, because Supreme Leader Khamenei's great concern about cultural invasion and a velvet revolution suggests he thinks his regime is in fact in danger and that the people don't support it. I think their Supreme Leader greatly exaggerates the extent to which the regime is in danger. But this is a man who throws reporters in jail, and in the case of Canadian Iranian reporters, he kills them. The hasn't happened to American Iranians, but there are lots of them who have been thrown in jail, because this regime is so paranoid about their activities that it thinks they could bring about an overthrow.

So it would seem to me that Khamenei's concern is how to use the nuclear program to force the west to back off and not to provide support for non-governmental organizations. And I say the “west” advisedly, because in my prepared remarks, I quoted from an Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps statement this last week that held forth about the grave dangers to Iran from the Dutch. It's the first time I've heard the Dutch described as a great world power in some centuries.

[Wayne Marston, NDP, Hamilton East—Stoney Creek, ON]

Or as a threat.

[The Chair, Conservative, Scott Reid]

We're out of time, unfortunately.

You're right. That seems like an appropriate comment for, say, 1650 AD or some time like that.

Mr. Sweet, are you doing the next round?

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

Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.

And thank you, Mr. Clawson. I did a little research on your institute. Congratulations on the good work you've been doing for 24 years and your expansion into Middle East studies. I'm glad you're here with the level of expertise you have.

I would like to pick up on some of Mr. Marston's questioning regarding the resources that Iran has right now. In your research, do you feel this regime is now beginning to hit the wall, as far as resources are concerned, because of the nature of the way they lead, the lack of economic development, and the over-stretching of their resources in the nuclear program?

Of course, Mr. Marston mentioned the protracted previous war. I don't think it's any secret their involvement in the destabilization of Iraq after the Americans entered there. In fact, I'm even curious for your thoughts on why that has diminished as well. Is that with respect to the fact that their resources are diminishing?

[Patrick Clawson]

The current Iranian government is racing towards the wall with its foot on the accelerator. There has been no adjustment whatsoever in government spending since the price of oil came down and the global financial crisis hit late last year. As a result, Iran is racing through its foreign exchange reserves. I don't see any change in policy happening until well after the next presidential election on June 12. And the record of what happened when Iran ran into serious economic difficulties in the early 1980s and mid-1990s is that in both cases, it was only after Iran was completely out of money that they made the slightest changes in economic policy—and then had to make dramatic changes in their policies. It looks likely that that will once again be what we see.

So in some ways we're in a race for time. If we can, through UN sanctions and other actions, slow down Iran's nuclear program, then Iran is going to run out of financial reserves and not have enough income to finance the extraordinarily inefficient government spending that is going on at the moment. That would be an excellent moment for saying to the Iranians that Iran's geostrategic situation was not so strong and that they would do well to compromise with the outside world.

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

So for lack of better words, you would see Iran's position right now and the chest-thumping you mentioned as similar to the position Russia was trying to put itself into before the Berlin Wall fell and we found out that in fact the chest-thumping was really very much that of a hollow regime.

[Patrick Clawson]

I'm not an expert on Russia of that time, but I would say that at the moment what we have in Iran is a small group, including the president, who sincerely believe that the tide of history is with them, and then there's a much larger group of people who think they're a mid-sized country with some very big problems coming up.

Every indication from the election campaign is that ordinary Iranians are already quite unhappy about the economic situation, and if we add to this dramatic cutbacks in government spending and much higher taxation, there are going to be some very unhappy people in Iran. I suspect that even more the politicians would be focusing on the domestic concerns and saying that foreign policy has to take a back seat compared to that.

That's very much the position of one of the candidates in the presidential election, a former speaker of parliament. He doesn't really care that much about foreign policy. While he may not have good foreign policy views, his concern is domestic policy, and that gives us something to work with.

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

With the hundreds who are on death row all the time and the number of human rights violations, along with the economic situation, I'm hoping it's only a matter of time before there's a significant pushback by the common citizen of Iran.

There are two things that I hope I can get in. I'll ask you the first and most important one right now.

There was a number you had mentioned on arms exports from Iran. Could you tell me the dollar figure again? Was it an import or export number around arms purchases?

[Patrick Clawson]

I said in the Middle East there have been purchases of $100 billion of weapons in the last three years, which seem to be well designed for dealing with Iran.

Iran has been accused by the nine states and Israel of providing several hundred million dollars a year to Hamas and Hezbollah. We have powerful supporting evidence on this from the Egyptian government in the last two weeks, which intercepted a number of Hezbollah operatives who were bringing arms and money into Hamas, and indeed Hezbollah has confirmed that's what they were doing. Given the magnitudes involved in what the Egyptians have discovered, those Israeli and American estimates look quite credible these days.

Let me say a word about the ordinary citizens of Iran. The regime has been quite successful at applying its Chinese model, namely that it lets its citizens do what they want in the space of three metres around them in return for people doing nothing outside that three-metre space. Therefore, there's a lot more opportunity for people in Iran to party and use intoxicants of various sorts than there used to be, but there's a lot more human rights abuses and violations if anyone tries to organize even the most innocuous things such as helping prostitutes and AIDS victims.

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

On the arms purchases, are they primarily small arms?

[Patrick Clawson]

What Iran has been shipping abroad has been some disturbingly sophisticated weapons systems, such as longer-range and more precise rockets that it's trying to get into the Gaza Strip that could be used to hit Tel Aviv, and also anti-aircraft missiles and anti-tank missiles. There are disturbing indications that what Iran is providing is considerably more sophisticated than small arms to Hamas, and certainly Iran has for quite some time been providing much more sophisticated weaponry to Hezbollah, which has become a pretty impressive light infantry force.

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

You talked about this velvet revolution and Ali Khamenei's abstract fear of this. Do you feel this is the primary motivator behind their behaviour as far as the nuclear race is concerned and as far as keeping their citizens subjugated in the way they do is concerned? Do you feel it's a hatred towards Israel? Do you feel it's their need to be the most powerful nation in the world? Is there one of these items that is pre-eminent?

[Patrick Clawson]

I don't think we know the mix. All those are there, along with the prestige of having advanced technology. With Khamenei, the man's preoccupation seems to be regime survival, and he seems to think that the essence of regime survival is finding a way to get the west to back off on its cultural invasion.

For Ahmadinejad and for many in the revolutionary guard corps, the key issue seems to be expanding Iran's influence and Iran becoming the pre-eminent player in the gulf. There may be others for whom there's more of a defensive concern, but the two key actors seem to be Khamenei and the revolutionary guard corps. With Khamenei, it's how do you get the west to back off on the cultural invasion, and with the revolutionary guard corps, it's how do you make Iran into the principal player in the region, and indeed, throughout the Muslim world.

[The Chair, Conservative, Scott Reid]

Thank you.

Mr. Kennedy, it's your turn now.

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

Thanks.

I guess I'd like to come back to your sense of...obviously, there's an enlarged international concern around the nuclear capacity, but is there a real understanding...and I appreciate that you're framing it in careful terms, which is, I think, helpful.

Are there any indications, not just from the declarations about centrifuges but from the actual activity that's been noted? In their current nuclear capability, how far away would Iran be, in the estimates of the international agencies and security forces and so on, from converting to a nuclear weapons system? What is the timeframe, and what are the markers in terms of when it becomes a critical point?

You say and the reports say that they're amassing certain kinds of material and so forth. What does that mean in terms of the road ahead?

[Patrick Clawson]

Iran has enough centrifuges and enough low-enriched uranium that it could, if it threw out the UN inspectors, probably make a nuclear weapon in a matter of months. Perhaps, if things went badly, it would take a year. But that would be a pretty primitive weapon, heavy and big, hard to deliver. It certainly wouldn't fit on a warhead of a missile, and it would be only one.

It's hard to come up with a rationale for why somebody would develop just one primitive warhead, because if everybody knows that you have nasty intentions, you have only the one missile, the one warhead, and it's now exploded. So the general feeling is that Iran would do well--maybe they won't take this advice--to wait until it has more low-enriched uranium and more centrifuges.

Furthermore, it's also quite possible that what Iran might decide to do is take all this technology that it's been developing and develop a second covert system, smaller presumably, where it would develop the material for one bomb, which it could then have without the world community knowing about it. Then, once it exploded that one bomb, it would have this big pile of material we know about, this low-enriched uranium, that it could quickly convert into a number of additional bombs.

However, there are real technical barriers that Iran has yet to overcome to figure out how to get to a warhead on a missile. They seem to be working on that. The one issue on which the IAEA has had the least success in getting any Iranian responses has been about the documentation for a project that Iran was working on about how to fit a warhead into a missile. Iran claims the documents are fake, but refuses to answer a whole lot of IAEA questions about that project.

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

You're putting forward different possible scenarios, and I guess for an embryonic program you have to understand what they might do that's tied to whatever strategic objectives they might have. Presumably, there is some relationship--and I want to come back to the whole hegemony of nuclear power and what that does both to domestic policy and to what they want for themselves regionally. They believe that Israel has nuclear weapons. They want to be a regional counter to that. It doesn't make sense that if that was their policy, they would have to come up against a fairly sophisticated.... Going back to the old Cold War kind of thinking, if you don't have the capacity, you're not serious, and you can't be taken fully seriously. The idea of a dirty bomb or something covert is a dangerous component.

I heard you expressing before some doubt about their overall strategy and asking why they would want to be...when this isn't good for their security, and so on, but I'm just trying to see where else they might be headed. Do they have the missile systems? What other parts of development would there be for them to have a sophisticated nuclear capacity, of the kind they allege other countries have?

[Patrick Clawson]

They have a missile that has the diameter and weight-carrying capacity to carry a nuclear weapon to Israel. They appear to have a program to design a warhead that would fit on that missile. They have a program to produce large amounts of low-enriched uranium, which would give them the raw material to build more than dozens of bombs. I say more than dozens because conceivably it would be even in the low hundreds of bombs. It's hard to look at this without starting to worry that they're planning to in fact produce dozens and dozens of bombs with the characteristic that they could fit on those long-range missiles.

Furthermore, they are testing even longer-range missiles. These multi-stage missiles they are testing would have the range to reach into eastern Europe, but what's more disturbing is that most countries that have learned how to build multi-stage missiles have been able to expand that upwards to the point where they could build an intercontinental ballistic missile. The great technical hurdles are in going to the multi-stage, not in how you ramp up from there to an intercontinental ballistic missile. The fact that Iran is putting so much effort into a multi-stage missile suggests that its ambition may in fact be to acquire intercontinental ballistic missiles, but we have no proof of that.