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

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

Right. But if I can bring you back to the idea of a time context for this, you're saying Iran as a nuclear threat of any description is fairly immediate. They have the ingredients. There's an easy strategy to understand, unless there's a covert option. Iran as a nuclear power of some kind with a real threat capacity exists. There are two parts to this question. First, how much time does that take for them? In other words, how far away is the risk for that? Second, what would you say about--and you've said a little bit about it, I know, at different points--the international community's ability now, and foreseeably, if Iran continues to be less cooperative, to know enough to anticipate where that will go?

[Patrick Clawson]

Iran has acquired a lot of the capabilities, including missile deliveries, that it would need in order to have an extraordinarily dangerous nuclear weapons system. We are increasingly at this stage debating what its intentions are and whether it will explode a bomb quickly or wait until it could do a more rapid breakout to a larger set of bombs.

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

When you say “explode a bomb”, do you mean for the purposes of testing or for the purposes of...?

[Patrick Clawson]

Presumably for testing it—presumably—

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

Pardon my lack of technical know-how, but presumably that needs to be done at some point if they're going to prove their capacity. Is that true or not?

[Patrick Clawson]

No, I don't think so. The Israelis, for instance, have never tested a weapon. Well, there's some dispute about whether they and the South Africans tested a weapon, but it doesn't appear the Israelis have tested a weapon. And the weapons design the Iranians seem to be going for is 60-year old technology. When the United States built nuclear weapons during World War II, we developed two designs. One was a design that we weren't sure would work, so we tested it at the Trinity site. But we still weren't so sure it would work well; therefore, what we dropped on Hiroshima was a bomb that had never been tested. And that is the type of bomb Iran is building, so it is a pretty straightforward technical thing. Getting it to fit on a missile is harder.

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

Right.

[The Chair, Conservative, Scott Reid]

I apologize. I let you go over five minutes, and gave you 10 minutes actually, so we'll turn now to Mr. Hiebert.

[Russ Hiebert, Conservative, South Surrey—White Rock—Cloverdale, BC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I too will seek about 10 minutes' worth of questioning.

I do have many, many questions, so I would appreciate your succinct answers.

It's hard to know where to begin. The first question that is on my mind is that western nations have known for years about Iran's intention to proceed with a nuclear program, yet the program seems to continue at the same pace as always. What more could be done to prevent them from succeeding?

[Patrick Clawson]

Well, Iran's program has moved at a remarkably slow pace. Let's remind ourselves that it was now 20 years ago that Iran started its clandestine nuclear activities. Twenty years is a long, long time for a program that is of such importance to Iran and from which they're running such great risks of international isolation. What that illustrates is how successful we have been, because of things like Canada's vigorous enforcements of the United Nations Security Council sanctions and the arrest of the gentleman who was shipping dual-use material last week.

[Russ Hiebert, Conservative, South Surrey—White Rock—Cloverdale, BC]

But you've also said that they're within months, if not a year, of creating a nuclear weapon. We've know for about the last three years that they were on the verge of this. Now that we're so close and the cat is almost out of the box, what do we do?

[Patrick Clawson]

Hopefully what we can do is to persuade the Iranians that it would be really stupid idea for them to build just one nuclear weapon, because if they were to explode just that one nuclear weapon, they would face tremendous international isolation and what Secretary of State Hillary Clinton referred to as “crippling sanctions”—and, indeed, quite possibly more. If Iran clearly only had one nuclear weapon and exploded it, then the United States government would be seriously debating whether to take pre-emptive military action, and a number of governments around the world, including many Arab governments, would be urging us to do it.

Hopefully what we can continue to do through combined efforts in the international community is to persuade the Iranians to go slow on this thing, and to say to them, okay, you are piling up great quantities of low-enriched uranium, but don't even think about doing more than that. Let us remember that most of the countries who started weapons programs abandoned them. My favourite example of this is the Swiss, who twice voted in public referenda in favour of building nuclear weapons and then in favour of testing the nuclear weapon inside Switzerland. It was only because of an accident in the tunnel they were building for this that they decided to change their mind. But lots of countries that have gone down this road even farther than Iran has in the end have backed off.

[Russ Hiebert, Conservative, South Surrey—White Rock—Cloverdale, BC]

To what degree has the new U.S. administration changed the U.S. position toward Iran?

[Patrick Clawson]

Certainly there has been a strong change in tone, and so far what we have seen are pretty much the same objectives. There was a lot of press in the United States about the Obama administration being willing to participate in negotiations with Iran without pre-conditions that Iran first suspend its enrichment. Well, look, we crossed that route three years ago. For the last three years, Javier Solana of the European Commission has been holding talks with the Iranians about what it would take to get negotiations restarted, because the European governments had said they wouldn't hold negotiations until Iran suspended its program. Therefore, Solana is not allowed to hold negotiations; he's holding talks about what it would take to get negotiations restarted. Some people might think that distinction is relatively small, and what the Obama administration was saying was, look, let's stop pretending; we've in fact been negotiating with Iran for the last three years and we should acknowledge that.

But so far that's the only indication of a change in objective—and even that you could say is a change in approach rather than a change in objective by the Obama administration.

[Russ Hiebert, Conservative, South Surrey—White Rock—Cloverdale, BC]

You said in your earlier answer to a question that Iran does not have the money or the friends. I was led to believe that Russia was somewhat of a friend to Iran. Can you elaborate on the connection between Iran and Russia?

[Patrick Clawson]

There's certainly no love lost on either side between the people of the two countries. They don't like each other. By contrast, Iranians like Americans and Americans like Iranians.

On the government side, the Russian government has not seen the Iranian nuclear program as an urgent issue, as argued repeatedly in the meetings of the P-5 plus one. The five permanent members of the Security Council plus Germany have been meeting regularly about this matter. Russia has repeatedly argued that the Iranians are further behind than other countries think, we have more time to deal with this, and at the end of the day the Iranians will come around, but we have to be patient and tolerant.

One gets the distinct impression that this issue is not high on the Russian agenda, and Russia sees no particular reason to be cooperative with Europe and the United States when they have been unhelpful, as far as Russia is concerned, on issues like Georgia. Indeed, the only way we ever got the first Security Council resolution about Iran through the Security Council was by agreeing to keep our mouths shut about some developments in Georgia at the time.

[Russ Hiebert, Conservative, South Surrey—White Rock—Cloverdale, BC]

You mentioned that Iran is having a presidential election in June, and two of the three candidates are slight moderates compared to the current president. Are there any candidates who might be willing to take the country in a more positive direction that respects human rights? What's the likelihood of that candidate, if there is such a candidate, succeeding? Will the election be free and fair in the first place?

[Patrick Clawson]

If a person were interested in taking an entirely different position on human rights, the guardian council that vets the candidates would never allow such a person to run. In any case, even if such a person were to run and win, the Supreme Leader has complete authority to overrule and dismiss the president. The judiciary has established itself as a very powerful organ that can broadly interpret laws, like insulting Islam, to do whatever they want, and the Revolutionary Guard Corps pays little attention to what the president does.

So the scope of reform within the framework of the existing system is depressingly small. That is one reason why a great many Iranians are interested only in the three-metre circle around them. On the other hand, we have a Supreme Leader who is terrified of the prospect of a Velvet Revolution.

In the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia, Mr. Havel was a dissident with seemingly no prospects of ever having any political post on a Thursday morning, and on the Tuesday morning he was the President of Czechoslovakia. It all happened in less than a week. Indeed, one week after the start of the Velvet Revolution, Mr. Havel was in the White House. I presume the Supreme Leader knows something about his country and worries about this.

[Russ Hiebert, Conservative, South Surrey—White Rock—Cloverdale, BC]

Do you think the elections will be fair?

[Patrick Clawson]

The elections will certainly not be fair. State television, which is where most people get their news, is only reporting about Ahmadinejad's activities; it's not reporting about the activities of others.

When it comes to the mechanics of voting, it is done by presentation of one's identity card. The interior minister has reported that there are 20 million extra identity cards floating around. He says that's due to people losing their identity cards and getting replacements, and I'm sure that's part of the explanation.

[Russ Hiebert, Conservative, South Surrey—White Rock—Cloverdale, BC]

What's the likelihood of a Velvet Revolution occurring? I know the Supreme Leader's obviously concerned about it. Do you see it happening, in light of the youthful demographic that seems to be emerging?

[Patrick Clawson]

I do not see such a Velvet Revolution happening soon. On the other hand, the track record of analysts predicting revolutions is very bad.

Mention was made earlier of the Berlin Wall. When Mr. Reagan stood before the Berlin Wall in June 1987 and said this wall must go, many people thought that was showing the early onset of Alzheimer's, yet within two and a half years, the wall was gone.

A U.S. government group looked at the track records of analysts predicting revolutions successfully and concluded that in the last 200 years, country experts had been inaccurate in every single case.

[The Chair, Conservative, Scott Reid]

You're over your time, Mr. Hiebert. If you have one more, I'll let you do it.

[Russ Hiebert, Conservative, South Surrey—White Rock—Cloverdale, BC]

I've been thinking about the logic that Iran must be facing. I know this is completely hypothetical, but they've made all these claims about wanting to annihilate Jerusalem or Israel.

You stated earlier that if they had demonstrated that they had a nuclear weapon, there'd be increased sanctions. There'd be support for a pre-emptive strike if they simply demonstrated that they had the weapons.

As they think about their options, certainly having nuclear weapons gives them a power position, a place to negotiate. That makes sense, but if they were actually to follow through on their threats and launch one of these missiles, would they simply be trying to precipitate World War III? Do they see the end? What's the outcome?

It would seem to me that the retaliation on Iran would be immense. They'd be bringing destruction upon themselves.

[Patrick Clawson]

Many countries get into wars because of miscalculations and ignorance about the other side. After the war is over, presumably at least one side regrets that the war started.

The great worry is that Iran has a record of ignorance about the outside world, and a record of miscalculation that suggests that we have to be worried that in a crisis, they would miscalculate and would think that their threats would cause the other side to back down, when in fact the other side would stand tough and we would get into a war that neither side wants.

That, I would suggest, has happened very often in history, and indeed in many ways it's what happened with the Iran-Iraq war. You might think that after having lost several hundred thousand of their citizens in a bloody eight-year war, the Iranian leaders would be much more cautious. Unfortunately, they're not, and the fact that the nuclear program is in the hands of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the exact same group that is also responsible for supporting terrorism, is not encouraging when we think about how they might be willing to gamble that a tough stance will cause the other side to back down.