Madam, - Paul Gillespie says the US National Intelligence Estimate report draws distinction between Iran's president Ahmadinejad, with his "belligerent anti-Zionism", and the country's ruling religious leaders who are "rational actors" and "far from the mad Islamofascist mullahs of neoconservative imaginings" (World View, December 8th).
Yet Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Khamenei was the one who, in December 2000 and in January 2001, declared that "the cancerous tumour called Israel must be uprooted from the region. . .and the perpetual aim of Iran is the obliteration of Israel". It was his number two, ex-president Ali Rafsanjani, who in December 2001 openly discussed the possibility of a nuclear strike on Israel and appeared to accept the destruction of Iranian cities, by an Israeli response, as an acceptable price to pay for Israel's annihilation. "The application of an atomic bomb," he said, "would not leave anything in Israel, but the same thing would just produce damages in the Muslim world."
Each year on Al-Quds (Jerusalem) Day, Shahab rockets are drawn through the streets of Tehran, with the name "Israel" marked on their sides, while crowds chant: "Death to Israel". Rational actors? Yet it is the US and Israel that are accused by your Editorial of December 5th of sounding "a growing drumbeat" for war!
Tony Kinsella (Opinion, December 5th) would be unwise to rely too much on the headline summary of the US National Intelligence Estimate stating that Iran halted its nuclear weapons programme in 2003. The rest of the report makes clear that it may very well have since resumed the programme. This is plausible and accords better with the recent rhetoric of Iran's leaders. In 2003, after the toppling of the Iraqi tyrant by the US, it made tactical sense to suspend this type of work, as Libya did.
With subsequent US difficulties in Iraq, the grounds to fear a US strike soon receded. Now 3,000 centrifuges at Natanz produce reactor-grade uranium which Iran, sitting on huge oil reserves, does not need. It takes only a quarter to a third as much energy again to enrich this to the 90 per cent U-235 level needed to make a Hiroshima-sized bomb. There is also the heavy water plant at Arak, not mentioned in the report, which can produce weapons-grade plutonium.
Unlike the US, Israel cannot afford the luxury of guesswork about these possibilities, but must constantly look at worst-case scenarios. If, as seems likely, this report makes international diplomatic pressure on Iran more difficult to achieve, the chances of Israel acting alone to deal with this existential threat are thereby increased.
It would not be the first time in history that a piece of paper framed with pacifist intentions ended up making war more likely. - Yours, etc,
DERMOT MELEADY, Dublin 3.