Experts dubious of Iran promise not to pursue nukes

Experts dubious of Iran promise not to pursue nukes.(Jpost).American and Israeli analysts are pessimistic over reports that Tehran will provide a written promise to the UN that it will not develop nuclear weapons. “Iran plans to declare in the UN that it will never go after nuclear bombs,” Vice President Mohammad Reza Rahimi said on Tuesday, AP quoted the Iranian Mehr news agency as reporting. He further claimed that international sanctions against Iran were trying to stop its “scientific progress,” according to the report. Experts are, however, pessimistic about any chance of success in negotiations with Iran. Different Iranian leaders are saying contradictory things, Patrick Clawson, the director of research at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, told The Jerusalem Post on Wednesday. Prof. Meir Litvak of the department of Middle Eastern history and the director for the Alliance Center of Iranian Studies at Tel Aviv University, told the Post on Wednesday that Iran’s word is not good enough. “What can be said is that promises are nice, but you need mechanisms to verify such pledges, and make sure that Iran does not renege at any time it wants, and God is always in the details,” Litvak said. Michael Rubin, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a former Pentagon official, told the Post that “Iran has a decades-long history of breaking promises. The day after they promised to lift the bounty on [author] Salman Rushdie, for example, so as to get the British ambassador back, they reimposed it. And don’t even ask about promises to respect embassies.”Hmmm.....The Islamic republic’s diplomats point to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s 2004 fatwa against the development, production, stockpiling, and use of nuclear weapons. The inviolability and permanence of the fatwa is open to some interpretation, however, and in earlier days, Iranian leaders made little secret of their intentions. In 1991, Deputy President Ayatollah Mohajerani stated that Iran should workwith other Islamic states to create an ‘‘Islamic bomb.’’ Ali Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani,characterized today as a pragmatist, in contrast to hardliner Ahmadinejad, in 1988 explicitly called on Iran to equip itself both in the offensive and defense use of chemical,bacteriological and radiological weapons.’’ By then, as then-Speaker of the Majlis and Commander in Chief, Rafsanjani had already won Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s approval to resume the Shah’s nuclear program and to begin secretly importing material and conducting experiments in violation of Iran’s safeguards agreement with the IAEARead the full story here.