Out of nuclear closet

When President Khatami of Iran announced last week that his country was producing nuclear fuel from its own uranium deposits and planned to widen its nuclear programme, it looked like a serious own-goal.

The nuclear reactors which the Russians are building in Bushehr, in southern Iran, have their Russian-made fuel ready-supplied. The only apparent point in Iran producing its own fuel would be to enable it to make its own nuclear weapons.

In other words, the three countries which President George Bush, to some people's embarrassment, linked together last year in an axis of evil - Iran, Iraq and North Korea - have indeed all come out of the nuclear closet. And Iran must surely have placed itself firmly on the American hit list.

Not so. Iran's decision to join the club of potential or actual nuclear powers in the region, whose members are Israel, Iraq, Pakistan and India, may be distinctly depressing, but it isn't suicidal.

Iran has judged its position, and American intentions, carefully. It knows that despite all the patriotic noise about American power that emanates from Washington at the moment, Bush has no intention of taking Iran on. It is, quite simply, too hard a nut to crack.

A leading Saudi politician says he recently had an argument with the American Vice-President, Dick Cheney, about the wisdom of attacking Iraq. "Why do it?" he asked despairingly in the end. "Because it's do-able," Mr Cheney answered, with commendable frankness.

Defeating Iraq is indeed do-able; the Americans and their allies found that out in 1991. We were, you may remember, subjected to weeks of propaganda about the Iraqi armed forces being the fourth largest in the world, yet they crumbled within a few hours.

Nowadays Iraq's defensive powers are even weaker. Attacking Iran, by contrast, is not do-able. It is far larger than Iraq, both in population and in area. Its armed forces are still not very well equipped. Yet it has a very definite strength which protects it.

This, curiously, derives from its politics. Whatever Westerners may think about the way Iran is governed, it is not a dictatorship like its neighbour, Iraq, and although I have sometimes mischievously listed Ayatollah Khomeini as one of the various dictators I have interviewed, it is unfair to his memory.

Never a dictator

Khomeini was never remotely a dictator. He was always a kind of chairman of the board, overseeing the quarrelsome figures who actually ran the place and intervening when he felt that circumstances required it.

And however unpopular the government of the day might have been, Khomeini himself retained the basic loyalty of most Iranians.

Iran is, in fact, a kind of looking-glass democracy, in which people can [within certain clearly defined limits] genuinely express their opinions about their rulers through the ballot box even if they no longer expect their votes to change things in any very serious way.

The long battle between reformers and conservatives, which has been played out ever since the revolution of 1979, has led to an intractable stalemate in Iran's affairs.

The voters have consistently shown by majorities of more than 80 per cent at election times that they favour the reformers; but the conservatives, outside the government yet with their hands on many of the levers of power, refuse to take the hint.

As a result everything - the trial of a respected writer, the nomination of a first-rate Farsi-speaking British ambassador, the editorial line of a newspaper, the precise wording of an official notice – becomes the battleground where this self-defeating war can be fought out.

And despite the defeats which every conservative presidential candidate receives from the voters, nothing changes this. The reformers may be in government, but their hands are tied.

The announcement of Iran's nuclear ambitions last week didn't come from the conservatives, though. It came from President Khatami himself, the man who has always enjoyed consistent public support. The fact is, Iran cannot allow itself to seem weak, now that the United States is flexing its muscles in the region.

Profoundly sceptical

Iran is profoundly sceptical about Western motives. It remembers how the Americans, desperate to prevent an Iranian victory in the eight-year war with Iraq, sent Dick Cheney to give Saddam Hussain American satellite intelligence to counter the danger from Iran.

Iranians remember, too, how, soon after Saddam's chemical warfare attack on his own citizens in Halabja in 1988, the British government was enthusiastically selling weapons to Iraq. And then denying it indignantly in parliament.

If you are a medium-sized power in the Middle East nowadays you do not tell yourself that you should rely on the United States and Britain to establish peace and democracy: you make sure you can defend yourself. You wouldn't want George Bush and Dick Cheney to think that attacking you might be do-able.

John Simpson is World Affairs editor of the BBC

© The Telegraph Group Limited, London 2003