Netanyahu on Iran - an assessment

Benjamin Netanyahu's speech to congress on Tuesday is intended to highlight what the Israeli leader insists are the risks of a nuclear deal with Iran.

However, to his critics, including an influential group of former military and intelligence officials in Israel, the prime minister's policies and statements on Iran are misleading and could even hasten Tehran's development of a nuclear weapon.

Below is an assessment of some of Mr Netanyahu's statements on the Iranian nuclear programme over the past two years.

September 2012: "It's only a few months, possibly a few weeks before they get enough enriched uranium for the first bomb."

In his famous 2012 speech to the UN General Assembly, Benjamin Netanyahu vividly illustrated his concerns about Tehran's nuclear ambitions with a crude diagram of a bomb. The implication was clear: Iran was in the final stages of developing an atomic weapon.

This was only partly true. The divergence between Mr Netanyahu and the Israeli intelligence service, Mossad, on the evidence for this claim has been well documented and was confirmed again last week when leaked Mossad cables from 2012 said: "Iran is not performing the activity necessary to produce weapons."

But as Mossad and other international intelligence assessments also made clear, while there was no evidence that Iran was enriching uranium beyond 20 per cent, there had been a substantial expansion of capacity to enrich up to that point.

Enrichment becomes progressively easier as uranium concentration grows, so making the leap from 5 per cent to 20 per cent enriched material is much harder than 20 per cent to 70 per cent - or from there to weapons grade (90 per cent). So Iran was not necessarily working towards building a bomb, but it was working towards being able to do so quickly should it decide to.

February 2013: "What they are doing is to shorten the time that it will take them to cross that line and the way they are (doing it) is by putting in new, faster centrifuges that cut the time by one-third."

Most experts agree that Iran is conducting research into a new generation of centrifuges to replace its existing stock of IR-1 centrifuges and that these could significantly increase Tehran's capacity to rapidly enrich uranium to a high degree.

But installing and operating them is more difficult than Mr Netanyahu makes out. Any deal with Iran would involve the dismantling of surplus centrifuge cascades, but replacing or updating them would take months of work and would almost certainly be detected. In addition, any new facilities would be beset with teething problems that would take time to iron out. Finally, more advanced designs depend on carbon fibre rotor blades, which Iran has a poor record of producing. Limiting imports of carbon fibre could be a key element of any sanctions regime that is kept after a deal is agreed.

December 2013: "As we have warned, and I say this with regret, the sanctions regime has started to weaken and very quickly."

When an interim deal with Iran was first struck in November 2013, there was concern that it would lead to the sanctions regime falling rapidly apart. But most observers have been struck by how robust the sanctions have remained. There are businesses waiting to pounce on the opportunities presented by the opening of Iran's economy, but for now the risks of doing business in Iran are simply too high, even when it might be legally permissible. P5+1 negotiators (the US, UK, Russia, China, France and Germany) have also made a phased rollback of sanctions one of their key red lines in talks. The phasing out of sanctions will depend on years of proven good behaviour from Iran.

September 2012: "Iran uses diplomatic negotiations as a means to buy time to advance its nuclear programme."

There is plenty of evidence to support this claim. In 2002, after years of low-level research Iran declared it had built new nuclear facilities at Arak and Natanz, prompting worldwide condemnation. The following year, Tehran promised to come clean on its nuclear activities and agreed to adhere to IAEA requirements, suspending enrichment and agreeing to giving inspectors broad access. But it reneged on its pledges. In 2004 the Paris agreement allowed Tehran to avoid being referred to the UN Security Council but the following year Iran began enriching uranium again and was sanctioned. In 2007 Iran again returned to the negotiating table but by 2010 it had massively ramped up its enrichment programme again.

September 2014: "[Supporters of a deal] claim that Iran's smooth talking president and foreign minister,[have] changed not only the tone of Iran's foreign policy but also its substance."

Mr Netanyahu's claim that Iran's president and foreign minister are not to be trusted is at odds with almost every P5+1 diplomatic and intelligence assessment of Iran. So far, Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, has thrown his weight behind his president and foreign minister, and shown a willingness to curb hardline voices at home in order to give them room for diplomatic manoeuvre. While the Ayatollah is no friend of the west, many long-term Iran watchers believe that he genuinely seeks an end to the punishing sanctions regime and is willing to sacrifice elements of the nuclear programme to do so. Even Israel is in agreement on this point. Yuval Steinitz, Israel's intelligence and strategic affairs minister told the FT last month: "If the pressure is sufficient and if the Iranians are forced to choose at the end of the day either to save their economy or to save their uranium enrichment facilities, I'm confident . . . they will choose to save the economy."

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