Nuclear Qom

When did Iran commence work at the Qom site? The question might be of significance when considering new ‘crippling’ sanctions. Its answer seems to be complicated. In March 2007, Iran withdraw its voluntary adhesion to the so-called modified code 3.1 of the nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT), implemented in 1992, which requires the member states (the Shah has signed the NPT in 1967, its majlis, or parliament, ratified it in 1974) to notify the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) as soon as a possible nuclear facility is even designed, in retaliation of referring the nuclear issue to the UN Security Council which the country considered illegal. The old code 3.1 demanded notifications only 180 days before introducing nuclear materials into the facility. Mohammed Sahimi at TehranBureau speculates on the possibility that Iran may have commenced its work on the site in the early 1990s. According to Sahimi, Iran would be pretty innocent if work had begun before 1992, even if the country, for a short period of time, later had implemented, voluntarily, the modified code 3.1.

For my taste, there is a certain circular reasoning in his arguments. More realistically would be if the country had started work at Qom after its one-sided withdrawal from its obligations, i.e., after March 2007. Iran’s well-known nuclear facilities in Natanz, Esfahan, and Arak had massively been threatened by possible military actions that year by the Bush-Cheney administration and Israel. Comparative satellite imagery of GoogleEarth images of 2005 and more recent images of DigitalGlobe of 2009, which have been provided by the Institute of Science and International Security (ISIS), suggest rather fundamental changes of the possible site(s) in recent years.

That Iran has notified the IAEA about the site before Obama in Pittsburgh trumpeted that the site has been known to American intelligence ‘for years’ is another issue. We’ll see on Thursday when the Geneva talks of the P5+1 and Iran commence whose strategy will finally prevail.

Classified and Declassified

On the eve of this year’s visit to New York president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad gave Ann Curry of NBC a rare interview at his official residence in Tehran. While the interview itself has carelessly been prepared, completely ignoring the mere facts of the brutal crackdown of the opposition movement after Iran’s highly disputed election, one insisting (albeit amateurishly formulated) question was obviously not answered by the president: “Is there a condition under which Iran would weaponize (meaning, creating a nuclear weapon)?”

There is a high risk that the visibly nerved president’s reluctant response will only serve as just another piece of evidence that Iran still has a covert military nuclear program. That he considers nuclear weapons as belonging to the past will not be sufficient in certain western circles.

In November 2007, the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran of US America’s 16 intelligence agencies had concluded that, “with high confidence, until fall 2003, Iranian military entities were working under government direction to develop nuclear weapons.” And that, “with moderate confidence, Tehran had not restarted its nuclear weapons programs as of mid-2007, but we don’t know whether it currently intends to develop nuclear weapons.” (Emphasis added.)

Most of the 2007 NIE is classified. What has been released so far should be considered as a summary of intelligence findings. The declassified summary of the NIE has been heavily discredited and its release criticized since the estimate gives the impression that Iran, at least until mid-2007, has no covert military nuclear program (with moderate confidence). The estimate had been released when the former Bush-Cheney administration was just about to strike Iran’s nuclear sites. It effectively prevented any strike since.

What does moderate confidence actually mean? The authors of the NIE define:

“Moderate confidence generally means that the information is credibly sourced and plausible but not of sufficient quality or corroborated sufficiently to warrant a higher level of confidence.”

Given that most of the NIE is still classified, referring to the declassified summary of the NIE and its main conclusion that Iran does not have, since 2003 and until mid-2007 and with moderate confidence, a military nuclear program, has been questioned by David Albright and Christina Walrond in a recent report of the Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS). They criticize a 2008 German court (Oberlandesgericht Frankfurt) decision which dismissed all charges against a German-Iranian businessman, Mohsen Vanaki, who had allegedly “illegally brokered the transfer of dual-use equipment to Iran with applications in a nuclear weapons program” (high-speed cameras, radiation detectors, night vision goggles), which had recently been overturned by Germany’s Federal Court of Justice. The Bundesgerichtshof decided on March 26, 2009 that the Oberlandesgericht should not have dismissed the findings of Germany’s federal intelligence service Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND) which provided the court with additional evidence to the NIE. While the Oberlandesgericht had correctly recognized that the BND’s assessment did not contain proof of an Iranian nuclear weapons program, it failed to recognize that the NIE’s judgment about the program was also not proof.

Circular reasoning has it that no proof formulated twice might cast enough doubt on Iran. The mere fact that Germany’s federal court had ordered a retrial may be considered by interested parties almost as proof that Iran indeed has a covert military program. Albright and Walrond’s report has been published just when American intelligence agencies, in an update of the 2007 NIE, reported to the White House that Iran has not restarted its nuclear weapons development program.

Albright and Walrond’s concluding claim that

“[G]iven difficulties faced by courts and governments in interpreting the declassified NIE and its relevance to international initiatives being taken to address Iran’s nuclear program, the U.S. government should declassify more of the 2007 NIE and any future one,”

sounds reasonable at first sight. But what they actually want to say is: there is more behind the curtain. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and its outgoing Director General Mohamed ElBaradei have recently faced similar rumors, in both ways. While in particular Israel has blamed the IAEA to hide incriminating evidence about Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons program, others claim that the IAEA conceals exculpatory evidence that the so-called alleged studies were forged, an issue which has been mentioned in numerous IAEA reports on Iran in recent years.

One may in fact conclude that highly diverse interpretations of classified intelligence information and declassified parts of it eventually would only serve the dictator(s) in Tehran.

Profiles in Courage

September 11, 2001 had been a turning point for almost all people in the world. As regards me, I remember filling packing cases after a hard work’s day in the preparation of a significant move: to the Middle East; my departure scheduled only some ten days later. I was about to join a brand new faculty at Kuwait University when I switched on the TV and saw, again and again, Manhattan’s Twin Towers hit by airplane, and hit again, then collapsing. Only thirty minutes later I had received the first telephone call of a friend who tried to convince me that Kuwait would be safe and I certainly would not change my stance.

Well, I didn’t loose my courage although none of my new and most curious colleagues really expected me to come after 9/11. The new beginning was cumbersome but overall quite interesting. I met people from all over the world, a true international faculty. They had, though, very different profiles of courage. I learned to know rather anxious people who never really understood that Islam was a great cultural achievement and worth of being studied in detail. I met greedy people who were there for the money only. As usual in Academia, you always also meet people with highly problematic personalities, preventing any real collaboration.

The Kuwaitis were friendly and in essence very helpful. Some of my new colleagues from the West who had been there for some time complained, though, that they were snobby, considering themselves very special. Some allegedly even looked down to us, the western expats, coming for the money, the infidels.  

As I settled, I became aware of a would-be colleague from the Ministry of Health who was somehow a relative of our Dean. Dr. I. presented himself as a VIP within Kuwait’s health system, a former MP, even a journalist; in fact a multitalented member of Kuwait’s closed society. He arduously tried to get into the faculty. When having been seconded, he quickly demanded giving lectures on topics he could hardly be considered to be an expert of. When finally appointed as assistant professor, he managed to serve in two independent departments.

The first Arabic word I learned in this context was wasta, or insider relationship, old boys’ network. Dr. I. represented wasta. Asking him a favor, one almost immediately got satisfied. He knew people and places. In his own private clinic he had employed numerous humble and subservient domestics. He could always count on their slavish obedience.

While his remote relative, the Dean, knew about Dr. I. but could not prevent him from joining the faculty, problems with him quickly emerged. Absurd criticism of expats led to early cessation of contracts. Then he attacked his Kuwaiti colleagues. There is a highly questionable rule at Kuwait University that a permanent appointment does not depend on scientific publications but rather on passing the American board examination or an equivalent qualification. Dr. I. had dozens of publications (which have to be considered worthless from a scientific point of view) and he was a specialist who had passed an equivalent board exam in Ireland. But some of his rivals among the Kuwaiti colleagues had not. If they were too close to his arch enemy, the Dean, he liked to question their qualifications. He usually involved the media and even the University President, who received dozens of letters of complaint.

On an especially revealing and even instructional occasion Dr. I. sent a pages-long email to the culprit, a very likeable young colleague with certain talents as a University teacher, where he referred to a certain hadith which is well-known among adherents of Shi’a Islam: mubahala. He updated this email, in which he accused his colleague of lying about the assumed expiration of his part II board exam, on a daily basis and sent copies of it to the President’s office, the Ministry and all faculty members. He even sent copies to students.

Mubahala reminds the pious believer of an incident in 631 CE (9 AH) when a group of Arabic Christians argued with the Prophet Muhammad which of the two parties erred in its doctrine concerning the nature of Jesus. Muhammad, after likening Jesus’ miraculous birth to Adam’s creation, called the Christians to mubahala, or cursing, where each party should ask God to destroy the lying party and their families. He then covered himself and his family (Ahl al-Bayt), i.e., his daughter Fatima, her husband Ali and their two boys Hasan and Husayn with a cloak. The Christian envoy declined taking part in mubahala and chose instead to pay tribute.

As far as I know, I was the only western expat who recognized the tremendous impact of Dr. I.’s curse on our young Kuwaiti colleague. Muslims, who read through all the baseless accusations which were sent day after day to dozens of people, were deeply shocked. Mubahala is definitely exceeding the limits. Dr. I. did not fear any consequences for his ruthless defamation. But the young colleague eventually resigned and left the faculty for good.

Years later, I learned that Dr. I. is a pretty prominent liar himself. In 1990, Iraq’s dictator Saddam Hussein had invaded the tiny but oil-rich country in the corner of the Persian Gulf. A 15-year-old Kuwaiti nurse, who had only been introduced as Nayirah and who later turned out to be the Kuwaiti US ambassador’s daughter, testified to the Congressional Human Rights Caucus on October 10, 1990 that she herself had witnessed babies being taken out of incubators and being left on cold floors to die. The incubators were then taken to Baghdad. After the war, it became clear that another alleged witness, who had testified before the UN Security Council and the Congress that he had supervised the burial of 120 infants and personally buried 40 newborn babies who had died after taken from their incubators by Iraqi soldiers, had used false names and identities. This witness later revoked and admitted that he had never seen these atrocities. The alleged Dr. Issah Ibrahim was in fact our Dr. I., not a surgeon but rather a dentist. The notorious story is still remembered as the “incubator lie” which essentially served in motivating the World public to support America’s actions of throwing the Iraqi troops out of the Kuwait in Operation Desert Storm. More information can be found in L. May’s Crimes against Humanity: A Normative Account, Cambridge University Press 2004.

A notorious liar is suffering from a habit. A Kuwaiti lawyer who I once had asked for some support in a libel case, in which Dr. I. was involved, was very hesitant to accept the job. “Is it about libel?” he asked me. “But that’s the way how we do it in this society.”

I recently got to know that Dr. I. has lost a lawsuit in court against his faculty chairman and has now sued the University President.

 

Note: Profiles in Courage is the title of the 1955 Pulitzer-Prize-winning bestseller by John F. Kennedy, which describes the integrity and bravery of eight US senators. It profiles moral courage of highly reputed men in the history of the Unites States. Despite overall enthusiastic reception the later 35^th US president was quickly blamed that he was the only man who won a Pulitzer Prize for a book which had been ghostwritten for him. The book has actually been written by his speechwriter Ted Sorensen.

Something to Work With

Iran’s long-awaited diplomatic proposal (not really a package) to the P5+1 world powers, the US, the UK, France, Germany, Russia, China, has disappointed many. The harshest reactions were coming from the US. American lawmakers may even want to use the five pages as further argument for new and ‘crippling’ sanctions.

The response may be premature. After a difficult situation following the disputed presidential election with unprecedented power struggles within the ruling establishment, which still seem not to be settled, the proposal may be considered a first and quite constructive contribution in preparation of new talks with Iran.

After all, it had to be expected that the issue of Iran enriching uranium (for merely peaceful purposes only, as Tehran continues to pretend) is not mentioned in the document. Rather, a fundamental reform of the UN, its Security Council and the IAEA is claimed. The latter might in fact be overdue. However painful, Tehran might be right when demanding, under para 2.6, “Promoting the universality of NPT (the nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty Iran is a signatory of) mobilizing global resolve and putting into action real and fundamental programmes toward complete disarmament and preventing development and proliferation of nuclear, chemical and microbial weapons.” Desirably, international double standards as regards existing and/or presumed military nuclear programs (Tehran does not explicitly mention Israel in the document, a non-signatory of the NPT possessing a stockpile of possibly 300-400 nuclear weapons) have in fact to come to an end.

That Iran raises security issues first shows that the country takes threats of new sanctions, regime change and, first and foremost, possible attacks of its nuclear facilities serious. Irrespective of a perceived lack of legitimacy of the current cabinet under President Ahmadinejad, the country, as other sovereign states, just demands respect.

That Iran raises eventually economic issues shows its present vulnerability.

Ramadan in Afghanistan

German Chancellor Angela Merkel has promised that the circumstances under which 125 people, many of them civilians (in fact 70), were killed in a NATO air strike last week near Kunduz in northern Afghanistan will be scrutinized carefully. The German Colonel Georg Klein  had ordered the air strike after two fuel tankers had been hijacked by the Taliban. The commander’s call has probably been in breach of NATO rules as it was based on just one intelligence source.

Chancellor Merkel and her Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier are amidst an election campaign where the highly unpopular issue of the 3720 or so German troops in Afghanistan under International Forces in Afghanistan (ISAF) command has consistently been played down, even ignored. The majority of the German population questions the presence of German soldiers in the Hindu Kush.

For some time, there are also incriminating questions being asked by the allied forces. It is not clear to German soldiers that they are fighting in a war in Afghanistan. According to Minister of Defense Franz Josef Jung, Germany isn’t at war in Afghanistan. “The goal of the German army is, alongside providing security, to help the country rebuild and with its development. We are not occupiers. Unfortunately there are situations where our soldiers have to fight. But we’re not looking for fights.”

“In a war, you don’t build schools, you don’t set up the water and power supply and you don’t build kindergartens and hospitals and you don’t train the military and the police.”

The official, prescribed, terminology of not being occupier does not fit with the known fact that German troops consume incredible amounts of alcoholic beverages. It has long been known that German soldiers are allowed two cans (1 l) of beer per day or an equivalent of wine. German Armed Forces are “importing” millions of liters of beer and wine each year to the Islamic country selling alcoholic beverages even to their NATO allies. As a matter of fact, local law is simply neglected in the country, not mentioning Ramadan, the holy month when Muslims observe strict rules for fasting.

When trying to figure out what had happened in the September 4 air strike, head of ISAF General Stanley McChrystal noted that too many of his underlings at the NATO base were either drunk or hungover, only a few hours after the deadly NATO attack. Furious, he immediatley banned any alcohol consumption.

When specifically asked the common response by German Armed Forces authorities is that alcohol is only consumed inside the camp and after hours. It violates Afghanistan law anyway. Lives are put at risk since radical Islamists usually know and will not forgive. It doesn’t make even a difference whether civilians are killed in a devastating air strike or soldiers behave like occupiers partying on weekends during the holy month.  

 

See also on this blog

Mobile Phone and Embedded about embedded journalism.

Better Off if the Europeans… about criticism of the German contribution in the war in Afghanistan.

In the Tower of Babel

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Those who have studied Islamic art and architecture for some time inevitably have asked sooner or later the following questions: How did they do that? Apart from the application of fundamental principles in geometry, how could they create most sophisticated and highly complicated geometric designs over extended areas in this stunning precision? And then, why did Muslims in the Golden Age of Islam do that? Who had taught them, and how? Where are the books and manuscripts? When and on what occasions met and collaborated  scientists and artists in Islamic civilization?

In the early 1970s these simple questions struck a young and extraordinary talented Iraqi lady with a strong background in history and historiography when she searched for a suitable topic for a doctoral thesis at Harvard [1]. These questions weren’t obvious at that time. When Wasma’a Chorbachi had explained her preliminary proposal and her desire of finding the relevant literature which had obviously been lost during the centuries, she was rather quickly turned down. Her advisor expressed his strong opinion that there was not such a thing. There had never been. His good advise was rather to expand her list of questions in order not to fail, for instance, including questions such as: Has the interest in science or geometry been part of the average cultured person’s background in the ninth or tenth century? What practical geometry had been developed by the tenth century? What caused the growth of this phenomenon? Geographically, where did it begin and in what directions did it spread?

 

A Needle in the Haystack

Wasma’a started her search taking advantage of the extensive resources of the Harvard library system. She read through catalogues and indices of manuscript collections available in libraries throughout the world. By the end of the week she had come across Kamāl al-Dīn Yūnis bin Man’a, one of the most outstanding teachers at the main school of the early 13^th century in Mosul, Iraq (which has later been named after him, al-Madrasah al-Kamālīyah, [2]). Among his work was a commentary on an earlier work of one of the most eminent mathematicians and scientists of the Islamic world of the 10^th century, Abū’l-Wafā al-Būzjānī. He lived in Baghdad from approximately 945 CE until his death in about 987 CE. The transliterated title of the main work was also more or less the title of Wasma’a’s PhD project: “A treatise on what the artisan needs of geometric problems”, while the title of Kamāl al-Din Yunis’ commentary was “Commentary on the geometry problems.” Thus, by the third week of her search Wasma’a Chorbachi had already been successful in achieving her first aim: to locate the relevant literature as regards the teaching of medieval artisans of the Islamic world by scientists.

Wasma’a’s next step was to travel to Europe and find and read the original manuscripts, in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris where she had located a Persian translation of Abū’l-Wafā al-Būzjānī’s manuscript of the “Treatise on what the artisan needs of geometric problems.” In Paris, she found an unnamed, undated manuscript probably from the 14^th century which clearly was of significantly greater importance than Abu’l Wafa’s work: “On interlocking similar and congruent figures.” Wasma’a writes:

“By the time I returned to Cambridge, I had located a range of written material, in the history of Islamic science and geometric design from the tenth century of the mid-nineteenth century, lying in library and museum storage rooms all over the world. In point of fact, my material turned out to be so convincing that it is now being used and propagated even by those who demonstrated such a strong sceptical attitude towards it at the beginning. Though locating the manuscripts took only two months, acquiring microfilms and/or photocopies of these documents without any backing or support took several years. Meanwhile; I was struggling to decipher the material, and to find an appropriate language in which to discuss it and describe the geometrical patterns with which it dealt.”

 

Confusing Language

Studying the right language (while noticing that different people with different background will describe what they see by using different terminology) took years for Wasma’a. It foremost included Group Theory, Crystallography and Symmetry Notation, fields with which historians and art historians are not really familiar per se. Wasma’a strictly applied scientific reasoning, though. It is interesting reading her rebuttal of ‘esoteric’ reasoning in explaining the ‘meaning’ in Islamic art which became most popular in the mid 1970s. According to proponents, the “principle of the unity of being’ was even “pushed to a point of scientific fallacy such as the claim that all geometric patterns of Islamic art are derivable through a single method of construction based on the subdivision of the circle, in order to declare this art work an example of the “Unity of Being”. ” Divine Unity, or Tawhīd, as the driving force for geometric patterns. That didn’t make sense in her opinion.

“The general public unfortunately remains unaware of this. If in these books, that are now readily available on the market, their authors had made clear that the presented views were modern understandings of old forms, turning them into symbols, there would be no reason to object. The problem lies in presenting these modern mystical views as historical truths, as if these symbols were the meanings at the time the art forms were created. The non-Islamicist who is exposed to these books [for example, I. El-Said’s Geometric Concepts in Islamic Art; L. Bakhtiar’s Sufi: Expressions of the Mystic Quest] will anachronistically assume that a modern interpretation is the historical truth. Where does one draw the line between true historical research and the creation of and attribution of symbolic meaning to forms from the past? How can we redeem the geometric shapes, forms and patterns from the shrouds of mystical interpretations in order to see the precise scientific design at their basis?” 

Describing the visual perception and linguistic or even fashionable semiotics further served only to confuse the interested layman in particular in the 1970s [3].

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In a comprehensive case study Wasma’a Chorbachi deconstructs one of several amazing brick pattern on one of the two Seljuq Kharraqan tomb towers (1093 CE) in the vicinity of Qazvin in northern Iran which consists, at first sight, of V-forms, X-forms as well as dots, but which, at second sight, comprises an extremely popular geometric structure, a square within a square within another square. I have described this pattern, which can be found, for instance, several times on the western and southern iwans of Esfahan’s Great Mosque [4], and how it may be created in another posting on this blog. It’s construction in five steps had been described in a systematic, scientifically correct, way in the above mentioned, unnamed, undated Paris manuscript No. 169 “On interlocking similar and congruent figures”, Wasma’a had been working on.

What follows is another case study of the Persian manuscript folio 192b about a similar structure of a kind of pinwheel which fascinates “in its use of a strict algorithm with irrational numbers.” It shows how the principles may lead to different designs which probably have been considered from a pure esthetic point of view.

“The science of symmetry of patterns tell[s] us that there are 17 different periodic two-dimensional groups and 7 groups periodic in a singular direction (string or ribbon), also that each of these groups could have an infinite number of different designs. Ad seen, these Islamic geometric manuscripts give us samples of the infinite design variations of the basic 17 periodic groups; these documented geometric problems or examples in turn could be the basis for developing  many new sets of design.”

See Dr. Wasma’a Chorbachi homepage here.

 

Notes

[1] This posting is about a remarkable text by Wasma’a K. Chorbachi which was based on two lectures given at MIT, Cambridge, in November 1987 and had been published in Computers Math Applic 1989; 17: 751-789: In the Tower of Babel: Beyond symmetry in Islamic design. It deals with a lot of questions which I have asked myself (and many others) since I became fascinated of Islamic art and architecture in recent years.

[2] Despite his Arabic name, Wasma’a’s advisor considered Kamāl al-Dīn Yūnis a member of the Nestorian Church which had been revived in Iraq in the 12^th century. Dr. Chorbachi explains her dismay with considerable prejudices as well. I suppose it is not entirely correct that the annoying response of her supervisor reflected a general ignorant attitude towards the achievements of the Islamic world in the West after WWII, as she describes it. Ignorant supervisors are frequently found in Academia, even at Harvard. It might in fact be the case that in particular Americans are in essence Eurocentric. Not to forget that the 1970s were a decade of great technological and scientific achievements mainly coming from the US, which were very much occupied in proxy wars of the Cold War, for instance in Vietnam. Islamic art and architecture may not have been regarded a fruitful field where scientific breakthroughs had to be expected. In any way, Wasma’a continued her search and found quite a lot of information about Kamāl al-Dīn Yūnis. I have to admit that in spite of considerable search of the internet, I could not identify the scholar yet.

[3] Mystic interpretations of Islamic geometric patterns are still prevalent in many esoteric circles in the West. When trying to talk about new discoveries or searches, for instance, the search for quasi-crystalline patterns, one generally faces incomprehension among people with a general interest in Islamic art and art historians. The “meaning” of the stunning patterns is of greater importance than the question, how could it be created. And whether it has been chosen for esthetic reason only.

[4] Interestingly, Wasma’a mentions 1122 CE as construction date of the iwans, i.e., after Assassin rebels had set the mosque on fire in 1121. She also mentions that the iwans were re-decorated in 1800. In fact, restoration and repair of the structures and tessellations constantly takes place. The celebrated decoration of, for instance, the western iwan is usually considered to be Timurid (15^th century) or Safavid (16^th and 17^th century).

See ArchNet for further pictures of the two Kharraqan tomb towers.