Two recent developments may improve relations between the U.S. and Iran, lowering the threat of American military strikes against that country. One is the International Atomic Energy Agency's announcement last week that the documents on which the U.S. had been basing its claim that Iran's nuclear program had a military side may have been fabricated (by the administration that gave us WMD).
The documents were given to the IAEA in 2005 by American intelligence, which refused to tell where it had gotten them except to say that they had come from the laptop of an Iranian researcher. They aroused skepticism at the IAEA from the beginning because many of them were in English. In addition, though U.S. officials insisted that they proved the Iranians were overhauling the nose cone of a Shabab 3 missile to carry a nuclear warhead, the papers didn't provide a coherent chain of evidence to support that claim.
The documents were also used to support a U.S. claim that an Iranian company, Kimia Madaan, was involved in the military side of Iran's nuclear program. But the IAEA is satisfied with other evidence confirming statements by Iran that Kimia Madaan doesn't work for the Iranian defense ministry, only for the civilian nuclear program, for which it designed and installed equipment for an ore processing plant.
The IAEA has not reversed the position stated on October 2 by its director, Nobel Peace Prize winner Mohamed ElBaradei: "If& people are talking about war, they need to tell me what is the casus belli. I have to be very clear here, that the casus belli could not be what we see today in Iran, because what we see in Iran today is—as I said—is far from having a nuclear weapon."
Meanwhile President-elect Barack Obama has said that he will move to end the war in Iraq and concentrate on the hunt for Osama bin Laden and the conflict in Afghanistan, possibly bringing Iran in on the effort to stabilize the situation there. Experts believe Iran doesn't want Afghanistan to revert to the rule of the Taliban, who killed nine Iranians and hundreds of Shiites in 1998.
