(AP Photo/Fars News Agency, Ali Shaigan)

Iranian state media today said the military has successfully test-fired Shahab and Sejil missiles, which are capable of reaching much of the Middle East, including Israel and American bases in the Gulf. The move comes just days after revelations of a secret nuclear enrichment program, and just days before multi-party talks on Iran’s nuclear program that will involve the United States. Anchor Jeb Sharp speaks with Charles Duelfer, a former US intelligence officer and weapons inspector. Download MP3

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JEB SHARP: I’m Jeb Sharp, and this is the World.  The United States, Britain and France today condemned the latest missile tests that Iran has conducted.  Iran shot off ballistic missiles that have sufficient range to hit Israel and US bases in the Middle East.  The move comes just days after revelations of a secret nuclear enrichment facility in Iran.  And it comes just days before the US is to sit down with Iran in multiparty talks on Tehran’s nuclear ambitions.  Charles Duelfer headed up the Iraq Survey Group, which searched for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.  Duelfer says the newly revealed facility in Iran shows that the country could make a nuclear weapon faster than we thought.

CHARLES DUELFER: It indicates a certain level of planning and expertise on the part of Iran to build in place a way of making a very short timeline between when they would do something that would be observable to the outside world and when they would actually have a nuclear weapon.  This is to say they could use their declared nuclear facility to make uranium of a certain level of enrichment, then shift to the new site for more highly enriched uranium.  The net effect is to shorten the warning time that the outside world would have before they achieve their weapon.  It could be as low as a month or two.

SHARP: So, would it be fair to say the United States and its allies want this facility inspected in part because they need to see if it changes their calculations about how close Iran may or may not be to an actual bomb?

DUELFER: That’s correct.  It would be much more difficult for Iran to deny they’ve got a weaponization program and just a civilian program.  They’ve been stating categorically they have only a program for civilian purposes.  It’s very difficult to explain its new facility under these terms.  This is going to be a point of enormous friction with Tehran, because they’re going to have a very tough time explaining this.

SHARP: I’m curious to see what you think about the way this has unfolded.  It seems the western powers knew about this program, but did not report it to their publics or the IAEA, and it’s being reported now that Barack Obama was briefed on it before his inauguration.  So help us understand the advantage of sitting on the intelligence for so long.

DUELFER: Well, I don’t know what President Obama was thinking.  It may be a part of a considered strategy of how to approach Iran on this.  They just recently had elections, obviously.  And I think there was a decision by the White House not to do anything to disturb the process of the Iranian elections.  It may also be that the information about that facility was not 100 percent certain.  It in fact was Iran which acknowledged it first.  Somehow they got wind of the fact that the IAEA and others were being briefed on this facility, and they came forth almost preemptively.  It’s interesting to note, I think, that Tehran has probably learned a great deal from the Iraq experience.  Their behavior appears from the outside to be carefully calculated to minimize the lead time and the information that would be available to the outside world that would incontrovertibly point to a weapons program, not just a civilian program on their part.  They are pursuing long-range ballistic missiles as you said in your introduction.  That is a long lead item.  But it is not something which is definitely connected to a weapons program.  They are producing enriched uranium which they argue is for a civilian program.  That again is a very long lead item.  The shortest lead items are those things which are associated only with a weapon.  A nuclear bomb.  And it would appear from the outside that they have learned a lesson from Iraq in terms of how to proceed in a fashion that provides the least amount of evidence to the outside world about their intentions.

SHARP: Charles Duelfer, thanks very much.

DUELFER: Thank you very much.

SHARP: Charles Duelfer headed up the Iraq Study Group searching for Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction after the US-led invasion.  He’s also author a new book, “Hide and Seek: The Search for Truth in Iraq.”

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Photo by Matthew Bell

Today is Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the year on the Jewish calendar. And for Jews around the world, it’s a day spent at home and at synagogue to ask God for forgiveness. In Israel, the “day of atonement” means that much of the country simply stops. Stores are closed, there’s no school, no newspapers and no Israeli television. And much less traffic. In and around Tel Aviv, the holiday has turned into a festival of bicycles for children. The World’s Matthew Bell has our story.

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JEB SHARP: The revelations of Iran’s nuclear facility and its missile tests may have made the holiest day of the Jewish calendar more somber than usual in Israel.  Yom Kippur is the Jewish Day of Atonement.  It began at sundown yesterday.  TV and radio stations in Israel went off the air.  There were no flights in and out of Israel’s international airport.  And nearly all businesses closed.  But The World’s Matthew Bell reports that not all of Israel came to a halt.

MATTHEW BELL:  Hundreds of Jews gathered to pray in front of the western wall in Jersualem’s old city hours before the start of Yom Kippur.  They were mostly men and boys.  The women and girls were cordoned off to one side.  They all faced the holiest site on earth for Jews, the Temple Mount.  Many rocked back and forth as they recited from books of scripture.  It was an example of the kind of religious devotion that makes Jerusalem Israel’s most pious place.  On the other side of Israel, less than an hour’s drive away, a different kind of preparation for the holiday took place, at bicycle shops.  Six-year-old Itimar was with his dad to pick up a few last-minute items.    Itimar wasn’t exaggerating.  Traffic in most of Israel completely stops for Yom Kippur.  And so the holiday has turned into a festival of bicycles for children, especially in and around Tel Aviv.  Karen Brima and her husband assembled a new Spiderman bike with training wheels for their three-year-old son.  They got it ready just in time for the big day.

BRIMA:  Yom Kippur in Tel Aviv might seem like a carnival, with all the kids on bikes.  But it’s also a solemn day.  This is when we fast and repent, and it’s the most important day of the year for the Jewish people.

BELL:  But for the young kids, who don’t fast, Yom Kippur is mostly about having fun.  By sundown, the normally traffic-clogged streets of Tel Aviv were free of cars.  That’s when the kids took over.  These kids say the best things about Yom Kippur are being able to ride as fast as they want, pop wheelies in the middle of the street, and stay up past their bedtime.  Lots of people in

Tel Aviv also go to the beach on this holiday.  But many secular Israelis here still fast and go to synagogue on Yom Kippur, even if they aren’t especially observant throughout the year.  Some people see all the bikes and the people at the beach, and are saddened by the growing secularization of Tel Aviv, but Raafi thinks it great.

RAAFI:  It is a very, very special atmosphere that suddenly, the city stops all the usual daily activity and becomes a unique capsule of quietness.  And the kids and the noise of laughter and all that is not something that is continuing the daily aspect.  Because it’s very, very different.  Usually, you have cars and the kids have to be very afraid and suddenly everything opens. It’s an amazing experience.

BELL:  Raafi says there’s something else that makes Yom Kippur special this year.  2009 is the 100^th anniversary of the official founding of Tel Aviv.

RAAFI:  We are really a fantastic place.  And every week almost you have an event that is happening here that is exciting, artistic, whatever.  You walk in the streets and see all the paintings.  So it’s a very exciting year, very strong acknowledgement of how far Tel Aviv came in terms of simply love of life and happiness and optimistic view of the future.  And Yom Kippur is simply part of the fun in that sense.

BELL:  The holiday ended tonight for many families with a meal to break the fast.  Tomorrow, Tel Aviv returns to the faster rhythms of modern-day city life.  For The World, I’m Matthew Bell in Tel Aviv.

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The Party also wants to transform China’s economy into one of the world’s most creative – to reclaim a mantle of creativity and innovation that China held for more than a thousand years, before being overtaken by the West.

In this five-part series The World’s Asia Correspondent Mary Kay Magistad explores the roots of China’s creative past, and what’s being done now, with what success, to relight that spark.

Here’s is the first part:
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This was China’s national observatory for 500 years. Astronomers studied the heavens, at the pleasure of the Emperor. Lu Dishen is a researcher here:

Lu: “Chinese paid a lot of attention to celestial phenomena. Because celestial phenomena occurring in the sky was believed to mean that something happened to the emperor or to the whole empire.”

Magistad: So the masses might see a solar eclipse as a sign that the emperor had lost the favor of heaven – and that might prompt them to try to overthrow the dynasty. Researcher Lu Dishen says that’s why the emperor didn’t allow just anyone to become an astronomer – only a trusted few:

Lu: “In China, in some dynasties, if you observed the sky by yourself, you would have been punished to killed.”

Magistad: But other scientists had plenty of room to explore new ways of doing things. And over the course of 1,500 years, they came up with some of the most important inventions the world had ever seen.

The Chinese invented paper, printing, gunpowder and the compass. They created silk, porcelain, Traditional Chinese Medicine, and the seismograph. In the 2nd century BC, Chinese were already deep-drilling for natural gas and, says researcher Lu Dishen, accurately charting the movement of the planets:

Lu: “Before the 15th century, Chinese astronomy was the most advanced in the world. But after that, after the Ming Dynasty to Qing Dynasty, we just followed the Western astronomy, because it was more advanced.”

Magistad: But why? Why was Western science able to overtake China’s substantial lead? The question has haunted China for generations.

The documentary, “River Elegy,” raised the question when it aired on China’s state-run television in 1988. “River Elegy” suggested that, since the 19th century, Chinese culture had become stultified, like the Yellow River silting up:

‘River Elegy’ film: “Is it our history of passive defeat over the past century that has conditioned us psychologically, or decades of poverty and backwardness? The spirit of a people is hurting. The cause of the pain is a civilization in decline.”

Magistad: Unlike Western civilization, the documentary said – and it argued that China needed to look to the West for new ideas, like science and democracy. The idea that only the West could save China was something Westerners had been saying about China for much of the 20th century.

A more sympathetic Westerner was British biochemist Joseph Needham. In the ‘30s, he raised the question that came to be known as the Needham Question: why had China lost its innovative edge? He devoted the rest of his life to documenting China’s great inventions, but never really answered the original question. Now, some China historians are asking, is that even the right question? Or did earlier Westerners frame it that way to reinforce a Western feeling of superiority, to justify forcing China to open to trade and modern influences?

Ken Pomeranz is the author of the book “The Great Divergence: China, Europe and the Making of the Modern World Economy.” Pomeranz, who’s a professor of Chinese history at the University of California at Irvine, says Chinese innovation didn’t end with the Ming Dynasty – it just changed direction:

Pomeranz: “It is true that there aren’t what we might call Chinese mega-inventions on the same level of the compass, or gunpowder, during the Ming. But what ends up being a mega-invention is often not a question of how innovative it is at the time, but of how other people wind up using them.”

Magistad: For instance – he says – the early steam engine was a clunky energy-guzzling monster. It could have been dismissed as an interesting but ultimately useless idea. The only way it was worth using was if there was cheap energy nearby. The British figured that out – and used it at the head of coalmines, to pump out water and mine coal. With the coal, they could put steam engines on wheels, to form trains. The trains could take coal to factories, and power plants. One idea led to another, and the Industrial Revolution was born.

Meanwhile, China was dealing with a different set of issues. It had coal too, but it was in the landlocked north. That made it prohibitively expensive to transport to where it could have been used. So innovation went not into finding labor-saving devices that used lots of energy, but devices that saved it – like the wok:

Its thin, curved metal distributes heat quickly, so it allowed the chef to use less of that expensive fuel. There was also the fact that while Europe had lots of land and not so many people – China had lots of people, and little arable land. So, Pomeranz says Chinese innovation went into getting the most out of each acre:

Pomeranz: “So the Chinese are, for instance, quite ingenious, over the course of the 16th, 17th, 18th and into the 19th centuries, in finding ways of getting more crops out of an acre. They’re still doing well at raising yields, and their yields per acre are the highest in the world, basically. They’re not that that great in maximizing yields per labor hour, because that wasn’t a crucial problem for them.”

Magistad: So, China’s innovation tackled different questions from Europe’s, and came up with different answers. Ultimately, China did fall behind, but it wasn’t because it stopped innovating. What happened is that under the Ming Dynasty, the emperors became less interested in interacting with the outside world, and absorbing new ideas. Trade continued on the coasts, but china didn’t keep current on the scientific advances happening in other countries.

Meanwhile, Europe was going through the Renaissance and Enlightenment and settling of the New World. Zhang Kaixun, who heads China’s Inventions Association, says all this helped Europe pull ahead of China:

Zhang: “The Renaissance itself wasn’t about science and technology, it was about art, philosophy and religion, and it created a free atmosphere and open environment for people to think. A free environment is very important for innovation. “

Magistad: While Europe was going through the Renaissance and Enlightenment, China was embracing a kind of neo-Confucianism, with a strict hierarchy and code of behavior. It pulled the best minds into becoming mandarins and scholars of classic Confucian texts, rather than merchants and entrepreneurs. This didn’t stop innovation, but it didn’t exactly encourage it either.

There are other possible reasons scientific innovation and the industrial age took off in Europe, while China’s rate of innovation slowed. Europe’s many states fought so much they had to keep coming up with new weapons and tactics. The wars prompted many Europeans to live in the relative safety of cities – where new ideas spread quickly. These included financial innovations, says Arthur Kroeber, who edits the China Economic Quarterly:

Kroeber: “You had the rise of big diversified banking firms… You had the development of insurance which is crucial to enabling to scale up trade in the way that it was previously not possible because you could insure against loss. You had the development of corporations, later stock companies, which enable people to spread risk and become much more entrepreneurial.”

Magistad: By contrast, Kroeber says, China’s economy was made up of small family businesses. It lacked corporations that might have encouraged inventors and entrepreneurs to take risks:

Kroeber: “Because again it is a risk-spreading mechanism that enables you to take a relatively modest amount of capital and leverage it out and not risk so much personally. And it also implies there are large swathes of the economy where you can scale up business activity to any size you want, more or less, without incurring the intervention of the State. And that’s always a problem in China. Once it gets big enough, the State always wants to get involved. And it wants to control things.”

Magistad: There were other factors that held back Chinese innovation too, wars and political upheaval, throughout much of the 19th century and into the 20th. There was a search for new ideas after the last emperor was overthrown in 1912. But war overtook that too – first the Japanese invasion, then the Communists fight to take power.

When Mao Zedong proclaimed the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, many Chinese hoped this would be a new start for China in the modern world. What they soon found instead was that Mao wasn’t interested in hearing ideas that deviated from his own. He sent hundreds of thousands of intellectuals to prison camps or to their deaths for questioning him. And in the mid-‘60s, he launched the Cultural Revolution.

Mao encouraged teenage Red Guards like these to persecute so-called “counter-revolutionaries.” They included intellectuals, those with ties to the West, and anyone whose ideas clashed with Mao’s orthodoxy. It was not fertile ground for innovation. And yet, Jin Xiaofeng – who’s now an internet entrepreneur – remembers it as a time for her, as a pre-teen, of some unexpected freedom:

Jin: “My parents were sent to the countryside, and I have no school to go. But that actually allowed me to have a lot of space of my own, I could do something different, creative, and entertain myself, not going through the education system.”

Magistad: She says that experience helped her grow up to become a risk-taking entrepreneur. She worries that young Chinese in school today are under too much pressure, within too much structure, to have the freedom to think creatively. And yet, thinking creatively is what the government wants them to do.

As it prepares to celebrate 60 years in power the Communist Party is pushing to make China a more innovative nation. The Party says that’s crucial for China’s continued economic growth. There’s also something more at stake – China’s sense of itself, and its place in the world. There’s a hunger to reclaim the respect China once enjoyed, as one of the most powerful and innovative places on earth. The question is how to get there.

For The World, I’m Mary Kay Magistad in Beijing.

• Peter Maass’ website
• Q & A with Maass on Crude World

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JEB SHARP: I’m Jeb Sharp, and this is the World.  The history of modern civilization has been largely written in oil.  Oil powered the economic explosion of the 20^th century.  It enabled humans to do things and go places they could barely imagine before.  But there are dire consequences to the production and sale of oil.  We all know about the environmental problems.  What is less understood is the damage that oil often inflicts on the countries that have it and product it.  That’s the subject of a new book.  It’s called, Crude World:  The Violent Twilight of Oil.  The author is Peter Maas.

PETER MAAS:  Oil is money.  And money tends to be power, and the problem with oil, and the money and the power that it generates is that it’s incredibly concentrated.  So it’s in a few places in very large quantities, and it leads to a struggle because the stakes are so high.  And the problem is and this is the paradox really is that people who live on top of the oil, for example, in Nigeria, where I went to, people actually live on top of the oil.  They don’t benefit from it, and in fact, in places like that they suffer because of it.  In fact, in Nigeria, not only do you have a tremendous amount of pollution, but you also have a tremendous amount of violence, and you have a tremendous amount of poverty.  And it’s not despite the oil, but because of the oil.

SHARP:  And to a certain extent, that’s an old story, right, oil driving conflict, oil-contaminating places.  And yet, you start out with this idea that it is actually quite hard to get your head around something you can’t see.  And I wonder if you mind just reading a bit in the introduction where you explain that.

MAAS: I’d be glad to.  To know a person, you talk to him.  To know a country, you visit it.  To know a religion, you study sacred text.  Oil defies these norms of interrogation.  It is a commodity that is extracted, refined, shipped, and poured into your gas tank with few people seeing it.  It has no voice, body, army or dogma of its own.  It’s invincible most of the time, but like gravity, it influences everything we do.

SHARP: Say a little bit more about Nigeria.  I have this photograph from the book in front of me.  I believe it’s by the photographer, Ed Kashi, and it just shows the hands and legs of a man, presumably who’s completely covered in crude.  What goes on there?

MAAS: I traveled into the Niger Delta, and ended up at this village, which was absolutely destitute.  I mean, there was no running water, there was no electricity, there was no medical care, anything like that.  And right across the creek, and in fact, just several hundred yards away, there was a really large oil facility run by Shell.  And you could see, and I’ve been in those facilities before, they’re all air conditioned, they have electricity, and all of that.  And so you have just like right next to each other these people living in destitute circumstances.  And then you have these oil facilities that are just absolutely wonderful and perfect. When I went around with the kind of local leader in this case, I could see there was oil dripping down into the creek, into the water, and there were times when there weren’t even any facilities around us, but I could smell the petroleum in the air.  And I looked down, and there’s a film of petroleum on the water.  And we would pass by one time, pass by this fisherman, who was like in a dug out canoe, and he said, “Well, I’ve been here for 12 hours,” and I looked what he had in his canoe, and there were just like four or five fish.  They were as large as minnows.  And I noticed that the man didn’t even have a fishing rod.  It was just a piece of string with a hook at the end.

SHARP: So why do we persist in this idea that oil equals development equals benefit for countries?

MAAS: You know, there’s so many reasons.  One can just be in a sense kind of popular culture, and just we’re kind of bread to think.  I mean, whether it’s Beverly Hillbillies or Dallas or TV shows like that, you think you got oil, you’re lucky, you’re rich.  And the specter is Saudi Arabia, with Saudi royal family traveling all over the world in their own private 747s.  It certainly gives the impression of richness, but that was one of the things I wanted to get behind because when you kind of go behind that façade, and even in Saudi Arabia itself, you find people who actually don’t have a lot of money, whose lives probably would be better if they didn’t have the oil that was under their land or in their waters.  And it’s not every country because a lot of countries that have oil do benefit from it.  But what interests me is this paradox, the countries that are caught in this position of not benefiting, and there are a lot of them.

SHARP: So picking up on this paradox of countries that benefit from oil, and countries that don’t, what accounts for the difference really?

MAAS: It almost sounds too simplistic to say it, but democracy.  Norway is one of the great success stories, and the reason that this happened is because Norway before it found oil, found democracy, and had incredibly strong and open institutions, so that when the oil was found, there was a national debate about okay, what do we do about it, how do we handle it, what is the best way to handle it?  And one of the things they decided is well, we shouldn’t spend it all.  We should put a lot of it aside because future generations need to benefit from it.  And then the money that was put into the Norwegian economy was done so in a very honest, transparent way, and so this kind of open process was just absolutely key. And that’s the problem that exists in a lot of these other countries is that they don’t have an open process.  I went to Equatorial Guinea, which is a little country in West Africa that found oil not too long ago in the 1990s, and when the money started coming in, what happened to the money is that it was all deposited into secret bank accounts that were controlled by the dictator of the country, Teodoro Obiang.  And so there was zero transparency, and to a degree, there still is almost zero transparency in that country and others.

SHARP: You also spent time meeting with and trying to understand oil executives, people in all facets of the industry and the economy around oil.  What did you learn about the human side of this because it’s not sort of sinister plots everywhere generating evil and poverty and destruction, it’s more complicated than that.

MAAS: I met a lot of oilmen, and I have to say I really like most of them because they’re very kind of pioneering people, in the sense of like they see a tough job out ahead of them, and they go straight to it, in terms of trying to get oil out of the ground from inhospitable places whether you’re talking geologically or politically.  But there’s kind of a divorce between what they do, and the impact it has.  And when I talked to them about this, a lot of them would say, “Well, look, I have this job, and I’m doing my job, and I cannot be responsible for ensuring that the oil that comes out of this ground is gonna be turned into money that is going to be made into clinics and things of that sort.  That is somebody else’s job, and you can’t hold me responsible for that.” And then at the same time, one executive told me, who I’ve talked with, he said, “Look, we go where the oil is.  We can’t choose like Microsoft or Yahoo to operate in nice countries that have developed markets.  We have to go where the oil is, and if you don’t want us to go to these places, then we’re gonna be stepping over manure in the streets of London and New York because we’re gonna have to go back to horses.”

SHARP: And we should say that oil makes possible the lifestyle we all enjoy, certainly here in the United States.

MAAS: I mean, oil has been a blessing for us, in terms of our lifestyles.  It has not been such a blessing for the climate, and we’re trying to come to grips with that now, and do something about it.  And it has not been such a blessing for lots of people who supply it to us, so it has always been a mixed picture, but I think the picture is now becoming clearer in the sense of like okay, now we need to reorganize the system, so that a) the climate survives, and so b) these people who have been suffering for our sake, in a way, do not continue to suffer.

SHARP: Peter Maas, thank you so much.  Peter Mass is the author of Crude World:  The Violent Twilight of Oil, thank you.

MAAS: Thank you.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

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JEB SHARP: We’re likely to learn more details about Iran’s secret nuclear site in the coming weeks.  A lot of small picture detail, in other words.  So we figured it would be useful to take a quick look at the region’s overall strategic chessboard.  Here’s The World’s Alex Gallafant with a list in hand.

ALEX GALLAFANT: We’ll run through a few of Iran’s interests one by one, with the help of Daniel Byman.  Byman directs the Center for Peace and Security Studies at Georgetown University.  Let’s start with Iraq, Iran’s neighbor to the west.  Under Saddam Hussein, it was Iran’s enemy.  Now, Dan Byman says, it’s under the strong influence of Iran.

DANIEL BYMAN: This influence is political, economic, cultural and military.  And it’s going to grow as US forces draw down from the country.

GALLAFANT: Perhaps Iran’s best friend in the region is Syria.  Both countries oppose Israel and are hostile to the United States.  The US is working on that — in fact, Syria’s Deputy Foreign Minister is in Washington today for talks.  But Byman says Syria’s ties to Iran will be hard to break.

BYMAN: In a way, they’re almost all the other one has.  So, to pry Syria loose will require quite a few concessions: from the United States and from Israel.

GALLAFANT: We’ll get to Israel in a moment.  But first, right next door to Syria, there’s Lebanon.  It’s home to the powerful Shiite militant group Hezbollah.  Iran helped found Hezbollah over 25 years ago — and remains its principal supporter.  But not everyone in the region wants a dominant Iran.  Take Sunni Arab nations such as Jordan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia.  They work with the United States to counter Iran’s influence.  But Byman says there’s tension: these countries are afraid the US will cut a deal with Tehran.

BYMAN: …whether over its nuclear program, or over Iraq or something else, and essentially, to abandon them….  They’re concerned the United States will shift from one side of the Muslim world to the Iranian world.  That view is overstated of course, but in the back of their minds, they don’t trust Washington to always do the right thing.

GALLAFANT: Now we’ll turn to Iran’s neighbor to the east: Afghanistan.  Iran sees the chaos there as a threat to its own stability.  Byman says Iran is concerned about the resurgence of the Taliban.  …but is also wary of increased American influence in the country.

BYMAN: Iran’s response to this has been to try to play all sides.  At times its people, its forces, its local sympathizers have cooperated with the United States and its allies in Afghanistan.  But Iran has also worked with anti-US forces including the Taliban in order to gain influence at a local level and try and gain options should the situation there change dramatically.
GALLAFANT: In other words, Iran accepts a degree of instability in exchange for strategic position.  Byman says that’s a basic Iranian strategy right across the region — to create chaos, to sow unrest or to create civil strife in its neighbors.

BYMAN: And so instability is a weapon for Iran to wield, but at the same time, Iran is concerned that the pot will bubble too much and eventually blow the top off.

GALLAFANT: The pot is certainly bubbling at the moment with news of Iran’s secret nuclear facility and its testing of medium range missiles.  All this is of particular concern to Israel — the main target of Iranian animosity.

BYMAN: Iran has consistently supported anti-Israel terrorist movements, and has claimed at least that its missile program and its nuclear program are in large part designed to counter Israel, not other powers.

GALLAFANT: Israel is an undeclared nuclear state — that makes it not just a regional power, but a global power.  And that’s what Iran aspires to be, according to Dan Byman.  But he adds that it’s still developing that status.  Its military is weak.  Its economy is struggling.  And, since Iran’s disputed election, the country’s leadership is under tremendous pressure.  Byman says Iran is a country that in many ways has punched well above its weight.  The question is: can it keep doing so?  For The World, I’m Alex Gallafant.

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