ISLAMABAD, July 20: America was unlikely to act on its threat of war on Iran over the nuclear issue, the head of an Iranian think tank said here on Wednesday. “We don’t know what they want to do, (but) they are in a deadlock. They are really confused about the domestic situation in Iran,” Dr Mustafa Zahrani told the participants in a dialogue between Iran’s Institute for Political and International Studies (IPIS) and the Institute of Strategic Studies, Islamabad (ISSI).

American intelligence and think tanks were expecting only 20 per cent turnout in last month’s presidential elections in Iran but it crossed 62 per cent, he recalled without identifying the winner, Mahmood Ahmadinejad.

“They (the Americans) can’t make a decision because the issue is so complex,” the Iranian expert said, pointing out that the US needed Iran’s help in the region where it was “bogged down”.

Consensus did not exist in Iran on acquiring nuclear weapons capability but the nation was united on being self-reliant, independent and self-sufficient, he said, justifying enrichment of uranium as fuel for Iran’s planned nuclear power plants.

Washington’s hostility towards Iran’s nuclear programme was not based on “practical or strategic thinking” but flowed from the untenable logic that “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence”, he said. Dr Zahrani argued that the US demanded “objective guarantees, meaning total dismantling” of Iran’s nuclear programme because it would not accept any technical data clearing Iran of the charge of pursuing a nuclear weapons programme. Since it could not wage war on Iran, or impose a blockade as energy-hungry Asia won’t let UN Security Council approve such sanctions, he said the US wanted “a roll back of the Libyan kind by Iran”. In his discourse Dr Zahrani made no reference to Pakistan’s alleged help to Iran’s nuclear programme or to the extraordinary nuclear cooperation agreement signed by the US with India on Tuesday but his Pakistani counterpart, Dr Shireen Mazari of ISSI, did. Ms Mazari said the US-India agreement dilutes the nuclear non- proliferation regime as it envisages preemptive action against “rogue states” suspected of developing “WMDs - weapons of mass destruction”. This was an attempt by the US to delink India from the regime and covertly admit it in the nuclear club, she said. It would eliminate the technical framework of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) for checking proliferation and vesting the power to decide a violator in the UN Security Council where India is seeking a permanent seat. She said the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) was being eroded as evident from the failure of the latest review conference on NPT to reach any conclusions because political bias was dictating its application. Ms Mazari recalled that the IAEA officials had described the so-called “Khan proliferation network” as only the tip of the iceberg. Nobody was talking about the rest of the iceberg because it lies in Europe, she said.