The United States's national-intelligence estimate (NIE) released on 3 December 2007 declares that Iran suspended its "nuclear-weapons program" in 2003, and says "with high confidence") that Tehran will be unable to accumulate enough enriched uranium to build a bomb until 2010-15. The news has been greeted as a blow to any plans for an armed attack on Iran, as well as a weakening of America's push for a tougher third round of United Nations sanctions against the country.

Nasrin Alavi is the author of We Are Iran: The Persian Blogs (Portobello Books, 2005). She spent her formative years in Iran, attended university in Britain and worked in London, and then returned to her birthplace to work for an NGO for a number of years. Today she lives in Britain.

Also by Nasrin Alavi on openDemocracy:

"Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's fear" (1 November 2005)

"Inside Iran" (14 February 2006)

"Iran: the elite against the people" (22 May 2006)

"Tehran's red card to human rights" (23 June 2006)

"Iran: cracks in the façade" (11 December 2006)

"Iran's election backlash" (19 December 2006)

"Iran's attack blowback" (5 February 2007)

"Women in Iran: repression and resistance" (5 March 2007)

"Axis of Evil vs Great Satan: wrestling to normality" (2 May 2007)

"The Iran paradox" (11 October 2007)

"Iran's circle of power" (23 October 2007)

The report - Iran: Nuclear Intentions and Capabilities - has been proclaimed as a national victory by Iran's state media. The Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad - in a speech to a crowd in Ilam province that was broadcast live on state television on 5 December - called it "the biggest triumph of the century for the people of Iran". In portraying the report as a retreat by the US in its standoff with Iran, Ahmadinejad conveniently glossed over the NIE's contention that Iran indeed had a covert nuclear-weapons programme which it halted in 2003 "in response to international pressure".

The NIE report has been broadly welcomed in Tehran by most political factions. Ali Larijani, representative of the the supreme leader Ayatollah Khamenei in the national-security council, believes that it offers a "breathing space" for the United States and indicates the possibility of a "new phase" in Iran/US relations; but he adds that he does not see it as an end to the standoff, since one of the main assertions of the report is that "pressure against Iran works". Iran's foreign minister Manouchehr Mottaki, meanwhile, states that "Iran is willing to welcome a new US rational stance towards the Iranian nation."

A president under fire

There are also growing calls inside Iran for the government to adopt a more rational stance in its international posture. Mohsen Aminzadeh, who served as deputy foreign minister during the presidency of Mohammad Khatami (1997-2005), last week told a reformist gathering that Ahmadinejad's government intentionally cultivates an anarchic foreign policy and "likes to be seen as unfathomable, outrageous, inexplicable and at odds with normal international conventions".

Aminzadeh, a reformist and career diplomat, has been a longstanding critic of Ahmadinejad's policies who in 2006 said that Iran is "now witnessing our worst state of affairs in the international scene since the revolution". His criticism has not abated; he now says that the Iranian president's inflammatory comments about the "destruction of Israel" were made to divert world attention from nuclear discussions and in the short term they succeed as it "becomes top news. But ultimately this policy is destructive and demolishes the bridges between Iran and the world community."

But such harsh criticism of the president goes wider than reformists. The ongoing charges of spying made by the government against former nuclear negotiator Hossein Mousavian - an associate of former president Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani (1989-97) accused of passing classified information to the west - has further deepened cracks within the conservative establishment. In November 2007, the former chief nuclear negotiator Hassan Rowhani scorned Ahmadinejad: "History guides that societies at all times fail, when they concoct enemies among themselves. An imaginary enemy brings about confrontation between social forces and leads to splits."

The conservative Islamic Republic newspaper reinforced the criticism by calling Ahmadinejad's conduct as president illogical and hazardous for Iran. The editorial also accused the president of character assassination of his political rivals as an early intervention in the campaign for the parliamentary elections in March 2008.

Ahmadinejad's blowback

In the approach to the March elections, it is becoming difficult to keep up with the proliferating splinter groups emerging from the cracks in Iran's once united conservative coalition. Whereas in the election of June 2005, they reassembled around the new Iranian president, today several influential figures are trying shrewdly to establish their distance from what they see as a failing Ahmadinejad. Meanwhile, some reformist groups and pragmatic conservatives are uniting around Hashemi Rafsanjani - still a heavyweight opponent of Ahmadinejad who now heads two powerful national bodies, the assembly of experts and the expediency council.

Among openDemocracy's articles about Iran and the United States:

"Dariush Zahedi & Omid Memarian, "Ahmadinejad, Iran and America" (15 January 2007)

Kamin Mohammadi, "Voices from Tehran" (31 January 2007)

Fred Halliday, "The matter with Iran" (1 March 2007)

Sanam Vakil, "Iran's hostage politics" (2 April 2007)

Nazenin Ansari, "Tehran's new political dynamic" (16 April 2007)

Rasool Nafisi, "Iran's cultural prison" (17 May 2007)

It is very likely that the government and its supporters will seek to use the US intelligence findings as a propaganda weapon in the forthcoming election campaign. Yet Iran's nuclear programme - whatever its real extent and character, and irrespective of the great heat and speculation it has generated abroad - has never been a major campaign issue in Iran. It is not clear that a political message focusing on this theme - far removed from the everyday lives and concerns of the vast majority of Iranians - would be as powerful as the government hoped.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was elected in June 2005 by tapping into the frustrations of Iran's large underclass. He promised that if the nation returned to the principles and ethics of the 1979 revolution he could redistribute Iran's oil wealth, fight corruption, and create jobs. In the event, he has succeeded (where a reformist government failed) in discrediting a hardline revolutionary ideology that is seen to have failed to create jobs and prosperity amongst the deprived millions in Iran. By the same token, he has inadvertently restored some of the confidence and influence of the reform movement in Iran.

The Iranian president has long declared negotiations over Iran's nuclear programme as simply "closed". It is clear to more thoughtful observers in Iran that if the NIE findings have cooled the crisis, in itself the report does not mean an end to the Iran/US standoff. Yet this respite is particularly welcome as Iran approaches parliamentary elections; Ahmadinejad's government will be unable to run a campaign on a war footing and will have to answer for its disastrous economic and social policies at home. In this sense, the US intelligence elite may have done Iran's hard-pressed reformers an unwitting service.