[lbo-talk] Juan Cole on the Bomb Iran debate

Michael Pollak mpollak at panix.com
Wed Mar 15 12:24:30 PST 2006


http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20060313_fishing_for_a_pretext_in_iran/

Truthdig

Fishing for a Pretext to Squeeze Iran

By Juan Cole

<snip>

Iran is a mid-size country of some 70 million, with a per capita

income of only about $2,000 a year. It has no weapons of mass

destruction, and its conventional military forms no threat to the

United States. From an Iranian point of view, the Americans are

simply being unreasonably aggressive. Supreme Jurisprudent Ali

Khamenei has given a fatwa or formal religious ruling against

nuclear weapons, and President Ahmadinejad at his inauguration

denounced such arms and committed Iran to remaining a nonnuclear

weapons state.

In fact, the Iranian regime has gone further, calling for the

Middle East to be a nuclear-weapons-free zone. On Feb. 26,

Ahmadinejad said: We too demand that the Middle East be free of

nuclear weapons; not only the Middle East, but the whole world

should be free of nuclear weapons. Only Israel among the states of

the Middle East has the bomb, and its stockpile provoked the arms

race with Iraq that in some ways led to the U.S. invasion of 2003.

The U.S. has also moved nukes into the Middle East at some points,

either on bases in Turkey or on submarines.

Iran is a signatory of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and has

allowed the International Atomic Energy Agency to inspect and

monitor its nuclear energy research program, as required by the

treaty. It raised profound suspicions, however, with its one

infraction against the treaty--which was to conduct some secret

civilian research that it should have reported and did not, and

which was discovered by inspectors. Tehran denies having military

labs aiming for a bomb, and in November of 2003 the IAEA formally

announced that it could find no proof of such a weapons program.

The U.S. reaction was a blustery incredulity, which is not actually

an argument or proof in its own right, however good U.S. Ambassador

to the United Nations John Bolton is at bunching his eyebrows and

glaring.

The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty allows Iran to develop

civilian nuclear energy, and the United States itself urged Iran to

build reactors in the 1970s. Iran does not have a heavy-water

breeder reactor, which is the easy way to get a bomb. It does have

light-water reactors for energy production, but these cannot be

used to get enough fissionable material to make a bomb. Although

Vice President Dick Cheney has made light of an oil state seeking

nuclear energy, it would be a rational economic policy to use

nuclear energy for domestic needs and sell petroleum on the world

market. Certainly, the NPT permits such a policy.

The difficulty for those concerned with proliferation is that for

Iran to independently run its light-water reactors, it needs to

complete the fuel cycle of uranium enrichment. The ability to

produce nuclear fuel is only one step away from the ability to

refine uranium further, to weapons-grade quality. Still, it is a

step away and could not easily be done in secret with inspectors

making visits. Iran is experimenting with refrigerator-size

centrifuges as a means of enriching uranium, but would need 16,000,

hooked up in a special way, to produce a bomb. It has 164, and one

of its proposals to defuse the crisis with the U.S. is to limit

itself to no more than 3,000. Otherwise, it says it ideally would

have 50,000 centrifuges.

No signatory of the NPT that allows regular IAEA inspections has

ever moved to the stage of bomb production. Inspections have been

extremely effective tools. United Nations weapons inspectors

discovered and dismantled Saddam Husseins weapons program after the

Gulf War in the early 1990s. The IAEA was even able to detect trace

plutonium on Iranian equipment that came from Pakistan, which

manufactures bombs. Those who remain suspicious of Irans ultimate

intentions are not completely without a case. But there is good

reason to believe that Irans nuclear program could have been

monitored successfully.

The Bush administration has arbitrarily taken the position that

Iran may not have a nuclear research program at all, even a

civilian one. This stance actually contradicts the guarantees of

the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Washington officials

continually intimate to the press that Tehran has an active weapons

program, which is speculation. And, of course, the United States

itself is egregiously in violation of several articles of the NPT,

keeping enough nuclear weapons on hair-trigger alert to destroy the

world several times over and actively pursuing new and deadly

weapons, even dreaming of tactical nukes. Its ally in the region,

Israel, never signed the NPT and was helped by the French to get a

bomb in the 1960s.

The U.S. National Intelligence Estimate released in summer 2005

estimates that if Iran did have an active nuclear weapons program,

and if the international atmosphere were favorable to it being able

to get hold of the requisite equipment, it would still be a good 10

years away from a bomb. But the international atmosphere is

actively hostile to such a development, and anyway it has not been

proved that there is such a weapons program.

If the Supreme Jurisprudent of theocratic Iran has given a fatwa

against nukes, if the president of the country has renounced them

and called for others to do so, if the International Atomic Energy

Agency has found no evidence of a military nuclear weapons program,

and if Iran is at least 10 years from having a bomb even if it is

trying to get one, then why is there a diplomatic crisis around

this issue between the United States and Iran in 2006?

The answer is that the Iranian nuclear issue is déjà vu all over

again. As it did with regard to the Baath regime in Iraq, the

militarily aggressive Bush administration wants to overthrow the

government in Tehran. Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, now in a

coma, urged the U.S. to hit Iran as soon as it had taken care of

Saddam Hussein. The Israelis have a grudge against it because it

helped end their military occupation and land grab in southern

Lebanon by giving aid to the Shiite Hezbollah organization, the

only Arab force ever to succeed in regaining occupied land from

Israel by military means. But Iran does not form a conventional

military threat to Israel.

Overthrowing the theocratic regime in Iran, Washington hopes, would

reduce Hezbollah pressure on Israel over its continued occupation

of the Shebaa Farms area (and, implicitly, the Golan Heights). It

would make Syria more complaisant toward Israel and Washington. It

would open up Iran to investment and exploration on the part of the

American petroleum majors, which are at the moment excluded because

the U.S. slapped an economic boycott on Iran. It might remove

support for the more hard-line elements among Shiite political

parties in Iraq, making that country easier for the U.S. to shape

and dominate. In short, a U.S.-installed regime in Iran would hold

out the promise of returning to the halcyon 1960s, when the shah

was an American puppet in the region.

The nuclear issue is for the most part a pretext for the Americans

to exert pressure on the regime in Tehran. This is not to say that

proliferation is not a worrisome issue, or that it can be ruled out

that Iran wants a bomb. It is to say that the situation simply has

not reached the point of crisis, and therefore other motivations

must be sought for the Bush administrations breathless rhetoric.

President Ahmadinejad, it should be freely admitted, has, through

his lack of diplomatic skills and his maladroitness, given his

enemies important propaganda tools. Unlike his predecessor,

Mohammad Khatami, Ahmadinejad is a Holocaust denier. He went to an

anti-Zionist conference and quoted Ayatollah Khomeini, saying that

the Occupation regime must vanish. This statement about Israel does

not necessarily imply violence. After all, Ariel Sharon made the

occupation regime in the Gaza Strip vanish. The quote was

translated in the international press, however, as a wish that

Israel be wiped off the map, and this inaccurate translation has

now become a tag line for all newspaper articles written about Iran

in Western newspapers.

In another speech, Ahmadinejad argued that Germans rather than

Palestinians should have suffered a loss of territory for the

establishment of a Jewish state, if the Germans perpetrated the

Holocaust. This argument is an old one in the Middle East, but it

was immediately alleged that Ahmadinejad was advocating the

shipping of Israelis to Europe. That was not what he said.

It is often alleged that since Iran harbors the desire to destroy

Israel, it must not be allowed to have the bomb. Ahmadinejad has

gone blue in the face denouncing the immorality of any mass

extermination of innocent civilians, but has been unable to get a

hearing in the English-language press. Moreover, the presidency is

a very weak post in Iran, and the president is not commander of the

armed forces and has no control over nuclear policy. Ahmadinejads

election is not relevant to the nuclear issue, and neither is the

question of whether he is, as Liz Cheney is reported to have said,

a madman. Iran has not behaved in a militarily aggressive way since

its 1979 revolution, having invaded no other countries, unlike

Iraq, Israel or the U.S. Washington has nevertheless succeeded in

depicting Iran as a rogue state.

A final issue between Iran and the United States that might explain

the escalating rhetoric over nonexistent nukes is Iraq. The U.S. is

bogged down in a quagmire there, fighting militant Sunni Arabs. But

it has also seen its political plans for Iraq checked on several

occasions by the rise of powerful Iraqi Shiite parties, such as the

Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), the Dawa

Party, and the Sadr Movement. Iran hosted SCIRI and Dawa in exile

in the Saddam years, and has close relations with them. There are

allegations that it gives them money.

To any extent that Iran has helped these parties win elections and

maintain their paramilitary forces, it has undermined the American

hope of installing a relatively secular figure as a Karzai-like

ruler. The U.S. would very much like to limit Iranian influence in

Iraq, and aggressiveness on the nuclear issue is a way for the Bush

administration to enlist European and other countries in the effort

to put pressure on Iran and make it cautious about intervening too

forcefully in Iraqi affairs.

In fact, the Shiite parties in southern Iraq are homegrown and

would almost certainly have done well in elections without any

Iranian support. The Americans are in some ways scapegoating Iran

for their own failures of analysis. They appear to have been

unaware of how popular the Shiite religious leaders had become in

the late Saddam period, and so were unprepared for their strong

showing in the U.S.-sponsored elections.

The United States has succeeded in bringing Iran before the United

Nations Security Council, though it is unclear if that body will

slap economic sanctions on Tehran. Such a move could be vetoed by

Russia or China, both of which have high hopes of sharing in the

Iranian oil bonanza. If an international boycott is imposed, it

will mainly harm the civilians and children of Iran. The crisis has

been fueled by Ahmadinejads alarming and foolish rhetoric, and by

the clever aggressiveness of the Bush administration, which is

better at framing its enemies than any other U.S. administration in

history.

Washington no longer has much leverage on Iran. Its military is

bogged down in Iraq, and its diplomats are forbidden to speak to

Tehran under most circumstances. Its attempt to prevent even a

civilian Iranian nuclear energy program may convince the clerical

hard-liners to pull their country out of the NPT and to end

international inspections. If the Iranians really did want a bomb,

they could not have asked for a better pretext to leave the NPT.

President Bush's policies toward Iran have already failed, and could

fail even more miserably in the months to come.

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