http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20060313_fishing_for_a_pretext_in_iran/
Truthdig
Fishing for a Pretext to Squeeze Iran
By Juan Cole
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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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