The Iran "Crisis" - A prelude to aggression

Of course, the argument is made or implied that the United States and Israel are good, need these weapons for legitimate defense, and are not likely to use them irresponsibly, whereas Iran is not good, supports terrorists, and doesn’t need these weapons for legitimate defense. This is pure ideology and utter nonsense, confuted by even a cursory glance at reality (for a fuller picture, see William Blum, Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II; Blum, Rogue State; and Noam Chomsky, Hegemony or Survival). As noted, the good United States is the only country to have used nuclear weapons and it did so against civilian targets. On irresponsibility, the United States has violated the UN Charter prohibition of cross-border armed attack, carrying out the “supreme crime” that the UN was designed to prevent no less than three times in the past seven years, and it and its Israeli client have systematically violated the Geneva Conventions on the treatment of prisoners and behavior in occupied territories, while Israel has ignored dozens of UN Security Council rulings, with U.S. support. 

As regards the support of terrorism, Iran is not in the same league with the United States and Israel, both of which have often directly engaged in terrorism—i.e., wholesale terrorism—as well as sponsoring and supporting retail terrorists. The U.S. nuclear club and threat is itself a form of terrorism and the United States has repeatedly threatened nuclear bombing. Its “shock and awe” strategies are openly designed to terrorize, and in Iraq (as in Vietnam, etc.) it pacifies by the use of massive firepower that terrifies as well as kills. The United States eventually turned to civilian targets in Serbia in 1999 with the open objective of forcing a quicker target surrender via terror attacks on civilians. Israel has also done the same, its pacification process during its long occupation and “redeeming the land” on the West Bank involving the steady and brutal use of force and terror. Years ago Abba Eban admitted that civilians in Lebanon had been bombed because “there was a rational prospect, ultimately fulfilled, that afflicted populations would exert pressure for the cessation of hostilities.” That is, Israel had followed a policy of terrorism, on Benjamin Netanyahu’s own definition of the word: “the deliberate and systematic murder, maiming, and menacing of the innocent to inspire fear for political ends.” 

This wholesale terrorism, directly employed, is supplemented by the sponsorship and support of local terrorists and terrorist armies. The Israelis sponsored a proxy army in Lebanon for years, just as the United States supported the Nicaraguan contras, the Mujahadeen and Taliban in Afghanistan (in the 1980s), and Savimbi’s UNITA in Angola. This is just scratching the surface of wholesale and sponsored terrorisms that Iran can never match. It is one of the great accomplishments of the Western propaganda system that these real and massive terrorisms are normalized, cannot be referred to by an invidious word like terrorism, the perpetrators allowed to be only “retaliating” and engaging in “counter-terrorism.” 

Parallels Between Iraq and Iran 

One similarity between the Iraq and Iran run-ups to military attack is threat inflation and a steady focus on the alleged threat. Even if Iran had a nuclear weapon or even a dozen nuclear weapons, would that threaten world peace and produce instability or would it merely lessen the threat to Iran itself by the power that proclaims a right to preventive warfare and its Israeli client? The mainstream media absolutely refuse to discuss this substantive issue, taking it for granted that Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons would be very bad and as good propaganda agents focusing only on daily claims of the threat and Iran’s alleged illicit and menacing moves toward acquiring such weapons. If their government says Iran’s actions pose a dire threat, that is enough for the media. The media were badly burned in the Iraq run-up and a few of them belatedly expressed regret at their gullibility, the New York Times most famously, but it took them no time at all to move into the same gullibility and propaganda role as regards the terrible Iran threat. 

Does the United States have clean hands in dealing with this issue? That is, has it abided by its NPT obligation to not threaten or use nuclear weapons against countries agreeing to forego nuclear weapons, and also to “pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament, and on a treaty on complete and general disarmament under strict and effective international control” (Article VI)? The answer is no on both counts: it has now openly threatened to use such weapons against any target and it has not only refused to work toward the elimination of nuclear weapons, it has made them explicitly a part of its fighting arsenal and is spending large sums to make them more practicable. The media never discuss this issue, which would make the U.S. stance on Iran’s nuclear weapons policies seem less credible. 

These U.S. failures also suggest that a reasonable case could be made for U.S. “non-compliance” with the NPT and that a “timeline” of its non-compliance might be constructed that would be far richer and vastly more relevant to global security than that fixed in regard to Iran’s conduct. After all, Iran doesn’t have a single nuclear weapon, and has a right under the NPT to develop a nuclear capability for peaceful purposes (Article IV); the United States has thousands of such weapons, poses a real threat to use them, and is in blatant violation of its agreement to work toward the reduction in existing stocks of weapons. (According to the estimate of the National Resources Defense Council, the United States possessed 10,600 nuclear warheads as of 2002—slightly more than one-half the world’s total.) 

Do the United States and Israel pose a military threat to Iran, possibly greater than the threat Iran poses to those countries? Does Iran have a right to defend itself against such threats? These matters are off the agenda for the propaganda system, but implicitly Iran has no such right. This double standard is clearly something that would be awkward to discuss openly. 

Israel has developed and produced nuclear weapons and threatened to use them and to attack Iran if it shows signs of working toward the development of such weapons. Is it reasonable that Israel should be free to do this and create and maintain a huge imbalance of power in the Middle East and refuse to sign the NPT, whereas Iran, which signed the treaty and allows frequent and intrusive inspections, should be the focus of attention and be deemed villainous for any inspection problems? Again, this is not discussible because it reflects a huge bias and double standard better kept implicit.  

The mechanism of the Iran pre-attack process is in many ways similar to that employed in the run-up to the Iraq invasion. Throughout roughly the same period that the United States has occupied Iraq, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has been pressuring Iran to live up to “safeguards” as well as sign onto the Additional Protocol of the NPT (which it did in 2003). The focus is on what the IAEA inspections regime regards as the “remaining outstanding issues,” as the IAEA director general expressed the matter in his September 24 news conference. The result has been a never-ending series of IAEA assessments of Iran’s “compliance” with its NPT obligations, combined with a relentless re-definition of the “outstanding issues” before the IAEA. This process works through an institutional machinery, which, once activated, as in the case of Iraq, makes it impossible for the accused state to satisfy the suspicions raised about its weapons program. Crucially, this institutional machinery only gets activated to focus on a target of the Godfather’s choice and never the Godfather or his Israeli client—though the Godfather is in open violation of the NPT, and its client refuses to make itself subject to that agreement. 

The major “outstanding issue” before the IAEA at present, and the one that both Washington and the EU-3 (Britain, France, and Germany) managed to make the bête noire of the special IAEA resolution of September 24—the first resolution to date to raise the possibility that the Iranian nuclear program could fall “within the competence of the Security Council, as the organ bearing the main responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security”—turns on Iran’s unwillingness to surrender its right under the NPT to engage in the nuclear-fuel cycle. In the November 2004 Paris Agreement with the EU-3, Iran had agreed to “extend its suspension to include all enrichment related and reprocessing activities,” while gaining the EU-3’s recognition that “this suspension is a voluntary confidence building measure and not a legal obligation”(INFCIRC/637). In early August of this year, Iran notified the IAEA that it was restarting its Uranium Conversion Facility at Isfahan, thereby ending its voluntary suspension of this facility’s uranium-enrichment activities. So the “international community” is upset with Iran because Iran is no longer voluntarily declining to engage in the nuclear-fuel cycle, having chosen instead to remove the IAEA’s seals on its centrifuges and start running them again. To be perfectly clear about this; no one at the IAEA has found Iran to be in violation of its NPT obligations. Rather, Iran stands accused of having failed to surrender its right to engage in activities in which Iran has every right to engage under the NPT. The appearance of a “crisis” has been fabricated out of nothing more than this. 

The Resolution adopted by the IAEA’s Board of Governors on September 24 by a vote of 22 to 1 (with 12 abstentions) makes no claims about Iranian violations of any obligations whatsoever. Instead it simply purported anger at Iran’s unwillingness to maintain the voluntary suspension of its Uranium Conversion Facility at Isfahan; that is, Iran’s decision to do what it has every right to do under the NPT. This Resolution even uses the phrase “resulting absence of confidence that Iran’s nuclear programme is exclusively for peace purposes…”—an unmistakable echo of the U.S. secretary of defense’s assertion with respect to alleged Iraqi weapons capabilities that the “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence” (“Implementation of the NPT Safeguards Agreement in the Islamic Republic of Iran,” Board of Governors, IAEA, September 24, 2005). With the Godfather threatening renewed aggression, and the UN and international community once again leaning over very far backwards to appease it, as in the Iraq case, it will be hard for Iran to reestablish “confidence” in its objectives and to prevent a new round of supreme criminality.  

As in the Iraq case, it is very rare for the mainstream media to suggest any U.S. motives beyond those proclaimed by the Bush administration itself—concern over violations of the NPT, Iran’s deceptive actions, and possible instability and nuclear support of terrorists. Could the U.S. focus be based on worry over a still-independent oil power in the Middle East that has even proposed organizing an alternative oil contracting market with business done in euros?  Could it be a simple continuation of that projection of power by an openly aggressive imperialist state that is out of control and threatening perpetual war and perpetual aggression? 

The U.S. nuclear stockpile contains roughly one-out-of-every-two warheads of the global stock and the United States possesses by far the most sophisticated and diversified systems for delivering its weapons to any place, at any time. Even granting the current regime’s pledge to reduce the U.S. nuclear stockpile to 6,000 warheads by 2012 (and we are not sanguine about the actual prospects), in sheer operational terms, the United States is the world’s nuclear-weapon power without peer. For its part, Israel is believed to possess on the order of 200 nuclear warheads (though estimates vary), having completed its first operational nuke as early as 1967 (if not earlier). But, crucially, although the only nuclear weapons power in the greater Middle East, Israel also is the only state in the region never to have acceded to the NPT or any of the multiple “safeguard”-type agreements in which Iran has been ensnared. It has never submitted to so much as a single weapons inspection.

It has never been made a theme, much less a recurring one, of the international community’s non-proliferation concerns, with the attendant media focus, threat-inflation, and political demonization that invariably accompanies it. Clearly, U.S. and Israeli policy with regard to nuclear weapons, these states’ obsession with maintaining their military superiority by further armament and aggressive warfare and diplomacy, their policies of power projection and “redemption of the land,” are themselves hugely destabilizing and distorting factors within the Middle East, and promise steady violent conflict in the years ahead. 

The U.S. exploitation and abuse of Iran’s signatory status with the NPT, and therefore NPT-related “safeguards” and the IAEA’s inspections process, to harass Iran over its nuclear program these past three years, and the ongoing U.S., Israeli, and other cross-border threats directed against Iran, are all clearly part of this broader power-projection effort. Given these realities, it is ludicrous to depict Iran’s nuclear-related policies as threats to “international peace and security,” as the U.S. and the EU-axis of Britain, France, and Germany have done. Iran is the prospective next victim and it is being threatened only in part to prevent it from taking steps that would enhance its power to defend itself. Under the NPT, Iran cannot legally develop nuclear weapons for this purpose, and any small number that it might somehow acquire would threaten nobody over the next decade or more. However, Iran is another center of power in the Middle East, as was Iraq, and allowing it to grow and prosper outside of U.S.-Israeli control is contrary to power-projection plans. Its nuclear-weapons threat is the parallel of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction threat—a cover and rationale for aggression and conquest. 

If the UN and the international community were ruled by a sense of justice rather than power, and capable of adopting measures to defend against all threats to peace and security, they would not be threatening Iran with referral to the Security Council over a nuclear program that is neither illegal nor demonstrably serving any other than a peaceful purpose. Instead, they would be assailing the United States and Israel and pressing them to abandon their threatening posture toward Iran and to begin to live up to the letter and spirit of the Non-Proliferation Treaty—the U.S. by working toward nuclear disarmament and the Israelis by acceding to the NPT while doing likewise. Whether we are talking about pre-invasion Iraq or Iran today, the priorities of the UN and the international community are not only badly misdirected—they are fundamentally at odds with the cause of peace and security. What is more, they have reached this dangerous stage for one reason above all: the hijacking of the decisive multilateral institutions by great powers committed to exploiting them for unilateral ends. 

Where nuclear weapons are concerned, the only reasonable goal over the long term is their elimination and each state’s surrender of that part of its sovereignty that covers nuclear energy to the administration of a genuine international agency capable of ensuring that nuclear energy contributes to “peace, health and prosperity throughout the world,” and is “not used in such a way as to further any military purpose” (here quoting the IAEA’s founding statute, drafted in 1956—the “atoms for peace” idea). Within any reasonable hierarchy of concerns, the risk of the development of nuclear weapons by the have-not states is at most a second-order concern; rather, it is the possession of nuclear weapons by the haves that remains a concern of the gravest order. For the IAEA or any other multilateral organization to conduct its affairs according to a different hierarchy of concerns shows how misguided and politicized it is. Where news reports and commentary about the nuclear-weapon haves and have-nots are concerned, our newspapers and cable television channels betray this inversion of priorities on a daily basis. But there is no good reason to expect the nuclear-weapon have-nots not to pursue nuclear weapons, given an international context within which the haves at one and the same time threatened them while adamantly refusing to disarm. It is the conduct of the nuclear-weapon haves that destabilizes and threatens international peace and security, and even survival. From the standpoint of a more peaceful world, liberated from the rule of violence, it is above all the nuclear-weapon haves that need to be deterred and contained.