On December 14, The Times announced that it had obtained documents about Iran’s nuclear program that revealed “a four-year plan to test a neutron initiator. This is the component of a nuclear weapon that triggers the explosion”. (Leading article, ‘Explosive Deceit; The exposure of Iran's program to test an essential component of a nuclear weapon confirms a pattern of duplicity by a bellicose regime,’ The Times, December 14, 2009)

The recent elections in Iran, and the subsequent challenges to their legitimacy, have been a matter of enormous internal conflict in Iran, and of seemingly endless debate in the rest of the world -- a debate that threatens to linger for some time yet.

Right after the June 12 elections in Iran, the Campaign for Peace and Democracy issued a statement expressing our strong support for the masses of Iranians protesting electoral fraud and our horror at the ferocious response of the government. Our statement concluded: "We express our deep concern for their well-being in the face of brutal repression and our fervent wishes for the strengthening and deepening of the movement for justice and democracy in Iran." Since the elections, some on the left, and others as well, have questioned the legitimacy of and the need for solidarity with the anti-Ahmadinejad movement. The Campaign's position of solidarity with the Iranian protesters has not changed, but we think those questions need to be squarely addressed.

The growing nonviolent insurrection in Iran against the efforts by the ruling clerics to return the ultra-conservative and increasingly autocratic incumbent president Mahmoud Ahmadinjead to power is growing. Whatever the outcome, it represents an exciting and massive outpouring of Iranian civil society for a more open and pluralistic society.

Fisk witnesses the courage of one million protesters who ignored threats, guns and bloodshed to demand freedom in Iran

Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has compared the protests following his country's recent sham election to the common scuffles that take place after a soccer game...

If it is true that Ahmadinejad's victory is fraudulent, it'll be a dream come true for those pushing a more confrontational approach with Iran.

As the fifth anniversary of the Iraq War approaches amid a renewed rise in violence, once-claimed U.S. regional goals of "democratization," "stability," "freedom" are overwhelmed by violent, anti-democratic, unilateral and militaristic U.S. actions across the beleaguered Middle East.

Washington watched as 2007 came to a violent and inglorious end. U.S. wars raged in Iraq and Afghanistan, U.S.-backed Israeli occupation suffocated Palestinians, U.S.-allied governments in Pakistan and Kenya faced national explosions over false democratization and stolen elections, and U.S. corporate-driven poverty and resource wars ravaged Africa. Powerful forces in the United States had already begun to critically reassess what they saw as the diminishing value of the Bush administration's reckless global interventionism.

The current Islamophobic crusade in the US reflects a deeply rooted racist demonisation of Muslim communities that, if not responded, might consolidate the racist demagoguery as a

The public in the United States doesn’t like what is going on and fully 81 percent feel that the country is moving in the wrong direction. But there doesn’t seem to be much the public can do about it.

T he Bush administration’s rapid escalation of anti-Iran rhetoric in the last few months should not be dismissed as posturing. Some of the attacks, especially Vice-President Cheney’s and UN Ambassador John Bolton’s speeches to the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee convention, were clearly aimed at least partly at that specific audience. But this Administration has a history of carrying out actions widely viewed, even among U.S. elites, as reckless and dangerous. The Bush administration’s new campaign of claiming Iran is responsible for the improvised explosive devices (IEDs or roadside bombs) that are proving so deadly, represents a further escalation of the threat by linking Iran to the rise in U.S. casualties in Iraq.  The extremist language of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad also has played a role in heating up the rhetorical battle. His outrageous claims denying the Holocaust appear to be playing to what he perceives as the views of his domestic audience. But Ahmedinejad’s refusal to recognize the obligations of national presidents in the world spotlight—especially the president of a nation in Washington’s crosshairs—has created a situation in which both sides may become boxed into political corners.  The Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) is based on the idea that countries with and without nuclear weapons all give up something and both have rights and obligations under the Treaty. Countries without nuclear weapons—almost all countries in the world have signed the Treaty—agree not to buy or build nuclear weapons. In return, the NPT allows them to create and use nuclear power and even urges the nuclear weapons countries to provide them with nuclear technology for their peaceful use, including the technology to enrich uranium. (This encouragement of the spread of nuclear technology and nuclear power is a huge weakness of the NPT, but it remains the operative legal framework.) On the other side, the five recognized nuclear weapons countries—the U.S., Russia, France, the UK, and China— are obligated under Article VI of the NPT to move towards full and complete nuclear disarmament.  The three known nuclear weapons states beyond the five official nuclear powers are Israel, India, and Pakistan. Unlike Iran, none of them have signed the NPT. (North Korea, widely viewed as having the ability to build, or perhaps even having an existing nuclear weapon, was a signatory to the NPT, but withdrew before moving towards full nuclear weapons capacity.)  Iran, however, is a signatory to the NPT and as such has been under voluntary international scrutiny for many years. Like all non-nuclear weapons signatories, Iran maintains the right to have access to nuclear technology, to build nuclear power plants, and to enrich uranium for peaceful purposes. Iran has not violated the NPT’s restrictions for non-nuclear weapons countries. Even the U.S. does not claim Iran is violating the NPT. The Bush administration claims, rather, that it “does not trust” Iran and therefore Iran should be denied the rights granted to it under the treaty.  Iran has no capacity to produce nuclear weapons at this time. If it chooses to move towards nuclear weapons production, estimates are that it would take five to ten years before it would be possible. Tehran has made clear its desire for a security guarantee with the U.S. During the year-long European-led negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program, Washington’s refusal to offer such a guarantee fueled public support in Iran for the nuclear program.  The escalating danger of a new U.S. military strike or a nuclear arms race in the Middle East must take into account the provocative nature of Israel’s unacknowledged, but widely known nuclear arsenal of 200-400 high-density nuclear bombs produced at its Dimona nuclear center in the Negev desert. The Israeli nuke was first tested jointly with apartheid South Africa in 1979 and made public by nuclear whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu in 1986. Since then Israel, with U.S. support, has maintained a nuclear policy of “strategic ambiguity,” neither confirming nor denying the existence of its nuclear weapons. As long as Israel, while continuing to violate international law in its occupation of Palestinian and Syrian territory, remains the Middle East’s sole nuclear power, other countries in the region will continue seeking nuclear parity for deterrence. (Alternatively, they may seek chemical or biological weapons, often termed the “poor countries’ nuclear weapons.”)  U.S. officials are not yet openly calling for military action against Iran; their rhetoric so far states that “all options are on the table,” with Cheney, Rice, Bush, and others making explicit threats about what Iran “must” do. When details do come out, U.S. and Israeli military and political officials claim to be looking only at “surgical” air strikes against known Iranian nuclear facilities. What is not being publicly answered is what the U.S. plans to do should Iran retaliate militarily to such an attack. If such retaliation is an attack on U.S. troops in Iraq or elsewhere in the region, a move to stall shipping in the strategic Strait of Hormuz, or an attack against Israel, would the U.S. then consider an invasion of Iran in response? In this context it makes less difference whether an initial military strike against Iran is carried out by the U.S. directly or by Israel—since Iran might respond militarily against either one regardless of which air force actually dropped the bombs. Governments around the world, including powerful European governments, remain skeptical of Washington’s intentions and are especially dubious regarding U.S. intelligence claims following the lies of the Iraq war. But most governments, including those who defied U.S. pressure on Iraq, remain eager to get back into Washington’s good graces. Since they know Iran, unlike Iraq before the invasion, does have a functioning nuclear energy program, many are prepared to put aside Iran’s legal position under the NPT and embrace Washington’s campaign to treat Iran as a global danger.   The UN’s nuclear watchdog (IAEA) continues to call for de-escalation of the rhetoric and reliance on negotiations, and has reported that there is no evidence of nuclear weapons production. But the IAEA has been unwilling to challenge Washington’s campaign directly, emphasizing instead its unhappiness with Iran’s allegedly insufficient transparency. IAEA Director Mohamed el Baradei even stated that “diplomacy has to be backed by pressure and, in extreme cases, by force.” The result is that overall international skepticism regarding the Bush administration’s claims may not be sufficient for winning governmental opposition to rising U.S. threats against Iran.  The IAEA board has now reported the Iran issue to the UN Security Council where closed, nonpublic debate is underway, initially involving only the five permanent members. At the moment it appears unlikely Russia and China would accept a resolution imposing fullscale economic sanctions against Iran. Both are strong trade partners with Iran—China depends on Iran for more than 10 percent of its growing oil needs and Russia’s nuclear industry remains tied to Iran’s nuclear power production.  Instead, it is likely that any call for Security Council sanctions will be in the form of so-called “smart sanctions,” largely limited to freezing assets and denying travel rights to specific members of the Iranian regime and specific Iranian companies. A greater danger may be the language of the resolution. If the U.S. agrees to call only for “smart” sanctions, the quid pro quo from Russia and China may be language that the Security Council decision is taken under Chapter VII of the UN Charter. The significance is that Chapter VII includes the Council’s right to use the military to enforce UN decisions. Even if only the Council may legally make such a determination, the very presence of the words “Chapter VII” in the text may be used by the Bush administration to claim that any future unilateral attack on Iran is somehow “enforcing UN resolutions.”  Another international shift whose consequences remain uncertain has to do with Iran’s planned opening of a new international oil trading center, with a euro-based, rather than dollar-based, exchange. Such a move would potentially threaten the dominance of the petro-dollar in the global oil markets and thus pose new risks for U.S. currency dominance. Saddam Hussein had shifted from dollars to euros for oil trading two years before the U.S. invasion; it was almost certainly one of several reasons for the overthrow of the Iraqi regime. The opening of such a new euro-based oil exchange in Iran would likely benefit Europe, with the possibility of a shift away from the current European passivity towards Washington’s military threats.  The following sums up my current talking points on the U.S. and Iran:   Escalating rhetoric, continued losses in Iraq, Bush’s political problems, and an ideologically-driven pursuit of power make the possibility of a U.S. military attack on Iran—however reckless and dangerous its consequences—a frighteningly real possibility.  Iran is a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and has not violated the Treaty. While there appear to be unresolved issues regarding full transparency, its nuclear program, including enriching uranium, is perfectly legal under NPT requirements for non-nuclear weapons states.  Iran does not have nuclear weapons; even if it is trying to build a nuclear weapons program, it could not produce weapons for five to ten years or more.  There is a dangerous, unmonitored, and provocative nuclear arsenal in the Middle East; it belongs to Israel, not Iran. U.S. hypocrisy and double standards in nuclear policy—accepting Israel’s unacknowledged nuclear arsenal and rewarding India’s nuclear weapons status while threatening war against Iran and denying its own obligations under the NPT—has undermined Washington’s claimed commitment to non-proliferation.  U.S. officials claim they are not considering an invasion of Iran, but “only” surgical air strikes against known nuclear facilities; they have not explained what their military response will be if Iran retaliates, whether against U.S. troops in Iraq or elsewhere, against U.S. oil tankers in near-by shipping lanes, or against Israel.  Global suspicions remain regarding U.S. claims because of Washington’s lies leading to the invasion of Iraq, but international conditions regarding Iran are significantly different; many governments appear more willing to consider Iran a “threat.”  The only solution to the crisis is to move towards a nuclear weapons-free, even weapons of mass destruction-free, zone across the entire Middle East.  In the U.S.-drafted UN Security Council Resolution 687, that ended the 1991 Gulf War and imposed sanctions on Iraq, Article 14 calls for “establishing in the Middle East a zone free from weapons of mass destruction and all missiles for their delivery.” It is time Washington was held accountable to that commitment.   Phyllis Bennis’s new book is Challenging Empire: How People, Governments, and the UN Defy U.S. Power   (Interlink).  

Y ears from now, when historians look back at agenda-building for a missile attack on Iran, they should examine closely a story that took up the U.S.’s most coveted space for media spin—the upper right corner of the New York Times front page—May 1, 2005.  Under the headline “Threats Shadow New Conference on Nuclear Arms,” the article in the Sunday edition set a tone that was to echo in U.S. media during the next several days. The conference for the Non-Proliferation Treaty “was meant to offer hope of closing huge loopholes in the treaty, which the United States says Iran and North Korea have exploited to pursue nuclear weapons,” the Times reported. “Instead, the session appears deadlocked even before it begins, according to senior American officials and diplomats.”  But the Times could have led off by pointing out, “huge loopholes in the treaty” have been exploited by the United States and a few other countries to maintain their nuclear arms dominance. Instead of resorting to fuzzy euphemisms, the story could have reported that the U.S., Japanese, and French governments are so committed to the commercial nuclear power industry that they still insist on promoting it—and further boosting nuclear arms proliferation in the process.  For more than five decades, U.S. government leaders—along with countless reporters and pundits—have insisted that the split atom can be wondrous rather than just ominous. In a speech to the United Nations in December 1953, President Dwight Eisenhower proclaimed a commitment to “atoms for peace.” He portrayed nuclear power as redemptive: “The United States pledges before you—and therefore before the world—its determination to help solve the fearful atomic dilemma—to devote its entire heart and mind to find the way by which the miraculous inventiveness of man shall not be dedicated to his death, but consecrated to his life.”  One-third of a century later, the New York Times was in the midst of a protracted crusade on behalf of the Shoreham nuclear power project on Long Island. In July 1986, Jack Newfield wrote in the Village Voice that he had counted 22 different times when the New York Times had editorialized in favor of the Shoreham nuclear plants during the previous 40 months. As it happened, members of the Times board of directors also sat on the boards of nuclear-invested utilities and banks.  Grassroots activism was often successful when it challenged the utilities seeking to generate more electricity with atomic power. Along the way, activists pointed out that nuclear power plants and nuclear weapons share the same basic fuel cycle. The anti-nuclear movement warned that fervent efforts to export nuclear power technology all over the globe would lead to the development of atomic weapons in more and more countries. But enormous media campaigns on behalf of the nuclear power industry are still with us.  On May 4—despite the dangers of catastrophic reactor accidents, the horrendous folly of creating massive amounts of atomic waste, and the proven role of nuclear power technology in nuclear weapons proliferation—a New York Times editorial contended, “There is mounting evidence that damage from global warming may dwarf any environmental risk posed by nuclear power. It is therefore critical to keep nuclear power as part of the nation’s energy mix.” Such commentaries encourage us to believe that widespread conservation and renewable resources aren’t viable, as if the only real choices are a radioactive future or an overheated globe.  This kind of nuclear fundamentalism is exactly what has smoothed the way for countries to acquire nuclear weapons technologies—and in some cases nuclear bombs—in recent decades. Like an institution run by religious fanatics, the New York Times still cannot let go of its corporate faith in the great god nuclear power.  These days, there is ugly irony in the emergence of Jimmy Carter as an advocate for nuclear sanity. In 1979, when the Three Mile Island nuclear power disaster occurred in Pennsylvania, President Carter went out of his way to flack for the atomic-energy industry. Like his predecessors and successors in the Oval Office, he pushed nuclear power on people in many other countries. Now Carter is singing a somewhat different tune. In an op-ed piece that appeared in the International Herald Tribune on May 2, he warned: “Iran has repeatedly hidden its intentions to enrich uranium while claiming that its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes only. This explanation has been given before, by India, Pakistan and North Korea, and has led to weapons programs in all three states.”  Meanwhile, Carter is suitably adamant about the importance of not allowing nuclear test explosions. “The comprehensive test ban treaty should be honored,” he wrote in the same article, “but the United States is moving in the opposite direction.” You wouldn’t know it from Carter, or from the U.S. media, but his Administration chose to jettison the appreciable prospects that a comprehensive test ban could have been locked into place a quarter-century ago.  When I visited the State Department early in the fourth year of the Carter presidency, an arms-control specialist asked me to turn off my tape recorder before he talked about ways that top officials at the government’s nuclear weapons labs were successfully sinking the test-ban efforts. Several months later, in October 1980, I summed up the situation in a Nation magazine article: “While proclaiming a desire to halt the nuclear arms race, the U.S. government has been quietly undermining chances for the most far-reaching disarmament treaty on the horizon—a comprehensive international ban on atomic bomb tests. The latest round of talks in Geneva ended in failure— with the United States’ tactics of delay drawing criticism from other delegations. No wonder: The Carter administration has caved in to the nuclear-weapons laboratories, which want to continue to test bombs and are opposed to a meaningful agreement that will stop the spread of nuclear weapons.”  In 2005, it’s bad enough that such history is scarcely on the U.S. media radar screen, while propaganda looms larger for an attack on Iran either by the Pentagon or by the U.S.-backed Israeli government. But in the present day, the hypocrisy of Washington’s righteous finger-pointing toward Iran is extremely dangerous. Carter has it right when he now calls the United States “the major culprit” in the erosion of the Non-Proliferation Treaty: “While claiming to be protecting the world from proliferation threats in Iraq, Libya, Iran and North Korea, American leaders not only have abandoned existing treaty restraints but also have asserted plans to test and develop new weapons, including antiballistic missiles, the earth-penetrating ‘bunker buster’ and perhaps some new ‘small’ bombs. They also have abandoned past pledges and now threaten first use of nuclear weapons against non-nuclear states.”  The odds are good that if the Pentagon doesn’t launch a major missile attack on Iranian facilities in the next year or so, the Israeli government will—with a wink and nod from President Bush. Yet, unlike Iran’s government, Israel is not even a signer of the Non-Proliferation Treaty. With a nuclear bomb stockpile now estimated at more than 200 warheads, Israel is fueling the nuclear arms race in the Middle East. But, from the White House to Capitol Hill to newsrooms across the United States, the Israeli nuclear arsenal draws scant mention let alone criticism.  A former UN weapons inspector in Iraq who previously served as Australia’s ambassador to the United Nations, Richard Butler, astutely wrote on May 1 in the Sydney Morning Herald that the U.S. government “can be expected to seek to draw attention away from its policies and actions by attempting to insist that the most significant issue at the review conference should be the potential breakout by Iran and North Korea.” Butler added: “In this context, it was remarkable to see the Israeli Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, during his recent visit to President George Bush’s Texas ranch, call on the U.S. to take urgent steps against Iran’s nuclear weapons program—the intelligence on which is quite divided. Neither side made any reference to the world’s largest clandestine nuclear weapons program —Israel’s.”  The person who has done more than anyone else to inform the world about that nuclear weapons program, Mordechai Vanunu, left his job as a technician at Israel’s Dimona nuclear facility before spilling the beans to the Sunday Times of London in 1986. The Israeli government promptly sent agents to kidnap Vanunu from Rome and take him back to Israel. As a result, Vanunu spent 18 years behind bars, mostly in solitary confinement. Since his release in April 2004, the Israeli authorities have imposed a travel ban along with other restrictions on Vanunu—and they’re threatening to put him back in prison if he keeps talking to journalists. If Vanunu were Iranian instead of Israeli, the U.S. press would be hailing him as a hero instead of giving him short shrift.  Like almost every other mainstream U.S. media outlet, the New York Times has provided little coverage of Vanunu, so the U.S. public has scant knowledge of his real-life experience with truth and consequences. Likewise, the Times has little to say about Washington’s extreme hypocrisies while the newspaper and the government denounce certain other countries for their nuclear programs.  But the New York Times has not skimped on coverage that adds to momentum for a military attack on Iran. And evidently the newspaper of record is just getting started. Norman Solomon’s latest book, War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death , will be published in early summer 2005.

cuz i agree