The Iran "Crisis"
A prelude to aggression
by Edward S. Herman & David
Peterson
Z magazine, November 2005
It is a bit frightening to see how, even
in the midst of the catastrophic aggression and occupation of
Iraq, the United States, having engaged once again in the "supreme
crime," is still able to mobilize the UN and its NATO allies
to focus on, browbeat, and threaten Iran to abandon its nuclear
activities or face some kind of retaliation. This collaboration
occurs despite the fact that the case the United States once made
about the Iraqi government's "weapons of mass destruction"
threat, perhaps the single most discredited series of official
lies in U.S. history, and while the United States is still killing
Iraqis, having destroyed the sizable city of Fallujah and now
giving the Fallujah treatment to a succession of cities that it
deems insurgent-friendly, recently Ta! Afar, with no end in sight.
True, the UN and NATO allies did give
retrospective sanction to the aggression-occupation and have given
it substantive support-UN Security Council Resolution 1546 of
June 2004 amounted to a complete reversal of their earlier refusal
to sanction the invasion-occupation. But by analogy, if Germany
and Italy had been sufficiently powerful, the League of Nations
might have belatedly approved the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia
and Poland, or Mussolini's invasion-pacification of Abyssinia,
in the pre-World War II era. This is a form of Kafkaesque progress-toward
recognition of the rights of those with the biggest teeth and
sharpest claws to rule the jungle, sanctioned by the "international
community" (i.e., the governments, international institutions,
and some NGOs, often far removed from the people who they purportedly
represent).
The United States claims that Iran's moves
toward nuclear power would be "incredibly destabilizing"
(Bush) and threaten "international peace" as well as
stability, whereas presumably the United States really knows all
about peace and stability, which it has so successfully brought
to Iraq and which it and its number one client Israel has brought
to Palestine. "Stability" in this Kafkaesque world means
an arrangement approved by the Godfather, so that any real world
instability is merely transitional, although it may last a long
time and involve mass killing and vast destruction.
Another remarkable feature of the new
"crisis" is that Iran is successfully portrayed as a
villain and threat based on a distant prospect of its acquiring
nuclear weapons, even as the United States and Israel brandish
those weapons and threaten Iran with attack. If Iran did acquire
nuclear weapons it could never use them against Israel or the
United States without committing national suicide, whereas the
United States has used them in the past and could do so now without
threat of nuclear retaliation. However, if Iran built a small
stock of such weapons it could pose a low probability threat of
a nuclear response to a direct attack. So Iran's real "threat"
is the threat of being able to defend itself (see Herman, "Iran's
Dire Threat," Z Magazine, October 2004). In the present political
environment, despite its recent setbacks, the United States can
still get the "international community" to go along
with its pretense that Iran poses some kind of genuine threat
and to cooperate with it in containing that mythical threat-whereas
in reality the international community is helping the United States
and Israel contain Iran's "threat" to acquire an improved
capacity for self-defense, and helping set the stage for another
invasion-occupation.
The United States gets away with this
despite the fact that it is unique in having used nuclear weapons-and
against civilian populations-continues to improve them, and, more
recently, has tried to make them smaller and more "practical,"
and openly threatens to use them once again. It has abandoned
the commitment it made in signing the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation
of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) in 1970 that it would not use them against
non-nuclear powers. It has also egregiously failed to implement
the promise in that treaty to strive to eliminate nuclear weapons
altogether. (In 1996, the International Court of Justice ruled
unanimously that, "There exists an obligation to pursue in
good faith and bring to a conclusion negotiations leading to nuclear
disarmament in all its aspects under strict and effective international
control.") The United States has also cooperated with its
client Israel in allowing and positively supporting Israel's long-standing
nuclear weapons program that has made it the only nuclear power
in the Middle East. Thus, by cooperating with the United States
in, its Iran-containment and prelude-to-aggression program, the
international community accepts the blatant double standard: that
only the United States and its allies and clients have a right
to acquire nuclear weapons and only their targets are properly
subject to international law and must be held to promises made
in international agreements.
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.
As in the Iraq case, the UN and NATO allies
have again chosen to accommodate the Godfather, so that instead
of rejecting the crude double standard being imposed by a government
with notoriously unclean hands, they have been struggling to push
Iran to agree to forego nuclear independence altogether, even
for work on the peaceful uses of nuclear energy that the United
States had encouraged for Iran when its dictatorial client the
Shah was in power.
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.
Edward S. Herman is an economist, media
critic, and author of numerous articles and books. David Peterson
is a freelance writer and researcher.
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