Re: IAEA Again Verifies Iranian Compliance-Neo-crazy Media Sycophants Drum for W
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Double Standards for Iran’s Nuclear Program
Source: Antiwar.com Authors: Muhammad Sahimi Dated: 2009-12-02
Muhammad Sahimi, professor of chemical engineering and materials science and the NIOC professor of petroleum engineering at the University of Southern California, has published extensively on Iran's nuclear program and its political developments.
Tension between Iran and the United States and its allies has been rising, following Iran’s rejection of the preliminary agreement that was reached between the two sides on Oct. 1, 2009, in Geneva. Under the deal, Iran was supposed to send 75 percent of its stockpile of low-enriched uranium (LEU) to Russia for conversion into fuel for a research reactor in Tehran. Russia was supposed to enrich Iran’s LEU to 19.75 percent (Iran’s LEU is at 3.8 percent level), and France to convert it into fuel rods.
Iran also agreed to allow the inspectors of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to visit the newly disclosed uranium-enrichment facility in Qom – called the Fordow facility – within two weeks. Iran delivered on that promise. After the visit by the inspectors, Mohamed ElBaradei, the IAEA outgoing director-general, declared that the facility was a "big hole in the mountain" and nothing to worry about.
But when the preliminary proposal was taken to Tehran, the various factions within the hard-line, conservative camp could not decide how to respond to the proposal. Given Iran’s historical suspicion of the West in general, and of France and Russia in particular, many of its hard-liners are not willing to send the hard-earned LEU abroad. Others, such as Maj. Gen. Hassan Firouzabadi, chief of staff of Iran’s armed forces, supported the proposal. So there were heated arguments in Tehran over the issue.
Finally, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who has the final say in the most important issues facing the nation, rejected the proposal. Iran then made a counterproposal. Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki declared that Iran is open to a simultaneous exchange of fuel rods for its research reactor with Iran’s LEU in Tehran. This was rejected by the United States and its allies in the P5+1 group – the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) plus Germany – which only adds to the Iranians’ suspicion. If the ultimate goal is to transfer Iran’s LEU outside of its reach, what difference does it make where to deliver the fuel and receive the LEU?
The U.S. and its allies responded by lobbying the Board of Governors (BOG) of the IAEA to pass a resolution on Nov. 27 to censure Iran for the construction of the Fordow enrichment plant. The resolution, drafted by the P5+1 group, demanded that Tehran stop uranium enrichment and immediately freeze the construction of the Fordow nuclear facility. It passed in a 25-3 vote with six abstentions.
As expected, Tehran rejected the IAEA resolution, the first one passed against Iran since 2006, as "politically motivated" and "illegal," aimed at depriving Iran of its basic rights. It announced a lofty goal of setting up to 10 other enrichment facilities on the scale of that in Natanz, which is supposed to house up to 55,000 centrifuges. Although the announcement is more than likely a bluff, it speaks to Iran’s deep anger.
Is there any validity to Tehran’s argument that the latest IAEA resolution is illegal? Let me first point out that, after Iran’s rigged June 12 presidential election, the government of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has lost its legitimacy in the eyes of a great majority of Iranians. As an Iranian-American, I happen to be one of those who consider Ahmadinejad’s reelection fraudulent. He and the government that he leads, which is essentially a military junta, are dangerous to Iran’s future.
However, the issue between Iran and the West goes beyond Ahmadinejad or any other Iranian government – democratic or not, for that matter. It has to do with Iran’s national rights in the framework of the international agreements that it has signed, in particular the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).
The issue also has to do with the double standards of the U.S. and its allies. They have agreed to transfer their nuclear technology to Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain, and India; did nothing to prevent Pakistan from developing a nuclear arsenal; and supported Israel in its quest for nuclear weapons. They have also not opposed agreements between Egypt and Russia and Oman and Russia regarding the construction of nuclear reactors in Iran’s vicinity. But the same nations lament a nuclear race in the Middle East and the "threat" that Iran’s nuclear program supposedly poses to peace and stability in the region.
In issuing the new resolution, the BOG of the IAEA has continued the questionable actions against Iran that began in the fall of 2006, after Iran ended the voluntary suspension of its uranium enrichment program. The BOG demanded that Iran suspend its nuclear program. However, the demand was illegal, because the IAEA Statute does not give the BOG or the director-general the authority to demand the suspension of a peaceful nuclear program.
Then, after Iran refused to comply with the illegal demand, the BOG voted on Feb. 4, 2006, to send Iran’s nuclear dossier to the UNSC. The two main reasons given for the referral were that the BOG had found Iran in non-compliance with the NPT and its Safeguards Agreement obligations and, second, that Iran had resumed enriching uranium after suspending enrichment voluntarily for nearly two years. Was the BOG’s action legal? The answer is an emphatic no. Let me explain.
It has been argued that Article III.B.4 of the IAEA Statute empowers it to send Iran’s dossier to the UNSC. This article states that the Agency shall
"Submit reports on its activities annually to the General Assembly of the United Nations and, when appropriate, to the Security Council: if in connection with the activities of the Agency there should arise questions that are within the competence of the Security Council, the Agency shall notify the Security Council, as the organ bearing the main responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security, and may also take the measures open to it under this Statute, including those provided in paragraph C of Article XII."
And what does Article XII.C state?
"[T]he inspectors shall report any non-compliance to the director general who shall thereupon transmit the report to the Board of Governors. The Board shall call upon the recipient state or states to remedy forthwith any non-compliance which it finds to have occurred. The Board shall report the non-compliance to all members and to the Security Council and the General Assembly of the United Nations."
Thus, there are at least three points in the two articles worth noting:
1. Contrary to what has been argued, the responsibility for identifying non-compliance rests not with the BOG, but with the inspectors and the director-general, none of whom have ever reported Iran to be in non-compliance with the NPT (i.e., making nuclear weapons in secret, helping another member state to do so, or transferring nuclear technology to a non-member state).
2. The dossier should be referred to the UNSC only if the NPT has been violated by the member state (in the above sense), or if nuclear materials have been diverted to non-peaceful applications (bomb-making), or if a breach has occurred to “further any military purpose." But the IAEA has certified time and again that none has occurred in Iran’s case.
3. The resolution adopted for sending Iran’s dossier to the UNSC also made illegal demands on Iran beyond the authority of the BOG and the IAEA. Among other things, it “deemed necessary” for Iran to
"Implement transparency measures, as requested by the director-general, including in GOV/2005/67, which extends beyond the formal requirements of the Safeguards Agreements and Additional Protocol, which include such access to individuals, documentation relating to procurement, dual-use equipment, certain military-owned workshops, and research and development as the Agency may request in support of its ongoing investigations." (Item 5 of article 1; emphasis mine.)
But there is not a single word in the UN Charter, the NPT, Iran’s Safeguards Agreement, or the IAEA Statute that indicates that the BOG or the director-general need to satisfy themselves that a country’s nuclear program is exclusively peaceful, or that it even has the authority to make such demands.
According to the BOG of the IAEA, one main reason that Iran’s dossier was sent to the UNSC was that the IAEA could not verify that Iran does not have a secret, parallel nuclear program and, hence, cannot verify the peaceful nature of Iran’s program. In addition to demanding proof of a negative (namely, that Iran does not have a secret, parallel nuclear program), the issue is dealt with by the Additional Protocol, not by the Safeguards Agreement. Regarding the Protocol, the following facts are well-established.
One is that according to the Sa’d Abaad Agreement of October 2003 and the Paris Agreement of November 2004 between Iran and the EU3 (Britain, France, and Germany), Iran agreed voluntarily to abide by the provisions of the Additional Protocol and provide the IAEA with expanded access to its nuclear facilities, well beyond its obligations (which Iran did). As the Paris Agreement stipulated,
"The EU3/EU recognize that this suspension [of enrichment-related activities] is a voluntary confidence-building measure and not a legal obligation. … In the context of this suspension, the EU3/EU and Iran have agreed to begin negotiations, with a view to reaching a mutually acceptable agreement on long-term arrangements."
But even if implementation of the Additional Protocol had been mandatory, it had nothing to do with the IAEA. The Sa’d Abaad and Paris Agreements were between Iran and the EU3. The IAEA was not a party to the agreements. Therefore, it could not use them against Iran. In fact, it was the EU3 that violated the Paris Agreement by insisting that Iran give up its inalienable right under Article IV of the NPT to the complete uranium enrichment cycle.
Since Iran has not ratified the Additional Protocol, it has no legal obligation to follow it. This puts Iran in the same category as 36 other nations, none of which have been referred to the UNSC. Moreover, according to the IAEA’s own reports, of the 61 states that have signed both the NPT safeguards and the Additional Protocol, the IAEA can certify the absence of undeclared nuclear facilities in only 21 nations. This puts Iran in the same category as 40 other nations, including Canada, the Czech Republic, and South Africa, none of which have been referred to the UNSC, another manifestation of the West’s double standards.
In its latest resolution against Iran, issued on Nov. 27, the IAEA once again made illegal demands by ordering Iran to stop construction of the Fordow facility. To give its demands "legal" cover, the resolution refers to the UNSC resolutions against Iran. But those resolutions too are illegal, because not only were they issued after Iran’s nuclear dossier was sent illegally to the UNSC, but the UNSC also did not follow the correct procedure for filing its resolutions under Chapter VII of the UN Charter, as I have described in detail elsewhere.
There is only one path to resolve the issue of Iran’s nuclear program: diplomacy without prejudice, double standards, and illegal demands. If a solution is reached, it will allow Iran’s democratic movement to advance further. If Iran does become a democracy, the question of its nuclear program should become moot.
With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
With the government growing increasingly desperate—and violent—the new clashes on the streets in Iran may very well prove to be the breaking point of the regime. If so, it shows that the Iranian theocracy ultimately fell on its own sword. It didn't come to an end due to the efforts of exiled opposition groups or the regime-change schemes of Washington's neoconservatives. Rather, the Iranian people are the main characters in this drama, using the very same symbols that brought the Islamic republic into being to close this chapter in a century-old struggle for democracy.
Protests flared up again because of Ashura, the climax of a month of mourning in the Shiite religious calendar. It is a day of sadness for the death of the Prophet Muhammad’s grandson, Imam Hussain, who was martyred in 680. And this year the commemoration coincided with the seventh day after the death of dissident Grand Ayatollah Ali Montazeri, adding to the significance of the day. Ashura is also a reminder that the eternal value of justice must be defended regardless of the odds of success. This has provided the relentless Green movement with yet another opportunity to outmaneuver the Iranian government by co-opting its symbols and challenge its legitimacy through the language of religion.
This battle cry for justice in all its simplicity is where most political conflagrations start. It is the deafness of the powers that be that often make them the kernel of something larger and more earth shattering. It is testimony to the arrogance of power that a simple and rather modest call for accountability and justice is beaten down only to return, demanding more, and less willing to compromise and accommodate.
And it wouldn’t be the first time. In 1906, the call for a house of justice went unheeded and was followed by demonstrations, and eventually transformed into a demand for a written constitution. Similarly, Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, in his imperial ineptitude, brought on himself an increasingly anti-monarchical coalition, ranging from liberals and communists, to the victorious Islamists who forged the Islamic republic in 1979.
Ashura, with its story of perseverance and martyrdom in the face of overwhelming force of oppression, was a perfectly stylized allegory for the struggle between the mighty state of the shah and the revolutionaries at the end of the 1970s. The Shiite mourning rituals, with their revisiting of the dead on the 3rd, 7th and 40th day of death, provided the demonstrators then, as well as now, with the opportunity to both remember those who died for the cause as well as re-iterating their opposition and condemnation of that state repression. This played an important role in bringing the simmering political discontent to a boiling point and wearing down what was perceived as the all-powerful Pahlavi state in 1977-78.
It is even more important this time around because there is no extensive leadership structure that steers the opposition. The ability to bring out crowds for important days of the calendar, religious and revolutionary ones, reminds everyone that they are not alone in their opposition to the current government.
No one can predict a revolution nor say with certainty when an authoritarian state loses its footing if not its grip. For it is not necessarily its ability or will to repress that will falter as much as ordinary people's unwillingness to allow themselves to be cowed and intimidated. It is a battle of wills where, on the one hand, the constant mobilization and tension pervading a discontented and rebellious society tests the state machinery's ability to endure as they try to perform their functions (including repression). Weighing in on the other side of the balance is the patience and capacity to stomach pain and suffering by the protesters and their sympathizers in all quarters of society.
Today a significant number of the original revolutionaries of 1979 are imprisoned or being harassed by shadowy groups from the borderlands of state authority. The constituency of the Islamic republic is becoming increasingly alienated as the hard-line faction ruling Tehran demands loyalty to an increasingly surreal understanding of, and vision for, Iranian society. Not much is left of the dynamism and visions that fuelled the revolution of 1979—but having learned from that experience, the demands of the reformist movement today are much more sophisticated and their abstention from violence so much more promising for the future.
The state's ability to use the language of religion to repress these developments is failing. Again and again, religion has proven itself to be much better suited as a language of resistance than governance. This became increasingly clear to Khomeini himself after the success of the revolution. In the constant bickering within the revolutionary elite, Khomeini increasingly invoked reasons of state for justifying actions, demoting religion to the role of ideological veneer. By the end of his life, he stated that the state could abrogate the basic principles of Islam if it deemed necessary for the survival of the Islamic republic.
Instead of a system where religious thinking controlled and wielded state power, he ended up with an arrangement where the state utilized religion for its own purposes, emptying religion and its language of substance, discarding it on the growing heap of unfulfilled promises of the revolution.
Ashura, the commemoration and the principle it invokes, proves to be relevant yet again, as those who hold the reins of power in Tehran unleash violence against their own people. Undoubtedly the people of Iran will persevere in their quest for greater freedom and justice through their nonviolent transformation of the system from within. It will indeed be ironic if the Iranian theocracy begins to crumble on the most important religious day of the Shiite calendar.
Rouzbeh Parsi is research fellow at the European Institute for Security Studies. Trita Parsi is the president of the National Iranian American Council and the 2010 recipient of the Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order.
WASHINGTON -- On Tuesday, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad did not just reject President Obama's latest feckless floating nuclear deadline. He spat on it, declaring that Iran "will continue resisting" until the U.S. has gotten rid of its 8,000 nuclear warheads.
So ends 2009, the year of "engagement," of the extended hand, of the gratuitous apology -- and of spinning centrifuges, two-stage rockets and a secret enrichment facility that brought Iran materially closer to becoming a nuclear power.
We lost a year. But it was not just any year. It was a year of spectacularly squandered opportunity. In Iran, it was a year of revolution, beginning with a contested election and culminating this week in huge demonstrations mourning the death of the dissident Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri -- and demanding no longer a recount of the stolen election but the overthrow of the clerical dictatorship.
Obama responded by distancing himself from this new birth of freedom. First, scandalous silence. Then, a few grudging words. Then relentless engagement with the murderous regime. With offer after offer, gesture after gesture -- to not Iran, but the "Islamic Republic of Iran," as Obama ever so respectfully called these clerical fascists -- the U.S. conferred legitimacy on a regime desperate to regain it.
Why is this so important? Because revolutions succeed at that singular moment, that imperceptible historical inflection, when the people, and particularly those in power, realize that the regime has lost the mandate of heaven. With this weakening dictatorship desperate for affirmation, why is the U.S. repeatedly offering just such affirmation?
Apart from ostracizing and delegitimizing these gangsters, we should be encouraging and reinforcing the demonstrators. This is no trivial matter. When pursued, beaten, arrested and imprisoned, dissidents can easily succumb to feelings of despair and isolation. Natan Sharansky testifies to the electric effect Ronald Reagan's Evil Empire speech had on lifting spirits in the Gulag. The news was spread cell to cell in code tapped on the walls. They knew they weren't alone, that America was committed to their cause.
Yet so aloof has Obama been that on Hate America Day (Nov. 4, the anniversary of the seizure of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran), pro-American counter-demonstrators chanted "Obama, Obama, you are either with us or with them," i.e., their oppressors.
Such cool indifference is more than a betrayal of our values. It's a strategic blunder of the first order.
Forget about human rights. Assume you care only about the nuclear issue. How to defuse it? Negotiations are going nowhere, and whatever U.N. sanctions we might get will be weak, partial, grudging and late. The only real hope is regime change. The revered and widely supported Montazeri had actually issued a fatwa against nuclear weapons.
And even if a successor government were to act otherwise, the nuclear threat would be highly attenuated because it's not the weapon but the regime that creates the danger. (Think India or Britain, for example.) Any proliferation is troubling, but a nonaggressive pro-Western Tehran would completely change the strategic equation and make the threat minimal and manageable.
What should we do? Pressure from without -- cutting off gasoline supplies, for example -- to complement and reinforce pressure from within. The pressure should be aimed not at changing the current regime's nuclear policy -- that will never happen -- but at helping change the regime itself.
Give the kind of covert support to assist dissident communication and circumvent censorship that, for example, we gave Solidarity in Poland during the 1980s. (In those days that meant broadcasting equipment and copying machines.) But of equal importance is robust rhetorical and diplomatic support from the very highest level: full-throated denunciation of the regime's savagery and persecution. In detail -- highlighting cases, the way Western leaders adopted the causes of Sharansky and Andrei Sakharov during the rise of the dissident movement that helped bring down the Soviet empire.
Will this revolution succeed? The odds are long but the reward immense. Its ripple effects would extend from Afghanistan to Iraq (in both conflicts, Iran actively supports insurgents who have long been killing Americans and their allies) to Lebanon and Gaza where Iran's proxies, Hezbollah and Hamas, are arming for war.
One way or the other, Iran will dominate 2010. Either there will be an Israeli attack or Iran will arrive at -- or cross -- the nuclear threshold. Unless revolution intervenes. Which is why to fail to do everything in our power to support this popular revolt is unforgivable.
[Salamantis] WTF is wrong with Obama on this issue? Is he secretly possessed by Hermit? Even the US Congress - both houses and both Democrat and Republican - overwhelmingly grasp these circumstances and their dire import, as I have previously posted:
Is there anything that could bring our deeply divided Congress together in an act of overwhelming bipartisanship? Is there any issue that could unite more than 400 members of the House of Representatives, Democrats and Republicans, in common cause? Is it even possible to have broad bipartisan agreement on a major problem facing the country today?
The answer is yes. You might not have noticed -- it didn't get much coverage -- but on Dec. 15 the House voted, by the unheard-of margin of 412 to 12, to pass a bill called the Iran Refined Petroleum Sanctions Act. With one loud, united voice, lawmakers told President Obama to stop messing around and impose real sanctions in response to the Iranian nuclear weapons program.
The bill targets a major Iranian vulnerability. Even though it has vast stores of oil -- it's the world's fourth-largest producer -- Iran has little capacity to refine that oil into gasoline, diesel fuel and other usable products. So an oil-rich nation has to import gas. If it can't get the gas, it can't keep its economy going. The legislation would crack down on the companies that provide the fuel that keeps the Iranian theocracy in business.
The act's prologue is an extended rebuke of the Obama administration's Iran policy. Iran's nuclear program is "a serious threat to the security of the United States," the prologue says, and many U.S. allies, including Britain, France and Germany, have already advocated tougher sanctions against Iran.
In October 2008, the prologue continues, then-senator and presidential candidate Barack Obama said petroleum sanctions might force Iran to change its ways. "If we can prevent them from importing the gasoline that they need and the refined petroleum products, that starts changing their cost-benefit analysis," Obama said. "That starts putting the squeeze on them."
The prologue goes on to cite the "serious and urgent nature" of the Iranian threat, as well as the "brutal repression and murder, arbitrary arrests, and show trials of peaceful dissidents" in Iran. It declares that Iran has not only ignored but has been "contemptuous of" Obama's efforts to reach out to Tehran.Iran "is not interested in a diplomatic resolution," the act concludes. Therefore, it is time for action.
The legislation would require Obama to impose sanctions on companies that sell refined petroleum to Iran or help Iran acquire refined petroleum, either by shipping it in or by increasing Iran's capacity to refine oil. The proposed sanctions extend to companies that provide ships for getting the refined products to Iran and even companies that insure those ships.
The sanctions include basically barring those firms from doing business in the United States -- prohibiting them from taking part in any financial transactions in the United States, freezing their U.S. assets and forbidding them from dealing in U.S. dollars. Those are real and serious penalties, and they would be felt if actually imposed on the companies that keep the Iranian machine running.
After decisive passage in the House, the act is now in the Senate, where it also has far-reaching bipartisan support. The problem is, the Democratic leadership has been more interested in passing a national health care bill by Christmas Eve than in dealing firmly with the Iranian nuclear threat.
But it will ultimately pass the Senate and then head to Obama's desk. Will the president who has invested so much of his personal prestige in the idea of engagement -- the man who, as a candidate, pledged to meet Mahmoud Ahmedinejad without preconditions -- actually take action?
"This is a test for the Obama administration," says an advocate of sanctions. "It's clear Iran is not cooperating. Will the administration lead on this and move forward to the United Nations, with the Europeans and then with the coalition of the like-minded? It will be a moment of truth, the time by which his foreign policy will be defined."
Support for action is as bipartisan as bipartisan can be. In the House, the act was passed with the votes of 241 Democrats and 171 Republicans. Republicans Mike Pence and Eric Cantor support it, and Democrats Henry Waxman and Barney Frank support it. The 12 lawmakers who voted against it were mostly fringe figures, including Reps. John Conyers, Dennis Kucinich and Ron Paul.
The mainstream message is as clear as Congress can make it: It's time for Obama to do something.
If you thought America would quickly regain the world's love, admiration and -- most important -- it's willingness to follow the U.S. lead once Barack Obama came to power, the news is disappointing. A useful guide to what has transpired comes from Venezuela's president and his most peculiar sulfurometer. Hugo Chávez, it seems, can smell the Devil, especially when the Prince of Darkness takes up residence in the body of an American president.
Watching Chávez's devil-spotting shows that efforts to turn America's foes into friends will, in many cases, prove utterly useless. There is an important lesson there for everyone, including the resident of the White House.
Chávez's first supernatural sighting came at the United Nations in 2006, when the Venezuelan leader took the podium after President Bush gave a speech and announced in the solemn chamber that he could smell sulfur still hanging in the air from Bush's presence.
The air cleared up nicely after the 2008 elections. ``It doesn't smell of sulfur. It's gone,'' declared Chávez last September, scanning the grand hall of the U.N. General Assembly. ``It smells of something else,'' he added approvingly. ``It smells of hope.'' The Chávez nasal gauge confirmed expectations that America's standing in the world was changing.
But hold the celebration. All is not well. On Dec. 18, Chávez revealed the new air-quality measurements during a speech in Copenhagen's U.N. Climate Change Conference. The Venezuelan's turn at the microphone came only moments after Obama, so the airborne particles tickled his sensitive nose. ``It smells likes sulfur here,'' he said, blaming the problem, shockingly, on Obama. The ``Nobel War Prize'' winner he called him.
In summary: Devil, Hope and now Devil again. America still personifies what is wrong with the world.
How is this possible? Wasn't Obama supposed to make the world love America again? Wasn't Bush the source of all of Washington's woes?
The opinion of one man, especially the president of Venezuela, is not terribly important, but it helps illustrate the folly of believing that ``tone'' determines international behavior. Clearly, Chávez's problem is not one man. It never was. Chávez's anti-Americanism was not the result of his dislike for Bush. Some will say what matters is not the man but his policies. But even that does not tell the whole story.
Some countries and politicians have goals and interests that conflict sharply with the United States. Regardless of how the man in the Oval Office speaks, regardless of how charming he is. And some nations and leaders will define themselves by their anti-Americanism.
Still, the conciliatory tone from President Obama does serve a useful purpose. When Bush was president, it was easy to believe that people like Chávez or regimes such as Iran's acted the way they did because America spoke in tones they found offensive or overly confrontational. Now we know there was more.
Iran's defiance of international demands on its nuclear program are not the product of poor table manners from the Bush administration. Iran behaves as it does because its regime has certain objectives, and its accelerated nuclear enrichment is key to achieving goals such as regional supremacy.
During the Bush years, many believed Iran's intransigence was the direct result of Bush's threatening stance. Since Obama came to power, he has tried unsuccessfully to stop Iran from lying to the U.N.'s nuclear authorities and deceiving the world's diplomats. Iran has dismissed all efforts despite Washington's new conciliatory tone and its efforts to find a diplomatic solution.
It has become more difficult to blame America for the problem. And yet, some will continue to see the devil's shadow and blame the US no matter how much America's president scrubs his foreign policy.
In the case of Iran, America's once-reluctant allies may have learned that the problem was not Washington's tone but Iranian objectives. That may or may not persuade Russia and China to support Western nations' efforts to pressure Iran through economic sanctions. But the truly important product of the new revelations will be found not overseas but inside the White House.
If Obama thought a change of tone would make the world see things America's way, his first year in power has brought a powerful lesson: Sometimes countries disagree simply because their goals are mutually exclusive.
Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist specialising in U.S. national security policy. The paperback edition of his latest book, "Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam", was published in 2006.
U.S. intelligence has concluded that the document published recently by the Times of London, which purportedly describes an Iranian plan to do experiments on what the newspaper described as a "neutron initiator" for an atomic weapon, is a fabrication, according to a former Central Intelligence Agency official.
Philip Giraldi, who was a CIA counterterrorism official from 1976 to 1992, told IPS that intelligence sources say that the United States had nothing to do with forging the document, and that Israel is the primary suspect. The sources do not rule out a British role in the fabrication, however.
The Times of London story published Dec. 14 did not identify the source of the document. But it quoted "an Asian intelligence source" - a term some news media have used for Israeli intelligence officials - as confirming that his government believes Iran was working on a neutron initiator as recently as 2007.
The story of the purported Iranian document prompted a new round of expressions of U.S. and European support for tougher sanctions against Iran and reminders of Israel's threats to attack Iranian nuclear programme targets if diplomacy fails.
U.S. news media reporting has left the impression that U.S. intelligence analysts have not made up their mind about the document's authenticity, although it has been widely reported that they have now had a full year to assess the issue.
Giraldi's intelligence sources did not reveal all the reasons that led analysts to conclude that the purported Iran document had been fabricated by a foreign intelligence agency. But their suspicions of fraud were prompted in part by the source of the story, according to Giraldi.
"The Rupert Murdoch chain has been used extensively to publish false intelligence from the Israelis and occasionally from the British government," Giraldi said.
The Times is part of a Murdoch publishing empire that includes the Sunday Times, Fox News and the New York Post. All Murdoch-owned news media report on Iran with an aggressively pro-Israeli slant.
The document itself also had a number of red flags suggesting possible or likely fraud.
The subject of the two-page document which the Times published in English translation would be highly classified under any state's security system. Yet there is no confidentiality marking on the document, as can be seen from the photograph of the Farsi-language original published by the Times.
The absence of security markings has been cited by the Iranian ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency, Ali Asghar Soltanieh, as evidence that the "alleged studies" documents, which were supposedly purloined from an alleged Iranian nuclear weapons-related programme early in this decade, are forgeries.
The document also lacks any information identifying either the issuing office or the intended recipients. The document refers cryptically to "the Centre", "the Institute", "the Committee", and the "neutron group".
The document's extreme vagueness about the institutions does not appear to match the concreteness of the plans, which call for hiring eight individuals for different tasks for very specific numbers of hours for a four-year time frame.
Including security markings and such identifying information in a document increases the likelihood of errors that would give the fraud away.
The absence of any date on the document also conflicts with the specificity of much of the information. The Times reported that unidentified "foreign intelligence agencies" had dated the document to early 2007, but gave no reason for that judgment.
An obvious motive for suggesting the early 2007 date is that it would discredit the U.S. intelligence community's November 2007 National Intelligence Estimate, which concluded that Iran had discontinued unidentified work on nuclear weapons and had not resumed it as of the time of the estimate.
Discrediting the NIE has been a major objective of the Israeli government for the past two years, and the British and French governments have supported the Israeli effort.
The biggest reason for suspecting that the document is a fraud is its obvious effort to suggest past Iranian experiments related to a neutron initiator. After proposing experiments on detecting pulsed neutrons, the document refers to "locations where such experiments used to be conducted".
That reference plays to the widespread assumption, which has been embraced by the International Atomic Energy Agency, that Iran had carried out experiments with Polonium-210 in the late 1980s, indicating an interest in neutron initiators. The IAEA referred in reports from 2004 through 2007 to its belief that the experiment with Polonium-210 had potential relevance to making "a neutron initiator in some designs of nuclear weapons".
The National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), the political arm of the terrorist organisation Mujahedeen-e Khalq, claimed in February 2005 that Iran's research with Polonium-210 was continuing and that it was now close to producing a neutron initiator for a nuclear weapon.
Sanger and Broad were so convinced that the Polonium-210 experiments proved Iran's interest in a neutron initiator that they referred in their story on the leaked document to both the IAEA reports on the experiments in the late 1980s and the claim by NCRI of continuing Iranian work on such a nuclear trigger.
What Sanger and Broad failed to report, however, is that the IAEA has acknowledged that it was mistaken in its earlier assessment that the Polonium-210 experiments were related to a neutron initiator.
After seeing the complete documentation on the original project, including complete copies of the reactor logbook for the entire period, the IAEA concluded in its Feb. 22, 2008 report that Iran's explanations that the Polonium-210 project was fundamental research with the eventual aim of possible application to radio isotope batteries was "consistent with the Agency's findings and with other information available to it".
The IAEA report said the issue of Polonium-210 – and thus the earlier suspicion of an Iranian interest in using it as a neutron initiator for a nuclear weapon - was now considered "no longer outstanding".
New York Times reporters David Sanger and William J. Broad reported U.S. intelligence officials as saying the intelligence analysts "have yet to authenticate the document". Sanger and Broad explained the failure to do so, however, as a result of excessive caution left over from the CIA's having failed to brand as a fabrication the document purporting to show an Iraqi effort to buy uranium in Niger.
The Washington Post's Joby Warrick dismissed the possibility that the document might be found to be fraudulent. "There is no way to establish the authenticity or original source of the document...," wrote Warrick.
But the line that the intelligence community had authenticated it evidently reflected the Barack Obama administration's desire to avoid undercutting a story that supports its efforts to get Russian and Chinese support for tougher sanctions against Iran.
This is not the first time that Giraldi has been tipped off by his intelligence sources on forged documents. Giraldi identified the individual or office responsible for creating the two most notorious forged documents in recent U.S. intelligence history.
In 2005, Giraldi identified Michael Ledeen, the extreme right-wing former consultant to the National Security Council and the Pentagon, as an author of the fabricated letter purporting to show Iraqi interest in purchasing uranium from Niger. That letter was used by the George W. Bush administration to bolster its false case that Saddam Hussein had an active nuclear weapons programme.
Giraldi also identified officials in the "Office of Special Plans" who worked under Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith as having forged a letter purportedly written by Hussein's intelligence director, Tahir Jalail Habbush al-Tikriti, to Hussein himself referring to an Iraqi intelligence operation to arrange for an unidentified shipment from Niger.
With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
Tehran Plans a Major Military Exercise Drill to Boost 'Defensive Capabilities' Coincides With Deadline Iran Has Set for West on Nuclear Offer
Iranian media on Sunday reported Tehran will conduct a large-scale defensive military exercise next month, coinciding with what government officials now say is a deadline for the West to respond to its counteroffer to a nuclear-fuel deal.
The commander of Iran's ground forces, Brig. Gen. Ahmad-Reza Pourdastan, said the drill will be conducted by Iran's army, in conjunction with some units of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, to improve "defensive capabilities," Press TV, the English-language, state-run media outlet reported.
The report follows comments by Iran's foreign minister Manouchehr Mottaki on Saturday, challenging Western nations to decide by the end of the month on counterproposals Tehran has floated to an internationally brokered nuclear-fuel deal. In the counterproposals, Iran has said it would agree to swap the bulk of its low-enriched uranium for higher enriched uranium, but in small batches and on Iranian soil.
Iranian officials also have named Turkey as a possible venue to swap the fuel. Iran has separately suggested it would be willing to buy enriched uranium from a third party.
The U.S. and Western allies have dismissed the counterproposals outright. In autumn, negotiators from Iran, the U.S., France, Russia and the International Atomic Energy Agency hammered out a proposed deal in which Iran would agree to ship out the bulk of its uranium to Russia, where it would be enriched and shipped back for use in a medical-research reactor. But Iranian officials refused to endorse the deal, despite a U.S.-imposed year-end deadline for Tehran to show progress in talks.
An IAEA spokesman declined to comment on the latest Iranian statements.
A European diplomat said that on Monday, the diplomatic year begins with a "review of measures the international community can use to increase its pressure on Iran" to begin serious negotiations.
The administration of U.S. President Barack Obama has said it would push for new sanctions against Iran early this year if Tehran didn't respond positively to the nuclear-fuel deal. Israeli officials, meanwhile, have suggested they would strike militarily if they thought Iran was nearing nuclear-weapons capability.
Mr. Obama has "begun talking to our friends and allies to consider the next step in this process," National Security Council Chief of Staff Denis McDonough said last week in Honolulu.
The U.S. is expected to push for United Nations-backed sanctions, despite uncertain support from Security Council members Russia and China. Washington is also consulting allies who might be willing to back sanctions outside the U.N., including Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
Arab support would further isolate Iran from some of its closest trading partners. While Iran and its Arab neighbors along the Persian Gulf have long had testy relations, Tehran depends on Arab Gulf states for significant trade -- in particular on the U.A.E.'s Dubai, a regional re-export hub.
Not all Arab neighbors are onboard with Washington's sanction plans. In a heavily attended security conference in Manama early last month, Bahrain's foreign minister said further Iranian sanctions wouldn't be fair.
"I think the people of Iran have had enough," Sheikh Khalid bin Ahmed Al Khalifa said to delegates, including Mr. Mottaki and top U.S. diplomats and military officials. Bahrain is a staunch American ally, hosting the U.S. Fifth Fleet.
Recent Iranian domestic unrest raises fresh challenges for the Obama administration in crafting any new sanctions. Officials must weigh measures that are tough enough to pressure the regime, but not too tough to enflame popular anger and shore up domestic support for President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
The original, IAEA-backed fuel proposal was embraced by Washington because it was seen as a first step in a longer negotiating process over Iran's nuclear ambitions.
Iran says it is pursuing peaceful energy, but many officials in the West suspect it's building weapons. The deal would have removed enough fissile material to delay the manufacture of any weapon for at least a short while.
Mr. Mottaki on Saturday said Iran would go ahead and produce and enrich its own fuel for the medical reactor if Western powers didn't agree either to swap the fuel or to sell it enriched uranium.
The U.S. has rejected any proposal other than the one hammered out with the IAEA.
"The IAEA has a balanced proposal on the table that would fulfill Iran's own request for fuel and has the backing of the international community," Mike Hammer, a spokesman for the National Security Council, said in an emailed statement. —Elizabeth Williamson and David Crawford contributed to this article.
Re: IAEA Again Verifies Iranian Compliance-Neo-crazy Media Sycophants Drum for W
« Reply #80 on: 2010-02-17 04:36:17 »
Eliminating the Bar for War
Source: Antiwar.com Authors: Peter Casey Dated: 2010-02-15
Before the greenhouse gases do us in, the world faces a more traditional apocalypse. Two heavily militarized states are preparing to attack a third. The ensuing war could ignite an intercontinental bonfire and burn much of civilization to ash long before global warming does real harm.
It appears that the U.S. and Israel have plans to bomb Iran. The bull’s-eyes undoubtedly were drawn on the targets long ago. The policymakers behind these plans have the delusion that, to stop Iran from acquiring the capability to make nuclear weapons, the U.S. or its ally can launch precision strikes on a few sites to disrupt Iran’s nuclear program and then call it a day. Not likely. The first bomb will strike like a cinder block on an ice-covered pond. Warfare will rapidly crack apart the dozens of fault lines throughout the Middle East, Northern Africa, and Central Asia.
None of this is news. Since the putative discovery of Iran’s allegedly "illicit" nuclear power activities in 2003 – which were neither illicit nor concealed in any material sense – the alternative media has been full of jeremiads about imminent U.S. or Israeli aggression against Iran. Those warnings cannot be dismissed en masse as politically motivated or the product of alarmists. There is evidence, for instance, that Israel came close to attacking Iran in the spring of 2008. According to the reports, then-Prime Minister Ehud Olmert unsuccessfully sought Bush’s approval to bomb Iranian nuclear facilities. Otherwise, the Bush-Cheney-Sharon-Olmert regimes vilified Iran and engaged in a good deal of reckless behavior toward it. As one small example, the appointment of the Iranian-obsessed psychopath John Bolton as U.S. ambassador to the UN scarcely signaled prudence or caution in Iran policy.
The anti-Iranian bellicosity was supposed to soften, if not quite disappear, with Barack Obama in the White House. People thought that Obama would beat Cheney’s swords into plowshares and endear America to the Islamic world once again. While no one can be blamed for experiencing a "surge" of relief on Bush’s exit, a year has passed and nothing has changed, at least not for the better. The infatuation with Obama as some sort of peaceful prophet has long outlived any justification. Obama is responsible for killing hundreds of peasants with "Predator drone" missile attacks along the Pakistan-Afghan border. He has ordered the re-invasion of Afghanistan for no apparent legitimate purpose. He has cemented permanent U.S. military presence in Iraq. And he has commissioned some of the most gargantuan military budgets in world history.
Despite his actions, a lot of Americans remain taken in by Obama’s charismatic, MLK-like peacemaking vibes. His warmongering and Bush-Cheney-like shredding of the Bill of Rights sometimes don’t seem to register – except among "Tea Partiers" and other distempered types, who flog him for not going far enough and unloading nukes on Tehran this instant. When it comes to Iran specifically, moreover, it is not clear that Obama ever gave much reason to hope for a less combative approach. The "dovish" Obama made his views clear the day after his party’s nomination in June 2008, when he sped off to a convention held by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) to assure the crowd that he was a true friend of Israel. Obama promised that the swords reserved for Iran would remain sharp and at the ready:
"There is no greater threat to Israel – or to the peace and stability of the region – than Iran. …
"The Iranian regime supports violent extremists and challenges us across the region. It pursues a nuclear capability that could spark a dangerous arms race and raise the prospect of a transfer of nuclear know-how to terrorists. [ Hermit : As if Israel was not at this game long before Iran was. ] Its president denies the Holocaust and threatens to wipe Israel off the map. [ Hermit : Neither of these allegations is true. Both have been repeatedly refuted. ] The danger from Iran is grave, it is real, and my goal will be to eliminate this threat. [ Hermit : None of the above assertions about Iran is sustainable, but the threats from the USA and from Israel against Iran most certainly are. ]
"But just as we are clear-eyed about the threat, we must be clear about the failure of today’s policy. We knew, in 2002, that Iran supported terrorism. We knew Iran had an illicit nuclear program. We knew Iran posed a grave threat to Israel. … [ Hermit : Again, whoever wrote this paragraph may have been taking dictation from AIPAC, but it was not "true" in any concrete sense. ]
"We will pursue this diplomacy with no illusions about the Iranian regime. Instead, we will present a clear choice. If you abandon your dangerous nuclear program, support for terror, and threats to Israel, there will be meaningful incentives – including the lifting of sanctions, and political and economic integration with the international community. If you refuse, we will ratchet up the pressure." [ Hermit : How do you abandon what you are not doing? This statement is dangerous lunacy as it cements the current march to war into policy with no means to back down. ]
Despite the gestalt impression of Obama as peace-seeker, his administration’s actions on Iran have not deviated from the prejudices and threats in his speech to AIPAC. Indeed, Obama’s speech takes aim at Bush-Cheney for not getting tough on Iran as hard and as fast as he, apparently, would have. The current U.S. leadership’s most recent actions on Iran may well present a greater threat to global stability than those of its predecessors.
Since the turn of the year, the U.S. has been deploying the heavy machinery needed to put war plans against Iran into action. In January, the Obama administration forced several Gulf countries to agree to install American ballistic-missile defense emplacements on their soil. At the same time, the Pentagon announced a new "first line" of defense in the Persian Gulf, reinforcing the U.S. Navy’s already considerable armada in the region with Aegis cruisers equipped with advanced radar and anti-missile systems. Moreover, under Obama, the plans for missile-shield systems Bush crammed down on Poland and the Czech Republic, which triggered furious protests from Russia, have been modified to concentrate on potential medium and short-range missile attacks from Iran. More recently, the Romanian government reportedly has agreed to accept U.S. anti-missile batteries on its territory to thwart theoretical Iranian rockets.
In a similar move, aimed more at a gullible American public than Iran, the Missile Defense Agency on Feb. 1 tested a new Raytheon-made defensive radar system to see if it could knock down a "simulated" Iranian ICBM attack on California. The test failed. But Golden State citizens shouldn’t start packing their bags in a panic just yet. The closest any actual Iranian missile could come to the United States is about 600 miles west of Sarajevo.
The Obama government’s moves are telegraphing to Iran that the U.S. is mobilizing defenses in anticipation of an Iranian response to U.S.-Israeli attack and ramping up the "Persian Menace" propaganda to weaken U.S. domestic antiwar sentiment.
As the U.S. fortifies its "interests" in the Middle East and Orange County from Iranian warheads, the Congress has been busy with a slew of sanctions bills, always by near-unanimous vote, always at the direction of the Israel lobby. The most recent bills would sanction any business or country that ships gasoline or heating oil to Iran unless the Iranians cede their rights under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty to peaceful development of nuclear energy. These "sanctions" bills may be a more creative hoax than Iranian warheads falling on Malibu. The war crowd loves to argue that because Iran has plenty oil, its nuclear activities must be for military rather than energy needs (as Iran claims). The sanctions legislation, however, demonstrates the frivolity of that argument: It targets petroleum imports because Iran lacks adequate refinement capacity and depends on imported fuel for its energy needs. On the other hand, the bills would create the very condition – deprivation of petroleum fuel – that, if anything, would force Iran to accelerate clandestine nuclear development, producing the opposite of the "sanction’s" ostensible purpose.
A lot of this recent effort looks and sounds similar to the run-up to Bush-Cheney’s Iraq invasion. There is, however, a profound difference in the current administration’s targeting of Iran. It is essentially following Cheney’s model for preventive war – with one exception: It has dispensed with relying on any tangible facts to "make the case" for war. Instead, it has made the Iranian leadership’s intent the decisive factor.
Bush-Cheney lowered the bar for starting war by adopting the doctrine that in a "post-9/11 world," preventive war is not only permissible but morally imperative. Cheney’s innovation lay in arguing that "failure to act" was inherently the greater risk, even if the likelihood of terrorist or other attack was trifling. In his "low-probability, high-impact event” analysis, the magnitude of the possible event was always horrific, limited only by the darkest imagination, a catastrophe the destructive impact of which would make the ever-looming specter of 9/11 look trivial in comparison. Cheney’s reasoning may have been fallacious and repugnant, but it was effective. It’s hard to argue against 9/11. He thereby swept aside the Western ideal of war as a matter of last resort to be launched only when necessary to repel an attack on self or others.
Cheney’s "1 percent solution," however, had an Achilles heel. It required the putative existence of actual, physical fact. The possibility that WMDs may exist may be small – but it still must exist. But the drawback to any plan based on assertion of fact is the possibility of refutation – maybe not in time to prevent a horror show, but sooner or later. In other words, under the Cheney Doctrine, the casus is subject to falsification, even long after the belli has broken out. Which is, of course, exactly what happened in Iraq.
The Cheney Doctrine’s very low bar for war was bad enough. Obama and his own neoconnish coterie of advisers, however, are tossing away the bar altogether.
The many anti-Iranian advocates and advisers who stayed on or arrived with Obama saw the consequences of the flaw of the Cheney Doctrine. While Cheney’s plan won the war, it seriously risked losing political support for the broader long-term U.S./Israeli objective of control of the Middle East and Central Asia. Indeed, the loss of the Holy Grail of neocon policy was such a dire prospect that its desperate defenders resorted to the most absurd excuses after the WMD search was a bust, including the claim one can still hear today that Saddam moved his WMDs to Syria.
Obama’s advisers also learned from Cheney’s mistakes, however. Picking up on Iran where Bush-Cheney left off, the Obama hawks are not about to try to justify war based on testable factual claims – or any fact-based claims whatsoever. If the Obama/Netanyahu war factions get their war, they will do so based on the article of faith that "we cannot allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon." To ensure that objective, they have concluded, Iran cannot be permitted to achieve the technological and manufacturing capability to build a bomb. Thus, a plan for war is being built on inherently unverifiable beliefs about what the leadership – more likely, some later leadership – of Iran might decide to do in the future with knowledge, skills, equipment, and infrastructure it has yet to acquire. Under the Cheney Doctrine, the U.S. needed to strike if there was a 1 percent risk that Iraq actually had WMDs. In contrast, the Obama-Netanyahu Doctrine permits military aggression if there is any chance that Iran someday may have the ability to create a nuclear weapon and might then decide to actually make one.
For Cheney’s progeny now in control [ Hermit : I would say "out of control" ] , the beauty of basing state action on inferences about Iran’s future intentions is its irrefutability. This approach already has been seen in action dozens of times. How often have the Iranians, the IAEA, even the U.S. intelligence community come forward with evidence supporting the "case" that Iran is not engaged in nuclear weapons activities, only to be met with the U.S. response: "We don’t believe you," or "That doesn’t mean they won’t resume a nuclear weapons program"? Obama himself best illustrated this sort of reasoning at a news conference Feb. 9, discussing Iran’s alleged "rejection" of an offer by the U.S. and its Western allies to convert some low-enriched uranium in Iran’s possession into medical isotopes, requiring enrichment to a level just short of weapons-grade. He said: "That indicates to us that, despite their posturing that their nuclear power is only for civilian use, that they in fact continue to pursue a course that would lead to weaponization. And that is not acceptable to the international community, not just to the United States." But virtually any step by Iran to develop nuclear capabilities with is own science and resources could lead to "weaponization." Obama here simply imputes a malicious intent – building the "case for war" based on analysis no better than palm reading.
What is in the heart of another group of people can be divined to be whatever one wants, based on whatever tea leaves or animal droppings one chooses to interpret. That is an exercise, however, that usually does not seek to determine any knowable facts, but simply to confirm prejudices. After all, "The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?" (Jeremiah 17:9). And isn’t it better – indeed, necessary, in a "post-9/11 world" – that the state assumes the worst? Once Cheney’s "high-impact event" constant is plugged in, the "case for war" is open and shut. And no evidence can ever be found – or not found – that can prove the war-makers wrong.
Because the "case for war" against Iran is being made based on the thoughts and intentions of Iranian leadership, and not on empirical fact, those who oppose war are mostly wasting their time arguing the evidence. It does not matter that the IAEA repeatedly has stated for years that it has found no evidence of a nuclear weapons missile program. It does not matter that the Iranian leadership and opposition (whom the war party otherwise claims to adore) steadfastly maintain that Iran has no plans to make nuclear weapons. It does not matter that the U.S. national intelligence consensus is and remains that Iran is not at work on nuclear weapons – despite enormous political pressure to alter its judgment. It does not matter that, even if Iran does intend to create a nuclear weapon, there is no reason to think that it would try to use it against the U.S., or that it could use it against the U.S. if it wanted to. Finally, it does not matter that the states engaged in this telepathy-based policymaking have been caught red-handed trying to manufacture evidence that Iran has an existing "nuclear weapons" program.
The only tangible fact that has any significance is that Iran does not have any nuclear weapons. And that matters only because we cannot allow it to get one, not in a "post-9/11 world" in which warfare based on remote possibilities that proved false has already killed millions of people.
Americans may be chastised for their mostly uncritical acceptance of the propaganda used to manufacture consent to the Iraq invasion. In mitigation, however, the leadership in government and the press were lying in a way that, if not entirely credible, at least conveyed their own conviction in the truth of their claims, the core of which was that Saddam Hussein actually possessed the means to murder millions of Americans in another 9/11.
The "case for war" on Iran does not depend on some infernal machine that Iran possesses. It depends entirely on speculation, suspicions, and superstitions about what a group of old men in Tehran might think – and what they might decide to do some time in the future – because of what they do not possess now. If Americans let war happen this time, on this quality of propaganda, then perhaps we will deserve what we get.
With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
About the MESS Report Israel treading carefully to avoid war with Syria In the last few weeks, Israel has been at pains to cool tensions with Syria and prevent misunderstandings that could spiral into confrontation on its northern border.
A huge central command training exercise, "Firestones 12", which took place in the north last week, conspicuously omitted simulations of war with Syria. Instead, the IDF fought mock battles in preparation for clashes with Hezbollah in Lebanon or Hamas in the Gaza Strip.
The army also cancelled emergency call-up drills for large numbers of regular forces and reserves, fearing Syria might mistake such a move as mobilization for war. At the same time, the government exploited both public and covert channels to send soothing messages to Damascus.
Recent weeks have seen increasingly frequent references by senior figures in Iran, Syria and Hezbollah of the prospect of war with Israel, which they accuse of planning a confrontation.
Last week the Syrian and Iranian presidents held talks with the heads of Hamas and Hezbollah in Damascus, where Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad proclaimed in a speech that the "Zionist regime" was approaching its demise.
Israel's effort to avert another escalation in the north, closely coordinated with the United States, is twofold, combining both assuagement and deterrence. The government is placating Syria with the message that it has no interest in war; but it also making threatening noises about the need to prevent arms smuggling to Hezbollah.
A senior IDF intelligence officer told the Knesset this week that Syria had supplied Hezbollah with "components" more significantly sophisticated than in the past. And the Lebanese newspaper Al-Hayat reported that that U.S. Secretary of state Hilary Clinton had warned Nabih Beri, speaker of the Lebanese parliament, that the U.S. might be hard pushed to restrain Israel from an excessive response if the flow of arms to Hezbollah continued.
Participants in last week's exercises returned encouraged by IDF commanders' professionalism - but depressed by the underlying reality. If war returns to the north, Israel may struggle to find a winning formula. Certainly, the air force could easily rain destruction on Lebanon and its infrastructure ? but there is no way of cutting drastically Hezbollah's ability to bombard northern Israel with Katyusha rockets at, or launch even heavier ordnance at Tel Aviv.
In a report this week for the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, David Schenker and Matthew Levitt write that it has Syria likely supplied Hezbollah with Russian shoulder-launched Igla antiaircraft missiles, which, they say, could threaten Israeli F-16 fighter planes over Lebanon.
Defense Minister Ehud Barak said last week at a Washington Institute memorial lecture for Haaretz correspondent Ze'ev Schiff that Hezbollah has around 45,000 missiles and rockets in Lebanon. This is considerably higher than Israel's previous estimates.
"We cannot accept these artificial differentiations between the terrorists of Hezbollah and the state of Lebanon and their sponsors," Barak said.
He continued: "We don?t need this conflict but if it is imposed upon us, we will not run after every individual terrorist but we will take both the Lebanese government and other sources of sponsorship, but mainly the Lebanese government and the Lebanese infrastructure, as part of the equation facing us."
Growing divisions over Iran
Meanwhile, there are signs of a deepening split in the senior ranks of the security forces over Israel's strategy for dealing with Iran. Barak has personal differences with Chief of Staff Gabi Ashkenazi - but they are also divided over strategy.
Tensions between the defense minister and his commander flared when their advisers clashed publicly a few weeks ago and have not since returned to normal. Secretive and provocative briefings from a range of sources are feeding the worsening feud. Friends of Ashkenazi, including former generals, claim the army chief is victim to serial and carefully directed harassment from Barak's staff. The defense minister's team continues to ridicule the charges and insists relations are fine, with regular joint meetings are taking take place as usual.
Ashkenazi, says one of his confidants, knows that history will not forgive him if he is seen as failing to prepare the IDF adequately for an offensive war. On the other hand, he is aware of the limitations of Israel's forces. Is he capable of supplying a clear plan of action? Detractors are infuriated by his habit of presenting decision makers with a menu of options, without committing himself to any of them.
In his visit to Israel last week, U.S. Senator John Kerry finally drew the veil fromm a series of mysterious trips to Israel by senior American officials when he hinted that their purpose was to urge Israel to shelve any plans to attack Iran - at least for now. The Americans, of course, need to wave the Israeli stick if they are to convince a doubting China to back sanctions - but they are genuinely worried Israel might act rashly. Israel, from the outset skeptical over President Barack Obama's attempt to engage the Ayatollahs, has begun (quietly) to voice mistrust in the efficacy of sanctions, now set to come into force in April at the earliest.
The Obama administration erred in playing down the military option while it tried to negotiate with Iran, which has been allowed to stall repeatedly. When finally in October the IAEA put forward a compromise, under which Iran would send uranium aboard for enrichment, it was the Iranians who wriggled out of the deal. It seems the decision was taken by the regime's spiritual leader, Ali Khamenei, who doubted the America's sincerity. As a result, the main outcome of U.S. strategy so far is that Iran has bought itself another year and a half of breathing space, during which its centrifuges never stopped spinning.
The dire threat of Iran is widely recognized to be the most serious foreign policy crisis facing the Obama administration. Congress has just strengthened the sanctions against Iran, with even more severe penalties against foreign companies. The Obama administration has been rapidly expanding its offensive capacity in the African island of Diego Garcia, claimed by Britain, which had expelled the population so that the US could build the massive base it uses for attacking the Middle East and Central Asia. The Navy reports sending a submarine tender to the island to service nuclear-powered guided-missile submarines with Tomahawk missiles, which can carry nuclear warheads. Each submarine is reported to have the striking power of a typical carrier battle group. According to a US Navy cargo manifest obtained by the Sunday Herald (Glasgow), the substantial military equipment Obama has dispatched includes 387 “bunker busters” used for blasting hardened underground structures. Planning for these “massive ordnance penetrators,” the most powerful bombs in the arsenal short of nuclear weapons, was initiated in the Bush administration, but languished. On taking office, Obama immediately accelerated the plans, and they are to be deployed several years ahead of schedule, aiming specifically at Iran.
“They are gearing up totally for the destruction of Iran,” according to Dan Plesch, director of the Centre for International Studies and Diplomacy at the University of London. “US bombers and long range missiles are ready today to destroy 10,000 targets in Iran in a few hours,” he said. “The firepower of US forces has quadrupled since 2003,” accelerating under Obama.
The Arab press reports that an American fleet (with an Israeli vessel) passed through the Suez Canal on the way to the Persian Gulf, where its task is “to implement the sanctions against Iran and supervise the ships going to and from Iran.” British and Israeli media report that Saudi Arabia is providing a corridor for Israeli bombing of Iran (denied by Saudi Arabia). On his return from Afghanistan to reassure NATO allies that the US will stay the course after the replacement of General McChrystal by his superior, General Petraeus, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Michael Mullen visited Israel to meet Israel Defense Forces Chief of Staff Gabi Ashkenazi and senior Israeli military staff along with intelligence and planning units, continuing the annual strategic dialogue between Israel and the U.S. in Tel Aviv. The meeting focused “on the preparation by both Israel and the U.S. for the possibility of a nuclear capable Iran,” according to Haaretz, which reports further that Mullen emphasized that “I always try to see challenges from Israeli perspective.” Mullen and Ashkenazi are in regular contact on a secure line.
The increasing threats of military action against Iran are of course in violation of the UN Charter, and in specific violation of Security Council resolution 1887 of September 2009 which reaffirmed the call to all states to resolve disputes related to nuclear issues peacefully, in accordance with the Charter, which bans the use or threat of force.
Some respected analysts describe the Iranian threat in apocalyptic terms. Amitai Etzioni warns that “The U.S. will have to confront Iran or give up the Middle East,” no less. If Iran’s nuclear program proceeds, he asserts, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and other states will “move toward” the new Iranian “superpower”; in less fevered rhetoric, a regional alliance might take shape independent of the US. In the US army journal Military Review, Etzioni urges a US attack that targets not only Iran’s nuclear facilities but also its non-nuclear military assets, including infrastructure – meaning, the civilian society. "This kind of military action is akin to sanctions - causing 'pain' in order to change behaviour, albeit by much more powerful means."
Such harrowing pronouncements aside, what exactly is the Iranian threat? An authoritative answer is provided in the April 2010 study of the International Institute of Strategic Studies, Military Balance 2010. The brutal clerical regime is doubtless a threat to its own people, though it does not rank particularly high in that respect in comparison to US allies in the region. But that is not what concerns the Institute. Rather, it is concerned with the threat Iran poses to the region and the world.
The study makes it clear that the Iranian threat is not military. Iran’s military spending is “relatively low compared to the rest of the region,” and less than 2% that of the US. Iranian military doctrine is strictly “defensive,… designed to slow an invasion and force a diplomatic solution to hostilities.” Iran has only “a limited capability to project force beyond its borders.” With regard to the nuclear option, “Iran’s nuclear program and its willingness to keep open the possibility of developing nuclear weapons is a central part of its deterrent strategy.”
Though the Iranian threat is not military, that does not mean that it might be tolerable to Washington. Iranian deterrent capacity is an illegitimate exercise of sovereignty that interferes with US global designs. Specifically, it threatens US control of Middle East energy resources, a high priority of planners since World War II, which yields “substantial control of the world,” one influential figure advised (A. A. Berle).
But Iran’s threat goes beyond deterrence. It is also seeking to expand its influence. As the Institute study formulates the threat, Iran is “destabilizing” the region. US invasion and military occupation of Iran’s neighbors is “stabilization.” Iran’s efforts to extend its influence in neighboring countries is “destabilization,” hence plainly illegitimate. It should be noted that such revealing usage is routine. Thus the prominent foreign policy analyst James Chace, former editor the main establishment journal Foreign Affairs, was properly using the term “stability” in its technical sense when he explained that in order to achieve “stability” in Chile it was necessary to “destabilize” the country (by overthrowing the elected Allende government and installing the Pinochet dictatorship).
Beyond these crimes, Iran is also supporting terrorism, the study continues: by backing Hezbollah and Hamas, the major political forces in Lebanon and in Palestine – if elections matter. The Hezbollah-based coalition handily won the popular vote in Lebanon’s latest (2009) election. Hamas won the 2006 Palestinian election, compelling the US and Israel to institute the harsh and brutal siege of Gaza to punish the miscreants for voting the wrong way in a free election. These have been the only relatively free elections in the Arab world. It is normal for elite opinion to fear the threat of democracy and to act to deter it, but this is a rather striking case, particularly alongside of strong US support for the regional dictatorships, particularly striking with Obama’s strong praise for the brutal Egyptian dictator Mubarak on the way to his famous address to the Muslim world in Cairo.
The terrorist acts attributed to Hamas and Hezbollah pale in comparison to US-Israeli terrorism in the same region, but they are worth a look nevertheless.
On May 25 Lebanon celebrated its national holiday, Liberation Day, commemorating Israel’s withdrawal from southern Lebanon after 22 years, as a result of Hezbollah resistance – described by Israeli authorities as “Iranian aggression” against Israel in Israeli-occupied Lebanon (Ephraim Sneh). That too is normal imperial usage. Thus President John F. Kennedy condemned the “the assault from the inside, and which is manipulated from the North.” The assault by the South Vietnamese resistance against Kennedy’s bombers, chemical warfare, driving peasants to virtual concentration camps, and other such benign measures was denounced as “internal aggression” by Kennedy’s UN Ambassador, liberal hero Adlai Stevenson. North Vietnamese support for their countrymen in the US-occupied South is aggression, intolerable interference with Washington’s righteous mission. Kennedy advisors Arthur Schlesinger and Theodore Sorenson, considered doves, also praised Washington’s intervention to reverse “aggression” in South Vietnam – by the indigenous resistance, as they knew, at least if they read US intelligence reports. In 1955 the US Joint Chiefs of Staff defined several types of “aggression,” including “Aggression other than armed, i.e., political warfare, or subversion.” For example, an internal uprising against a US-imposed police state, or elections that come out the wrong way. The usage is also common in scholarship and political commentary, and makes sense on the prevailing assumption that We Own the World.
Hamas resists Israel’s military occupation and its illegal and violent actions in the occupied territories. It is accused of refusing to recognize Israel (political parties do not recognize states). In contrast, the US and Israel not only do not recognize Palestine, but have been acting for decades to ensure that it can never come into existence in any meaningful form; the governing party in Israel, in its 1999 campaign platform, bars the existence of any Palestinian state.
Hamas is charged with rocketing Israeli settlements on the border, criminal acts no doubt, though a fraction of Israel’s violence in Gaza, let alone elsewhere. It is important to bear in mind, in this connection, that the US and Israel know exactly how to terminate the terror that they deplore with such passion. Israel officially concedes that there were no Hamas rockets as long as Israel partially observed a truce with Hamas in 2008. Israel rejected Hamas’s offer to renew the truce, preferring to launch the murderous and destructive Operation Cast Lead against Gaza in December 2008, with full US backing, an exploit of murderous aggression without the slightest credible pretext on either legal or moral grounds.
The model for democracy in the Muslim world, despite serious flaws, is Turkey, which has relatively free elections, and has also been subject to harsh criticism in the US. The most extreme case was when the government followed the position of 95% of the population and refused to join in the invasion of Iraq, eliciting harsh condemnation from Washington for its failure to comprehend how a democratic government should behave: under our concept of democracy, the voice of the Master determines policy, not the near-unanimous voice of the population.
The Obama administration was once again incensed when Turkey joined with Brazil in arranging a deal with Iran to restrict its enrichment of uranium. Obama had praised the initiative in a letter to Brazil’s president Lula da Silva, apparently on the assumption that it would fail and provide a propaganda weapon against Iran. When it succeeded, the US was furious, and quickly undermined it by ramming through a Security Council resolution with new sanctions against Iran that were so meaningless that China cheerfully joined at once – recognizing that at most the sanctions would impede Western interests in competing with China for Iran’s resources. Once again, Washington acted forthrightly to ensure that others would not interfere with US control of the region.
Not surprisingly, Turkey (along with Brazil) voted against the US sanctions motion in the Security Council. The other regional member, Lebanon, abstained. These actions aroused further consternation in Washington. Philip Gordon, the Obama administration's top diplomat on European affairs, warned Turkey that its actions are not understood in the US and that it must “demonstrate its commitment to partnership with the West,” AP reported, “a rare admonishment of a crucial NATO ally.”
The political class understands as well. Steven A. Cook, a scholar with the Council on Foreign Relations, observed that the critical question now is "How do we keep the Turks in their lane?" – following orders like good democrats. A New York Times headline captured the general mood: “Iran Deal Seen as Spot on Brazilian Leader’s Legacy.” In brief, do what we say, or else.
There is no indication that other countries in the region favor US sanctions any more than Turkey does. On Iran’s opposite border, for example, Pakistan and Iran, meeting in Turkey, recently signed an agreement for a new pipeline. Even more worrisome for the US is that the pipeline might extend to India. The 2008 US treaty with India supporting its nuclear programs – and indirectly its nuclear weapons programs -- was intended to stop India from joining the pipeline, according to Moeed Yusuf, a South Asia adviser to the United States Institute of Peace, expressing a common interpretation. India and Pakistan are two of the three nuclear powers that have refused to sign the Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT), the third being Israel. All have developed nuclear weapons with US support, and still do.
No sane person wants Iran to develop nuclear weapons; or anyone. One obvious way to mitigate or eliminate this threat is to establish a NFWZ in the Middle East. The issue arose (again) at the NPT conference at United Nations headquarters in early May 2010. Egypt, as chair of the 118 nations of the Non-Aligned Movement, proposed that the conference back a plan calling for the start of negotiations in 2011 on a Middle East NWFZ, as had been agreed by the West, including the US, at the 1995 review conference on the NPT.
Washington still formally agrees, but insists that Israel be exempted – and has given no hint of allowing such provisions to apply to itself. The time is not yet ripe for creating the zone, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton stated at the NPT conference, while Washington insisted that no proposal can be accepted that calls for Israel's nuclear program to be placed under the auspices of the IAEA or that calls on signers of the NPT, specifically Washington, to release information about “Israeli nuclear facilities and activities, including information pertaining to previous nuclear transfers to Israel.” Obama’s technique of evasion is to adopt Israel’s position that any such proposal must be conditional on a comprehensive peace settlement, which the US can delay indefinitely, as it has been doing for 35 years, with rare and temporary exceptions.
At the same time, Yukiya Amano, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, asked foreign ministers of its 151 member states to share views on how to implement a resolution demanding that Israel "accede to” the NPT and throw its nuclear facilities open to IAEA oversight, AP reported.
It is rarely noted that the US and UK have a special responsibility to work to establish a Middle East NWFZ. In attempting to provide a thin legal cover for their invasion of the Iraq in 2003, they appealed to Security Council Resolution 687 (1991), which called on Iraq to terminate its development of weapons of mass destruction. The US and UK claimed that they had not done so. We need not tarry on the excuse, but that Resolution commits its signers to move to establish a NWFZ in the Middle East.
Parenthetically, we may add that US insistence on maintaining nuclear facilities in Diego Garcia undermines the nuclear-free weapons zone (NFWZ) established by the African Union, just as Washington continues to block a Pacific NFWZ by excluding its Pacific dependencies.
Obama’s rhetorical commitment to non-proliferation has received much praise, even a Nobel peace prize. One practical step in this direction is establishment of NFWZs. Another is withdrawing support for the nuclear programs of the three non-signers of the NPT. As often, rhetoric and actions are hardly aligned, in fact are in direct contradiction in this case, facts that pass with little attention.
Instead of taking practical steps towards reducing the truly dire threat of nuclear weapons proliferation, the US must take major steps towards reinforcing US control of the vital Middle East oil-producing regions, by violence if other means do not succeed. That is understandable and even reasonable, under prevailing imperial doctrine. The dire threat of Iran is widely recognized to be the most serious foreign policy crisis facing the Obama administration. Congress has just strengthened the sanctions against Iran, with even more severe penalties against foreign companies. The Obama administration has been rapidly expanding its offensive capacity in the African island of Diego Garcia, claimed by Britain, which had expelled the population so that the US could build the massive base it uses for attacking the Middle East and Central Asia. The Navy reports sending a submarine tender to the island to service nuclear-powered guided-missile submarines with Tomahawk missiles, which can carry nuclear warheads. Each submarine is reported to have the striking power of a typical carrier battle group. According to a US Navy cargo manifest obtained by the Sunday Herald (Glasgow), the substantial military equipment Obama has dispatched includes 387 “bunker busters” used for blasting hardened underground structures. Planning for these “massive ordnance penetrators,” the most powerful bombs in the arsenal short of nuclear weapons, was initiated in the Bush administration, but languished. On taking office, Obama immediately accelerated the plans, and they are to be deployed several years ahead of schedule, aiming specifically at Iran.
“They are gearing up totally for the destruction of Iran,” according to Dan Plesch, director of the Centre for International Studies and Diplomacy at the University of London. “US bombers and long range missiles are ready today to destroy 10,000 targets in Iran in a few hours,” he said. “The firepower of US forces has quadrupled since 2003,” accelerating under Obama.
The Arab press reports that an American fleet (with an Israeli vessel) passed through the Suez Canal on the way to the Persian Gulf, where its task is “to implement the sanctions against Iran and supervise the ships going to and from Iran.” British and Israeli media report that Saudi Arabia is providing a corridor for Israeli bombing of Iran (denied by Saudi Arabia). On his return from Afghanistan to reassure NATO allies that the US will stay the course after the replacement of General McChrystal by his superior, General Petraeus, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Michael Mullen visited Israel to meet Israel Defense Forces Chief of Staff Gabi Ashkenazi and senior Israeli military staff along with intelligence and planning units, continuing the annual strategic dialogue between Israel and the U.S. in Tel Aviv. The meeting focused “on the preparation by both Israel and the U.S. for the possibility of a nuclear capable Iran,” according to Haaretz, which reports further that Mullen emphasized that “I always try to see challenges from Israeli perspective.” Mullen and Ashkenazi are in regular contact on a secure line.
The increasing threats of military action against Iran are of course in violation of the UN Charter, and in specific violation of Security Council resolution 1887 of September 2009 which reaffirmed the call to all states to resolve disputes related to nuclear issues peacefully, in accordance with the Charter, which bans the use or threat of force.
Some respected analysts describe the Iranian threat in apocalyptic terms. Amitai Etzioni warns that “The U.S. will have to confront Iran or give up the Middle East,” no less. If Iran’s nuclear program proceeds, he asserts, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and other states will “move toward” the new Iranian “superpower”; in less fevered rhetoric, a regional alliance might take shape independent of the US. In the US army journal Military Review, Etzioni urges a US attack that targets not only Iran’s nuclear facilities but also its non-nuclear military assets, including infrastructure – meaning, the civilian society. "This kind of military action is akin to sanctions - causing 'pain' in order to change behaviour, albeit by much more powerful means."
Such harrowing pronouncements aside, what exactly is the Iranian threat? An authoritative answer is provided in the April 2010 study of the International Institute of Strategic Studies, Military Balance 2010. The brutal clerical regime is doubtless a threat to its own people, though it does not rank particularly high in that respect in comparison to US allies in the region. But that is not what concerns the Institute. Rather, it is concerned with the threat Iran poses to the region and the world.
The study makes it clear that the Iranian threat is not military. Iran’s military spending is “relatively low compared to the rest of the region,” and less than 2% that of the US. Iranian military doctrine is strictly “defensive,… designed to slow an invasion and force a diplomatic solution to hostilities.” Iran has only “a limited capability to project force beyond its borders.” With regard to the nuclear option, “Iran’s nuclear program and its willingness to keep open the possibility of developing nuclear weapons is a central part of its deterrent strategy.”
Though the Iranian threat is not military, that does not mean that it might be tolerable to Washington. Iranian deterrent capacity is an illegitimate exercise of sovereignty that interferes with US global designs. Specifically, it threatens US control of Middle East energy resources, a high priority of planners since World War II, which yields “substantial control of the world,” one influential figure advised (A. A. Berle).
But Iran’s threat goes beyond deterrence. It is also seeking to expand its influence. As the Institute study formulates the threat, Iran is “destabilizing” the region. US invasion and military occupation of Iran’s neighbors is “stabilization.” Iran’s efforts to extend its influence in neighboring countries is “destabilization,” hence plainly illegitimate. It should be noted that such revealing usage is routine. Thus the prominent foreign policy analyst James Chace, former editor the main establishment journal Foreign Affairs, was properly using the term “stability” in its technical sense when he explained that in order to achieve “stability” in Chile it was necessary to “destabilize” the country (by overthrowing the elected Allende government and installing the Pinochet dictatorship).
Beyond these crimes, Iran is also supporting terrorism, the study continues: by backing Hezbollah and Hamas, the major political forces in Lebanon and in Palestine – if elections matter. The Hezbollah-based coalition handily won the popular vote in Lebanon’s latest (2009) election. Hamas won the 2006 Palestinian election, compelling the US and Israel to institute the harsh and brutal siege of Gaza to punish the miscreants for voting the wrong way in a free election. These have been the only relatively free elections in the Arab world. It is normal for elite opinion to fear the threat of democracy and to act to deter it, but this is a rather striking case, particularly alongside of strong US support for the regional dictatorships, particularly striking with Obama’s strong praise for the brutal Egyptian dictator Mubarak on the way to his famous address to the Muslim world in Cairo.
The terrorist acts attributed to Hamas and Hezbollah pale in comparison to US-Israeli terrorism in the same region, but they are worth a look nevertheless.
On May 25 Lebanon celebrated its national holiday, Liberation Day, commemorating Israel’s withdrawal from southern Lebanon after 22 years, as a result of Hezbollah resistance – described by Israeli authorities as “Iranian aggression” against Israel in Israeli-occupied Lebanon (Ephraim Sneh). That too is normal imperial usage. Thus President John F. Kennedy condemned the “the assault from the inside, and which is manipulated from the North.” The assault by the South Vietnamese resistance against Kennedy’s bombers, chemical warfare, driving peasants to virtual concentration camps, and other such benign measures was denounced as “internal aggression” by Kennedy’s UN Ambassador, liberal hero Adlai Stevenson. North Vietnamese support for their countrymen in the US-occupied South is aggression, intolerable interference with Washington’s righteous mission. Kennedy advisors Arthur Schlesinger and Theodore Sorenson, considered doves, also praised Washington’s intervention to reverse “aggression” in South Vietnam – by the indigenous resistance, as they knew, at least if they read US intelligence reports. In 1955 the US Joint Chiefs of Staff defined several types of “aggression,” including “Aggression other than armed, i.e., political warfare, or subversion.” For example, an internal uprising against a US-imposed police state, or elections that come out the wrong way. The usage is also common in scholarship and political commentary, and makes sense on the prevailing assumption that We Own the World.
Hamas resists Israel’s military occupation and its illegal and violent actions in the occupied territories. It is accused of refusing to recognize Israel (political parties do not recognize states). In contrast, the US and Israel not only do not recognize Palestine, but have been acting for decades to ensure that it can never come into existence in any meaningful form; the governing party in Israel, in its 1999 campaign platform, bars the existence of any Palestinian state.
Hamas is charged with rocketing Israeli settlements on the border, criminal acts no doubt, though a fraction of Israel’s violence in Gaza, let alone elsewhere. It is important to bear in mind, in this connection, that the US and Israel know exactly how to terminate the terror that they deplore with such passion. Israel officially concedes that there were no Hamas rockets as long as Israel partially observed a truce with Hamas in 2008. Israel rejected Hamas’s offer to renew the truce, preferring to launch the murderous and destructive Operation Cast Lead against Gaza in December 2008, with full US backing, an exploit of murderous aggression without the slightest credible pretext on either legal or moral grounds.
The model for democracy in the Muslim world, despite serious flaws, is Turkey, which has relatively free elections, and has also been subject to harsh criticism in the US. The most extreme case was when the government followed the position of 95% of the population and refused to join in the invasion of Iraq, eliciting harsh condemnation from Washington for its failure to comprehend how a democratic government should behave: under our concept of democracy, the voice of the Master determines policy, not the near-unanimous voice of the population.
The Obama administration was once again incensed when Turkey joined with Brazil in arranging a deal with Iran to restrict its enrichment of uranium. Obama had praised the initiative in a letter to Brazil’s president Lula da Silva, apparently on the assumption that it would fail and provide a propaganda weapon against Iran. When it succeeded, the US was furious, and quickly undermined it by ramming through a Security Council resolution with new sanctions against Iran that were so meaningless that China cheerfully joined at once – recognizing that at most the sanctions would impede Western interests in competing with China for Iran’s resources. Once again, Washington acted forthrightly to ensure that others would not interfere with US control of the region.
Not surprisingly, Turkey (along with Brazil) voted against the US sanctions motion in the Security Council. The other regional member, Lebanon, abstained. These actions aroused further consternation in Washington. Philip Gordon, the Obama administration's top diplomat on European affairs, warned Turkey that its actions are not understood in the US and that it must “demonstrate its commitment to partnership with the West,” AP reported, “a rare admonishment of a crucial NATO ally.”
The political class understands as well. Steven A. Cook, a scholar with the Council on Foreign Relations, observed that the critical question now is "How do we keep the Turks in their lane?" – following orders like good democrats. A New York Times headline captured the general mood: “Iran Deal Seen as Spot on Brazilian Leader’s Legacy.” In brief, do what we say, or else.
There is no indication that other countries in the region favor US sanctions any more than Turkey does. On Iran’s opposite border, for example, Pakistan and Iran, meeting in Turkey, recently signed an agreement for a new pipeline. Even more worrisome for the US is that the pipeline might extend to India. The 2008 US treaty with India supporting its nuclear programs – and indirectly its nuclear weapons programs -- was intended to stop India from joining the pipeline, according to Moeed Yusuf, a South Asia adviser to the United States Institute of Peace, expressing a common interpretation. India and Pakistan are two of the three nuclear powers that have refused to sign the Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT), the third being Israel. All have developed nuclear weapons with US support, and still do.
No sane person wants Iran to develop nuclear weapons; or anyone. One obvious way to mitigate or eliminate this threat is to establish a NFWZ in the Middle East. The issue arose (again) at the NPT conference at United Nations headquarters in early May 2010. Egypt, as chair of the 118 nations of the Non-Aligned Movement, proposed that the conference back a plan calling for the start of negotiations in 2011 on a Middle East NWFZ, as had been agreed by the West, including the US, at the 1995 review conference on the NPT.
Washington still formally agrees, but insists that Israel be exempted – and has given no hint of allowing such provisions to apply to itself. The time is not yet ripe for creating the zone, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton stated at the NPT conference, while Washington insisted that no proposal can be accepted that calls for Israel's nuclear program to be placed under the auspices of the IAEA or that calls on signers of the NPT, specifically Washington, to release information about “Israeli nuclear facilities and activities, including information pertaining to previous nuclear transfers to Israel.” Obama’s technique of evasion is to adopt Israel’s position that any such proposal must be conditional on a comprehensive peace settlement, which the US can delay indefinitely, as it has been doing for 35 years, with rare and temporary exceptions.
At the same time, Yukiya Amano, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, asked foreign ministers of its 151 member states to share views on how to implement a resolution demanding that Israel "accede to” the NPT and throw its nuclear facilities open to IAEA oversight, AP reported.
It is rarely noted that the US and UK have a special responsibility to work to establish a Middle East NWFZ. In attempting to provide a thin legal cover for their invasion of the Iraq in 2003, they appealed to Security Council Resolution 687 (1991), which called on Iraq to terminate its development of weapons of mass destruction. The US and UK claimed that they had not done so. We need not tarry on the excuse, but that Resolution commits its signers to move to establish a NWFZ in the Middle East.
Parenthetically, we may add that US insistence on maintaining nuclear facilities in Diego Garcia undermines the nuclear-free weapons zone (NFWZ) established by the African Union, just as Washington continues to block a Pacific NFWZ by excluding its Pacific dependencies.
Obama’s rhetorical commitment to non-proliferation has received much praise, even a Nobel peace prize. One practical step in this direction is establishment of NFWZs. Another is withdrawing support for the nuclear programs of the three non-signers of the NPT. As often, rhetoric and actions are hardly aligned, in fact are in direct contradiction in this case, facts that pass with little attention.
Instead of taking practical steps towards reducing the truly dire threat of nuclear weapons proliferation, the US must take major steps towards reinforcing US control of the vital Middle East oil-producing regions, by violence if other means do not succeed. That is understandable and even reasonable, under prevailing imperial doctrine.
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