Brendan Stone and Stephen Gowans discuss the Obama administration’s Nuclear Posture Review on Unusual Sources radio.
Phil Taylor and Stephen Gowans discuss the same subject on The Taylor Report.
Category: Iran
Nuclear Posture Review 2010
Inducing potential victims to surrender their right to self-defense under threat of nuclear annihilation
By Stephen Gowans
In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, Washington named Iraq, Iran and north Korea as forming an axis of evil. Soon after, the first of these countries was invaded by US and British forces on entirely spurious grounds. The invading forces met little resistance, for Iraq had effectively disarmed under a regime of international sanctions championed by Washington and London that led to the deaths of more than one million over its decade-plus-long existence. The pretext for the aggression was that Iraq retained weapons of mass destruction. It had none.
Around the same time, Washington tore up an accord with north Korea that committed the latter to shuttering its plutonium reactor at Yongbyon and forswearing the pursuit of nuclear weapons, and the former to building light water reactors and delivering fuel oil while the reactors were being built. Washington tarried on the reactor construction, convinced the Juche regime would collapse before the United States had to make good on its commitment. As the date for completion of the reactors drew near, and with only the foundations of the reactors having been built, Washington declared that north Korea had admitted to operating a secret uranium enrichment program. Pyongyang denied the charge. One Bush administration official warned the north Koreans to draw the appropriate lesson from the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq. They did. North Korea fired up its Yongbyon reactor and embarked upon development of a nuclear deterrent.
Whether Iran drew the same lesson is unclear. The National Intelligence Estimate, the consensus of the US intelligence community, is that Iran pursued a nuclear weapons program until 2003, the year of the US-British invasion of Iraq, but has since abandoned it. Iran has worked to develop its own capability to generate enriched uranium for use in civilian nuclear power plants, while at the same time working on long range missiles. Irrespective of its nuclear weapons intentions, which Tehran says it doesn’t have, both activities converge on providing the country with the capability of developing nuclear warheads and the means of delivering them. While Tehran is not in the position to present a nuclear deterrent today, it may in the not too distant future be able to rapidly develop one to deter a US or Israeli attack.
There are two conclusions to be drawn from the above and a third that is axiomatic.
1. The United States and Britain have long records of highly provocative behavior based on policies of military aggression, the most conspicuous recent example of which is the invasion of Iraq. Naming countries as forming an axis of evil is a virtual declaration of war. Invading one of them, without provocation and on entirely contrived grounds, is a repugnant act and an international crime of the highest order. North Korea and Iran, the two remaining countries of the US-designated axis, have reasonable cause to fear military aggression by the United States or its proxies.
2. If the case of Iraq is definitive, US policy is to pressure its targets to surrender their means of self-defense to facilitate US pursuit of a subsequent war of aggression.
3. Countries that possess a nuclear weapons capability reduce the Pentagon’s room for manoeuvre and therefore reduce the probability that they will become the object of US military aggression.
From these three points may be drawn a fourth: The United States, as the world’s major agent of military aggression, is the principal cause of nuclear proliferation.
If read superficially, Washington’s 2010 Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) would lead you to believe that US policy makers have finally figured out that the cardinal rule of nonproliferation is to abjure military aggression. Countries that aren’t threatened by nuclear powers have no need to develop nuclear weapons for self-defense. However, a closer reading of the review shows that nothing has changed. US president Barack Obama has stayed true to form, obscuring his pursuit of his predecessors’ policies beneath honeyed phrases that create the impression of change, where no change of substance exists.
The NPR declares “that the United States will not use or threaten to use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear weapons states”, even if they attack the United States, its vital interest or allies and partners with chemical or biological weapons. This differs, but only on the surface, from the policy of preceding administrations which refused to renounce the use of nuclear weapons against non-nuclear states. There are a number of reasons why the difference is apparent only.
While nuclear weapons are widely regarded as being unparalleled in their destructive power (and they are), the United States is able to deliver overwhelming destructive force through its conventional military capabilities. A promise not to use or threaten to use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear states is not the same as an assurance not to use or threaten to use devastating military force. Six decades ago it was possible to obliterate a city through conventional means, as the United States and Britain demonstrated in the firebombing of Dresden. If a city could be destroyed by conventional means more than half a century ago, imagine what the Pentagon could do today through conventional forces alone. Indeed, the NPR makes clear that the United States is prepared to shrink its nuclear arsenal partly because “the growth of unrivalled U.S. conventional military capabilities” allows Washington to fulfill its geostrategic goals “with significantly lower nuclear force levels and with reduced reliance on nuclear weapons.”
The NPR also provides a number of escape hatches that allow Washington to continue to dangle a nuclear sword of Damocles over the heads of the two remaining axis of evil countries. One is that nuclear weapons can be used, or their used threatened, against a country that is not “party to the NPT” (the nuclear non-proliferation treaty) even if the country doesn’t yet have nuclear weapons, or it is unclear whether it does. This is the north Korea escape clause. It allows Washington to continue to threaten north Korea (which may or may not have a working crude nuclear weapon) with nuclear obliteration, just as it has done since the early 1990s when the US Strategic Command announced it was re-targeting some of its strategic nuclear missiles on the DPRK (the reason why north Korea withdrew from the NPT.)
Another escape hatch allows Washington to reach for the nuclear trigger whenever it deems a country to have fallen short of “compliance with [its] nuclear non-proliferation obligations,” even if the country doesn’t have nuclear weapons and is a party to the NPT. This is the Iran escape hatch, intended to allow Washington to maintain the threat of nuclear annihilation vis-à-vis Iran or any other country Washington unilaterally declares to be noncompliant with the treaty’s obligations. Washington has a history of fabricating casus belli. 10-100,000 Kosovo Albanian dead and Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, neither of which were ever found, represent recent examples of the United States waging war on entirely fictitious grounds. Washington could readily produce “sexed up” intelligence to declare Iran or any other NPT signatory to be in breach of its treaty obligations, thereby justifying the use of nuclear weapons against a non-nuclear state.
As for the United States’ commitment not to reach for its nuclear arsenal in response to a chemical or biological attack on itself, its vital interests (a term that defies geography and democracy, for how is it that the United States’ vital interests extend to other people’s countries?) its allies and its partners, this too is verbal legerdemain. As a careful reading of the NPR makes clear, the truth of the matter is that the United States will attack any country with nuclear weapons if such an attack is deemed necessary by Washington to protect its interests, which is to say, the interests of the corporations, banks and investors whose senior officials and representatives dominate policy formulation in Washington and provide the major funding, and post-political jobs, to the country’s politicians. According to the NPR, “the United States reserves the right to make any adjustment in [its commitment] that may be warranted…” Translation: We won’t attack non-nuclear weapons states with nuclear weapons unless we decide it’s in our interests to do so.
Washington’s attachment of escape clauses and reservations to its commitment calls to mind Rajani Palme Dutt’s description of how the great powers made a mockery of the Kellog Pact, an agreement to renounce recourse to war as an instrument of foreign policy.
“The United States government exempted from its operation any action for the maintenance of the Monroe Doctrine. The French Government insisted that the pact must not be understood to refer to wars of self-defense or in fulfillment of treaty obligations. The British Government made the most sweeping reservation of all…
“Not content with the ‘defense’ of the Empire, covering a quarter of the world, Britain…reserved for itself full ‘freedom of action’ in any unspecified ‘regions of the world,’ where it might at any time claim ‘a special and vital interest.’ This sweeping claim of British imperialism left the Monroe Doctrine behind as a parochial affair in comparison. Needless to say, this claim was thereafter taken as equally applicable to themselves by the other Powers: thus the Italian representative at Geneva specifically referred to it as justifying Italy’s claim that its war on Abyssinia was no breach of the Kellog Pact.
“What, then, remained of the Kellog Pact even on the day that it was signed? Wars of ‘defense’ were clearly understood to be excluded from its operation. Wars for the maintenance of colonial possession or in execution of treaties were equally understood to be excluded. So were wars on behalf of ‘special and vital interests’ in any ‘regions of the world.’ With these small exceptions the imperialist signatories ‘renounced’ war.” (R. Palme Dutt, World Politics: 1918-1936, Random House, New York, pp. 151-152.)
What, then, remains of the Obama administration’s assurance, even on the day the NPR was published, that Washington won’t attack non-nuclear states with nuclear weapons? Countries that may or may not have nuclear weapons are excluded. Countries that don’t have nuclear arms and are party to the NPT, but which may develop a nuclear arms capability, and importantly, are independent of the United States, are excluded. Countries which, through their pursuit of independent economic development policies, threaten the special and vital interests of the United States in any region of the world, are excluded. With these small exceptions, Washington has renounced the use of nuclear weapons against non-nuclear states.
The NPR is said to be based on “the President’s agenda for reducing nuclear dangers and pursuing the goal of a world without nuclear weapons.” But it’s clear from the very beginning of the review that US policy stands in the way of the president’s ostensible aim. “As long as nuclear weapons exist,” the review begins, “the United States will maintain a safe, secure, and effective arsenal…to deter potential adversaries…” The implication is that the country to first develop nuclear weapons, and the only country to have ever used them, intends to be the last country to have them, arrogating onto itself the monopoly right to maintain a nuclear arsenal to deter potential adversaries. Only if every other country surrenders their rights to deter potential adversaries, and yields this right exclusively to the United States, can the implications of the president’s aim be realized. But given the United States’ sanguinary history of busting down the doors of weak countries to lay claim to their land, labor, resources and markets on behalf of its economic elite, only the insane, opportunistic, unprincipled, cowardly or co-opted would yield their right to self-defense to such a predatory country. The president’s agenda for reducing nuclear dangers and pursuing the goal of a world without nuclear weapons is more aptly described as an agenda for inducing potential victims to surrender their right of self-defense, and under the threat of nuclear annihilation. In other words, US foreign policy carries on in its characteristic imperialist and war-like manner, despite the elevation of a black Democrat, and now Nobel Peace Prize winner, to the highest elected office of the land.
Washington Post: North Korean, Iranian nuclear capability threatens US imperialism
By Stephen Gowans
Washington Post columnist Walter Pincus has put his finger on what’s wrong with north Korea and Iran developing nuclear weapons, or having the capability to do so.
The problem is that nuclear weapons are a deterrent, which means that if either country possesses a credible nuclear arsenal and the means of delivering warheads, their conquest by US forces isn’t in the cards. And that is something Pincus seems to regard as regrettable.
In his March 30 column Pincus points to General Kevin P. Chilton, head of the US Strategic Command.
Chilton reminded US legislators that, “Throughout the 65-year history of nuclear weapons, no nuclear power has been conquered or even put at risk of conquest, nor has the world witnessed the globe-consuming conflicts of earlier history.” [1]
Pincus regarded this as a warning, “a thought others in government ought to ponder as they watch Iran and North Korea seek to develop nuclear capability.” [2]
In other words, the implication of Chilton’s view, as Pincus interprets it, is that there is little chance that a nuclear-armed north Korea or Iran could be conquered or even put at risk of conquest, a prospect so alarming to him, that he urges government officials to think through what would happen if Tehran and Pyongyang developed a credible threat of self-defense.
Pincus’s circularity (we ought to conquer these countries before they’re no longer conquerable) invites the question: Why conquer them at all? The standard answer, that both countries are threats to their neighbors, doesn’t work, for two reasons.
First, the real threat, as Pincus implicitly acknowledges, isn’t one of north Korea endangering south Korea or Iran wiping Israel off the map, but of both countries acquiring the means to make themselves effectively unconquerable.
Second, other countries have acquired large nuclear arsenals, and far from being treated as threats that must be pressed to relinquish their nuclear arms, are aided by the United States in acquiring more of them.
Consider India. The very same issue of The Washington Post that found Picus worrying about north Korea and Iran becoming unconquerable carried an article on negotiations between the United States and India, the outcome of which is that the latter will soon import spent nuclear fuel from the former. [3]
India will be able to extract plutonium from the fuel it imports to make nuclear weapons. Although India has pledged not to do so, “it diverted civilian nuclear fuel to build its first nuclear weapons three decades ago.” [4] Already India has manufactured weapons-grade plutonium for an estimated 100 warheads and has “has built weapons with yields of up to 200 kilotons.” [5]
What’s more, the country is not part of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. Iran, portrayed by Pincus’s colleagues as a looming nuclear threat is a treaty signatory, while north Korea was, until Chilton’s predecessors at Strategic Command announced in 1993 that the DPRK would be targeted with strategic nuclear missiles.
Strange that Pincus wasn’t warning government officials to ponder Chilton’s words about nuclear powers avoiding the risk of conquest as they watch India strengthen its nuclear capability, with US assistance.
But then India is already part of Washington’s informal empire. Plus, exporting nuclear fuel to India promises to fatten the bottom line of the US nuclear industry.
It’s not so curious to discover that north Korea, a country Pincus seems to think really should be conquered before it’s too late, comes in dead last on the Heritage Foundation’s economic freedom index, a ranking of how congenial countries are to the profit-making interests of banks, corporations and wealthy investors. Countries that have low tax rates, welcome foreign investment and trade, and spend little on government programs are considered economically free, while countries whose governments intervene in the economy to achieve public policy goals, or to prohibit exploitation, are relegated to the basement of the list.
Generally speaking, where a country appears on the list, offers a pretty good gauge of whether a country is in or out of favor with Washington, whose foreign policy since the Bolshevik Revolution and before has been guided by how open other countries are to US investment and exports. US policy leans toward prying open closed economies and rhapsodizing about open ones.
The places of selected countries on the Heritage Foundation 2010 Index of Economic Freedom, are shown below. (The index ranks 179 countries.)
• North Korea, 179
• Zimbabwe, 178
• Cuba, 177
• Myanmar (Burma), 175
• Venezuela, 174
• Iran, 168
Notice that the bottom dwelling countries are the objects of various Western efforts of regime change, some involving the threat of military intervention and all involving destabilization carried out, in most cases, with the participation of “pro-democracy nonviolence activists,” groups that profess to be progressive and anti-imperialist but are in reality lieutenants of the US foreign policy estblishment. No surprise that their major funding comes from such wealthy individuals as Peter Ackerman and George Soros, who play prominent roles in US ruling class circles. Ackerman is a member of the elite Council on Foreign Relations and was head of the CIA-interlocked Freedom House. Soros is a veteran anti-communist warrior.
It’s no accident that the countries that are on Washington’s regime change hit list also happen to be on the Heritage Foundation’s list of countries that are least accommodating to business interests, no accident because US corporations, investors and banks dominate the formulation of US foreign policy. It makes sense that they would go after “closed economies” (i.e., closed to export of capital and commodities on favorable terms) since these economies represent an unrealized potential for profit-making, and also the threat of a bad example if they’re allowed to get away with shaping economic policy to serve local interests rather than those of foreign capital.
While not among the Index of Economic Freedom stars, India ranks much higher on the list (124) and has been praised for moving “forward with market-oriented economic reforms” and opening its trade regime.
We might ask why anyone would create an index of economic freedom in the first place. It is safe to say that the only people interested in creating a map of favourable opportunities for the export of capital and commodities are those with capital and commodities to export. You won’t find north Koreans, Cubans or Zimbabweans surveying the world to find out whose policies are geared toward promoting attractive returns for investors, largely because they haven’t surplus capital to export. In these countries, the development of internal productive forces is the top priority. And north Korea and Cuba haven’t structural compulsions to export capital. But imperialist countries have plenty of surplus capital, which is why “economic freedom” and rolling over governments that oppose it, is an obsession in Washington and other major capitals.
Pincus strays from the script in calling for north Korea and Iran to be conquered before they can make themselves unconquerable, rather than repeating the accustomed nonsense about the dangers of first strikes launched against neighbors, Europe or even the United States. At the same time, his employer makes US hypocrisy plain by running a story about the United States preparing to export spent nuclear fuel to a country that refuses to join the nonproliferation treaty and has amassed a substantial nuclear arsenal. Finally, the failure of north Korea and Iran to serve themselves up as profitable fields for US investment, while India displays a greater willingness to cater to the profit-making requirements of US corporations, offers a glimpse into the real reasons behind Washington’s double-standard.
1. Walter Pincus, “As missions are added, Stratcom commander keeps focus on deterrence”, The Washington Post, March 30, 2010.
2. Ibid.
3. Rama Lakshmi and Steven Mufson, “US, India reach agreement on nuclear fuel reprocessing”, The Washington Post, March 30, 2010.
4. Ibid.
5. James Lamont and James Blitz, ‘India raises nuclear stakes,’ Financial Times, September 27, 2009.
Behind Washington’s Iran policy: Myths and reality
By Stephen Gowans
While Washington’s Iran policy is often described as oriented toward containment of Iran’s nuclear ambitions, the aims are much broader, and the assumption that Iran has nuclear weapons ambitions is without foundation. US policy is directed at eclipsing the rise of Iran as an independent economic, military and political power, and seeks as an ultimate objective the subordination of Iran to Washington, economically, militarily and politically. Washington’s short-term goal is to prevent Tehran from developing an independent nuclear power industry that is sufficiently advanced to establish a breakout capability — the potential to rapidly manufacture nuclear arms in response to a crisis. An Iran able to rapidly add a nuclear deterrent to its defensive capabilities threatens Washington’s containment policy by taking away the option of low US and ally casualty level military aggression. Since the Vietnam War the United States has avoided engagements or combat modes that would imperil the lives of large numbers of US soldiers. A war waged against a non-nuclear Iran could be long and drawn out, but is unlikely to produce US casualties of such magnitude as to touch off major resistance within the United States. A war waged against a nuclear-armed Iran, however, would be an altogether more dangerous affair.
The US containment policy is built on four planks: sanctions, sabotage of Iran’s nuclear industry, destabilization, and the threat of military aggression. The threat of military aggression has dual, competing, possibilities. It has the potential to encourage Tehran to develop a breakout capability as a deterrent against the possibility of US or Israeli military aggression or both. On the other hand, it could encourage moderate elements within the country to acquiesce to demands that Iran accept dependence on the West as its source for enriched uranium. Destabilization, that is, the funding and training of opposition groups, especially those engaged in democracy promotion (what a Bush administration official once called a rubric to get people to support regime change that cannot be accomplished through military means [1]) aims at replacing the current government with one that is amenable to subordination to US corporate, banking and military interests. Sanctions and threats of military aggression can have either positive or negative effects; they may demoralize the government and increase the likelihood of its capitulation, or strengthen the resolve of the government and people to resist. In this, a key question is whether the population attributes the painful consequences of sanctions and the terror of threatened war to failures of their own government or to the rapacity of the outside powers that have imposed the sanctions and issued the threats. This in turn depends on the success of the government in putting forward its case, and the success of the intervening powers in putting forward theirs. This is the battle of propaganda. To make their case, the intervening powers fund misnamed ‘independent’ media, broadcast anti-government programming across international borders, and rely on nationals trained and educated in the West to return to their country of origin as promoters of pro-imperialist values and champions of regime-change. The government counters with its own media and public relations, locked in competition with outside powers for the hearts and minds of its citizens.
To justify its program of sanctions, sabotage, destabilization and the possibility of future war against Iran, Washington has built a charge sheet against Iran’s president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Ahmadinejad is accused of Holocaust-denial, Jew-hating, and seeking to acquire nuclear weapons to wipe Israel off the map. Israel-booster Elie Wiesel summarizes the case.
“Ahmadinejad is a danger to the world and pathologically sick. He is dangerous because he openly wants to destroy Israel, meaning, to destroy another six million Jews. We all know that Ahmadinejad – an open anti-Semite and the world’s biggest Holocaust denier – intends to destroy Israel and bring disaster to the entire world. Governments must stop Ahmadinejad and put him on trial at the International Court of Justice in The Hague on charges of open incitement for genocide.” [2]
These themes are amplified in pot-boiler writer Stephen Coonts’ latest novel, The Disciple. Here’s how The Ottawa Citizen of February 28, 2010 described the plot:
“Is Iran building nuclear weapons and if so, what do its fanatical President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his equally fanatical clerical backers intend to do with them?
Coonts is in little doubt of Ahmadinejad’s jihadist intentions: Turn Iran into a ‘Martyr Nation’ by reducing Israel -‘the Zionist problem’ — to nuclear dust, firing a couple of warheads at the forces of Satan (i.e., American bases) in Iraq and…vaporizing the Iranian capital Tehran and blaming it on the Americans, thereby inspiring a massive jihad that the United States could not possibly hope to survive.”
A recent addition to the charge sheet is the claim that Ahmadinejad won re-election as president last year through fraudulent means and no longer enjoys popular support among Iranians. He is, then, in the view of Western politicians, a mimetic media, and top-selling novelists, a vicious and fanatical anti-Semite, who rules illegitimately on behalf of a backward theocracy, and is bent on laying his hands on nuclear weapons to incinerate Israel. As is now common practice in the demonization programs that routinely precede Western campaigns of military and economic warfare, the leader of the targeted country is made to resemble no less a demon than Adolph Hitler.
Briefly, on the charge that Ahmadinejad is a Holocaust-denier who wants to wipe Israel off the map: Much of what Ahmadinejad has said about the Holocaust concerns its illegitimacy as a justification for Israel and the Zionist project. If the Nazis perpetrated the Holocaust, why are Palestinians paying the price? he asks. [3] And while there is no doubt that Ahmadinejad would like to see the destruction of Israel, he desires the country’s destruction as a Zionist state, in the same way many sought the destruction of South Africa as an apartheid state. There is no implication in Ahmadinejad’s prediction that Israel will disappear (be wiped off the map) that the country, as a physical entity, and the people within it, will be turned to dust, much less that Israel’s collapse will come about as a result of a nuclear strike by Iran. Explaining what he meant when he said Israel will be destroyed, Ahmadinejad asked, “What befell the Soviet Union? It disappeared, but was it done through war? No. It was through the voice of the people.” [4] Ahmadinejad challenges Israel’s legitimacy, and Zionists, like Wiesel, don’t like it. To deflect attention from the legitimate issues the Iranian president raises about how Zionists exploit the Holocaust to justify the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, he is portrayed as a warmonger who seeks the destruction of the Jews. Screaming “Holocaust” every time Israel’s legitimacy is challenged is a hoary Zionist tactic. [5]
In any event, the idea of Iran launching a nuclear first-strike on Israel is ridiculous in the extreme. First, a nuclear attack on Israel, indeed any attack on Israel by Iran, would be met by a devastating counter-strike by Israel and the United States. Israel is stronger militarily than Iran, the happy consequence (for Israel, though hardly for Palestinians) of the $3 billion in military aid it receives annually from the United States. Israel also possesses an arsenal of some 200 nuclear weapons (the basis for which was provided by France in return for Israeli participation in the war on Nasser’s Egypt that would become the 1956 Suez Canal crisis. [6]) What’s more, Israel has the backing of the largest military power on the planet, the United States. During the last Democratic primaries, then candidate Hilary Clinton warned that if Iran attacked Israel, the United States would “totally obliterate” Iran [7], a warning not to be taken lightly, even if Clinton isn’t president. Uzi Rubin, a private defense consultant who ran Israel’s missile shield program in the 1990s, reminds us that Iran “is radical, but radical does not mean irrational. They want to change the world, not commit suicide.” [8] Moreover, since Ahmadinejad’s opposition to Israel has much to do with the suffering of Palestinians at the hands of Zionism, incinerating Israel makes no sense. This would obliterate the larger part of the Palestinian population, which lives within and on the edge of Israel.
Indeed, contrary to the nonsense of pro-war bamboozlers, the destruction of Israel qua Zionist state is a matter to be achieved, in Ahmadinejad’s view, by democratic, not military, means.
“We have no problem with people and nations. Of course, we do not recognize a government or a nation for the Zionist regime…We are opposed to the idea that the people who live there should be thrown into the sea or be burnt. We believe that all the people who live there, the Jews, Muslims and Christians, should take part in a free referendum and choose their government.” [9]
Is Iran working toward an atomic bomb?
Last September, the international nuclear watchdog, the IAEA, issued a “statement cautioning that it ‘has no concrete proof’ that Iran ever sought to make nuclear arms, much less to perfect a warhead.” According to the then top inspector, Mohamed ElBaradei, the agency had,
“not seen concrete evidence that Tehran has an ongoing nuclear weapons program … But somehow, many people are talking about how Iran’s nuclear program is the greatest threat to the world … In many ways, I think the threat has been hyped. Yes, there’s concern about Iran’s future intentions and Iran needs to be more transparent with the IAEA and the international community … But the idea that we’ll wake up tomorrow and Iran will have a nuclear weapon is an idea that isn’t supported by the facts as we have seen them so far.” [10]
Dennis Blair, the United States Director of National Intelligence, told the US Senate in February that “Tehran was following a ‘cost-benefit approach’ to its nuclear decision-making and that it remained unclear whether Iran’s leadership would make a political calculation to begin producing weapons-grade uranium.” [11] In other words, Iran has not begun to produce weapons-grade uranium and it is unclear it ever will.
The US National Intelligence Estimate of November 2007, a summary of the views of the US intelligence community, concluded that Iran no longer has a nuclear weapons program (but once did.) [12] Every now and then the Obama administration points to ‘new evidence’ that supposedly contests the conclusion, but the US intelligence community has yet to revise its 2007 findings, despite the administration’s frequent claims of having unearthed fresh indications of Iran’s nuclear weapons ambitions.
However, the fact that Washington’s own intelligence community won’t say Iran has a nuclear weapons program hasn’t stopped the administration’s warmongers from talking to the media as if the question is beyond dispute. US war secretary Robert Gates remarked that the “reality is that they have done nothing to…stop their progress toward a nuclear weapon,” [13] as if it is clear that progress is being made. At the same time, US secretary of state Hilary Clinton “referred to Iran’s ‘pursuit of nuclear weapons’ and said …’we don’t want to be engaging while they’re building their bomb.’” [14]
In recent days, more ‘new evidence’ has come forward, brought to public attention by The New York Times, always eager to turn an evidentiary sow’s ear into a silk purse if it means giving further impetus to the drive to war. According to the newspaper, an IAEA report “cited new evidence, much of it collected in recent weeks that appeared to paint a picture of a concerted drive in Iran toward a weapons capability.” The new evidence is “an escalating series of steps by Iran: the enrichment to 20 percent, its acknowledgment of a secret enrichment plant in Qum, its efforts to metalize uranium and its rejection of a deal to enrich its uranium outside the country.” [15] There’s a lot of straw-clutching going on here.
First, Iran is enriching uranium to 20 percent (not the 93 percent needed for a weapon.) It is doing so to produce medical isotopes. Iran’s supply is running short and is expected to be exhausted by the end of the year. Iranians could import the isotopes but sanctions bar the way. Tehran, then, has few options but to produce the isotopes itself – and that means enriching uranium beyond levels needed for use in civilian power plants. Washington proposed that Iran ship its stockpile of low-enriched uranium to Russia and France for processing into fuel rods, which would then be returned once the processing was complete. This would take a year or so. Afraid Washington could renege on the deal once it got its hands on its stockpile, Tehran issued a counterproposal. Fuel rods would be exchanged for enriched uranium simultaneously, on Iranian soil, and in installments. This would prevent the United States from using the uranium-for-fuel-rods swap as a ruse to cheat Iran out of its stockpile of low-enriched uranium. Paranoia or prudence? Before the 1979 Islamic Revolution, the United States built a small research reactor in Iran, and supplied it with weapons-grade uranium (yes, weapons-grade uranium. When Iran was ruled by the dictator, the Shah, Washington was happy to equip Iran with bomb fuel.) After the revolution, Washington refused to provide more fuel, and still owes Iran millions of dollars for fuel that wasn’t delivered. [16] Significantly, Washington has rejected Iran’s counterproposal, but puts the blame for the breakdown on Tehran.
Second, the Obama administration has made much of the so-called secret enrichment facility at Qum, a plant whose ‘secret’ existence Obama first revealed to the world, days after Iran had already acknowledged its existence to the IAEA. How can a plant be secret, if it has already been acknowledged? [17]
Third, while Iran’s efforts to metalize uranium could be aimed at making the core of an atom bomb, turning uranium into a metallic form is also a step in civilian applications. [18] The claim, then, that metalizing uranium is evidence of an intention to make a bomb is no more compelling than the claim that importing chlorine signals an intention to make chlorine gas for military use. Chlorine can also be used for water purification. In the same vein, it could be pointed out that a head can be bashed in with a hammer, but buying one from a hardware store doesn’t necessarily or even often make the purchaser a would-be murderer. Nevertheless, in conformity with the requirements of pre-war demonization campaigns, all Iranian actions are now automatically assigned a sinister interpretation. For example, in a February 25 meeting with Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, Ahmadinejad vowed that the countries of southwest Asia would create a future “without Zionists and without colonialists.” “We tell [the United States] that instead of interfering in the region’s affairs, to pack their things and leave,” he said. While an expression of a desire for an end to Zionist domination of Palestine and freedom from outside interference, The Washington Post’s report on the meeting led with this headline: “Iran, Syria mock U.S. policy; Ahmadinejad speaks of Israel’s ‘annihilation’.” [19] The equivalent in the 1990s would have been a headline declaring that the anti-apartheid movement sought South Africa’s annihilation. Worse, contradictory evidence is interpreted as confirming evidence. An egregious example of this is provided by The New York Times interpretation of the following statement from Ahmadinejad.
“Please pay attention and understand that the people of Iran are brave enough that if it wants to build a bomb it will clearly announce it and build it and not be afraid of you. When we say we won’t build it that means we won’t.” [20]
Iran has repeatedly said it has no intention of building a bomb. Despite this, the writer of one version of the newspaper’s story wondered whether Ahmadinejad’s words were a possible acknowledgement of a nuclear weapons program!
In any event, Iran told international inspectors about its metallization efforts; they’re hardly secret. [21]
Still, it remains unclear whether Iran is secretly building a bomb, is seeking a breakout capability, or is doing neither. No compelling evidence of a secret nuclear weapons program has been brought forward, though there has been much innuendo and unsubstantiated and sometimes ridiculous claims of the sort the Bush administration plied the media with during the run-up to the invasion of Iraq and the Clinton administration foisted on a compliant press prior to the terror bombing of Yugoslavia. That Tehran seeks a breakout capability is a possibility. The US goal of eclipsing the continued rise of Iran as a southwest Asian power necessitates the threat of military aggression. The US containment policy may have motivated the Iranian leadership to begin building a civilian nuclear energy industry in order to acquire a breakout capability, but whether Iran’s nuclear program has this as an ultimate end, or whether Tehran simply wants a cost-efficient way of producing electricity using its own abundant reserves of uranium, is unclear.
In any event, if Iran is building a bomb, or if its civilian program is motivated by the goal of developing a breakout capability, we should ask:
o What kind of a threat would this pose — a threat to us, or what Edward Herman calls the threat of self-defense [22], that is, a threat to overt US and Israeli military aggression against Iran?
o Is an Iran with a nuclear weapons capability more dangerous than an Israel [23], an India, a Pakistan or, indeed, a United States with nuclear weapons?
RT News recently ran billboard advertising in US airports which superimposed an image of Obama upon Ahmadinejad. Next to the images ran this question: “Who poses the greater nuclear threat?” The ads were banned [24] (in a country that frequently condemns other countries for repressing political free speech), and perhaps so because the answer is clear. Given a choice between a country that has numberless nuclear weapons, has used them twice, and threatened their use many more times, and another that doesn’t have any, and if it did, doesn’t have the means to deliver them, and if it could deliver them, would commit suicide in doing so, the clear choice is the former…Obama, not Ahmadinejad.
Against this backdrop it’s easy to see that the energies of those who are truly interested in a nuclear free world are least effectively channelled into campaigns against Iran and more effectively channeled into campaigns against the United States and its fellow nuclear powers. Campaigns ought to be aimed at eliminating the root causes of nuclear proliferation. Immediately, these are the refusal of existing nuclear weapons powers to work toward the elimination of their nuclear arsenals, as they committed to do in the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. This was to be the quid-pro-quo that removed incentives for non-nuclear powers to develop their own nuclear weapons. Another proliferation incentive is the US practice of threatening non-nuclear states militarily. US threats make the development of nuclear weapons a strategic necessity for targeted countries.
Does Ahmadinejad lack popular support?
Three weeks prior to Iran’s disputed presidential election, Ken Ballen and Patrick Doherty conducted a poll for the international arm of the US Republican Party, the International Republican Institute, hardly a booster of Ahmadinejad. The poll showed that “Ahmadinejad led by a more than 2 to 1 margin – greater than his actual apparent margin of victory”. Ahmadinejad is who Iranians want, they concluded. [25]
Subsequently, the Program on International Policy Attitudes, a program of the Center for International and Security Studies at the University of Maryland, published a study titled “Analysis of Multiple Polls Finds Little Evidence Iranian Public Sees Government as Illegitimate.” [26] The study was based on an analysis of multiple polls from three different sources, some from within Iran and others from outside: a series of 10 polls conducted by the University of Tehran; eight based on telephone interviews conducted by the North American firm GlobeScan; and a poll by the University of Maryland.
The polls found that:
o In the week prior to and weeks after the election, a majority said it planned to, or did, vote for Ahmadinejad.
o “In several post-election polls, more than seven in ten said they saw Ahmadinejad as the legitimate president.”
o “About eight in ten said the election was free and fair.”
o None of the polls found any indication of anything close to majority support for regime change.
o “Large majorities, including majorities of (opposition) supporters, continue to endorse the Islamist character of the government.”
There may have been fraud, but if there was, it’s clear the outcome didn’t misrepresent the popular will. The idea, then, that Ahmadinejad has no popular support and that the Green Movement represents a majority of Iranians, or even close to one, is a myth.
Destabilization
Many people have become so entranced by the apparent ‘people power’ character of the mass demonstrations and protests that followed last year’s disputed election, that they’ve turned a blind eye to the very real possibility that the unrest – and the fact that the election was disputed at all – may owe much to behind-the-scenes machinations of the US government.
“According to the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence there was a series of clandestine meetings in Rome and Paris between Pentagon officials and Iranian dissidents in 2001 and 2003. The meetings included discussions about possible covert actions to destabilize the government in Tehran…” [28]
On May 23, 2007, ABC News reported: ‘The CIA has received secret presidential approval to mount a covert ‘black’ operation to destabilise the Iranian government.’
On May 16, 2007, the London Daily Telegraph reported that Bush administration operative John Bolton said that a US military attack on Iran would “be a ‘last option’ after economic sanctions and attempts to foment a popular revolution had failed”. (My emphasis.)
On May 27, 2007, the same newspaper reported that: “Mr. Bush has signed an official document endorsing CIA plans for a propaganda and disinformation campaign intended to destabilize, and eventually topple, the theocratic rule of the mullahs.”
On July 7, 2008, Seymour Hersh reported in the New Yorker that, “Late last year, Congress agreed to a request from President Bush to fund a major escalation of covert operations against Iran…These operations, for which the President sought up to four hundred million dollars…are designed to destabilise the country’s religious leadership.” [27]
Individuals and organizations involved in fomenting regime change uprisings in Serbia, Georgia, Ukraine and attempts to do so in Venezuela, Zimbabwe and Belarus, are involved in these destabilization campaigns as advisers to and trainers of Green Movement activists. One of the principal figures is Gene Sharp, head of the Albert Einstein Institution, who advised right-wing Venezuelans on how to use civil disobedience to overthrow Hugo Chavez. [29] More than two years ago, in a March, 2007 interview in The Progressive, Sharp acknowledged that he has been working since 2004 with Iranian dissidents on how to bring down the government in Tehran. [30] One of the hallmarks of democracy promotion is to create the myth that an election is stolen, to justify an attempted overthrow through civil disobedience.
Is war imminent?
It may come next year. Here’s Richard N. Haass, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, and formerly director of policy planning for the US State Department, where he was a principal adviser to then secretary of state Colin Powell: “I think we can get through 2010 without a military strike. But 2011 could be more dicey.” [31] The Council on Foreign Relations is the premier US ruling class think-tank. It brings together CEOs, corporate lawyers, scholars, and military and government officials, to write policy papers, which are then sent to the State Department. CFR statements should never be taken lightly. [32]
Another indication that war could come by next year is the steps Washington has begun to take to build a defensive shield around its clients in southwest Asia. Missile defense systems are being deployed in Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Kuwait, additions to US-supplied systems that already exist in Saudi Arabia and Israel. Aegis cruisers are now permanently on patrol in the Persian Gulf. [33]
The purpose of these new deployments isn’t to protect US allies from first-strike attacks from Iran, but from retaliatory strikes that would follow a US (or Israeli) attack. The United States and Israel have threatened a first strike attack on Iran repeatedly. Iran has not threatened to attack any country (except if attacked first.)
The real case against Ahmadinejad
Washington, dominated by CEOs, corporate lawyers, investment bankers, and their toadies, despises Ahmadinejad because corporate America despises him. And corporate America despises him because he is bad for US business.
He is opposed politically because he asserts Iran’s right to a self-reliant civilian nuclear power industry. The United States and Europe are willing to allow Iran to have nuclear energy for civilian use, so long as they control Iran’s access to the enriched uranium needed to power it. This would put the West in the position of being able to extract concessions from Iran by threatening to turn off the tap, on top of providing Western capital with a lucrative investment opportunity.
Ahmadinejad is also opposed politically because he backs Hamas and Hezbollah, opponents of Washington’s attack dog in southwest Asia, Israel. Both organizations are portrayed as terrorist groups that threaten Israel’s existence, but neither are anywhere near large or strong enough or have sufficient backing to pose even the faintest existential military threat to Israel. They do, however, pose the threat of self-defense, which is to say they are capable of inflicting some retaliatory harm on Israel and are therefore seen as impediments to Israel’s free movement in asserting US interests in the Middle East on Washington’s behalf.
Economically, Ahmadinejad earns Wall Street’s disapproval for maintaining Iran’s “high tariff rates and non-tariff barriers,” failing to dismantle “import bans” and leaving regulations in place. Neither does his “weak enforcement of intellectual property rights,” “resistance to privatization,” and insistence on keeping the oil sector entirely within state hands, earn him friends among Wall Street investors and bankers. [34]
In Wall Street’s view, Ahmadinejad’s sins against the profit-making interests of foreign banks and corporations are legion. He “halted tentative efforts to reform the state-dominated economy” — begun by Rafsanjani and favored by Mousavi — “and has greatly expanded government spending.” He maintains an income tax rate that, in Wall Street’s opinion, is too high, and controls “the prices of petroleum products, electricity, water and wheat for the production of bread,” provides “economic subsidies,” and influences “prices through regulation of Iran’s many state-owned enterprises.” [35]
Equally troubling is that on Ahmadinejad’s watch, foreign investment faces “considerable hostility.” “The state remains the dominant factor in the economy.” That means US capital is denied profitable investment opportunities. “Foreign investment is restricted or banned in many activities, including banking, telecommunications, transport, oil and gas.” And when foreign investors are allowed in, ceilings are placed on their share of market. [36]
Banking is another sore spot for Wall Street’s deal-makers. The government keeps banks under tight rein and the insurance sector is dominated by five state-owned companies. Plus, Iranian workers have enjoyed considerable rights within their jobs. The state imposes strict limits on the number of hours an employee can work in a single week, and firing a worker isn’t left to the discretion of capital, to meet its profit-making needs. It “requires approval of the Islamic Labor Council.” [37]
This doesn’t mean that Iran is socialist; far from it. But you don’t have to be socialist to earn Wall Street’s, and therefore, Washington’s, enmity. Imposing tariffs, restricting foreign investment, providing subsidies to domestic firms, and placing performance requirements on foreign investment, are often enough to place a foreign government on Washington’s regime change hit list. Refusing to integrate into the US military machine doesn’t help either. Forcing change on independent governments is easier when they are small, feeble and mostly defenseless, which is why, from Washington’s point of view, it is imperative to eclipse the rise of potential regional competitors before they become too large to deal with readily.
Conclusion
The two major justifications for aggressive action against Iran — that the country is pursuing the development of nuclear weapons and that Ahmadinejad’s re-election was illegitimate – are baseless. There is no compelling evidence to support either accusation. Even if true, these matters would not be justifiable grounds for war, sanctions or destabilization. US and Israeli hostility to Iran and the threat both countries’ nuclear arsenals pose to Iran establish conditions that make Iran’s acquisition of its own nuclear arms as a means of self-defense a virtual necessity. (That doesn’t mean Tehran is seeking to acquire nuclear weapons, but the incentive conditions are certainly in place.) And were there indeed evidence that Ahmadinejad had stolen the last election and is governing without popular support, we could hardly expect US interference, in the form of government and corporate foundation-backed democracy promotion, to have anything other than the interests of Washington and its corporate patrons in mind.
The real reasons for US sanctions, destabilization, sabotage and threats of war are ultimately rooted in economics. The Iranian economy offers too few profit-making opportunities to US corporations, banks and investors and could offer more. Moreover, Iran maintains a military, political and economic independence that Washington – keen to preserve its hegemonic status – cannot abide. Accordingly, Washington has implemented a program aimed at denying Iran an independent source of civilian nuclear energy and breakout nuclear weapons capability – a source both of economic growth and a potential means of self-defense – while at the same time attempting to bring down the government in Tehran, to replace it with one amenable to a role subordinate to US military, corporate and banking interests. To justify these actions, Washington has created a distorted image of Ahmadinejad as a Persian Hitler, keen on carrying out the Final Solution by nuclear means. This is utter nonsense. It is war propaganda of no solidity, on par with deceptions of Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction and genocide in Kosovo used to justify earlier US-led wars of aggression.
1. Guy Dinmore, “US and UK develop democracy strategy for Iran,” Financial Times (UK), April 21, 2006.
2. “Wiesel: If Ahmadinejad were assassinated, I wouldn’t shed a tear,” Haaretz, February 9, 2010.
3. Ahmadinejad: “Iran condemns fabricating such a pretext (the Holocaust) for the Zionist regime to commit genocide against the Palestinian nation and occupy Palestine. Europeans cannot tolerate the Zionist regime’s presence in their own region but want to impose it on the Middle East. Give (the Zionists) the vast land of Canada and Alaska to build themselves a home and resettle there.” Financial Times (UK), October 5, 2007.
According to the New York Times of September 19, 2008, Ahmadinejad called the Holocaust a “fake.” Exactly one year later, September 19, 2009, the following headline appeared on The New York Times website: “Amid protests, Iran leader calls Holocaust a myth.” The accompanying story, however, was short on details. While the article extended to 18 paragraphs, this is all that was said about Ahmadinejad’s reputed Holocaust denial: Ahmadinejad “called the Holocaust a myth as his country marked an annual pro-Palestinian demonstration… […] Several reports quoted him as saying the Holocaust was a false pretext for the establishment of Israel in 1948. ‘It is a lie’ based on unprovable and ‘mythical claim,’ he was quoted as saying in the speech.” (Alan Cowell, “Amid protests, Iran leader calls Holocaust a myth,” The New York Times, September 19, 2009.)
The Iranian government’s English-language PressTV had another version. It said that after Ahmadinejad denounced Israel as a “symbol of lies and deception” which was founded on ‘colonialist’ attitudes,” he “question[ed] the story behind the Holocaust and urged a probe into it. If the Holocaust, as you claim, is true, why don’t you allow a probe into the issue?’” (“Ahmadinejad wants global front against Israel,” PressTV, September 18, 2009.)
4. The New York Times, September 26, 2007.
5. See Ilan Pappe’s The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, Oneworld Publications, 2006 on how the founders of Israel often invoked the danger of a second Holocaust to justify their fight against opponents who had no interest in wiping out the Jews, only protecting their homes and land from expropriation by a Jewish state, and who Jewish forces outnumbered.
6. Richard Becker, “1956 Suez War: Turning point in Middle East balance of forces,” PSLWeb.org, October 3, 2006, http://www.pslweb.org/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&id=5839
7. Mark Landler, “Iran policy now more in sync with Clinton’s views,” The New York Times, February 17, 2010.
8. Howard Schneider, “Israel finds strength in its missile defenses,” The Washington Post, September 19, 2009.
9. The New York Times, September 19, 2008.
10. William J. Cole, “UN nuclear watchdog says Iran threat ‘hyped’,” Associated Press, September 2, 2009. http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory?id=8469192
11. “Gates disputes Iran nuclear deal,” Reuters, February 6, 2010.
12. “Intelligence on Iran: The new U.S. assessment has some good news — but the reaction to it could be bad,” The Washington Post, December 5, 2007, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/12/04/AR2007120401772.html .
13. “Gates disputes Iran nuclear deal,” Reuters, February 6, 2010.
14. Mark Landler, “Clinton pleads for patience at U.S.-Islamic world forum,” The New York Times, February 15, 2010.
15. David E. Sanger and William J. Broad, “Inspectors say Iran worked on warhead,” The New York Times, February 19, 2010.
16. Glenn Kessler, “Iran seeks a deal for reactor,” The Washington Post, October 11, 2009.
17. Stephen Gowans, “Iran’s acknowledged nuclear fuel plant and Israel’s secret nuclear weapons plant,” what’s left, September 28, 2009, https://gowans.wordpress.com/2009/09/28/iran%E2%80%99s-acknowledged-nuclear-fuel-plant-and-israel%E2%80%99s-secret-nuclear-weapons-plant/
18. Sanger and Broad, February 19, 2010.
19. Howard Schneider, “Iran, Syria mock U.S. policy, Ahmadinejad speaks of Israel’s ‘annihilation’”, The Washington Post, February 26, 2010.
20. Michael Slackman, “Iran boasts of capacity to make bomb fuel,” The New York Times, February 11, 2010.
21. Sanger and Broad, February 19, 2010.
22. Edward S. Herman, “Iran’s Dire Threat (It might be able to defend itself),” Z Magazine, October, 2004.
23. It is instructive to note the absence in the West of hysteria over Israel possessing an estimated 200 nuclear warheads and its refusal to sign the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty. By contrast, Iran, a signatory to the treaty, and free from nuclear weapons, is greeted with hysteria for seeking to exercise its treaty rights to harness the atom for peaceful, civilian purposes. Iran’s nuclear sites are open to international inspectors. On the other hand, “Israel has rejected the call by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to join the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and open up its atomic sites to international inspection.” (Mark Weiss, ‘Israel spurns nuclear watchdog’s call to open atomic sites to inspection,’ Irish Times, September 19, 2009; http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/world/2009/0919/1224254860406.html)
The United States and the European Union, which profess to be opposed to nuclear proliferation, initially tried to block the vote, and then voted against it. (http://english.aljazeera.net/news/middleeast/2009/09/2009918173136830771.html It seems the United States and European Union aren’t opposed to nuclear proliferation; they’re opposed to Iran exercising its NPT rights.
24. Globe and Mail reporter Mark MacKinnon described the advertising this way: “The head is a jumble of brown skin, greying hair and oddly incongruous features. You have to stop and stare for a second to understand that two men’s faces are blurred together in the picture. One belongs to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the other to U.S. President Barack Obama. […] Its tagline upset many who saw it, and got the poster banned from airports across the United States: “Who poses the greater nuclear threat?” […] It’s part of an advertising campaign for RT News, an English-language television station headquartered in Moscow and newly arrived in Canada. The idea that the U.S. may be more dangerous than Iran doesn’t come up often on Western networks such as CBC, CNN or BBC World. And that is exactly the station’s point.”
(Mark MacKinnon, “Big Brother 2.0?” The Globe and Mail (Toronto), February 8, 2010.)
25. Ken Ballen and Patrick Doherty, “Ahmadinejad is who Iranians want,” The Guardian (UK), June 15, 2009.
26. “Analysis of Multiple Polls Finds Little Evidence Iranian Public Sees Government as Illegitimate,” worldpublicopinion.org, February 3, 2010, http://www.worldpublicopinion.org/pipa/articles/brmiddleeastnafricara/652.php
27. The New York Times, June 6, 2008.
28. Seymour M. Hersh, “Annals of National Security: Preparing the Battlefield: The Bush Administration steps up its secret moves against Iran,” The New Yorker, July 7, 2008, http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/07/07/080707fa_fact_hersh
29. Michael Barker, “Sharp Reflection Warranted Nonviolence in the Service of Imperialism,” June 30, 2008, http://www.swans.com/library/art14/barker01.html; Eva Golinger, Making Excuses for Empire:
A Reply to the Self-Appointed Defenders of the AEI , MRZIne, August 5, 2008.
The Albert Einstein Institution revealed the extent of its involvement with anti-Chavez groups, as well as its distaste for the Venezuelan president, in its Annual Report, 2000-2004, pp. 20-21.
“After his failed coup attempt in 1992, Hugo Chávez emerged victorious from the presidential elections in December 1998. Since then the regime has become increasingly authoritarian despite having been democratically elected. Soon after coming into office, Chávez drafted a new constitution, which significantly increased the powers of the presidency. Chávez’s popularity began to wane in December 2001 when he announced by decree a set of 49 new laws affecting industries including banking, agriculture and oil. People reacted by taking to the streets for a one day nationwide civil strike. The government responded with violent repression against the protesters. In this climate, the opposition has had difficulty mobilizing. Venezuelan society is extremely polarized as a result, and poised for the potential outbreak of violence. Venezuelans opposed to Chávez met with Gene Sharp and other AEI staff to talk about the deteriorating political situation in their country. They also discussed options for opposition groups to further their cause effectively without violence. These visits led to an in-country consultation in April 2003. The nine-day consultation was held by consultants Robert Helvey and Chris Miller in Caracas for members of the Venezuelan democratic opposition. The objective of the consultation was to provide them with the capacity to develop a nonviolent strategy to restore democracy to Venezuela. Participants included members of political parties and unions, nongovernmental organization leaders, and unaffiliated activists. Helvey presented a course of instruction on the theory, applications and planning for a strategic nonviolent struggle. Through this, the participants realized the importance of strategic planning to overcome existing shortcomings in the opposition’s campaign against Chávez. Ofensiva Ciudadana, a pro-democracy group in Venezuela, requested and organized the workshop. This workshop has led to continued contact with Venezuelans and renewed requests for additional consultations.” http://aeinstein.org/organizations/org/2000-04rpt.pdf
30. Amitabh Pal, “Gene Sharp Interview,” The Progressive Magazine, March, 2007, http://www.progressive.org/mag/intv0307.
Sharp said, “Our work is available in Iran and has been since 2004. People from different political positions are saying that that’s the way we need to go. And that kind of struggle broadly has important precedence in Iranian/Persian history, both in the 1906 democratic revolution and in the 1979 struggle against the Shah—all predominantly nonviolent forms of struggle. If somebody doesn’t decide to use military means, then it is very likely that there will be a peaceful national struggle there.”
For more on the role of democracy promoters in Iran see Stephen Gowans, “The Role and Aims of US Democracy Promotion in the Attempted Color Revolution in Iran,” what’s left, July 4, 2009, https://gowans.wordpress.com/2009/07/04/the-role-and-aims-of-us-democracy-promotion-in-the-attempted-color-revolution-in-iran/
31. David E. Sanger, “Obama takes several gambles in bid to defend nuclear standoff with Iran,” The New York Times, February, 11, 2010.
32. For more on the Council on Foreign Relations see G. William Domhoff, Who Rules America? Power & Politics, McGraw Hill, Fourth Edition, 2002, pp. 85-88.
33. David E. Sanger and Eric Schmitt, “U.S. speeding up missile defenses in Persian Gulf,” The New York Times, January 31, 2010.
34. 2009 Index of Economic Freedom. http://www.heritage.org/Index/Country/Iran
35. Ibid.
36. Ibid.
37. Ibid.
Obama and New York Times Working to Give Solidity to Groundless Iran Nuclear Weapons Charge
By Stephen Gowans
I have no idea whether Iran has a secret nuclear weapons program, and neither does the Obama administration, but that hasn’t stopped Obama’s advisers from claiming that Iran remains determined to develop nuclear weapons. Nor has it stopped The New York Times from working with the Obama administration to create the impression that Iran has a covert nuclear arms program, despite the country’s insistence it hasn’t, and absent any compelling evidence it has.
In a January 3 article (“U.S. sees an opportunity to press Iran on nuclear fuel”) New York Times’ reporters Steven Erlanger and William Broad cite the views of U.S. and other Western officials that dispute Tehran’s claim that Iran’s nuclear program is for civilian use only. Erlanger and Broad note that:
o Obama’s strategists believe that “Iran’s top political and military leaders [remain] determined to develop nuclear weapons.”
o “Iran’s insistence that its nuclear program is for civilian purposes only is roundly rejected by Western officials and, in internal reports, by international nuclear inspectors.”
o “After reviewing new documents that have leaked out of Iran and debriefing defectors lured to the West, Mr. Obama’s advisers say they believe the work on weapons design is continuing on a smaller scale — the same assessment reached by Britain, France, Germany and Israel.”
o “In early September, the American ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency, Glyn Davies, warned that Iran had ‘possible breakout capacity.’”
o “Mr. Obama’s top advisers say they no longer believe the key finding of a much disputed National Intelligence Estimate about Iran, published a year before President George W. Bush left office, which said that Iranian scientists ended all work on designing a nuclear warhead in late 2003.”
In these five paragraphs Erlanger and Broad manage to reveal nothing that isn’t already known: that Iran says it isn’t seeking nuclear weapons and that U.S and Israeli politicians say it is. But they’ve written the article in a way that creates the impression that the existence of a nuclear weapons program in Iran is almost beyond dispute.
At no point do The New York Times’ reporters cite contradictory evidence, except to acknowledge that Iran denies it seeks nuclear weapons. However, they immediately counter Iran’s denial, noting that it is rejected by Western officials.
It is, however, untrue that Iran’s denials are uniformly rejected. The United Nations nuclear watchdog, the IAEA, says there is no solid evidence that Iran has ever had a nuclear arms program. Erlanger and Broad themselves reported this on October 4, 2009. “In September, the IAEA issued a ‘statement cautioning it ‘has no concrete proof’ that Iran ever sought to make nuclear arms, much less to perfect a warhead.’” [1] Added Mohamed ElBaradei, the chief nuclear watchdog at the time: “We have not seen concrete evidence that Tehran has an ongoing nuclear weapons program… But somehow, many people are talking about how Iran’s nuclear program is the greatest threat to the world. In many ways, I think the threat has been hyped.” [2]
While the U.S. intelligence community hasn’t gone so far as to say there is no concrete proof that Tehran ever had a nuclear weapons program, in its 2007 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) it did say that Iran hasn’t had a nuclear weapons program since 2003.
In a September 10, 2009 article, Erlanger reported that “new intelligence reports delivered to the White House say that [Iran] has deliberately stopped short of the critical last steps to make a bomb,” and “The new intelligence information collected by the Obama administration finds no convincing evidence that the design work has resumed.” [3]
It could be that new evidence compiled since September has led the Obama administration to adopt a revised view. Certainly, Obama’s advisers say they no longer believe the NIE, but they’ve been saying that since February. Back then, they acknowledged that “no new evidence (had) surfaced to undercut the findings of the (NIE)” but that they didn’t believe it, all the same. [4]
Significantly, Erlanger and Broad report that, “The administration’s (current) review of Iran’s program … (does) not amount to a new formal intelligence assessment.” In other words, the new intelligence, information from allies, and analyses that have led Obama’s advisers to conclude that Iran remains determined to develop nuclear weapons, isn’t of sufficient weight or credibility to revise the NIE. Just as was true in February.
Sanger and Broad reported as recently as December 16 that the “Institute for Science and International Security, a group in Washington that tracks nuclear proliferation” urged “caution and further assessment” of some of the evidence Obama advisers say has led them to reject the NIE, because “we have seen no evidence of an Iranian decision to build” nuclear weapons. [5]
The Obama administration’s recent actions smack of the former Bush administration’s practice of glomming on to any evidence, no matter how dubious, to make the case that Iraq had banned weapons. Bush may have been replaced by Obama, but the practice of sexing up intelligence to fabricate a case for war, or in this case, more sanctions in the short term — and of The New York Times playing a role in uncritically circulating pretexts for U.S. aggression — continue.
It would appear that while there is no credible evidence to revise the NIE, it is convenient for the Obama administration to claim that Iran is bent on acquiring nuclear arms. So it simply says it has new evidence that Iran is secretly working on building nuclear weapons. The New York Times, frequently complicit in U.S. foreign policy deceptions, plays along.
One other matter: Would an Iran with a nuclear weapons capability be a threat that warrants a pre-emptive strike?
Any nuclear arms capability Iran developed would be rudimentary and pose what U.S. foreign policy critic Edward Herman has called the threat of self-defense. Nuclear weapons would offer Iran a way of making the United States and Israel, both with vastly larger arsenals than Iran could ever develop in decades, and track records of attacking countries that threaten to disturb the balance of power in the Middle East (i.e., that threaten to challenge U.S. domination of the region), to think twice about overt aggression. A few nuclear weapons wouldn’t turn Iran into the new bully on the block, capable of throwing its weight around, and getting its way. Israel, with its estimated 200 nuclear warheads, is the region’s biggest bully, and, backed by the bully extraordinaire, the United States, will continue to be for some time. Iran, even a nuclear-armed one, is a military pipsqueak, by comparison.
As Uzi Rubin, a private defense consultant who ran Israel’s missile shield program in the 1990s, reminds us: Iran “is radical, but radical does not mean irrational … They want to change the world, not commit suicide.” [6] The United States, on the other hand, wants to rule the world, and will resort to whatever baseless charges are necessary to justify its actions.
1. “Report says Iran has data to make a nuclear bomb,” The New York Times, October 4, 2009.
2. http://www.boston.com/news/world/europe/articles/2009/09/02/un_nuclear_watchdog_says_iran_threat_hyped/
3. “US says Iran could expedite nuclear bomb,” The New York Times, September 10, 2009.
4. Greg Miller, “US now sees Iran as pursuing nuclear bombs,” Los Angeles Times, February 12, 2009.
5. “Nuclear memo in Persian puzzles spy agencies,” The New York Times, December 16, 2009.
6. Howard Schneider, “Israel finds strength in its missile defenses,” The Washington Post, September 19, 2009.
The bootstrap theory of propaganda
By Stephen Gowans
The New York Times and U.S. politicians are, through assertion and repetition, attempting to create as common knowledge the idea that Iran has a nuclear weapons program and that the last presidential election in Iran was fraudulent, even though there is no evidence to back either claim.
In today’s (November 23, 2009) New York Times, reporter Alexei Barrionuevo writes that “Brazil’s ambitions to be a more important player on the global diplomatic stage are crashing headlong into the efforts of the United States and other Western powers to rein in Iran’s nuclear arms program” (my emphasis.)
This treats the existence of a nuclear arms program in Iran as an established finding.
Yet, Tehran denies it has a nuclear weapons program and the U.N nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, says it “‘has no concrete proof’ that Iran ever sought to make nuclear arms…” [1] The 2007 U.S. National Intelligence Estimate disagrees, in part, claiming that Iran had a nuclear weapons program in 2003, but says that Iran has since disbanded it. In February, “US officials said that…no new evidence has surfaced to undercut the findings of the 2007 (estimate).” [3]
According to the head of the I.A.E.A, Mohamed ElBaradei, the agency has
“not seen concrete evidence that Tehran has an ongoing nuclear weapons program… But somehow, many people are talking about how Iran’s nuclear program is the greatest threat to the world… In many ways, I think the threat has been hyped. Yes, there’s concern about Iran’s future intentions and Iran needs to be more transparent with the IAEA and the international community… But the idea that we’ll wake up tomorrow and Iran will have a nuclear weapon is an idea that isn’t supported by the facts as we have seen them so far.” [3]
Barrionuevo isn’t alone in asserting, without evidence, that Iran is building nuclear arms. U.S. Representative Eliot Engel, chairman of the House Subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere, told Barrionuevo that “the world is trying to figure out how to prevent Iran from having nuclear weapons,” assuming, as a given, that Iran is trying to have nuclear weapons.
Engel also says that Iran’s president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad “is illegitimate with his own people,” a reference to the disputed presidential election Iran’s opposition claims Ahmadinejad won through fraud. Barrionuevo points to critics who worry that a planned visit to Brazil by Ahmadinejad will “legitimize” the Iranian president “just five months after what most of the world sees as his fraudulent re-election.”
Yet there is no evidence the election was stolen. All that backs the allegation is the assertion of the opposition that the election was fraudulent and “what most of the world” believes, this being based on the Western media treating opposition claims as legitimate.
This is a circular process. Most of the world believes the election was fraudulent because that’s what the principal source of information on this matter, the media, led it to believe. Now the New York Times offers the fact that the assertion is widely believed as evidence it is true. This might be called the bootstrap theory of propaganda: legitimize an assertion by treating it as true, and when most of the world believes it’s true, offer the reality that everyone believes it to be true as evidence it is.
The only relevant evidence that would allow us to determine whether the outcome of the election was crooked or fair is provided by the sole methodologically rigorous poll conducted prior to the election. It was sponsored by the international arm of the U.S. Republican Party, the International Republican Institute, hardly a booster of Ahmadinejad. Carried out three weeks prior to the election, the poll “showed Ahmadinejad leading by a more than 2 to 1 margin – greater than his actual apparent margin of victory”. [4] The pollsters, Ken Ballen and Patrick Doherty, concluded that “Ahmadinejad is who Iranians want.”
The process of creating commonly held beliefs that have no evidentiary basis, and doing so through assertion and repetition, is not new. To justify an illegal war on Yugoslavia, Western politicians, and the Western media in train, asserted without evidence that a genocide was in progress in Kosovo in 1999. Tens of thousands of corpses were expected to be found littering the “killing fields” of the then-Serb province. But when forensic investigators were dispatched to Kosovo after the war to document the genocide, the bodies never turned up. By frequently repeating unsubstantiated claims, people were led to believe that systematic killings on a mass scale were being carried out, and that the West had a moral obligation to intervene. The public was duped.
Similarly, Western politicians “sexed up” intelligence on weapons of mass destruction to justify the 2003 invasion of Iraq. The Western media went along, acknowledging only after public support for the war had been engineered by the media’s propagation of U.S. and British government lies, that it got it wrong. The politicians said they had been misled by the C.I.A. The C.I.A said it was pressured by the politicians. All that mattered was that many people believed that Saddam Hussein was hiding banned weapons. When none were found, a new pretext for dominating Iraq militarily was trotted out, and acceptance of the pretext was aided by the repetition of more unsubstantiated assertions.
The bootstrap theory of propaganda is at work again, this time in connection with Iran.
1. William J. Broad and David E. Sanger, “Report says Iran has data to make a nuclear bomb,” The New York Times, October 4, 2009.
2. Greg Miller, “US now sees Iran as pursuing nuclear bombs,” The Los Angeles Times, February 12, 2009.
3. William J. Cole, “UN nuclear watchdog says Iran threat hyped,” The Boston Globe, September 2, 2009.
4. Ken Ballen and Patrick Doherty, “Ahmadinejad is who Iranians want,” The Guardian (UK), June 15, 2009.
Dracula censures mosquito for feasting on human blood
Despite revelations of complicity in major human rights abuses, Canada takes lead role in U.N. rebuke of Iran.
By Stephen Gowans
Canada sponsored on November 20 a U.N. General Assembly Resolution censuring Iran for human rights abuses, only three days after a senior Canadian diplomat testified before a Canadian House of Commons committee that the Canadian military had been complicit in the torture of Afghans.
Richard Colvin, who served 17 months in Afghanistan, testified that Afghans who were detained by Canadian soldiers were tortured after they were turned over to Afghan authorities. Colvin says that when he raised the matter with higher authorities, he was ignored and later told to remain silent.
In his testimony, Colvin asked Canadian members of parliament, “If we are complicit in the torture of Afghans in Kandahar, how can we credibly promote human rights in Tehran or Beijing?” [1]
As early as May 2006, Colvin informed Lieutenant-General Michel Gauthier, then-commander of Canadian Expeditionary Force Command, that he had reason to believe ”the likelihood is that all the Afghans we handed over were tortured.” [2]
Despite repeated attempts to red-flag his concerns to higher authorities, Colvin was ignored. Then in April 2007, he received “written messages from the senior Canadian government co-ordinator for Afghanistan to the effect that (he) should be quiet and do what (he) was told.” [3]
Canada had defended its transfer policy, arguing that if detainees were tortured, the Red Cross would let Canadian military officials know. But Colvin testified that when the Red Cross tried to alert the Canadian military, the “Canadian Forces in Kandahar wouldn’t even take their phone calls.” [4]
After Colvin raised the alarm, it took more than a year for Ottawa to negotiate a new transfer agreement. Under the new agreement, Canadian officials were able to visit detainees to determine whether they were being tortured. An Afghan human rights organization that receives funding from the Canadian government, reported this year that 98 percent of detainees are tortured, an indication that torture continues, despite the amended transfer agreement. [5]
While Colvin condemned Canada’s complicity in torture on the grounds that it is “a very serious violation of international and Canadian law” and is “a war crime,” [6] the Canadian media have largely overlooked the principal wrong, focusing instead on how the revelation could strengthen the insurgency and complicate efforts to win the hearts and minds of Afghans. That Canada’s military has committed a serious violation of international law – a war crime — is barely acknowledged.
Colvin is partly to blame for deflecting attention from the principal crime to tactical considerations. In his testimony, he offered four reasons Canadians ought to care about Afghan detainees being tortured. (That he felt he had to offer any reason, is shocking.) Violating Canadian and international law ranked only second. What concerned Colvin more – and what the Canadian media have picked up on as the principal crime – is that most of the detainees were “innocent,” that is, weren’t insurgents. In other words, implicit in much of the media coverage, and Colvin’s testimony, is the idea that the real scandal isn’t that detainees were tortured, but that the wrong people were tortured, and that this strengthens the insurgency by turning large numbers of Afghans, who would have otherwise acquiesced to the occupation, against it. Based on the additional concern Colvin has shown for the “farmers, truck drivers, tailors, peasants” and “random human beings in the wrong place at the wrong time; young men in their fields and villages who were completely innocent but were nevertheless rounded up,” [7] torturing those who resist a foreign military occupation isn’t the problem; it’s the torture of “innocents” that is troubling, and it’s troubling because it stirs up the natives. Canadian soldiers, then, are being criticized, not, as they should be, for committing a war crime, but for acting in a way that undermines the mission’s goal of pacifying the Afghan population.
The use of the word “innocents” to describe those who aren’t resisting occupation, and by implication, “guilty” for those who are, is a criminalization of a behavior that, while inconvenient to the goals of the Canadian military in helping to enforce U.S. domination of Afghanistan, is hardly criminal at all. It is what some part of a population will reliably do, and has every right to do, when confronted by an uninvited foreign military presence. Complicity in the torture of insurgents is every bit as much a crime as complicity in the torture of non-insurgents.
As other Western countries, Canada presents itself as having the moral authority to call non-Western nations to account for human rights abuses. Its condemnations, however, are selective, directed exclusively at countries that resist Western domination, while passing over those that are firmly within the orbit of U.S. imperialism. Canada is prepared to censure Iran, Zimbabwe and China, but not Haiti (where it acts as part of a foreign occupation force), Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Israel and countries of North Africa, despite regular and flagrant human rights violations in these countries. It is difficult to understand how a country that participates in the military occupation of Afghanistan for reasons that are contrived and indefensible, joined an unprovoked and illegal air war against Yugoslavia in 1999, is complicit in torture, and has treated its aboriginal people abominably, has the moral authority to lecture anyone on human rights.
By contrast, Iran, the object of Canada’s censure, hasn’t attacked any country in the modern era, doesn’t act as a janissary to an imperialist bully, and isn’t complicit in torture as an occupying force in foreign territory.
Were Canada genuinely interested in promoting human rights it would have long ago sponsored U.N. General Assembly resolutions to censure the United States for its notorious abuses of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, Abu Ghraib in Iraq, and at the largest U.S. detention facility in Afghanistan, Bagram air base, where US “military personnel who know Bagram and the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, describe the Afghan site as tougher and more Spartan” and where “many are still held communally in big cages.” [8] But, then, the abuse of prisoners carried out in the service of U.S. foreign policy goals doesn’t seem to rank high on Canada’s list of human rights violations.
Canadian officials defend their country’s military presence in Afghanistan as necessary to back up the “democratic” government of Hamid Karzai, and yet Karzai’s government routinely tortures prisoners, and without the slightest censure by Canada in international forums. Karzai recently won a second term as president in an election marred by fraud engineered in part by his brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, a C.I.A. operative who is “a suspected player in the country’s booming illegal opium trade.” [9] While vote fraud in the last presidential election in Iran is only alleged, and without much supporting evidence, the fraudulent nature of the last Afghan presidential election is nowhere in dispute. [10] The Afghan president should be denounced as a dictator, (and would be, were he not a puppet of the United States and therefore immune from the demonizing criticism the Western media and Western governments dole out to leaders of countries that resist U.S. control and domination.) And yet, far from censuring the Afghan government for its human rights abuses and vote fraud, Canada helps prop up the country’s deeply unpopular government through an illegitimate military presence.
Despite calls in parliament for an inquiry into Colvin’s allegations, the Canadian government refuses to pursue the matter publicly, preferring instead to engage in attempts to discredit Colvin as unreliable, an effort undermined by its having seen fit to appoint him to a senior diplomatic post in Washington. Ottawa insists there is no evidence that Afghan officials tortured detainees turned over by Canadian soldiers. But the Afghanistan Human Rights Commission, which receives substantial funding from the Canadian government, reported this year that a survey it conducted of detention center inmates found that 98 percent had been tortured. [11]
On top of complicity in the torture of the people of a country it is guilty of participating in an indefenesible military occupation of, the Canadian government is guilty of torturing the truth, in the service of the fiction that it has the moral authority to rebuke other countries for their human rights abuses. We in the West, and particularly those of us in Canada, ought to be more concerned about the behavior of the Canadian government and its military, than of the Iranian government, whose censurable activities (related to political survival in the face of an overthrow movement Western powers have had a hand in organizing [12]) are by far the lesser crimes, if indeed, they can even be called crimes.
Canada, then, is waging an unjust war, within which, the evidence suggests, it has committed a war crime. On top of this, it has been silent on the crimes and human rights abuses of its Western allies and non-Western countries that operate, as it does, under the umbrella of U.S. imperialism.
The only way Canada can begin to establish moral authority is to withdraw from Afghanistan, offer restitution to the Afghans it has been complicit in the torture of, and hold the United States, Britain, Israel and other allies to account for their crimes and human rights abuses. And that’s just for starters. It also needs to refrain from sponsoring movements to overthrow governments, such as Iran’s, that pursue an independent course outside the domination of other countries. (Tehran’s arrest of political activists who have sought, with Western assistance and encouragement, to overthrow the Ahmadinejad government, would never have happened had Canada and other Western countries not interfered in Iran’s affairs by financing regime change NGOs.) Until Ottawa makes these amends, its censure of Tehran remains tantamount to Dracula rebuking a mosquito for feasting on human blood.
1. “Transcript: Explosive testimony on Afghan detainees,” The Canadian Press, November 18, 2009.
2. Steve Chase, “Canada complicit in torture of innocent Afghans, diplomat says,” The Globe and Mail (Toronto), 2009.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Steve Chase and Campbell Clark, “Many detainees were just farmers, Afghan official says,” The Globe and Mail (Toronto), November 20, 2009.
6. “Transcript: Explosive testimony on Afghan detainees,” The Canadian Press, November 18, 2009.
7. Ibid.
8. Eric Schmitt, “Pentagon seeks prison overhaul in Afghanistan,” The New York Times, July 20. 2009.
9. Dexter Filkins, Mark Mazzetti and James Risen, “Brother of Afghan leader is said to be on C.I.A payroll,” The New York Times, October 28, 2009.
10. Stephen Gowans, “When election fraud is met by congratulations,” What’s Left, November 3, 2009. https://gowans.wordpress.com/2009/11/03/when-electoral-fraud-is-met-by-congratulations/
11. Steve Chase and Campbell Clark, “Many detainees were just farmers, Afghan official says,” The Globe and Mail (Toronto), November 20, 2009.
12. Stephen Gowans, “The role and aims of US democracy promotion in the attempted color revolution in Iran,” What’s Left, July 4, 2009. https://gowans.wordpress.com/2009/07/04/the-role-and-aims-of-us-democracy-promotion-in-the-attempted-color-revolution-in-iran/
Iran’s acknowledged nuclear fuel plant and Israel’s secret nuclear weapons plant
By Stephen Gowans
Western press accounts of the existence of an unfinished Iranian nuclear fuel plant near Qum have subtly changed, drawing closer to a view more compatible with Washington’s aim of marshalling support for stepped up sanctions against Iran.
While early press reports acknowledged that Iran had on Monday, September 22 notified the International Atomic Energy Agency of the plant’s existence [1] (that is, days before the Obama administration drew attention to it) stories in major dailies now omit any mention of the Iranian notification. Instead, the reporting on the issue now creates the impression that the existence of the facility was unknown outside of Iran until US officials revealed it on Friday, September 26. For example, New York Times reporters David E. Sanger and William J. Broad write of “the revelation Friday of the secret facility at a military base near the holy city of Qum.” [2] The facility could hardly be secret, since it existence had been revealed by Iran itself five days earlier.
U.S. media have also omitted any mention of a secret nuclear weapons plant in another West Asian country, Israel.
Israel’s secret nuclear weapons plant, long in existence, is located in the Negev desert near Dimona. [3] I.A.E.A inspectors have never visited it and never will unless Israel becomes a signatory to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, a treaty Iran has voluntarily submitted to. (While the United States is a nominal signatory, it acts as if it’s not bound by the treaty’s provisions, and therefore is effectively no more a member than Israel is.)
Neither are Israel and the United States members of the International Criminal Court (sharing non-membership with Russia and China.) I.C.C. non-membership, however, doesn’t mean the court can’t pursue prosecutions in connection with non-member states. It can, if ordered to by the U.N. Security Council (i.e., by the United States, Russia and China, the same countries that won’t join the court themselves.) The Security Council ordered the I.C.C. to investigate crimes committed in connection with fighting in Darfur. That’s why the president of Sudan is wanted by the I.C.C., even though Sudan isn’t a member of the court. Washington’s de jure and de facto power to veto the Security Council (the overwhelming strength of the U.S. military pretty much allows the United States to operate by its own rules) are ultimately the reasons why the former president of the United States, George W. Bush, isn’t wanted by the court and not because Bush is free of the taint of massive war crimes. It only matters that you commit crimes if you aren’t the United States or don’t have its backing. And even then not having Washington’s backing is frequently all that matters. After all, Iraq was attacked, invaded, and occupied even though it wasn’t concealing the banned weapons Washington said it was failing to come clean on.
When the U.N. Human Rights Commission’s fact-finding mission on war crimes committed in Gaza from December 2008 to January 2009 said Israel should carry out serious, independent investigations, and if it didn’t, the Security Council should refer the matter to the I.C.C., [4] Israel immediately rejected the demand. Not widely reported was that the United States said there was no chance it would allow the Security Council to refer the matter to the I.C.C., arguing the U.N. report was “unbalanced.” U.S. officials noted that 85 percent of the commission’s report detailed Israeli war crimes, and only 15 percent those committed by Hamas. [5] But the “imbalance” reflected the imbalance in the struggle, with Israel using its formidable war machine to cause considerable civilian death, injury and destruction, while Hamas fired crude, home-made rockets whose effect was hardly registered. If the report was mostly about Israeli war crimes, it was because Israel committed most the war crimes.
Owing to the protection it receives from Washington, Israel won’t be answering to the I.C.C., and nor will it be sanctioned for failing to sign up to the non-proliferation treaty or for having a secret nuclear weapons program. These penalties are solely reserved for countries that are resisting U.S. domination, not facilitating its extension, the role Israel plays as U.S. attack dog in West Asia and northern Africa.
Israel already has an attack on another country’s nuclear facilities under its belt (the 1981 bombing of Iraq’s Osirak reactor.) Over the last year it has issued a series of military threats against Iran’s civilian nuclear facilities. That is, a nuclear weapons state has repeatedly threatened a non-nuclear weapons state. And yet Iran not Israel is presented in the Western media as dangerous and aggressive.
Israel has always relied on the deception that it is under existential threat to justify its numerous aggressions, when always it has had at its command military force in excess of that its opponents can marshal. This is true even going back to its founding in 1948, when it faced off against ragtag Arab volunteers, and then a disorganized agglomeration of Arab armies, while claiming it was defending itself against a second holocaust.
While it’s true that the government of Iran is hostile to the Zionist occupation of Palestine, Iran poses no serious military threat to Israel, and wouldn’t, even if it were capable of quickly producing nuclear weapons. The best it could do is present a threat of self-defense. It would take years for Iran to match Israel’s current nuclear arsenal, and in the intervening period, Israel could vastly expand its own. Plus, Israel, already possessing a formidable military – it receives $3 billion in U.S. military aid every year — is backed by history’s most formidable military power, the United States. Iran, even with the rudimentary arsenal of nuclear weapons it may have the capability (though perhaps never the intention) of producing at some point, is no match for Israel – and this its leaders know well. The country, remarked Uzi Rubin, a private defense consultant who ran Israel’s missile shield program in the 1990s, “is radical, but radical does not mean irrational. They want to change the world, not commit suicide.” [6]
1. David E. Sanger, “U.S. to accuse Iran of having secret nuclear fuel facility,” The New York Times, September 26, 2009.
2. See for example David E. Sanger and William J. Broad, “U.S. to demand inspection of new Iran plan ‘within weeks’”, The New York Times, September 27, 2009.
3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negev_Nuclear_Research_Center
4. Neil MacFarquhar, “Inquiry finds Gaza war crimes from both sides,” The New York Times, September 16, 2009.
5. Colum Lynch, “U.S. faces doubts about leadership on human rights,” The Washington Post, September 22, 2009.
6. Howard Schneider, “Israel finds strength in its missile defenses,” The Washington Post, September 19, 2009.
Iran’s not so secret, ‘secret’ fuel plant
By Stephen Gowans
The construction of a uranium enrichment facility by Iran outside of Qum, which Tehran notified the International Atomic Energy Agency of days ago, has been seized upon dishonestly by Washington “as a chance to…persuade other countries to support the case for stronger sanctions” against Iran. [1]
Washington is seeking an international sanctions regime to pressure Iran into abandoning its enrichment of uranium. So far Washington has had little success in marshalling the support of Russia and China, whose cooperation is needed for a United Nations Security Council resolution to escalate sanctions against the Islamic republic.
The United States and the European Union want Iran to import nuclear fuel for its power plants, rather than enrich its abundant supplies of domestic uranium itself. While Iran insists its fuel program is for civilian use, the means to enrich uranium at home provides Tehran with a nuclear weapons capability. It’s a short step from enriching uranium for use in commercial reactors to enriching it to a higher grade for use in nuclear weapons.
There are, then, two reasons why Washington wants to force Tehran to abandon its enrichment program:
A. The potential to quickly develop nuclear weapons would equip Tehran with the means to deter Washington and its allies from using the threat of military force to coerce the country into surrendering its independence.
B. Were Tehran forced to look abroad for sources of nuclear fuel, its independence would be sharply limited by Washington’s ability to cut off its nuclear fuel supply.
To advance its aims of securing backing for an international sanctions regime, Washington has accused Iran of secretly building, with the intention of producing weapons grade uranium, an undisclosed facility in violation of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. There are a number of problems with this accusation.
1. There is no operating fuel plant. The enrichment facility is unfinished and is not expected to be operational until some time next year. [2]
2. It is not secret. Iran notified the IAEA that it was building the facility days before Washington contrived to use the acknowledgement as evidence of a secret nuclear weapons program. A September 26 David E. Sanger New York Times article ran under the headline “U.S. to accuse Iran of having secret nuclear fuel facility,” inviting the question, how can a nuclear fuel facility be secret, if its existence is already publicly acknowledged? The headline should have read, “U.S. to accuse Iran of having a nuclear fuel facility that was unacknowledged before it was acknowledged.” That The New York Times has taken a tautology and turned it into an apparently damning revelation points to the ever compliant U.S. media’s role as one of equivocation in the service of marshalling support for U.S. foreign policy positions.
3. Under the terms of Iran’s agreement with the IAEA, Tehran is required to report when nuclear material is introduced into a facility, not when construction of the facility begins. [3] Iran reiterated this point with the nuclear agency in March 2007 [4]. When centrifuges (which are used to process nuclear fuel) began to be moved into the unfinished plant, Iran let the IAEA know of the facility’s existence, in accordance with its agreement.
4. Lost amid Washington’s spin is the reality that “even United States intelligence officials acknowledge that there is no evidence that Iran has taken the final step toward creating a bomb.” [5] And yet the Obama administration is treating Iran’s public disclosure of the existence of the unfinished fuel plant as evidence of a secret weapons program. While news reports now suggest that U.S. intelligence “had been tracking the covert project for years” [6] and that the facility is too small to be used for enriching uranium to commercial grade, only two weeks ago The New York Times reported that “new intelligence reports delivered to the White House say that the country has deliberately stopped short of the critical last steps to make a bomb.” [7] If Iran has deliberately stopped short, then the facility could hardly be intended to produce bomb fuel. Isn’t the construction of such a facility a step in making a bomb?
Not so hidden in Washington’s accusation is a threat of war. United States President Barack Obama announced that “the alternative to (the Iranian’s) giving up their program…is to ‘continue down a path that is going to lead to confrontation.’” [8] Obama added that the ‘secret’ (though publicly acknowledged) Iranian plant “represents a direct challenge to the basic foundation of the nonproliferation regime.” [9] This is nonsense, and it is so for all the reasons cited above. But it’s also nonsense for another reason: the real direct challenge to the basic foundation of the nonproliferation regime is the United States itself. It tolerates the nuclear arsenals of its allies — not being particularly vexed by proliferation to Israel, India and Pakistan — while threatening non-allies militarily, and thereby providing them with an incentive to acquire nuclear weapons as a means of self-defense.
The true foundation of the nonproliferation treaty is a quid pro quo, whereby nuclear weapons states agree to give up their weapons while non-nuclear states agree not to acquire them. Part of the agreement is that non-nuclear states are to have access to nuclear energy for civilian use, as long as they abide by the provisions of the nonproliferation treaty. Iran has abided by the agreement, though for Washington and the EU, it’s not enough. Iran is expected to renounce its right to an independent civilian nuclear power industry, to prevent it from acquiring the capability of developing nuclear weapons, should it ever need to counter U.S. or Israeli military (and possibly nuclear) blackmail. It also forces Iran into a dependence on the West for nuclear fuel. The selective enforcement of the non-proliferation treaty in the interests of U.S. foreign policy represents the real challenge to the nonproliferation regime.
1. Helene Cooper and Mark Mazzetti, “Cryptic Iranian note ignited an urgent nuclear strategy debate,” The New York Times, September 26, 2009.
2. David E. Sanger, “U.S. to accuse Iran of having secret nuclear fuel facility,” The New York Times, September 26, 2009.
3. Neil MacFarquhar, “Iran’s leader mocks West’s accusations,” The New York Times, September 26, 2009.
4. “Tehran’s nuclear ambitions: A timeline,” The Washington Post, September 26, 2009.
5. Cooper and Mazzetti.
6. Sanger, “U.S. to accuse Iran…”
7. David E. Sanger, “US says Iran could expedite nuclear bomb,” The New York Times, September 10, 2009.
8. David E. Sanger and William J. Broad, “U.S. allies warn Iran over nuclear deception,” The New York Times, September 26, 2009.
9. Ibid.
United4Iran: Financial and Corporate Interests Mobilize the Left
By Stephen Gowans
United4Iran, which describes itself as “a non-partisan collaborative of individuals and human rights organizations” whose “aim is to support the Iranian people’s human rights,” has organized a Global Day of Action for July 25.
People are invited to “join this unprecedented wave of global citizen activism in solidarity with the people of Iran,” to be held in more than 105 cities around the world.”
United4Iran is sponsored by a number of organizations that receive funding from philanthropic foundations dominated by corporate interests and by the US National Endowment for Democracy, an organization established by the US government to do overtly what the CIA used to do covertly (i.e., funnel money to groups and organization working, often unknowingly, toward US foreign policy goals.)
A global day of action in 105 cities requires organizing and publicity that depends critically on generous funding — funding which corporations, wealthy individuals and the governments they dominate are all too happy to provide if it serves their interests.
While there will be a global day of action on behalf of the people of Iran, it’s a pretty good bet that none of the following are in the works: large-scale, global actions to show solidarity with the people of Honduras, or of Kyrgyzstan, where the incumbent president, who has been accused of political repression, was re-elected amid charges of fraud, or of Saudi Arabia, despite Amnesty International, one of the sponsors of this week-end’s action, accusing the Saudi authorities of using torture to extract confessions and of using their powerful international clout to get away with it.
The Honduras coup is tacitly supported by Washington; Kyrgyzstan is home to an important US military base; and Saudi Arabia is an oil rich country that works cooperatively with US oil companies and military interests.
There are dozens of countries whose people we ought to be showing solidarity with, but predictably, it is only countries that are on Uncle Sam’s regime change hit list that merit generously funded actions.
Indeed, the only global day of action sponsored by Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, Reporters without Borders, and any other organization which receives funding from Western governments and corporate philanthropic foundations, will be those aimed at countries that are charting an independent course and offer too few investment and export opportunities to Wall Street and corporate America.
If and when these same countries are brought under US domination, all funding for demonstrations of solidarity with the people of these countries will dry up, along with concern for their plight. Indeed, no one will have the slightest clue as to the welfare of the people they once showed such keen solidarity with.
No matter; the attention of those who zealously show their solidarity with the people of Iran (which people? the peasants and working class who supported Ahmadinejad, or the affluent, who were educated in tony universities in the West, who supported Mousavi?) will soon enough focus their attention on the people of another US State Department target country, and new global days of actions will be held, to pave the way for the overthrow, through destabilization, color revolution or military intervention, of that country’s government.
And so it goes. The media, dominated by corporate and financial interests, and the corporate philanthropists who fund left and human rights groups, set the agenda which the left, with no sophisticated understanding of who wields power and how and to what end, blindly follows. Imperialism is so much easier when the one sector that ought to be against it, can so readily be manipulated into acting on its behalf.
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