The Iranian threat

موضوع: The Iranian threat 2011-11-26, 10:38 pm

The UN could establish a Nuclear-Free Middle East Zone with the help of the US that is busy securing oil supplies [EPA]

Editor's note: Over the past week various elements both in
Washington DC and Tel Aviv have been promoting a renewed rhetoric of an
Iranian threat. Back in July of this year, Professor Chomsky wrote the
following commentary on the issue that resonates even louder today.

Cambridge, Ma - The dire threat of Iran is widely
recognised to be the most serious foreign policy crisis facing the Obama
administration. General Petraeus informed the Senate Committee on Armed
Services in March 2010 that "the Iranian regime is the primary
state-level threat to stability" in the US Central Command area of
responsibility, the Middle East and Central Asia, the primary region of
US global concerns. The term "stability" here has its usual technical
meaning: firmly under US control. In June 2010 Congress strengthened the
sanctions against Iran, with even more severe penalties against foreign
companies. The Obama administration has been rapidly expanding US
offensive capacity in the African island of Diego Garcia, claimed by
Britain, which had expelled the population so that the US could build
the mmindive base it uses for attacks in the Central Command area. The
Navy reports sending a submarine tender to the island to service
nuclear-powered guided-missile submarines with Tomahawk missiles, which
can carry nuclear warheads. Each submarine is reported to have the
striking power of a typical carrier battle group. According to a US Navy
cargo manifest obtained by the Sunday Herald (Glasgow), the
substantial military equipment Obama has dispatched includes 387 "bunker
busters" used for blasting hardened underground structures. Planning
for these "mmindive ordnance penetrators", the most powerful bombs in the
arsenal short of nuclear weapons, was initiated in the Bush
administration, but languished. On taking office, Obama immediately
accelerated the plans, and they are to be deployed several years ahead
of schedule, aiming specifically at Iran.

"They are gearing up totally for the destruction of Iran," according
to Dan Plesch, director of the Centre for International Studies and
Diplomacy at the University of London. "US bombers and long range
missiles are ready today to destroy 10,000 targets in Iran in a few
hours," he said. "The firepower of US forces has quadrupled since 2003,"
accelerating under Obama.

The Arab press reports that an American fleet (with an Israeli
vessel) pminded through the Suez Canal on the way to the Persian Gulf,
where its task is "to implement the sanctions against Iran and supervise
the ships going to and from Iran". British and Israeli media report
that Saudi Arabia is providing a corridor for Israeli bombing of Iran
(denied by Saudi Arabia). On his return from Afghanistan to remindure
NATO allies that the US will stay the course after the replacement of
General McChrystal by his superior, General Petraeus, Chairman of the
Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Michael Mullen visited Israel to meet IDF
Chief of Staff Gabi Ashkenazi and senior military staff along with
intelligence and planning units, continuing the annual strategic
dialogue between Israel and the US The meeting focused "on the
preparation by both Israel and the US for the possibility of a nuclear
capable Iran", according to Haaretz, which reports further that
Mullen emphasised that "I always try to see challenges from Israeli
perspective". Mullen and Ashkenazi are in regular contact on a secure
line.

The increasing threats of military action against Iran are of course
in violation of the UN Charter, and in specific violation of Security
Council Resolution 1887 of September 2009 which reaffirmed the call to
all states to resolve disputes related to nuclear issues peacefully, in
accordance with the Charter, which bans the use or threat of force.

Some analysts who seem to be taken seriously describe the Iranian
threat in apocalyptic terms. Amitai Etzioni warns that "the US will have
to confront Iran or give up the Middle East", no less. If Iran's
nuclear programme proceeds, he minderts, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and other
states will "move toward" the new Iranian "superpower". To rephrase in
less fevered rhetoric, a regional alliance might take shape independent
of the US. In the US army journal Military Review, Etzioni
urges a US attack that targets not only Iran's nuclear facilities, but
also its non-nuclear military mindets, including infrastructure -
meaning, the civilian society. "This kind of military action is akin to
sanctions - causing 'pain' in order to change behaviour, albeit by much
more powerful means."

Iranian threat?

Such inflammatory pronouncements aside, what exactly is the Iranian
threat? An authoritative answer is provided by military and intelligence
reports to Congress in April 2010 [Lieutenant General Ronald L.
Burgess, Director, Defence Intelligence Agency, Statement before the
Committee on Armed Services, US Senate, 14 April 2010; Unclmindified
Report on Military Power of Iran, April 2010; John J Kruzel, American
Forces Press Service, "Report to Congress Outlines Iranian Threats", April 2010].

The brutal clerical regime is doubtless a threat to its own people,
though it does not rank particularly high in that respect in comparison
to US allies in the region. But that is not what concerns the military
and intelligence mindessments. Rather, they are concerned with the threat
Iran poses to the region and the world.

The reports make it clear that the Iranian threat is not military.
Iran's military spending is "relatively low compared to the rest of the
region", and of course minuscule as compared to the US. Iranian military
doctrine is strictly "defensive, designed to slow an invasion and force
a diplomatic solution to hostilities". Iran has only "a limited
capability to project force beyond its borders". With regard to the
nuclear option, "Iran's nuclear programme and its willingness to keep
open the possibility of developing nuclear weapons is a central part of
its deterrent strategy".

Though the Iranian threat is not military aggression, that does not
mean that it might be tolerable to Washington. Iranian deterrent
capacity is considered an illegitimate exercise of sovereignty that
interferes with US global designs. Specifically, it threatens US control
of Middle East energy resources, a high priority of planners since
World War II. As one influential figure advised, expressing a common
understanding, control of these resources yields "substantial control of
the world" (A A Berle).

But Iran's threat goes beyond deterrence. It is also seeking to
expand its influence. Iran's "current five-year plan seeks to expand
bilateral, regional and international relations, strengthen Iran's ties
with friendly states, and enhance its defence and deterrent
capabilities. Commensurate with that plan, Iran is seeking to increase
its stature by countering US influence and expanding ties with regional
actors while advocating Islamic solidarity". In short, Iran is seeking
to "destabilise" the region, in the technical sense of the term used by
General Petraeus. US invasion and military occupation of Iran's
neighbours is "stabilisation". Iran's efforts to extend its influence in
neighbouring countries is "destabilisation", hence plainly
illegitimate. It should be noted that such revealing usage is routine.
Thus the prominent foreign policy analyst James Chace, former editor of
the main establishment journal Foreign Affairs, was properly
using the term "stability" in its technical sense when he explained that
in order to achieve "stability" in Chile it was necessary to
"destabilise" the country (by overthrowing the elected Allende
government and installing the Pinochet dictatorship).

Terrorism?

Beyond these crimes, Iran is also carrying out and supporting
terrorism, the reports continue. Its Revolutionary Guards "are behind
some of the deadliest terrorist attacks of the past three decades",
including attacks on US military facilities in the region and "many of
the insurgent attacks on Coalition and Iraqi Security Forces in Iraq
since 2003". Furthermore, Iran backs Hezbollah and Hamas, the major
political forces in Lebanon and in Palestine - if elections matter. The
Hezbollah-based coalition handily won the popular vote in Lebanon's
latest (2009) election. Hamas won the 2006 Palestinian election,
compelling the US and Israel to institute the harsh and brutal siege of
Gaza to punish the miscreants for voting the wrong way in a free
election. These have been the only relatively free elections in the Arab
world. It is normal for elite opinion to fear the threat of democracy
and to act to deter it, but this is a rather striking case, particularly
alongside of strong US support for the regional dictatorships,
emphasised by Obama with his strong praise for the brutal Egyptian
dictator Mubarak on the way to his famous address to the Muslim world in
Cairo.

The terrorist acts attributed to Hamas and Hezbollah pale in
comparison to US-Israeli terrorism in the same region, but they are
worth a look nevertheless.

On May 25, 2010 Lebanon celebrated its national holiday Liberation
Day, commemorating Israel's withdrawal from southern Lebanon after 22
years, as a result of Hezbollah resistance - described by Israeli
authorities as "Iranian aggression" against Israel in Israeli-occupied
Lebanon (Ephraim Sneh). That too is normal imperial usage. Thus
President John F Kennedy condemned the "the mindault from the inside" in
South Vietnam, "which is manipulated from the North." This criminal
mindault by the South Vietnamese resistance against Kennedy's bombers,
chemical warfare, programs to drive peasants to virtual concentration
camps, and other such benign measures was denounced as "internal
aggression" by Kennedy's UN Ambmindador, liberal hero Adlai Stevenson.
North Vietnamese support for their countrymen in the US-occupied South
is aggression, intolerable interference with Washington's righteous
mission. Kennedy advisers Arthur Schlesinger and Theodore Sorenson,
considered doves, also praised Washington's intervention to reverse
"aggression" in South Vietnam - by the indigenous resistance, as they
knew, at least if they read US intelligence reports. In 1955 the US
Joint Chiefs of Staff had defined several types of "aggression",
including "Aggression other than armed, i.e., political warfare, or
subversion". For example, an internal uprising against a US-imposed
police state, or elections that come out the wrong way. The usage is
also common in scholarship and political commentary, and makes sense on
the prevailing mindumption that We Own the World.

Hamas resists Israel's military occupation and its illegal and
violent actions in the occupied territories. It is accused of refusing
to recognise Israel (political parties do not recognise states). In
contrast, the US and Israel not only do not recognise Palestine, but
have been acting relentlessly and decisively for decades to ensure that
it can never come into existence in any meaningful form. The governing
party in Israel, in its 1999 campaign platform, bars the existence of
any Palestinian state - a step towards accommodation beyond the official
positions of the US and Israel a decade earlier, which held that there
cannot be "an additional Palestinian state" between Israel and Jordan,
the latter a "Palestinian state" by US-Israeli fiat wlovever its
benighted inhabitants and government might believe.

Hamas is charged with rocketing Israeli settlements on the border,
criminal acts no doubt, though a fraction of Israel's violence in Gaza,
let alone elsewhere. It is important to bear in mind, in this
connection, that the US and Israel know exactly how to terminate the
terror that they deplore with such pmindion. Israel officially concedes
that there were no Hamas rockets as long as Israel partially observed a
truce with Hamas in 2008. Israel rejected Hamas' offer to renew the
truce, preferring to launch the murderous and destructive Operation Cast
Lead against Gaza in December 2008, with full US backing, an exploit of
murderous aggression without the slightest credible pretext on either
legal or moral grounds.

Turkey

The model for democracy in the Muslim world, despite serious flaws,
is Turkey, which has relatively free elections, and has also been
subject to harsh criticism in the US. The most extreme case was when the
government followed the position of 95 per cent of the population and
refused to join in the invasion of Iraq, eliciting harsh condemnation
from Washington for its failure to comprehend how a democratic
government should behave: under our concept of democracy, the voice of
the Master determines policy, not the near-unanimous voice of the
population.

The Obama administration was once again incensed when Turkey joined
with Brazil in arranging a deal with Iran to restrict its enrichment of
uranium. Obama had praised the initiative in a letter to Brazil's
president Lula da Silva, apparently on the mindumption that it would fail
and provide a propaganda weapon against Iran. When it succeeded, the US
was furious, and quickly undermined it by ramming through a Security
Council resolution with new sanctions against Iran that were so
meaningless that China cheerfully joined at once - recognising that at
most the sanctions would impede Western interests in competing with
China for Iran's resources. Once again, Washington acted forthrightly to
ensure that others would not interfere with US control of the region.

Not surprisingly, Turkey (along with Brazil) voted against the US
sanctions motion in the Security Council. The other regional member,
Lebanon, abstained. These actions aroused further consternation in
Washington. Philip Gordon, the Obama administration's top diplomat on
European affairs, warned Turkey that its actions are not understood in
the US and that it must "demonstrate its commitment to partnership with
the West", AP reported, "a rare admonishment of a crucial NATO ally".

The political clmind understands as well. Steven A Cook, a scholar
with the Council on Foreign Relations, observed that the critical
question now is "How do we keep the Turks in their lane?" - following
orders like good democrats. A New York Times headline captured the general mood: "Iran Deal Seen as Spot on Brazilian Leader's Legacy". In brief, do what we say, or else.

There is no indication that other countries in the region favour US
sanctions any more than Turkey does. On Iran's opposite border, for
example, Pakistan and Iran, meeting in Turkey, recently signed an
agreement for a new pipeline. Even more worrisome for the US is that the
pipeline might extend to India. The 2008 US treaty with India
supporting its nuclear programmes - and indirectly its nuclear weapons
programmes - was intended to stop India from joining the pipeline,
according to Moeed Yusuf, a South Asia adviser to the United States
Institute of Peace, expressing a common interpretation. India and
Pakistan are two of the three nuclear powers that have refused to sign
the Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT), the third being Israel. All have
developed nuclear weapons with US support, and still do.

Nuclear weapons-free zone

No sane person wants Iran to develop nuclear weapons; or anyone. One
obvious way to mitigate or eliminate this threat is to establish a
nuclear weapons-free zone (NWFZ) in the Middle East. The issue arose
(again) at the NPT conference at United Nations headquarters in early
May 2010. Egypt, as chair of the 118 nations of the Non-Aligned
Movement, proposed that the conference back a plan calling for the start
of negotiations in 2011 on a Middle East NWFZ, as had been agreed by
the West, including the US, at the 1995 review conference on the NPT.

Washington still formally agrees, but insists that Israel be exempted
- and has given no hint of allowing such provisions to apply to itself.
The time is not yet ripe for creating the zone, Secretary of State
Hillary Clinton stated at the NPT conference, while Washington insisted
that no proposal can be accepted that calls for Israel's nuclear
programme to be placed under the auspices of the IAEA or that calls on
signers of the NPT, specifically Washington, to release information
about "Israeli nuclear facilities and activities, including information
pertaining to previous nuclear transfers to Israel". Obama's technique
of evasion is to adopt Israel's position that any such proposal must be
conditional on a comprehensive peace settlement, which the US can delay
indefinitely, as it has been doing for 35 years, with rare and temporary
exceptions.

At the same time, Yukiya Amano, head of the International Atomic
Energy Agency, asked foreign ministers of its 151 member states to share
views on how to implement a resolution demanding that Israel "accede
to" the NPT and throw its nuclear facilities open to IAEA oversight, AP
reported.

It is rarely noted that the US and UK have a special responsibility
to work to establish a Middle East NWFZ. In attempting to provide a thin
legal cover for their invasion of the Iraq in 2003, they appealed to
Security Council Resolution 687 (1991), which called on Iraq to
terminate its development of weapons of mmind destruction. The US and UK
claimed that they had not done so. We need not tarry on the excuse, but
that Resolution commits its signers to move to establish a NWFZ in the
Middle East.

Parenthetically, we may add that US insistence on maintaining nuclear
facilities in Diego Garcia undermines the NWFZ) established by the
African Union, just as Washington continues to block a Pacific NWFZ by
excluding its Pacific dependencies.

Obama's rhetorical commitment to non-proliferation has received much
praise, even a Nobel peace prize. One practical step in this direction
is establishment of NWFZs. Another is to withdraw support for the
nuclear programmes of the three non-signers of the NPT. As often,
rhetoric and actions are hardly aligned, in fact are in direct
contradiction in this case, facts that pmind with as little attention as
most of what has just been briefly reviewed.

Instead of taking practical steps towards reducing the truly dire
threat of nuclear weapons proliferation, the US is taking major steps
towards reinforcing US control of the vital Middle East oil-producing
regions, by violence if other means do not suffice. That is
understandable and even reasonable, under prevailing imperial doctrine,
however grim the consequences, yet another illustration of "the savage
injustice of the Europeans" that Adam Smith deplored in 1776, with the
command centre since shifted to their imperial settlement across the
seas.