US beefs up dossier

George W Bush’s explanation of his volte-face over a proposed Iran-India gas pipeline project appeared slightly disingenuous. ‘Our beef with Iran is not the pipeline,” the United States president said recently after withdrawing previous objections and giving the go-ahead to Washington’s new friends in Delhi. ‘Our beef with Iran is the fact that they want to develop a nuclear weapon.”

But US fears about Iranian nukes are hardly the whole story. Washington is compiling a dossier of grievances against Tehran similar in scope and seriousness to the pre-war charge-sheet against Iraq. Other complaints include Iranian meddling in Iraq, support for Hamas in Palestine and Hizbullah in Lebanon, and human rights abuses.

Bush regularly urges Iranians to seize the ‘freedom they seek and deserve”. In Tehran’s ministries, that sounds like a call for regime change. He has ignored past Iranian offers of talks and tightened US economic sanctions.

Official Washington’s quickening drumbeat of hostility is beginning to recall political offensives against Libya’s Moammar Gadaffi, Panama’s Manuel Noriega and Saddam Hussein, which all ended in violence. Rightwing American media are urging action, deeming Iran ‘an intolerable threat” that is the ‘central crisis of the Bush presidency”.

As was the case with Iraq, administration tub-thumping is influencing public opinion — notwithstanding subsequent debunking of many of its Iraq claims. Polls suggest many Americans are now convinced Iran is the new public enemy No 1. Forty-seven percent told Zogby International they favoured military action to halt its nuclear activities.

While hopes of avoiding confrontation are not yet dead, warnings by John Bolton, the US ambassador to the United Nations, that Iran could face ‘painful consequences” over its nuclear activities were a reminder of Bush’s repeated refusals to eschew armed force. Iranian officials believe the US is determined to undermine and if possible overthrow Iran’s theocracy and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s government — regardless of whether a nuclear compromise is reached. That helps explain Tehran’s hardline negotiating stance.

They cite a US decision to spend $75-million on funding potential Iranian opposition forces, including NGOs, trade unions and human rights groups, and local language propaganda broadcasts — tactics pioneered in Serbia, Georgia and Ukraine. Iran accuses the US of stirring discontent among its Kurdish, Baluch and Azeri minorities, suspicions fed by a US marine corps investigation to gauge the strength of opposition to the central government among non-Persian groups. Tehran also believes the US is using the People’s Mujahideen, an anti-regime group once backed by Hussein and blamed for many terrorist attacks, for intelligence-gathering and destabilisation.

It recently demanded that British troops quit Basra after linking them to unrest among Arab Iranians in Khuzestan, abutting south-east Iraq. Britain has rejected the claims.

The ‘EU three” — Britain, France and Germany — remain focused on the nuclear controversy rather than on broader Iran-related issues. A senior British official said they would, if necessary, support ‘graduated” pressure on Iran via the UN Security Council, which meets in New York next week, ‘possibly leading to trade restrictions or more likely, travel and financial sanctions on individuals”. But the official said the Europeans ‘do not have a clear view of what we will do at a later stage” should Iran refuse to bend.

This lack of an agreed strategy may encourage US hawks, egged on by Israel, to seize the initiative — even at the risk of an Iraq-style split with Europe. They have been biding their time for three years. Now they want action. For starters, Bolton is expected to seek a 30-day UN deadline for Iran to back down or face counter-measures.

And on Wednesday the American ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency, Greg Schulte, called for ‘special inspections” by the UN nuclear teams in Iran, in effect giving them carte blanche in their detective work. The mechanism has been used only once before, unsuccessfully, in North Korea 13 years ago.

Resorting to special inspections would be ‘much more intrusive” than the IAEA’s ongoing inspections in Iran, said a diplomat. But was up to the IAEA to decide. —