The United States is planning what will be a catastrophic attack on Iran. For the Bush cabal, the attack will be a way of ”buying time” for its disaster in Iraq. In announcing what he called a ”surge” of American troops in Iraq, George W Bush identified Iran as his real target. ”We will interrupt the flow of support [to the insurgency in Iraq] from Iran and Syria,” he said. ”And we will seek out and destroy the networks providing advanced weaponry and training to our enemies in Iraq.”
”Networks” means Iran. ”There is solid evidence,” said a state department spokesperson on January 24, ”that Iranian agents are involved in these networks and that they are working with individuals and groups in Iraq and are being sent there by the Iranian government.” Like Bush’s and Tony Blair’s claim that they had irrefutable evidence that Saddam Hussein was deploying weapons of mass destruction, the ”evidence” lacks all credibility. Iran has a natural affinity with the Shia majority of Iraq, and has been implacably opposed to al-Qaeda, condemning the 9/11 attacks and supporting the US in Afghanistan. Syria has done the same. Investigations by The Los Angeles Times and others, including British military officials, have concluded that Iran is not engaged in the cross-border supply of weapons. General Peter Pace, chairperson of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, has said no such evidence exists.
As the American disaster in Iraq deepens and domestic and foreign opposition grows, ”neocon” fanatics such as Vice-President Dick Cheney believe their opportunity to control Iran’s oil will pass unless they act no later than the spring. For public consumption, there are potent myths. In concert with Israel and Washington’s Zionist and fundamentalist Christian lobbies, the Bushites say their ”strategy” is to end Iran’s nuclear threat. In fact, Iran possesses not a single nuclear weapon nor has it ever threatened to build one; the CIA estimates that, even given the political will, Iran is incapable of building a nuclear weapon before 2017, at the earliest.
Unlike Israel and the US, Iran has abided by the rules of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, of which it was an original signatory and has allowed routine inspections under its legal obligations — until gratuitous, punitive measures were added in 2003, at the behest of Washington. No report by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has ever cited Iran for diverting its civilian nuclear programme to military use. The IAEA has said that for most of the past three years its inspectors have been able to ”go anywhere and see anything”. They inspected the nuclear installations at Isfahan and Natanz on January 10 and 12 and in early February. The head of the IAEA, Mohamed El-Baradei, says an attack on Iran will have ”catastrophic consequences” and only encourage the regime to become a nuclear power. The current United Nations Security Council resolution is the result of Washington coercion, as a leading Bush official all but admitted in India recently.
Unlike its two nemeses, the US and Israel, Iran has attacked no other countries. It last went to war in 1980 when invaded by Hussein, who was backed and equipped by the US, which supplied chemical and biological weapons produced at a factory in Maryland. Unlike Israel, the world’s fifth military power with thermo-nuclear weapons aimed at Middle-East targets, an unmatched record of defying UN resolutions and the enforcer of the world’s longest illegal occupation, Iran has a history of obeying international law and occupies no territory other than its own.
The ”threat” from Iran is entirely manufactured, aided and abetted by familiar, compliant media language that refers to Iran’s ”nuclear ambitions”, just as the vocabulary of Saddam’s non-existent weapons of mass destruction arsenal became common usage. Accompanying this is a demonising that has become standard practice. As Edward Herman has pointed out, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, ”has done yeoman service in facilitating this”; yet a close examination of his notorious remark about Israel in October 2005 reveals its distortion.
According to Juan Cole, American professor of modern middle history, and other Farsi language analysts, Ahmadinejad did not call for Israel to be ”wiped off the map”. He said:”The regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time.” This, says Cole, ”does not imply military action or killing anyone at all.” Ahmadinejad compared the demise of the Jerusalem regime to the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The Iranian regime is repressive, but its power is diffuse and exercised by the mullahs, with whom Ahmadinejad is often at odds. An attack would surely unite them.
An American naval buildup in the eastern Mediterranean has begun. This is almost certainly part of what the Pentagon calls Conplan 8022, which is the aerial bombing of Iran. In 2004, National Security Presidential Directive 35, entitled Nuclear Weapons Deployment Authorisation, was issued. It is classified, of course, but the presumption has long been that NSPD 35 authorised the stockpiling and deployment of ”tactical” nuclear weapons in the Middle East. This does not mean Bush will use them against Iran, but for the first time since the most dangerous years of the Cold War, the use of what were then called ”limited” nuclear weapons is being openly discussed in Washington.
The well-informed Arab Times in Kuwait says Bush will attack Iran before the end of April. One of Russia’s most senior military strategists, General Leonid Ivashov says the US will use nuclear munitions delivered by Cruise missiles launched in the Mediterranean. ”The war in Iraq,” he wrote on January 24, ”was just one element in a series of steps in the process of regional destabilisation. It was only a phase in getting closer to dealing with Iran and other countries. [When the attack on Iran begins] Israel is sure to come under Iranian missile strikes. Posing as victims, the Israelis will suffer some tolerable damage and then an outraged US will destabilise Iran finally, making it look like a noble mission of retribution … Public opinion is already under pressure. There will be a growing anti-Iranian hysteria, leaks, disinformation et cetera … It remains unclear whether the US Congress is going to authorise the war.”
Asked about a US Senate resolution disapproving of the ”surge” of US troops to Iraq, Cheney said: ”It won’t stop us.” Last November, a majority of the American electorate voted for the Democratic Party to control Congress and stop the war in Iraq. Apart from insipid speeches of ”disapproval”, this has not happened and is unlikely to happen. Influential Democrats, such as the new leader of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, and would-be presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and John Edwards have disported themselves before the Israeli lobby. Edwards is regarded in his party as a ”liberal”. He was one of a high-level American contingent at a recent Israeli conference in Herzliya, where he spoke about ”an unprecedented threat to the world and Israel [sic]. At the top of these threats is Iran … All options are on the table to ensure that Iran will never get a nuclear weapon.”
Can this really be happening again, less than four years after the invasion of Iraq which has left about 650 000 people dead? I wrote virtually this same article early in 2003; for Iran now read Iraq then. The silence must be broken now.