Iran:
The War Begins
By John Pilger
10 February, 2007
The New Statesman
As
opposition grows in America to the failed Iraq adventure, the Bush administration
is preparing public opinion for an attack on Iran, its latest target,
by the spring.
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 spokesman
on 24 January, "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 United States in Afghanistan. Syria
has done the same. Investigations by the New York Times, 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, chairman 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, "neo-con"
fanatics such as Vice-President Dick Che- ney 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 United States, 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 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 10 and 12 January and will return on 2 to 6
February. The head of the IAEA, Mohamed ElBaradei, says that an attack
on Iran will have "catastrophic consequences" and only encourage
the regime to become a nuclear power.
Unlike its two nemeses, the
US and Israel, Iran has attacked no other countries. It last went to
war in 1980 when invaded by Saddam 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 its thermo nuclear weapons aimed at Middle East targets and an
unmatched record of defying UN resolutions, as 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 WMD arsenal became common
usage. Accompanying this is a demonising that has become standard practice.
As Edward Herman has pointed out, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad "has
done yeoman service in facilitating [this]"; yet a close examination
of his notorious remark about Israel in October 2005 reveals how it
has been distorted. According to Juan Cole, American professor of modern
Middle East and south Asian history at the University of Michigan, 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 Israeli 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.
Nuclear option
The one piece of "solid
evidence" is the threat posed by the United States. An American
naval build-up in the eastern Mediterranean has begun. This is almost
certainly part of what the Pentagon calls CONPLAN 8022-02, 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 discussed openly in Washington. What they are
debating is the prospect of other Hiroshimas and of radioactive fallout
across the Middle East and central Asia. Seymour Hersh disclosed in
the New Yorker last year that American bombers "have been flying
simulated nuclear weapons delivery missions . . . since last summer".
The well-informed Arab Times
in Kuwait says that 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 from the Mediterranean. "The war in Iraq," he wrote
on 24 January, "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 the 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 . . . remain[s] 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, Vice-President
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 the 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." Hillary Clinton has said: "US policy must be unequivocal
. . . We have to keep all options on the table." Pelosi and Howard
Dean, another liberal, have distinguished themselves by attacking the
former president Jimmy Carter, who oversaw the Camp David Agreement
between Israel and Egypt and has had the gall to write a truthful book
accusing Israel of becoming an "apartheid state". Pelosi said:
"Carter does not speak for the Democratic Party." She is right,
alas.
In Britain, Downing Street
has been presented with a document entitled Answering the Charges by
Professor Abbas Edalat, of Imperial College London, on behalf of others
seeking to expose the disinformation on Iran. Blair remains silent.
Apart from the usual honourable exceptions, parliament remains shamefully
silent, too.
Can this really be happening
again, less than four years after the invasion of Iraq, which has left
some 650,000 people dead? I wrote virtually this same article early
in 2003; for Iran now, read Iraq then. And is it not remarkable that
North Korea has not been attacked? North Korea has nuclear weapons.
In numerous surveys, such
as the one released on 23 January by the BBC World Service, "we",
the majority of humanity, have made clear our revulsion for Bush and
his vassals. As for Blair, the man is now politically and morally naked
for all to see. So who speaks out, apart from Professor Edalat and his
colleagues? Privileged journalists, scholars and artists, writers and
thespians, who sometimes speak about "freedom of speech",
are as silent as a dark West End theatre. What are they waiting for?
The declaration of another thousand-year Reich, or a mushroom cloud
in the Middle East, or both?
[John Pilger is a renowned
author, journalist and documentary film-maker. A war correspondent,
his writings have appear in numerous magazines, and newspapers.]
February 5, 2007 New Statesman
(UK)
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