Cheney
Menaces Iran
With Military Aggression
By Peter Symonds
25 February, 2007
World
Socialist Web
Military
action against Iran may not have featured in US Vice President Dick
Cheney’s keynote speech in Sydney yesterday, but it is certainly
on his mind. In two interviews published today—in Murdoch’s
Australian and on the US-based ABC News website—he confirmed that
the Bush administration was willing to go to war against Tehran on the
pretext of halting its nuclear programs.
The Australian’s foreign
editor Greg Sheridan asked Cheney whether he shared the view of Republican
senator John McCain that the only thing worse than a military confrontation
with Iran would be a nuclear-armed Iran. After pausing to consider his
reply, the vice president bluntly declared: “I would guess that
John McCain and I are pretty close to agreement.”
Coming from the chief architect
of the illegal US-led invasion of Iraq, these words can have only one
meaning: the US is preparing for a military attack on Iran. As far as
Cheney is concerned, Tehran’s failure this week to abide by the
US-backed UN resolution demanding the suspension of Iran’s uranium
enrichment facilities is just one more nail in the coffin.
Sheridan, who applauded Cheney’s
militarist stance, obviously understood the vice president’s threat.
“If I were a mullah in Tehran those words would just about make
my blood run cold,” he declared. As Sheridan is aware, a second
US aircraft carrier group has just arrived in the Persian Gulf, providing
the US military with the capacity to carry out round-the-clock bombing
against Iranian targets.
Cheney provided no evidence
to back his bald assertion that Iran is seeking to build nuclear weapons.
He candidly admitted that the US does not believe Iran has nuclear weapons
yet, but added, “we do believe they are working to enrich uranium
to levels that would make it possible to produce nuclear weapons”.
The remark is deliberately
deceptive. The Iranian regime has repeatedly declared its intention
of completing the construction of an industrial-scale uranium enrichment
plant at Natanz to provide fuel for its nuclear power plants. Under
the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), any country has the right
to do so. The Natanz facility is monitored by the International Atomic
Energy Agency (IAEA), which, despite unsubstantiated US allegations,
has found no positive evidence that Iran has a nuclear weapons program.
By intentionally conflating
“having nuclear weapons” with “the capacity to produce
nuclear weapons,” Cheney is concocting a new casus belli for war.
As he told Sheridan: “You get various estimates of where the point
of no return is. Is it when they possess weapons or does it come sooner,
when they have mastered the technology but perhaps not yet produced
fissile material for weapons?”
On this basis, the Bush administration
could attack Iran right now. Tehran “mastered the technology”
of uranium enrichment last year and produced a small amount of the low-enriched
uranium required to nuclear fuel. Iran has also announced plans for
a limited industrial-scale facility of some 3,000 gas centrifuges this
year. This would be more than enough to meet Cheney’s criterion
for war, regardless of whether the plant actually produced the highly
enriched uranium needed for bombs.
The US accusations are completely
two-faced and hypocritical. The Bush administration gave the green light
to India to speed up the manufacture of nuclear weapons by concluding
an agreement with New Delhi last year to lift the restrictions imposed
following India’s 1998 nuclear tests. Of course, Washington does
not insist that its close ally Israel sign the NPT and give up its stockpile
of nuclear weapons.
To evoke the menace of “nuclear
terrorism,” Cheney resorted to further lies and half-truths. He
repeated the unproven claim that the Iranian regime is supplying weapons
to anti-US insurgents in Iraq. He denounced Iranian President Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad for making “threatening noises to Israel and the US
and others”. He condemned Iran as “the prime sponsor of
Hezbollah, working through Syria in the conflict with Israel last summer
in an effort to topple the government of Lebanon”.
This last accusation is especially
cynical. It was Israel, with the backing of the US administration, and
Cheney in particular, that unleashed a devastating bombardment of Lebanon,
then invaded the south of the country, in a bid to wipe out Hezbollah.
Washington viewed Israel’s criminal war on Lebanon as the opening
shot of a wider military confrontation with Iran.
For all Cheney’s apocalyptic
rhetoric about the Iranian threat, the Bush administration’s targeting
of Iran has nothing to do with any of these pretexts. Cheney himself
hinted at the real reason when he noted Iran’s strategic location.
“They occupy one whole side of the Persian Gulf,” he explained
to ABC News, “[and] clearly have the capacity to influence the
world’s supply of oil—about 20 percent of the daily production
comes out through the Straits of Hormuz.”
The purpose of any US war
on Iran, like the 2003 invasion of Iraq, would be to further longstanding
US ambitions to dominate the oil-rich regions of the Middle East and
Central Asia. Iran with its own huge reserves of oil and gas, not only
lies across the Persian Gulf from Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and other major
producers, but sits between Iraq and the largely unexploited oil and
gas fields of the Central Asian republics.
In his interview with ABC
News, Cheney again made clear that the Bush administration has a war
on Iran under active consideration. He was asked to respond to a recent
statement by British Prime Minister Tony Blair that diplomacy was “the
only sensible solution” to the Iranian crisis. After repeating
the standard White House line that “all options are on the table,”
he was asked if a military solution was realistic. Cheney refused to
answer the question, declaring: “I am not going to go beyond where
I am... ”
Cheney may be coy about publicly
declaring his support for a war, but it is a poorly kept secret that
within the Bush administration he strongly advocates this incendiary
course of action. In an article in yesterday’s London-based Times,
“senior British government sources” expressed their fear
that President Bush would seek to “settle the Iranian question
through military means” next year if diplomatic efforts failed.
The Times explained: “The
hawks are led by Dick Cheney, the vice president, who is urging Mr Bush
to keep the military option ‘on the table’. He is also pressing
the Pentagon to examine specific war plans—including, it is rumoured,
covert action.” A string of reports over the past year have revealed
advanced plans by both the US and Israel for a military assault on Iran.
The military preparations
have been made, but what is still needed is a pretext for war. That
is the significance of Cheney’s remarks, reported in the Sydney
Morning Herald, to yesterday’s breakfast with select members of
the Australian-American Leadership Dialogue. The issue arose of the
Democrats’ opposition to the Bush administration’s war policies,
and the far more deep-seated hostility of the majority of Americans
to the Iraq war.
Cheney was completely unfazed.
According to the Sydney Morning Herald, “It is understood he said
the Democrats in the US were riding public opposition to the war that
could end up prejudicing their leadership credentials. He said the mood
could easily shift if there was another terrorist attack.”
These remarks reflect more
than Cheney’s utter contempt for public opinion and democratic
norms. He recognises that the beleaguered Bush administration requires
more than its present litany of lies to wage a new war of aggression
against Iran. To drown out and intimidate widespread public opposition
and to energise its own fascistic social base, the Bush administration
desperately needs a new terrorist outrage.
In congressional testimony
on February 1, former national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski
openly warned of “some provocation in Iraq or a terrorist act
in the US blamed on Iran culminating in a ‘defensive’ military
action against Iran that plunges a lonely America into a spreading and
deepening quagmire eventually ranging across Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan
and Pakistan”.
No one should be in any doubt
that the gangster cabal in the White House, with Cheney in the lead,
is more than capable of exploiting a new terrorist attack as the pretext
for launching a reckless and criminal war on Iran.