Turning
Truth On Its Head
By Abbas Edalat &
Mehrnaz Shahabi
30 October, 2007
Guardian
Comment Is Free
The US has opened up a new front
in its now sharply accelerated war drive on Iran. The announcement
last week by Condoleezza Rice, branding Iran's Revolutionary Guards
Corps a terrorist organisation, and imposing the strongest sanctions
yet since 1979 Iranian Revolution, alarmed several democratic presidential
candidates who described it as an indication that the White House had
begun its "march to war".
In his
article in today's Guardian, Max Hastings correctly predicts
that within six months these sanctions could only lead to a military
attack on Iran, a prospect that he opposes. However, he plays right
into the hands of warmongers by giving unequivocal support to the two
main US accusations against Iran:
"Few strategists
dispute either that Iranian revolutionaries are playing a prominent
role in frustrating the stabilisation of Iraq, or that Iran is doing
its utmost to build nuclear weapons."
These are precisely the allegations that are used by the neoconservatives
and Israel to demonise the Revolutionary Guards and the government of
Ahmadinejad, justify the latest sanctions and pave the way for a military
attack.
The Islamic Revolutionary
Guards Corps is an army of 125,000 and an indispensable part of the
Iranian military. It was formed during the eight-year war waged against
the Islamic Republic by Saddam Hussein, who was at the time fully supported
by the US and its European allies. With this historic role in defeating
foreign aggression, the Corps occupies a special place in the Islamic
Republic, has a large domain of operation and runs a significant part
of the economy.
The US designation is the
first time in international relations that a military body of a sovereign
state is branded as terrorist. Given the Revolutionary Guards' credibility
in defending the country, the US measures will be seen in the eyes of
ordinary people as an attack by the US on Iran's sovereignty, along
the lines of the US-UK engineered coup against the democratically elected
government of Dr Mossadegh in 1953.
As a justification for the
new sanctions against Iranian banks, companies and individuals, Rice
accused the Revolutionary Guards of being "proliferators of WMD".
This accusation has been repeatedly contradicted by the head of the
International Atomic Energy Agency, Dr ElBaradei's unambiguous assertions
that there is absolutely no evidence of a nuclear weaponisation programme
in Iran. In August, the IAEA cleared
Iran of its plutonium experiments and confirmed the peaceful
nature of all of Iran's declared enrichment activities.
"We have not come to
see any undeclared activities or weaponisation of their programme",
Dr Mohammad ElBaradei said
in September, "Nor have we gotten intelligence to that effect."
This Sunday, he
repeated the same assertion in a CNN interview.
But Rice's accusation against
the Revolutionary Guards is not only totally unfounded, it turns the
truth outrageously on its head. Throughout its eight-year war of aggression,
the Iraqi army used chemical weapons on the Iranian Revolutionary Guards,
soldiers and civilians. The US was complicit
in both the proliferation and the use of WMD against the Revolutionary
Guards, who were amongst the 52,000 Iranian victims
of this war crime.
In response to the latest
US measures against Iran, Vladimir Putin, who along with the Chinese,
has refused to back further sanctions against Iran, saying: "Running
around like a mad man with a blade in one's hand is not the best way
to solve such problems."
Also, Rice's accusation against
the Quds force, a division of the Revolutionary Guards, of support for
terrorism in Iraq and beyond, is in sharp contrast to British government's
own evidence. David Miliband, the foreign secretary, in an interview
with the Financial Times in July admitted that there was no evidence
of Iranian involvement in the violence and instability in Iraq. Afghanistan's
foreign minister has recently contradicted the US accusations against
Iran by
pointing out that there is no evidence for Iran arming
the Taliban forces. Prime Minister Maliki and President Karzai too have
repeatedly stressed Iran's positive role in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The unfounded allegations
by the US and Rice's declaration to the Congress that Iran was "perhaps
the single greatest challenge" for US security, is part of the
unmistakable chorus of war from the US administration, following Bush's
invocation of the "World War III" and Cheney's threat of "serious
consequences" for Iran, the week previously. It is an ominous indication
that the voices of dialogue have been decidedly drowned by the war camp
who are pushing for a military attack on Iran.
In Britain, Gordon Brown
has been quick to support the latest US measures and refused to rule
out the military option. The new sanctions will not avert the military
option by the US, as a number of leading politicians in the UK, France
and Germany claim, but would only be the prelude to a military attack.
Brown is placing Britain in the path of another unprovoked and illegal
war with catastrophic consequences for the people of Iran, the region
and the whole world.
Seymour Hersh wrote in a
recent article in the New Yorker that this summer in a
closed circuit video discussion between Bush and Ian Crocker, the US
ambassador in Iraq, Bush said that he wanted all along the border inside
Iran to be bombed and that "the British were on board".
The British public should
wake up to the disastrous foreign policy the UK government is continuing
to pursue after the invasion of Iraq and urgently demand their MPs to
table an emergency motion in the House of Commons to oppose sanctions
and any military attack on Iran.
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