10-10-05, 8:52 am

Continued from Iran: Imperialism's Second Strike, Part 1

What he said next, in this public discourse on Al Jazeera, was pointed and explosive: 'Our findings in Iraq proved that the agency was right because we didn't find anything which indicated the presence of nuclear weapons in Iraq... If we want to take a lesson from Iraq, we should not rush before all realities are clarified, and this is what we want to do about Iran.'

That was just a year ago, and it appeared from such remarks that El-Baradei was getting ready to give Iran a clean enough chit to undercut the U.S.-E.U. pressure. Then strange things began to happen. The U.S. of course let its displeasure be known. It was also well-known that El-Baradei's second term at the IAEA was to end in 2005 and the U.S., angry at the softness of his remarks, was going to oppose a third term for him, just as, despite all of U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Anan's cooperation, the U.S. had turned against the renewal of his term as Secretary-General after Anan said that in terms of the U.N. Charter the U.S. invasion of Iraq was illegal. El-Baradei too now became a sitting duck. He seems to have responded to this U.S. pressure by escalating his demands on Iran. Sometime in very late summer this year there was an inexplicable buzz in New York that the U.S. was ready to drop its opposition to him. Then came his report of September 3 in which he sternly listed areas in which Iran had not cooperated and demanded that Iran's 'transparency measures should extend beyond the formal requirements of the Safeguards Agreement and Additional Protocol and include access to individuals, documentation related to procurement, dual-use equipment, certain military-owned workshops and research and development locations'.

THE breadth of these demands is breathtaking. An inspection authority representing a specific agency was demanding rights which are not granted to the agency by the protocols of the agency itself, the terms of the NPT, the various Agreements and Protocols which Iran had signed in good faith and as voluntary steps to build confidence. And the language was extraordinary: 'access to individuals' without specifying the individuals. Any and all 'individuals' in the Islamic Republic of Iran? Which 'military-owned workshops and research and development locations'? Iran was apparently not to keep any military secrets at all. Documentary evidence exists to prove that inspection teams in Iraq included secret service agents who were using the inspections as an alibi for gathering all sorts of defence-related information and passing that information on to the Israelis and the U.S. Was the game being repeated now in Iran as well?

The second, even more alarming aspect of these demands, was that some of them re-appear, verbatim, in the E.U.-3 resolution in the meeting of September 24 for which India too voted. El-Baradei was providing for that board meeting and its resolution the language for demands so excessive that Iran was bound to reject them - 'illegal and illogical', as the Iranian delegate called them. Iran was now bound to retaliate by not acceding to these additional demands, possibly issuing 'threats' of its own, thus paving the way for the charge of 'non-compliance' to become more aggressive. At any rate, El-Baradei did get his third term, with a unanimous vote, just a couple of days after that decisive meeting. The masters got out of him what they wanted and then re-employed him.

Is El-Baradei a dishonest man? One simply does not know. The charitable view, on the face of it, seems to be that he is the classic international civil servant, enmeshed in the balancing acts of the bureaucracy and caught in an impossible situation. If he conducts his inspections within the rules of the available treaties and protocols and, at the end, declares Iran innocent, the U.S. shall simply shrug off the findings, declare that much remain uninspected, claim superior knowledge, and proceed to do whatever it wished to do in the first place. If, on the other hand, he keeps escalating his demands, to show the U.S. that inspections are still going on, the Iranians are bound to draw a line somewhere, sooner or later, and a case of 'non-compliance' gets strengthened, even if Iran is only refusing to comply with demands which have no basis in law or even in normal conventions of diplomacy. In either case, there is no proof that Iran is trying to make nuclear weapons, and what El-Baradei now finds or does not find has little relevance to how the game is going to get played out. Hans Blix, the chief weapons inspector in Iraq, kept saying that he has found nothing but, in complaining that Saddam was not complying fast enough, he too kept providing to the U.S. the ammunition for charges of 'non-compliance'. Now, when his word matters little, Blix is often found on Swedish television denouncing the Iraq invasion. El-Baradei seems destined to play the same role in relation to Iran.

It is possible that the E.U.-3, and the U.S. from behind these proxies, would be reluctant to refer the Iran case to the Security Council for consideration of economic and political sanctions, for fear of Russia or China, or both, vetoing such a resolution. Apparently, the Iranians themselves are not counting on such a veto. Iran's constitution places foreign relations entirely in the hands of its Supreme Leader, and Iran's former Foreign Minister, Ali Akbar Velayati, who serves as an advisor to the present Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is reputedly of the view that instead of actually taking on the burden of vetoing a resolution brought forth jointly by the U.S. and the E.U., Russia and China are likely to try and only soften the terms of the sanctions. What is also plausible, however, is that the U.S.-E.U. combine may entirely bypass the Security Council mechanism and settle for a combined Euro-American regime of sanctions and then recruit countries around the world to comply with the terms of that sanctions regime, with the understanding that the Euro-American combination has enough clout to gain cooperation from the majority of the countries in the global state system.

The latter option is being developed by a group comprising high-ranking former and current officials of the U.S. and Europe, including Strobe Talbot, an experienced India hand. That option is also more likely because the only basis in international law for hauling Iran to the Security Council is 'non-compliance with the NPT' itself, to which Iran is a signatory. For the rest, the Security Council so far has neither required inspections nor set the terms for them. The sticking point here is Article IV of the NPT which gives any signatory 'an inalienable right to develop, research, produce, and use nuclear energy for peaceful purposes', and to acquire technology to this effect from other countries. Much is being made by the U.S., the E.U. and their corporate media of Iran's 'enrichment' of uranium. The fact is that lower levels of enrichment are actually necessary for the normal functioning of reactors and production of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes, and only very high level of enrichment can produce weapons grade uranium. Iran's bid to 'enrich' nuclear fuels is thus within its 'inalienable right'. Iran has offered various credible formulas for international supervision of enrichment levels, including the idea of Western corporate investment in Iran's nuclear facilities, but to no avail so far.

SO, will there be sanctions against Iran, within or outside the Security Council framework? This question is tied up with the more fundamental question: what does the U.S. want? Rather: what is the long-term policy and strategic objective of the Bush administration with regard to Iran, and what can it realistically hope to achieve at present? These are two different questions and we shall take up mainly the first of these questions here and will come to the complexities of the current situation in a later article.

There is no doubting the fact that in the neo-conservative global vision, and in policies of the Bush administration based on that vision - not to speak of the Israeli calculations which the core thinkers of the neo-conservative stream represent - Iran has always been the main prize. The quip doing the rounds in Washington for some years is: 'everyone wants to go to Baghdad but real men want to go to Teheran.' Iran had been the lynchpin of the U.S. empire in Muslim West Asia until 1978, which was then lost to the Islamic revolution; conquest of it would also be a kind of recovery. In resource terms, Iran's oil deposits are said to be second only to Saudi Arabia and, combined with its gas deposits - said to be by far the largest in the world - it is at the very heart of hydrocarbon power. In the immediate term, much of Iran's oil goes to China and sanctions against Iran disrupt that supply, aside from destroying prospects for the envisioned Asian Energy Security Grid. Strategically, Iran's control of the Straits of Hormuz gives it a unique vantage point for controlling the tanker traffic in the Gulf as a whole. Politically, an Iran which has enjoyed peace since the end of the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, and therefore has had the time to refurbish its armed forces and financial stability, is potentially the only real counter to Israel in the region, especially if it can also develop a nuclear instrument; with Egypt neutralised and Iraq fallen, conquest of Iran will leave Israel to do what it will, for decades to come, with no credible adversary.

THE fantasy of conquest has taken many forms. One variant was that the demonstration of overwhelming power in Iraq shall make the ruling clergy in Iran wilt and run for cover; the occupation of Syria would be a cake-walk and the Hizbollah in Lebanon, supposedly mere clients of Iran and puppets of Syria, would disintegrate; a Shia-dominated, Western-oriented democratic republic in Iraq would be an inspiration to the anti-clerical, West-oriented democratic movement in Iran which would be ready to overthrow the Islamic yoke; the Azeri minority in Iran shall play the same role as the Kurdish minority did in Iraq, on the side of the U.S.; the Mujahideen-e-Khalq who have been stationed in Iraq, first under Saddam Hussein and now nurtured by the U.S., will be sent in to soften the ground for U.S. Special Forces, to gather intelligence and to help whip up the popular uprising; the several exile Iranian groups, including the monarchical ones, that the U.S. has been nursing on American soil, shall be flown in, as Chalabi's men and other exile groups were flown into Iraq; and a blistering U.S.-Israel attack shall secure the country, pacifying it in due course, over a year or two. In other words, the scenario they had prepared for Iraq would be repeated in Iran as well, if they can have their way.

We know that plans for an attack on Iran - Israeli, American, or more plausibly an Israeli-instigated American attack on Iran - have been afoot for quite a while. On January 4, 2002, soon after the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan, Benjamin Netanyahu, the former Prime Minister of Israel, wrote in an article in The Jerusalem Post: 'American power topples the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, and the Al Qaeda network there collapses on its own. The United States must now act similarly against the other terror regimes - Iran, Iraq, Arafat's dictatorship, Syria, and a few others.' On February 5, 2002, well before the U.S. invasion of Iraq, The Times of London wrote that according to Ariel Sharon, the current Israeli Prime Minister, 'Iran is the centre of `world terror', and as soon as an Iraq conflict is concluded, he [Sharon] will push for Iran to be at the top of the `to do list'... He sees Iran as `behind terror all around the world' and a direct threat to Israel.' The New York Times of February 16, 2002, reported Vice-President Dick Cheney as saying, as if taking his cue from Sharon: 'There is a great yearning on the part of the Iranian people to restore and re-establish relationships with the U.S. and the West. By the same token, the government appears to be committed, for example, to trying to destroy the peace process as it relates to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And we've seen all too many examples of their active support of terrorism and their, as the President said the other night in the State of the Union speech, unstinting efforts to develop weapons of mass destruction.' These three charges - not accepting Israeli supremacy; support for 'terrorism'; 'weapons of mass destruction' became a litany in the official pronouncements over the next many months.

In May 2003, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a resolution which, in effect, authorised a 'pre-emptive' attack on Iran, with the resolution approved by a vote 376-3, indicating complete identity of purpose between Republicans and Democrats. Competition for superior credentials in the hate-Iran game between Republicans and Democrats was well indicated when Susan Rice, one of the national security advisers to John Kerry, the Democratic presidential candidate, accused Bush of 'standing on the sidelines while Iran's nuclear programme has been advanced'. In September 2003, Reuters and the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported the U.S. plans to sell to Israel a huge number of air-launched bombs, including 500 'bunker buster' bombs that would be able to penetrate Iran's underground nuclear facilities. According to The Washington Post columnist William Arkin, the official U.S. strategic plan (formally known as CONPLAN 8022-02) completed in November 2003, authorized 'a preemptive and offensive strike capability against Iran and North Korea'.

I cite these few news reports from 2002-03 to illustrate how long the idea of an invasion of Iran has been in the air. I shall skip the intervening period, except to say that all through 2004 there was immense speculation, all around the globe about an imminent Israeli attack on Iran: how Israel had moved its nuclear submarines into the Gulf, how Israel had conducted war games in preparation for a surprise attack on Iran's nuclear installations, and so on. By the summer of 2005, Bush was on Israeli television, saying that the U.S. might itself strike at Iran and would fully understand Israel's own security needs if it were to attack Iran. At the same time, independent sources seemed to suggest that a low-intensity warfare against Iran had already begun, with a variety of U.S. spy aircraft crowding the Iranian air space, client groups of Iranian origin getting infiltrated into Iran, perhaps even some U.S. Special Forces making incursions into the remoter areas, and so on.

Now, it is possible that some of all this is just psychological warfare, to evoke fear in Iran and thus soften Iranian positions in favour of more concessions to the U.S., not just in the nuclear arena, which is in itself insignificant, but in the much more crucial and complex matter of Iran's influence in Iraq, Syria, Southern Lebanon, Bahrain and the eastern provinces of Saudi Arabia, not to speak of the southeastern provinces of Afghanistan. In other words, Iran may not be facing the prospect of invasion but may be squeezed between the threat of escalating internal subversion and imminent referral to the Security Council for sanctions. Given the whole historical record of aggressive U.S. design and Israeli insistence, the signs are ominous enough for Tony Benn, the much admired senior figure in British Labour Left, to write: 'The build-up to a new war is taking exactly the same form as it did in 2002. First we are being told that Iran poses a military threat, because it may be developing nuclear weapons. We are assured that the President is hoping that diplomacy might succeed through the European negotiations which have been in progress for some months... This is just what we were told when Hans Blix was in Baghdad talking to Saddam on behalf of the U.N., but we now know, from a Downing Street memorandum leaked some months ago, that the decision to invade had been taken long before that.'

In a sense, we do not even have to wait for that kind of memorandum to surface after the war and tell us how early the war was planned. We have plenty of documents telling us that preparations for the invasion of Iran - with varying scripts and objectives - have been going on for at least three years, not just conceptually but in terms of actual military preparations: war games, positioning of men and materials all the way from Azerbaijan to the Gulf waters, not to speak of Iraqi territory itself, or negotiations for use of Turkish air space for that matter. So far, an actual invasion of Iran has been stalled due to the sheer scale of Iraqi resistance, the internal disarray of U.S. armed forces, and Iran's own ability to unleash vast forces against the U.S. in Iraq, Afghanistan and Lebanon. It is in this perspective that subjecting Iran not to a hot war but to a prolonged cold one, in the shape of a regime of economic sanctions and internal sabotage, may be for the U.S. the more feasible option for the present.

Continued from Iran: Imperialism's Second Strike, Part 1

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