Iran: the next war
Bush and Blair are gearing up for it, and they are
preparing us, too - just as they did before attacking
Iraq. But where is the threat?
By John Pilger
02/09/06 "ICH"
-- -- Has Tony Blair, our minuscule Caesar, finally
crossed his Rubicon? Having subverted
the laws of the civilised world and brought carnage to a
defenceless people and bloodshed to his own, having lied
and lied and used the death of a hundredth British
soldier in Iraq to indulge his profane self-pity, is he
about to collude in one more crime before he goes?
Perhaps he is seriously unstable now, as some have
suggested. Power does bring a certain madness to its
prodigious abusers, especially those of shallow
disposition. In The March of Folly: from Troy to Vietnam,
the great American historian Barbara Tuchman described
Lyndon B Johnson, the president whose insane policies
took him across his Rubicon in Vietnam. "He lacked
[John] Kennedy's ambivalence, born of a certain
historical sense and at least some capacity for
reflective thinking," she wrote. "Forceful and
domineering, a man infatuated with himself, Johnson was
affected in his conduct of Vietnam policy by three
elements in his character: an ego that was insatiable and
never secure; a bottomless capacity to use and impose the
powers of his office without inhibition; a profound
aversion, once fixed upon a course of action, to any
contradictions."
That, demonstrably, is Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and the
rest of the cabal that has seized power in Washington.
But there is a logic to their idiocy - the goal of
dominance. It also describes Blair, for whom the only
logic is vainglorious. And now he is threatening to take
Britain into the nightmare on offer in Iran. His
Washington mentors are unlikely to ask for British
troops, not yet. At first, they will prefer to bomb from
a safe height, as Bill Clinton did in his destruction of
Yugoslavia. They are aware that, like the Serbs, the
Iranians are a serious people with a history of defending
themselves and who are not stricken by the effects of a
long siege, as the Iraqis were in 2003. When the Iranian
defence minister promises "a crushing
response", you sense he means it.
Listen to Blair in the House of Commons: "It's
important we send a signal of strength" against a
regime that has "forsaken diplomacy" and is
"exporting terrorism" and "flouting its
international obligations". Coming from one who has
exported terrorism to Iran's neighbour, scandalously
reneged on Britain's most sacred international
obligations and forsaken diplomacy for brute force, these
are Alice-through-the-looking-glass words.
However, they begin to make sense when you read Blair's
Commons speeches on Iraq of 25 February and 18 March
2003. In both crucial debates - the latter leading to the
disastrous vote on the invasion - he used the same or
similar expressions to lie that he remained committed to
a peaceful resolution. "Even now, today, we are
offering Saddam the prospect of voluntary disarmament . .
." he said. From the revelations in Philippe Sands's
book Lawless World, the scale of his deception is clear.
On 31 January 2003, Bush and Blair confirmed their
earlier secret decision to attack Iraq.
Like the invasion of Iraq, an attack on Iran has a secret
agenda that has nothing to do with the Tehran regime's
imaginary weapons of mass destruction. That Washington
has managed to coerce enough members of the International
Atomic Energy Agency into participating in a diplomatic
charade is no more than reminiscent of the way it
intimidated and bribed the "international
community" into attacking Iraq in 1991.
Iran offers no "nuclear threat". There is not
the slightest evidence that it has the centrifuges
necessary to enrich uranium to weapons-grade material.
The head of the IAEA, Mohamed ElBaradei, has repeatedly
said his inspectors have found nothing to support
American and Israeli claims. Iran has done nothing
illegal; it has demonstrated no territorial ambitions nor
has it engaged in the occupation of a foreign country -
unlike the United States, Britain and Israel. It has
complied with its obligations under the Non-Proliferation
Treaty to allow inspectors to "go anywhere and see
anything" - unlike the US and Israel. The latter has
refused to recognise the NPT, and has between 200 and 500
thermonuclear weapons targeted at Iran and other Middle
Eastern states.
Those who flout the rules of the NPT are America's and
Britain's anointed friends. Both India and Pakistan have
developed their nuclear weapons secretly and in defiance
of the treaty. The Pakistani military dictatorship has
openly exported its nuclear technology. In Iran's case,
the excuse that the Bush regime has seized upon is the
suspension of purely voluntary
"confidence-building" measures that Iran agreed
with Britain, France and Germany in order to placate the
US and show that it was "above suspicion".
Seals were placed on nuclear equipment following a
concession given, some say foolishly, by Iranian
negotiators and which had nothing to do with Iran's
obligations under the NPT.
Iran has since claimed back its "inalienable
right" under the terms of the NPT to enrich uranium
for peaceful purposes. There is no doubt this decision
reflects the ferment of political life in Tehran and the
tension between radical and conciliatory forces, of which
the bellicose new president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is but
one voice. As European governments seemed to grasp for a
while, this demands true diplomacy, especially given the
history.
For more than half a century, Britain and the US have
menaced Iran. In 1953, the CIA and MI6 overthrew the democratic
government of Muhammed Mossadeq, an inspired nationalist
who believed that Iranian oil belonged to Iran. They
installed the venal shah and, through a monstrous
creation called Savak, built one of the most vicious
police states of the modern era. The Islamic revolution
in 1979 was inevitable and very nasty, yet it was not
monolithic and, through popular pressure and movement
from within the elite, Iran has begun to open to the
outside world - in spite of having sustained an invasion
by Saddam Hussein, who was encouraged and backed by the
US and Britain.
At the same time, Iran has lived with the real threat of
an Israeli attack, possibly with nuclear weapons, about
which the "international community" has
remained silent. Recently, one of Israel's leading
military historians, Martin van Creveld, wrote:
"Obviously, we don't want Iran to have nuclear
weapons and I don't know if they're developing them, but
if they're not developing them, they're crazy."
It is hardly surprising that the Tehran regime has drawn
the "lesson" of how North Korea, which has
nuclear weapons, has successfully seen off the American
predator without firing a shot. During the cold war,
British "nuclear deterrent" strategists argued
the same justification for arming the nation with nuclear
weapons; the Russians were coming, they said. As we are
aware from declassified files, this was fiction, unlike
the prospect of an American attack on Iran, which is very
real and probably imminent.
Blair knows this. He also knows the real reasons for an
attack and the part Britain is likely to play. Next
month, Iran is scheduled to shift its petrodollars into a
euro-based bourse. The effect on the value of the dollar
will be significant, if not, in the long term,
disastrous. At present the dollar is, on paper, a
worthless currency bearing the burden of a national debt
exceeding $8trn and a trade deficit of more than $600bn.
The cost of the Iraq adventure alone, according to the
Nobel Prizewinning economist Joseph Stiglitz, could be
$2trn. America's military empire, with its wars and
700-plus bases and limitless intrigues, is funded by
creditors in Asia, principally China.
That oil is traded in dollars is critical in maintaining
the dollar as the world's reserve currency. What the Bush
regime fears is not Iran's nuclear ambitions but the
effect of the world's fourth-biggest oil producer and
trader breaking the dollar monopoly. Will the world's
central banks then begin to shift their reserve holdings
and, in effect, dump the dollar? Saddam Hussein was
threatening to do the same when he was attacked.
Refugee Housing in Khuzestan (Persian Gulf) built by
the refugees with the U.N. to Khalili's design
While the Pentagon has no plans to occupy all of Iran, it
has in its sights a strip of land that runs along the
border with Iraq. This is Khuzestan, home to 90 per cent
of Iran's oil. "The first step taken by an invading
force," reported Beirut's Daily Star, "would be
to occupy Iran's oil-rich Khuzestan Province, securing
the sensitive Straits of Hormuz and cutting off the
Iranian military's oil supply." On 28 January the
Iranian government said that it had evidence of British
undercover attacks in Khuzestan, including bombings, over
the past year. Will the newly emboldened Labour MPs
pursue this? Will they ask what the British army based in
nearby Basra - notably the SAS - will do if or when Bush
begins bombing Iran? With control of the oil of Khuzestan
and Iraq and, by proxy, Saudi Arabia, the US will have
what Richard Nixon called "the greatest prize of
all".
But what of Iran's promise of "a crushing
response"? Last year, the Pentagon delivered 500
"bunker-busting" bombs to Israel. Will the
Israelis use them against a desperate Iran? Bush's 2002
Nuclear Posture Review cites "pre-emptive"
attack with so-called low-yield nuclear weapons as an
option. Will the militarists in Washington use them, if
only to demonstrate to the rest of us that, regardless of
their problems with Iraq, they are able to "fight
and win multiple, simultaneous major-theatre wars",
as they have boasted? That a British prime minister
should collude with even a modicum of this insanity is
cause for urgent action on this side of the Atlantic.
With thanks to Mike Whitney. John Pilger's new book,
Freedom Next Time, will be published by Bantam Press in
June
First published in the New Statesman
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