February 17, 2006
I have thought for a long time now
that the U.S. would attack Iran. I know that the experts
have said this simply isn't possible so long as the U.S.
is bogged down in Iraq, and that Jack Straw has stated
pretty clearly that Britain won't be on board if the
U.S. decides to use its "military option." U.S. domestic
opposition to the war on Iraq has slowly risen to about
55%, and there is no groundswell for a third war in
Southwest Asia. But the U.S. has for several years
called openly for "regime change" in Tehran, and while
early on during the Bush administration Colin Powell's
State Department opted to court reformers in the Iranian
government, the neocons in power have long since put
their bets of the underground opposition. They don't
negotiate with evil, as they like to say; they plan to
defeat it.
Condi Rice has once again
denounced the Iranian regime as bent on "political
subversion, terrorism, and support for violent Islamist
extremism," and (as the neocons always do) depicted Iran
as "a strategic challenge" not just to the Bush
administration but to "the world," "the international
community." U.S. arm-twisting of the IAEA has paid off
to the extent that the agency has found Iran "in
non-compliance" with the Non-Proliferation Treaty and
seems poised to "report" or "refer" Iran to the UN
Security Council for some sort of action next month. To
the chagrin of many (including myself) the Indians,
Russians and Chinese caved in to the tendentious,
selective statement on Iran earlier this month, joining
forces with the U.S. and lending credence to the
Bushites' depiction of Iran as a lawless loner defying
the whole of respectable humanity. Whatever happens in
March, Bush will be able to use as political capital the
September and February IAEA statements as he goes to the
American people seeking support for some further
action.
Just as it built the case
against Iraq, the administration has tirelessly prepared
its brief against Iran, discarding no exile's report nor
putative terror link as implausible, no assessment of
nuclear capability as alarmist. It's rushed to make bold
charges (about traces of enriched uranium on centrifuges
purchased from Pakistan) that it has had to quietly
drop. Washington obviously wants to find reasons
to attack Iran, and would be delighted to discover a
full-fledged illegal nuclear weapons program buried in
the bowels of the Islamic Republic. That's why the
Iranian nuclear program is all over the front pages, and
why the embedded press has taken to alluding
matter-of-factly to "Iran's nuclear weapons
program." (As though it, in its journalistic
objectivity, knows there is such a thing, and
that that the journalist's job is to encourage anxiety
about it!)
There's surely enough
material to fill up another hour of the UN's time should
Rice decide to follow Colin Powell's act in February
2003 and ask the "international community" to validate
another criminal assault on a sovereign state. All of
this vilification of Iran has to be leading to
something. But to what? A Security Council debate
producing sanctions against Iran? That's apparently John
Bolton's optimal scenario. It seems unlikely, given
Russian and Chinese veto threats, but the
representatives of both these countries caved in
unexpectedly at the last IAEA vote. The Security Council
may well deliberate, keeping the Iranian "threat" in the
news, but deadlock over any action, allowing Bush to
declare, "We tried to get the UN to act rationally, to
confront the clear danger from Iran, but some nations
putting narrow selfish interests first have proved
unhelpful. Therefore we must again act with a coalition
of our friends to do what needs to be done to meet this
terrorist threat."
Were there nothing to gain
from this procedure, the U.S. wouldn't be working
overtime to bring Iran before the Security Council.
There must be some game plan to activate once the UN
ritual's done. Perhaps a couple game plans whose
advocates quietly tussle behind the scenes in the highly
secretive Bush White House and Pentagon. Scott Ritter
suggested last June that the U.S. would use air and land
forces based in Azerbaijan and "the coastal
highway running along the Caspian Sea from Azerbaijan to
Tehran" in an attack on Iran. Another script
involves the seizure of the ethnically Arab and oil-rich
province of Khuzestan. A "shock & awe" hit on Iran's
dispersed nuclear facilities is apparently part of any
plan, although some plans leave this mission up to the
Israelis and their U.S.-supplied bunker-busters. In any
U.S. operation the Mujahadeen Khalq would be deployed to
engage in what Washington would in other contexts surely
describe as "terrorist" actions.
All these possibilities
seem so stupid from the vantage point of the
imperialists' own interests that one is tempted to
dismiss them. How can they afford to provoke Shiite
outrage in occupied Iraq, where their troops are both
hated and overextended as it is? How can they risk the
massive expansion of hostilities on Israel's northern
border? How can they imagine that an attack would meet
with popular enthusiasm, and produce from out of nowhere
a pro-U.S. regime---rather than unite civil society
behind the Ahmadinejad and the mullahs? It just wouldn't
make sense.
But is all the
administration's rhetoric, growing shriller by the
month, so much sound and fury, signifying nothing? That
wouldn't make sense either. My best bet is that failing
to force through a resolution imposing sanctions on
Iran, Washington will bully its allies, who a year ago
traded grudging U.S. support for the "E3"-Iran talks for
the European promise to support punitive sanctions
should Tehran continue to insist on its right to enrich
uranium, into applying such sanctions. Iran will then
settle comfortably enough into an axis of convenience
involving China, the number one customer for its oil,
and Russia, its key partner in nuclear technology.
Why would Europe comply
with a scheme that would raise its petroleum prices and
threaten its considerable investments in Iran? Perhaps
it sees such sacrifices as the price for healing the
rift that opened as the U.S. prepared its aggression
against Iraq. Perhaps it surmises that the U.S. is in
decline, and that the dollar will weaken and the euro
strengthen as Iran sets up its euro-based petroleum
exchange. Perhaps it is responding to quiet threats from
the notorious Ambassador Bolton. In any case, if the
goal is to cap these many months of bluster with some
concrete bullying achievement paving the way for further
action down the line, a sanctions regime imposed not by
the "international community" but merely by the U.S. and
its allies might be the best the neocons can do for the
time being.
Failing, for a second
time, to validate Washington's regime change plans in
the region, the UN will draw the administration's fire.
The neocons will accomplish one of their central goals
by effectively crippling the international body, while
continuing to posture as the tribune of the
"international community." These thugs care nothing, of
course, about global public opinion. But they are keenly
interested in shaping U.S. opinion and acquiring the
freedom to move forward with whatever strategy for
empire opportunity might afford them down the road. If
an Iraq-style invasion isn't yet in the cards, at least
a UNSC debate would as reported through the corporate
press show the American people who "their" friends are
and make a future attack seem more palatable. If
discussion results, as expected, in one or more "no"
votes, the administration will say that its friends are
on one side (Good), Iran and its friends on the other
(Evil), and the UN unwilling to take sides "irrelevant."
Posing as chiefs of the camp of the Good, the
unilateralist neocons having shuffled off the coil of
international accountability will do whatever they think
necessary to control the Middle East.
Meantime, as the UN
showdown approaches, and as the rumors of war
proliferate, the antiwar movement ought not assume that
the mad is entirely out of the question. Cheney asked
Stratfor last summer to draw up a plan for a large-scale
air assault on Iran, employing both conventional and
tactical nuclear weapons, to be immediately implemented
in the wake of a terrorist attack (of any origin) on the
U.S. If he is imagining the unimaginable, so must we if
we want to prevent it.
Belatedly, an organization
specifically formed to oppose war on Iran has been
announcing itself through mass emails soliciting
endorsements. StopWaronIran.com, noting that "Just as in
the case of Iraq, none of the claims made by the U.S.
government stand up to unbiased scrutiny," and urges "an
immediate end to Washington's campaign of sanctions,
hostility, and falsehood against the people of Iran." It
opposes "any new U.S. aggression against Iran." The
group is international, its statement initially endorsed
by Ramsey Clark, Howard Zinn, George Galloway, Tony
Benn, Harold Pinter, and Margarita Papandreou among
others. While all paying attention puzzle about the
possible outcomes of the U.S.'s anti-Iran campaign, I
urge everyone with a conscience to sign this statement.
http://stopwaroniran.org/
Gary
Leupp is Professor
of History at Tufts University, and Adjunct Professor of
Comparative Religion. He is the author of Servants,
Shophands and Laborers in in the Cities of Tokugawa
Japan; Male
Colors: The Construction of Homosexuality in Tokugawa
Japan; and Interracial
Intimacy in Japan: Western Men and Japanese Women,
1543-1900. He is also a contributor to
CounterPunch's merciless chronicle of the wars on Iraq,
Afghanistan and Yugoslavia, Imperial
Crusades.
He can be reached at: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
|