[Peace-discuss] Next stop Tehran?

[C. G. Estabrook]

With Iraq beaten, the US is now playing the same dangerous WMD game with Iran

Simon Tisdall

Tuesday May 27, 2003

The Guardian

Imagine for a moment that you are a senior official in Iran's foreign
ministry. It's hot outside on the dusty, congested streets of Tehran. But
inside the ministry, despite the air-conditioning, it's getting stickier
all the time. You have a big problem, a problem that Iran's president,
Mohammad Khatami, admits is "huge and serious". The problem is the Bush
administration and, specifically, its insistence that Iran is running "an
alarming clandestine nuclear weapons programme". You fear that this,
coupled with daily US claims that Iran is aiding al-Qaida, is leading in
only one direction. US news reports reaching your desk indicate that the
Pentagon is now advocating "regime change" in Iran.

Reading dispatches from Geneva, you note that the US abruptly walked out
of low-level talks there last week, the only bilateral forum for two
countries lacking formal diplomatic relations. You worry that
bridge-building by Iran's UN ambassador is getting nowhere. You understand
that while Britain and the EU are telling Washington that engagement, not
confrontation, is the way forward, the reality, as Iraq showed, is that if
George Bush decides to do it his way, there is little the Europeans or
indeed Russia can ultimately do to stop him.

What is certain is that at almost all points of the compass, the
unmatchable US military machine besieges Iran's borders. The Pentagon is
sponsoring the Iraq-based Mojahedin e-Khalq, a group long dedicated to
insurrection in the Islamic republic that the state department describes
as terrorists. And you are fully aware that Israel is warning Washington
that unless something changes soon, Iran may acquire the bomb within two
years. As the temperature in the office rises, as flies buzz around the
desk like F-16s in a dogfight and as beads of sweat form on furrowed brow,
it seems only one conclusion is possible. The question with which you
endlessly pestered your foreign missions before and during the invasion of
Iraq - "who's next?" - appears now to have but one answer. It's us.

So what would you do?

This imaginary official may be wrong, of course. Without some new
terrorist enormity in the US "homeland", surely Bush is not so reckless as
to start another all-out war as America's election year approaches?
Washington's war of words could amount to nothing more than that. Maybe
the US foolishly believes it is somehow helping reformist factions in the
Majlis (parliament), the media and student bodies. Maybe destabilisation
and intimidation is the name of the game and the al-Qaida claims are a
pretext, as in Iraq. Perhaps the US does not itself know what it wants to
do; a White House strategy meeting is due today. But who knows? Tehran's
dilemma is real: Washington's intentions are dangerously uncertain.

Should Iran continue to deny any present bomb-making intent and facilitate
additional, short-notice inspections by the International Atomic Energy
Agency to prove it? Should it expand its EU dialogue and strengthen
protective ties with countries such as Syria and Lebanon, India, Russia
and China, which is its present policy? The answer is "yes". The
difficulty is that this may not be enough. Should it then go further and
cancel its nuclear power contracts with Moscow? Should it abandon
Hizbullah and Palestinian rejectionist groups, as America demands? This
doubtless sounds like a good idea to neo-con thinktankers. But surely even
they can grasp that such humiliation, under duress from the Great Satan,
is politically unacceptable. Grovelling is not Persian policy.

Even the relatively moderate Khatami made it clear in Beirut recently that
there would be no backtracking in the absence of a just, wider Middle East
settlement. And anyway, Khatami does not control Iran's foreign and
defence policy. Indeed, it is unclear who does. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei,
ex-president Hashemi Rafsanjani, security chief Hassan Rohani, and the
military and intelligence agencies all doubtless have a say, which may be
why Iran's policies often appear contradictory. Tension between civil
society reformers and the mullahs is endemic and combustible. But as US
pressure has increased, so too has the sway of Islamic hardliners.

Iran's alternative course is the worst of all, but one which Bush's
threats make an ever more likely choice. It is to build and deploy nuclear
weapons and missiles in order to pre-empt America's regime-toppling
designs. The US should hardly be surprised if it comes to this. After all,
it is what Washington used to call deterrence before it abandoned that
concept in favour of "anticipatory defence" or, more candidly, unilateral
offensive warfare. To Iran, the US now looks very much like the Soviet
Union looked to western Europe at the height of the cold war. Britain and
West Germany did not waive their right to deploy US cruise and Pershing
nuclear missiles to deter the combined menace of overwhelming conventional
forces and an opposing, hostile ideology. Why, in all logic, should Iran,
or for that matter North Korea and other so-called "rogue states" accused
of developing weapons of mass destruction, act any differently?

If this is Iran's choice, the US will be much to blame. While identifying
WMD proliferation as the main global threat, its bellicose post-9/11
policies have served to increase rather than reduce it. Washington
ignores, as ever, its exemplary obligation to disarm under the nuclear
non-proliferation treaty (NPT). Despite strategic reductions negotiated
with Russia, the US retains enormous firepower in every nuclear weapons
category. Worse still, the White House is set on developing, not just
researching, a new generation of battlefield "mini-nukes" whose only
application is offensive use, not deterrence. Its new $400bn defence
budget allocates funding to this work; linked to this is an expected US
move to end its nuclear test moratorium in defiance of the comprehensive
test ban treaty.

Bush has repeatedly warned, not least in his national security strategy,
that the US is prepared to use "overwhelming force", including first use
of nuclear weapons, to crush perceived or emerging threats. It might well
have done so in Iraq had the war gone badly. Bush has thereby torn up the
key stabilising concept of "negative security assurance" by which nuclear
powers including previous US administrations pledged, through the NPT and
the UN, not to use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear states. Meanwhile
the US encourages egregious double standards. What it says, in effect, is
that Iran (and most other states) must not be allowed a nuclear capability
but, for example, Israel's undeclared and internationally uninspected
arsenal is permissible. India's and Pakistan's bombs, although recently
and covertly acquired, are tolerated too, since they are deemed US allies.
Bush's greatest single disservice to non-proliferation came in Iraq. The
US cried wolf in exaggerating Saddam's capability. Now it is actively
undermining the vital principle of independent, international inspection
and verification by limiting UN access to the country. Yet would Iraq have
been attacked if it really had possessed nuclear weapons? Possibly not.
Thus the self-defeating, mangled message to Iran and others is: arm
yourselves to the teeth, before it it too late, or you too could face the
chop.

Small wonder if things grow sticky inside Tehran's dark-windowed
ministries right now. If Iran ultimately does the responsible thing and
forswears the bomb, it will not be for want of the most irresponsible
American provocation.

s.tisdall at guardian.co.uk

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