[Mb-civic] Iran-Crossing the Rubicon

[Michael Butler]

    The Next War - Crossing the Rubicon
    By John Pilger
    t r u t h o u t | Perspective

    Friday 10 February 2006

    Has Tony Blair, the minuscule Caesar, finally crossed his Rubicon?
Having subverted the laws of the civilized world and brought carnage to a
defenseless 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 neighbor, 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 recognize 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.

    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
Labor 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.