Maybe Tom Engelhardt is right.
Archive for the 'Iran' Category
The prospect of an attack on Iran has been on my mind since the attack on Iraq, not in the least because it would probably precipitate a great depression and turn much of the world into a fireball.
Tom Engelhardt has a thoughtful piece on why he thinks the U.S./Israel won’t attack Iran, despite some of the nutters running around the halls of power in those countries.
Let’s hope he’s right.
The media in the West has a lot of blood on its hands already. Is it going to have more blood on its hands in Iran? Iran is not the belligerent party:
When it comes to demonising Iran, the US, Israel and Britain have a unified message and a compliant media, which has learned nothing from its mistakes during the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, and seems happy to continue to act as a government propaganda arm in some cases.
Thanks to the dutiful corporate mouthpieces, most Americans and Britons have no idea that Tehran is acting within its rights under the NPT.
They don’t know that in December, a US intelligence estimate stated categorically that Iran is not currently developing nukes or that the nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which monitors Iranian facilities, has no proof it seeks to do so.
The West’s propaganda campaign is so effective that the majority of Westerners believe that Iran is the belligerent even though the facts support the contrary argument.
Paul Jay interviews Noam Chomksy on U.S. policy toward Iran:
Suppose it was true that Iran is helping insurgents in Iraq. I mean, wasn’t the United States helping insurgents when the Russians invaded Afghanistan? Did we think there was anything wrong with that? I mean, Iraq’s a country that was invaded and is under military occupation. You can’t have a serious discussion about whether someone else is interfering in it. The basic assumption underlying the discussion is that we own the world.”
Here’re a few points to keep in mind if you’re bothering to follow the current propaganda campaign being waged against Iran.…
Mohamed ElBaradei, Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and last year’s Nobel Peace Laureate, posited in 2004 that:
If the world does not change course, we risk self-destruction.
Albert Einstein had some thoughts on this:
I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.
While Noam Chomsky—described by the New York Times as “arguably the most important intellectual alive”—contended in a recent lecture that:
Under the current U.S. policies, a nuclear exchange is inevitable.
The U.S., nuclear weapons and the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty
It’s worth recalling that no other nation in history has attacked another country with nuclear bombs other than the United States of America, killing hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians in the process.
It’s also useful to recall the official reasons given for invading Iraq: nuclear proliferation, terrorism and human rights abuses. As was widely predicted, the invasion of Iraq has increased terror, human rights abuses and nuclear proliferation. Exponentially.
In short, the United States of America is a dangerous rogue state, plagued by deceit.
While Washington cynically uses the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) against Iran to further its agenda of domination over the oil rich region of the Middle East, it does so having flagrantly rejected its own obligations under the treaty.
Being a signatory to the treaty the U.S. has a binding legal requirement to move towards “complete disarmament under strict and effective international control.” But, as we all know, the United States of America is unique in the world in that the sun shine out of its ass and is thus exempt from international law and treaty obligations.
While none of the nuclear powers have lived up to their commitments under the NPT the U.S. is far in the lead in rejecting them and alone in officially rejecting them. Not to mention its open plans to develop new nuclear weapons.
Iran, nuclear weapons and the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty
Obviously Iran has never attacked another country with nuclear weapons (or with any weapons for that matter), nor is it openly discussing plans to attack another country, unlike Israel (which has developed nuclear weapons and refuses to sign the NPT) and the U.S., both of which are openly discussing plans to bomb Iran.
By invading Iraq and rejecting it obligations under the NPT the U.S. has effectively encouraged Iran and other countries to develop nuclear weapons in an effort to deter the neo-conservative radicals. As Martin van Creveld—an Israeli military historian at the Hebrew University in Israel—puts it, after the invasion of Iraq, “had the Iranians not tried to build nuclear weapons, they would be crazy.”
On the other hand Mohamad ElBaradei of the IAEA—the same man who warned that there were no nuclear weapons programs in Iraq—says there is “no evidence” of nuclear weapons programs or “diversion of nuclear material to nuclear weapons” in Iran.
Iran’s current activities, as far as the evidence is concerned, fall within its legal rights under the NPT, of which Article IV grants signatories the “inalienable right … to develop research, production and use of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes.”
Article IV of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty
Washington has demanded that Article IV be revised and restricted, and a good case can be made for that. The treaty was entered into force in 1970 and these days, with modern technology, being able to produce fuel for reactors is apparently just a step away from nuclear weapons. So restriction of Article IV is a sensible move.
Any revision of Article IV, however, would need to ensure unimpeded access to nuclear materials for non-military use, otherwise Washington’s call for restricting Article IV can be seen as nothing more than a “cynical intention to convert the NPT into a convenient instrument of U.S. foreign policy,” as strategic analyst and former NATO planner Michael MccGwire put it.
With this in mind Mohamed ElBaradei of IAEA made a reasonable proposal that production and processing of weapons-usable material should be restricted “exclusively to facilities under multinational control … acompanied … above all, by an assurance that legitimate would-be users could get their supplies.”
Only one country has officially accepted ElBaradei’s proposal: Iran.
On 16 February, 2006, Secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council (SNSC) Ali Larijani stated that, “Should a credible international system for providing nuclear fuel be in place, the Islamic Republic of Iran would be ready to procure its nuclear fuel from that system.”
As Noam Chomsky has noted, implementation of ElBaradei’s proposal would “terminate the crises and be a great advance forward in preserving the species.”
Unfortunately that path is being blocked because of Washington’s flat rejection of ElBaradei’s proposal. Putting weapons-usable nuclear materials under multinational control would of course limit Washington’s unique authority to do whatever it likes.
And, in more serious news, Washington threatens to bomb Iran unless it will pull a rabbit out of its own ass.
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