Archive for the 'Iran' Category

The propaganda war against Iran

Published
by
Christiaan
on 13 March, 2006
in Imperialism, International relations, Iran, Law, Politics and US foreign policy
. 3 Comments

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.

Related:

External links:

Armchair tough talk

Published
by
Christiaan
on 7 October, 2005
in Imperialism, International relations, Iran, Iraq, Middle East, Politics, US foreign policy and War
. 2 Comments

In their efforts to drum up more war, armchair war criminals can make some pretty outlandish statements.

This from the prep school punk draft dodging fanatic himself:

There’s always a temptation in the middle of a long struggle to seek the quiet life, to escape the duties and problems of the world and to hope the enemy grows weary of fanaticism and tired of murder. We will keep our nerve and we will win that victory.

And then there’s this pearler from his poodle:

There is no justification for Iran or any other country interfering in Iraq. Blair apparently said this at a news conference with Iraqi President Jalal Talabani. It reminds me of when they talk about the jihadists in Iraq being foreign fighters, as if the hundreds of thousands of Americans and British weren’t foreign.

The U.S. invasion of Iran has already begun

Published
by
Christiaan
on 20 June, 2005
in Imperialism, International relations, Iran, Middle East, US foreign policy and War
. 0 Comments

Scott Ritter, former UN Chief Weapons Inspector in Iraq, writing for Aljazeera, argues that the invasion of Iran has already begun, much the same way as the invasion of Iraq begun in the summer of 2002. It’s really worth reading the whole article, but here’s a large excerpt:

Americans, along with the rest of the world, are starting to wake up to the uncomfortable fact that President George Bush not only lied to them about the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq (the ostensible excuse for the March 2003 invasion and occupation of that country by US forces), but also about the very process that led to war.

On 16 October 2002, President Bush told the American people that “I have not ordered the use of force. I hope that the use of force will not become necessary.”

We know now that this statement was itself a lie, that the president, by late August 2002, had, in fact, signed off on the ‘execute’ orders authorising the US military to begin active military operations inside Iraq, and that these orders were being implemented as early as September 2002, when the US Air Force, assisted by the British Royal Air Force, began expanding its bombardment of targets inside and outside the so-called no-fly zone in Iraq.

President Bush had signed a covert finding in late spring 2002, which authorised the CIA and US Special Operations forces to dispatch clandestine units into Iraq for the purpose of removing Saddam Hussein from power.

The fact is that the Iraq war had begun by the beginning of summer 2002, if not earlier.

As with Iraq, the president has paved the way for the conditioning of the American public and an all-too-compliant media to accept at face value the merits of a regime change policy regarding Iran, linking the regime of the Mullah’s to an “axis of evil” (together with the newly “liberated” Iraq and North Korea), and speaking of the absolute requirement for the spread of “democracy” to the Iranian people.

But Americans, and indeed much of the rest of the world, continue to be lulled into a false sense of complacency by the fact that overt conventional military operations have not yet commenced between the United States and Iran.

As such, many hold out the false hope that an extension of the current insanity in Iraq can be postponed or prevented in the case of Iran. But this is a fool’s dream.

The reality is that the US war with Iran has already begun. As we speak, American over flights of Iranian soil are taking place, using pilotless drones and other, more sophisticated, capabilities.

The violation of a sovereign nation’s airspace is an act of war in and of itself. But the war with Iran has gone far beyond the intelligence-gathering phase.

President Bush has taken advantage of the sweeping powers granted to him in the aftermath of 11 September 2001, to wage a global war against terror and to initiate several covert offensive operations inside Iran.

The most visible of these is the CIA-backed actions recently undertaken by the Mujahadeen el-Khalq, or MEK, an Iranian opposition group, once run by Saddam Hussein’s dreaded intelligence services, but now working exclusively for the CIA’s Directorate of Operations.

It is bitter irony that the CIA is using a group still labelled as a terrorist organisation, a group trained in the art of explosive assassination by the same intelligence units of the former regime of Saddam Hussein, who are slaughtering American soldiers in Iraq today, to carry out remote bombings in Iran of the sort that the Bush administration condemns on a daily basis inside Iraq.

… with everyone’s heads rooted in the events of the past, many are missing out on the crime that is about to be repeated by the Bush administration in Iran - an illegal war of aggression, based on false premise, carried out with little regard to either the people of Iran or the United States.

Most Americans, together with the mainstream American media, are blind to the tell-tale signs of war, waiting, instead, for some formal declaration of hostility, a made-for-TV moment such as was witnessed on 19 March 2003.

We now know that the war had started much earlier. Likewise, history will show that the US-led war with Iran will not have begun once a similar formal statement is offered by the Bush administration, but, rather, had already been under way since June 2005, when the CIA began its programme of MEK-executed terror bombings in Iran.

How long before we forget Iraq?

Published
by
Christiaan
on 9 April, 2003
in Imperialism, Iran, Iraq, US foreign policy and War
. 1 Comment

Saddam’s regime is on the brink, a joyous occasion to be sure, after years of tyranny, supported by the U.S., UK and other Western governments while committing his worst crimes, and then 12 years of sanctions, making his regime stronger and ordinary Iraqi people weaker. Sadly it means nothing to the thousands killed by U.S. and UK bombing campaigns, the hundreds of thousands killed by sanctions and, if we take a cursory look at history we know, despite what you’ll be told by corporate media, that it doesn’t mean much for the future of those left alive either.

Since the Second World War the United States Government has bombed 21 countries. None of these bombing campaigns led to the establishment of humane democracies in the countries involved. What most of them did lead to was the crushing of any semblance of a challenge to North American dominance and capitalism, and democracy in most cases.

  • China (1945-46 & 1950-53)
  • Korea (1950-53)
  • Guatemala (1954, 1960, 1967-69)
  • Indonesia (1958)
  • Cuba (1959-61)
  • Congo (1964)
  • Peru (1965)
  • Laos (1964-73)
  • Vietnam (1961-73)
  • Cambodia (1969-70)
  • Lebanon (1983-84)
  • Grenada (1983)
  • Libya (1986)
  • El Salvador (right through the 1980s)
  • Nicaragua (right through the 1980s)
  • Panama (1989)
  • Bosnia (1995)
  • Iraq (1991-2003)
  • Sudan (1998)
  • Former Yugoslavia (1999)
  • Afghanistan (2001-02)

How many more are they planning to bomb? Bush’s advisers say Iraq is just a “battle in the wider war.” They have named North Korea, Iran, and even Syria, Cuba and Libya as possible future targets. They call it a war without end.

The images you see on your TV will subside. The people celebrating on your screens, mostly of the Shiite majority will be forgotten just as those in Afghanistan and many other countries have been forgotten, while the U.S. Government moves onto the next target. The U.S. Government won’t for a minute entertain the idea of Shiite (Islamic) self-determination in Iraq. Prepare now for the installation of a U.S. puppet regime in place to ensure democracy does not ensue, to ensure “uninterrupted, secure U.S./Allied access to Gulf oil.” Prepare now for U.S. military occupation. Prepare now for U.S. Evangelical Christian missionaries (”relief workers”). Prepare now for asset stripping of oil reserves by U.S. corporations and lucrative reconstruction contracts awarded to U.S. corporations, all of which have close ties to the U.S. Government. Prepare now for Iraqi resistance to U.S. occupation.

Photo of an American soldier draping the Star Spangled Blindfold over a statue of Saddam Hussein after the invasion in 2003The Star-Spangled Blindfold draped over the head of a Saddam Hussein statue by a young U.S. marine pretty much sums up the hidden imperial nature of North American motives. Prepare now for the next target. What will the pretext be? Another terrorist attack?

The lesson learnt by those on the U.S. Government hit list? Arm yourself and arm yourself to the hilt with nuclear weapons because—judging by the different ways in which North Korea and Iraq have been dealt with—that’s, ironically, the only way you might avoid a U.S. lead invasion in the short term.

External links:

  • U.S. Military Occupation and Iraqi Resistance

14 “enduring bases” set in Iraq | 23 March, 2004
Wikipedia: Iraqi resistance
Wikipedia: Islamic Front of Iraqi Resistance

  • U.S. Religious Occupation and Zealotory

Iraqi patriarch slams US evangelicals | 21 May, 2005

  • Iraqi Death Toll

Study Claims Iraq’s ‘Excess’ Death Toll Has Reached 655 000 | 11 October, 2006
Co-Author of Medical Study Estimating 650,000 Iraqi Deaths Defends Research in the Face of White House Dismissal | 12 October, 2006

  • U.S. Economic Occupation & Thievery

Economic Occupation: The World Bank and IMF in Iraq | 17 March, 2006
Iraq for Sale: The War Profiteers | A Robert Greenwald film
Oily Truth Emerges in Iraq | 23 February, 2007

Under the proposed law, Iraq’s immense oil reserves would not simply be opened to foreign oil exploration, as many had expected. Amazingly, executives from those companies would actually be given seats on a new Federal Oil and Gas Council that would control all of Iraq’s reserves.

Oil Grab in Iraq | 22 February, 2007

While debate rages in the United States about the military in Iraq, an equally important decision is being made inside of Iraq—the future of Iraq’s oil. A new Iraqi law proposes to open the country’s currently nationalized oil system to foreign corporate control. But emblematic of the flawed promotion of “democracy” by the Bush administration, this new law is news to most Iraqi politicians.

What Congress Really Approved: Benchmark No. 1: Privatizing Iraq’s Oil for US Companies | 26 May, 2007

Now they have Congress blackmailing the Iraqi Parliament and the Iraqi people: no privatization of Iraqi oil, no reconstruction funds.