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What's Up With Bush And Iran?
Topic Started: Apr 15 2006, 08:46 AM (129 Views)
abuturab82
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What's up with Bush and Iran?

By Ali Moossavi -- The Arab American News:

http://www.arabamericannews.com/newsarticl...?articleid=4959

In the debate over the "threat" of Iran's nuclear weapons, one issue that isn't discussed, but should be, is the aftermath. If Seymour Hersh's latest article in The New Yorker is any indication of President Bush's true agenda for Iran, then the aftermath is the only issue of importance, because military strikes and regime change are foregone conclusions.

The aftermath was never seriously considered by Bush et al in the run-up to the war on Iraq. Propaganda emanating from the usual mouthpieces told us that U.S. troops would be greeted as liberators, reconstruction would be cheap and democracy would be implanted and spread across the region. Civilian casualties would be limited, they said.

Needless to say, none of this was true. Nor were any of the reasons the American people were given to justify the war in the first place. There was no link between Saddam Hussein and Al-Qaida, there were no weapons of mass destruction and Iraq was not a threat to the world.

While administration credibility now dominates the debate over Iraq, it's meaningless in the grand scheme of things. It was clear to those who follow the region that much of what Washington and London were saying was either distorted or blatantly false. The rest of America would have known this also, if the mainstream media had actually done their job.

The real reason for invading Iraq was that it contains the world's second largest known oil reserves, under the control of a nationalist regime that both inspired the "Arab and Muslim street" and threatened Israel. Regardless of the nature of Hussein's dictatorship (hardly a stellar example of leadership in the Middle East,) the idea of an external force "freeing a people" is a colonial one, as old as colonialism itself.

And that is exactly the same dynamic prompting the war drums on Iran: colonialism, or to be precise, neo-colonialism, the establishment of a "democratic" pro-western regime. Iran is the second-largest oil producer in OPEC and it too is under the control of a nationalist regime that's inspirational to the "Arab and Muslim street" and a threat to Israel.

All this can be summed up in the words of one diplomat Hersh interviewed: "The real issue is who is going to control the Middle East and its oil in the next ten years." The answer, according to every administration from FDR to Bush, is the United States and its allies.

Iran does have nuclear ambitions and has also been perfecting a missile capability to deliver nuclear warheads. All the while it claims to desire nuclear energy solely for domestic power generation. Sitting on a sea of oil, Iran's insistence on development of nuclear power - in the face of the attendant technical and political problems - hardly makes sense unless the goal is military. Technical problems there are. There is always the danger of a Three Mile Island or a Chernobyl. There is the persistent problem of where to put radioactive waste.

But the United States is no role model here. It has nullified the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. It violates the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty by massive expenditures on a large range of nuclear weapons activities. It is doing nothing about decreasing its stockpile of nuclear weapons. Is the U.S. less of a threat to world order than Iran?

This is the third time the U.S. intervenes to institute regime change for control of Iran's oil. In 1941, Britain and the Soviet Union invaded Iran, removed Reza Shah from power and put his son, Mohammed Reza, on the throne as the new Shah of Iran. It was hoped he would be more open to the West. And he was. But in 1951, his Prime Minister, Dr Mohammad Mossadegh, nationalized the Iranian oil industry. The Iranians were about to take control of Iran. It could not be allowed to happen.

In1953 Dr Mossadegh was ousted by the Shah's officers with British and American assistance. Kermit Roosevelt was a CIA agent who, in cooperation with British intelligence, bought the participation of army leaders and orchestrated the overthrow.

The Shah's subsequent rule, propped up by us, was marked by the torture and murder of those who crossed his path. Secular opponents were ruthlessly eliminated, leaving only religious extremists able to maintain any strength, even with their leadership in exile. In 1979, that religious leadership in exile overthrew the Shah, who died a year later in Cairo. The clerics have been in charge since.

However, nuclear weapons in Iran throw a monkey wrench into this third intervention scenario and hence the intense reaction Washington has had.

As American Enterprise Institute scholar Michael Rubin said on National Public Radio's "Talk Of The Nation" on Wednesday, a nuclear-armed Iran cannot be susceptible to external regime change while in the midst of an uprising. In other words, if an uprising were engineered, the U.S. couldn't militarily assist in the establishment of a pro-western regime and the Revolutionary Guards would crush the opposition with impunity. Hersh's article says we're already in Iran engineering that uprising: "...teams of American combat troops" have established "contact with anti-government ethnic-minority groups."

Those groups include Azeris, Baluchis and Kurds, and given the sectarian violence raging in Iraq, manipulation of ethnic fault lines could lead Iran down the same path. A series of bombings over the summer in Tehran and Ahvaz, in which Iranian Arabs appeared to be behind at least some of them, may be the first shot fired in that war.

This is what propels American military planning. The hope, according to Hersh's article, is that a well-coordinated strike will embarrass the regime and people will rise up as a result.

Pragmatists have repeatedly argued that such a move will not only backfire, Iran will retaliate in Iraq, Lebanon, Afghanistan and Palestine. There's also the spectre of it cutting back oil supplies and imposing a blockade on the Strait of Hormuz, the vital oil shipping area of the Persian Gulf.

Pragmatists also point out that, despite the Bush administration hype, Iran is at least a decade away from having any nuclear capability. As U of M Professor Juan Cole wrote recently "Despite all the sloppy and inaccurate headlines about Iran 'going nuclear,' the fact is that all President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said on Tuesday was that it had enriched uranium to a measely 3.5 percent, using a bank of 180 centrifuges hooked up so that they 'cascade.' "

"The ability to slightly enrich uranium is not the same as the ability to build a bomb. For the latter, you need at least 80% enrichment, which in turn would require about 16,000 small centrifuges hooked up to cascade. Iran does not have 16,000 centrifuges. It seems to have 180. Iran is a good ten years away from having a bomb."

So the truth is, Iran does not have nuclear capability and Bush would be a fool to launch a war on Iran. Sound familiar? That's the problem. The truth made no difference in Iraq.

The core issue here is sovereignty versus neocolonialism.

The strength of colonialism depends on how weak self-determination is, and since the debate occurs within the parameters of tactics and strategy, undermining Iran's self-determination remains the central point..

An ethical debate would admit that there has to be consistency: either everyone gets to have nukes, or no one gets them. But that is practically nowhere to be found. Instead, the media tries to give Washington the best advice on how to disarm Iran with headlines like the one found in the April 3rd edition of Time: "Will This Man Get The Bomb?" with a photo of Iranian President Ahmadinejad.

There's speculation that Saddam Hussein's pursuit of a euro-based oil bourse may have contributed to his downfall. Such a plan would have undermined the American dominated market, in which two bourses, London's International Petroleum Exchange and New York's Nymex are both dominated by American oil companies.

Iran has reportedly pursued a similar path and the bourse was supposed to start in March of this year. The significance of this has been debated, although not in any major media outlet (surprise, surprise.)

Some analysts, like William Clark, author of "Petrodollar Warfare: Oil, Iraq and the Future of the Dollar," say that Iraq's proposed bourse was what caused Operation Iraqi Freedom.

"Tehran's objective constitutes an obvious encroachment on dollar supremacy in the crucial international oil market," he said in an article in the "Energy Bulletin."

Others disagree. Adam Sieminski, oil analyst with Deutche Bank in London, told the London Guardian on June 16, 2004 that IPE and Nymex "are regulated markets based on well-established systems for trading." Still others think it's irrelevant, like Cole, who told me in an email that, "the question of dollars versus euros is irrelevant."

Regardless, such a move strikes as much of a nationalist chord as developing nukes and, as such, is at least a symbolic challenge to America's economic might, as nuclear weapons symbolically challenge American military might. In other words, Iranian President Ahmadinejad is playing to the home crowd, just as Bush is looking for a way to save Republican control of Congress in the fall.

And if it all goes wrong? Look at Iraq, and magnify.



Ali Moosavi is a Detroit area freelance writer. Reuel S. Amdur and M. Kay Siblani contributed to this report
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