Writing for The Guardian on Thursday, Timothy Garton Ash argues that although we must stop Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, we shouldn’t bomb it to do so. In his words,
“The cure would be worse than the disease.”
Certainly, it would. According to Paul Rogers of the Oxford Research Group, an attack on Iran would be “the start of a protracted military confrontation that would probably involve Iraq, Israel and Lebanon as well as the United States and Iran, with the possibility of west Gulf states being involved as well.” Dmitriy Sedov goes further, warning that a strike on Iran would be the “beginning of an epoch of nuclear wars.” In the words of Sir Richard Dalton, Britain’s ambassador to Tehran from 2002-06, any attack would be “a disaster for Iran, the region and quite possibly the world”.
But considering the facts, and considering recent history, is it really appropriate to label Iran as the “disease”, to which American military action is the “cure” (albeit, as Garton Ash observers, not a very effective one)? Is it responsible to continue to portray Iran as a security threat even as the American/Israeli drumbeat for war grows louder by the day?
We recently learned that the U.S. ignored a diplomatic overture by Iran in 2003, in which Iran proposed negotiations based on: Iran taking action to reduce Hizbullah to a “mere political force” in Lebanon, “transparency” over the concerns of an Iranian nuclear weapons programme, “enhanced action” against al-Qaeda in Iran, a halt in Iranian support of “Palestinian opposition groups” (e.g Hamas and Islamic Jihad), “pressure on these organisations to stop violent actions against civilians within the 1967 borders” and an “acceptance” of the two-state solution regarding the Israel/Palestine conflict, as defined by the Arab Peace Initiative. In return, the U.S. would halt “hostile behaviour” towards Iran, abolish sanctions against Iran, combat “anti-Iranian” terrorist groups in Iraq and the U.S., acknowledge Iran’s “legitimate security interests” in the region and allow Iran “full access to peaceful nuclear technology, biotechnology and chemical technology”.
The U.S. ignored the overture, doing nothing to follow up on the Iranian offer of discussions. Was this due to, as Flynt Leverett (a former aide to Condoleeza Rice) would have it, “some combination of ideological blindness and incompetency”? No; as Dan Kovalik writes, the American dismissal of Iran’s peace overture, together with everything else that is happening with regards to Iran right now, “leads to one and only one conclusion: that the Bush administration is not interested in peace with Iran”.
Looking at the history of U.S. involvement in the Middle East, even the recent history (since we all know how forgetful our amnesiac press can be), the idea that U.S. intervention could be the “cure” for anything in the region is not one that springs to mind. Last year, the U.S. was complicit to the level of a partner in Israel’s brutal aggression against Lebanon. The United States sent weapons shipments to Israel during the war and repeatedly delayed and blocked a resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire. As a result, over 1,000 civilians, roughly a third of them children, were killed, and some 970,000 people were displaced. According to Amnesty International, the “evidence strongly suggests that the extensive destruction of public works, power systems, civilian homes and industry was deliberate and an integral part of the military strategy, rather than “collateral damage””. Human Rights Watch likewise reported that Israel consistently failed to “distinguish between combatants and civilians.”
After the first Gulf war, the U.S. led the way in enforcing a decade of “genocidal” sanctions against Iraq. That description comes from Dannis Halliday, a former UN humanitarian coordinator in Iraq who resigned in protest in 1998 over what he termed the “illegal and immoral” sanctions regime, which amounted to a “deliberate policy to destroy the people of Iraq”. “We are in the process of destroying an entire society”, he said. The sanctions were responsible for the deaths of roughly a million people, half of them children. When asked for her opinion on the murder of 500,000 Iraqi children, then-U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright replied, “we think the price is worth it.”
The sanctions continued right up to the illegal U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. The invasion was an aggression, defined at Nuremberg as the “supreme international crime”, and has so far killed approximately 650,000 Iraqis. It was condemned recently by former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski as a “war of choice” and “a historic, strategic and moral calamity.” Testifying before the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Brzezinski described the invasion of Iraq as born of “Manichean principles and imperial hubris.” Brzezinski went on to lay out a “plausible scenario” for a future war with Iran, which would involve:
“Iraqi failure to meet the benchmarks, followed by accusations of Iranian responsibility for the failure, then by some provocation in Iraq or a terrorist act in the US blamed on Iran, culminating in a `defensive’ US military action against Iran that plunges a lonely America into a spreading and deepening quagmire eventually ranging across Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan.”
This prediction looks to be an accurate one. U.S. politicians have been on the propaganda offensive in recent days, trying to blame Iran for insurgent attacks on U.S. troops in Iraq. In reality, as the recent National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) recognises, Iranian support for Iraqi militias is “not likely to be a major driver of violence…because of the self-sustaining character of Iraq’s internal sectarian dynamics”. Veteran reporter Patrick Cockburn is similarly sceptical, writing,
“No serious observer of Iraq since the US invasion believes for a moment that Iran has sustained the Sunni insurgency or played an essential role in the rise of the Shia militias.”
In any event, Iran is not even being accused of supporting the Sunni insurgency. Rather, it is alleged that Iran is supporting the same Shi’ite militias that we are are supporting. As Juan Cole writes,
“some 99 percent of all attacks on U.S. troops occur in Sunni Arab areas and are carried out by Baathist or Sunni fundamentalist (Salafi) guerrilla groups. Most of the outside help these groups get comes from the Sunni Arab public in countries allied with the United States, notably Saudi Arabia and other Gulf monarchies. Washington has yet to denounce Saudi aid to the Sunni insurgents who are killing U.S. troops…
If Iran is providing materiel (sic) to anyone, it is to U.S. allies. Tehran may be helping the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq and its Badr Corps paramilitary, but the U.S. is not fighting that group.”
Republican congressman Ron Paul confronted Secretary of State Rice on Wednesday over the administration’s “unproven accusations of Iranian support for the Iraqi insurgency” and “unproven charges against Iran’s nuclear intentions”. Indeed, the U.S. government has already been found guilty of producing misleading intelligence on Iran – late last year, the IAEA branded a congressional report into Iran’s nuclear programme as “outrageous and dishonest”, “erroneous” and “misleading”. Now, it seems, they are at it again.
On February 2, National Security spokesman Stephen Hadley admitted that a briefing on Iran was held back because it was “overstated” and not “focused on the facts”. Hadley implies that the White House delayed the release of the briefing after deciding it was too loose with the facts, but a recent article in the National Journal disagrees, stating that it was the “intelligence community” that pressured White House officials into re-writing the dossier. All the signs are that the Bush administration is once again fixing intelligence around the policy, as it did with Iraq. “It’s absolutely parallel,” according to former CIA counter-terrorism expert Philip Giraldi. “They’re using the same dance steps – demonize the bad guys, the pretext of diplomacy, keep out of negotiations, use proxies. It is Iraq redux.”
The Guardian reports today that despite official denials, “US preparations for an air strike against Iran are at an advanced stage”. It cites Vincent Cannistro, a Washington-based intelligence analyst, as saying,
“Planning is going on, in spite of public disavowals by Gates. Targets have been selected. For a bombing campaign against nuclear sites, it is quite advanced. The military assets to carry this out are being put in place…
We are planning for war. It is incredibly dangerous.”
If we accept for a moment that Iran is planning to develop nuclear weapons (even though there is no proof of this at all), we must also understand that it is doing so for entirely understandable reasons. They have nothing whatsoever to do with “destroying Israel” or turning the whole world into a caliphate, and everything to do with Iran’s rational, perceived self-interest. As Ray Tayekh, Senior Fellow for Middle East Studies at the Council of Foreign Relations, writes,
“It is important to note that Iran’s policy toward Iraq, as elsewhere in the Gulf, is predicated on carefully calibrated calculations of national interest, as opposed to a messianic mission of advancing the revolution…
“From the outset it must be emphasized that for all the factions involved in this debate, the core issue is how to safeguard Iran’s national interests. The Islamic Republic is not an irrational rogue state seeking such weaponry as an instrument of an aggressive, revolutionary foreign policy. This is not an “Islamic bomb” to be handed over to terrorist organizations or exploded in the streets of New Yorkor Washington. The fact is that Iran has long possessed chemical weapons, and has yet to transfer such arms to its terrorist allies. Iran’s cautious leaders are most interested in remaining in power and fully appreciate that transferring nuclear weapons to terrorists could lead to the type of retaliation from the United States or Israel that would eliminate their regime altogether. For Iran this is a weapon of deterrence and power projection.”
Iran is surrounded by hostile nuclear powers (Pakistan to the East and the U.S. in Iraq and Afghanistan) and has been repeatedly and explicitly threatened with attack by both the U.S. and Israel, two nuclear states with a history of aggression (the U.S. does not even hide this fact; the National Security Strategy openly affirms America’s right to conduct preventive strikes – prevention, under international law, is indistinguishable from aggression). Apart from mere self-defence, a nuclear Iran would also be less restrained in its dealings with other states. The balance of power in the region would shift slightly away from the U.S. and its client states towards Iran. That is, of course, completely unacceptable to the U.S., hence the current manufactured “Iran crisis”, ostensibly about an Iranian security threat but in reality aimed at securing U.S. domination by crushing a potential rival.
We should not be surprised at this; protecting and furthering U.S. hegemony abroad has been the central pillar of the post-Cold War neocon doctrine (which in turn should not surprise us, since it has also been the central doctrine of U.S. foreign policy since the Second World War). As far back as 1992, a leaked draft Defense Planning Guidance (DPG) document, crafted by “Scooter” Libby, Paul Wolfowitz and Zalmay Khalilzad, called for `massive increases in defense spending, the assertion of lone superpower status, the prevention of the emergence of any regional competitors, the use of preventive–or preemptive–force, and the idea of forsaking multilateralism if it didn’t suit U.S. interests.’ In 2007, we can see that the Bush administration has followed this strategy to the letter. The DPG states,
“Our first objective is to prevent the reemergence of a new rival. This is a dominant consideration underlying the new regional defense strategy and requires that we endeavor to prevent any hostile power from dominating a region whose resources would, under consolidated control, be sufficient to generate global power. These regions include Western Europe, East Asia, the territory of the former Soviet Union, and Southwest Asia.
There are three additional aspects to this objective: First the United States must show the leadership necessary to establish and protect a new order that holds the promise of convincing potential competitors that they need not aspire to a greater role or pursue a more aggressive posture to protect their legitimate interests. Second, in the non-defense areas, we must account sufficiently for the interests of the advanced industrial nations to discourage them from challenging our leadership or seeking to overturn the established political and economic order.
Finally, we must maintain the mechanisms for deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role. (my emphasis)”
The White House was forced to reject the draft DPG after the massive stir it caused when leaked to the public. However, the re-draft kept many of its core doctrines, even if the language was softened-up.
When Zalmay Khalilzad first showed the draft to then-Defense Secretary Dick Cheney, he was reportedly impressed, replying, “You’ve discovered a new rationale for our role in the world.”
A nuclear Iran would be a significant threat to U.S. and Israeli domination of the Middle East, hence the Bush administration’s determination to prevent Iran from gaining the capacity to quickly develop nuclear weapons should it choose to at some point in the future. As military historian Martin van Crevald writes,
“In the 1950s it was America’s own clients, Britain and France, who were regarded as the offenders and put under pressure. Between 1960 and 1993, first China, then Israel (albeit to a limited extent) and finally India and Pakistan were presented as the black sheep, lectured, put under pressure and occasionally subjected to sanctions. Since then, the main victim of America’s peculiar belief that it alone is sufficiently good and sufficiently responsible to possess nuclear weapons has been North Korea.
As the record shows, in none of these cases did the pessimists’ visions come true. Neither Stalin, Mao nor any of the rest set out to conquer the world. It is true that, as one country after another joined the nuclear club, Washington’s ability to threaten them or coerce them declined…
Given the balance of forces, it cannot be argued that a nuclear Iran will threaten the United States. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s fulminations to the contrary, the Islamic Republic will not even be a threat to Israel. The latter has long had what it needs to deter an Iranian attack…
The main countries to feel the impact of a nuclear Iran will surely be those of the Persian Gulf. This is not because Tehran is likely to drop a bomb on Kuwait or the United Arab Emirates; rather, the Iranian regime may feel less constrained in dealing with its neighbors across the Gulf. (my emphasis)”
So, a nuclear Iran would present a challenge to U.S. hegemony in the resource rich and strategically invaluable Middle East. It is therefore easy to understand why the Bush administration is so opposed to the idea of a nuclear Iran. However, given the disastrous record of U.S. and Israeli intervention in the region, why should we we share its view? It would be more appropriate for Timothy Garton Ash and others to frame the question thus: would the cure of a nuclear Iran be worse than the disease of U.S. dominance of the Middle East? I, for one, am not so sure that it would be.
Cross-posted at The Heathlander