The Coming Attack on Iran

The spring of 2007 is increasingly feeling like the fall of 2002. The steady drum beat of charges against Iran bares a striking resemblence to the bipartisan fear mongering in the lead up to the Iraq war. While the case against Iraq was transparently false from the start, the fact that the charges levied in the drive to war were false is now a matter of record. That, barely four years later, the same type of strategy could be used against Iran should be generating uncomfortable laughter at the audacity of our elected leaders. The widening bipartisan consensus behind another war of agression is troubling, but, given US policy in the region, not surprising. Like Iraq, the US stance against Iran has more to do with its oil resources and sucessful defiance of the US than with an imagined military threat that it poses. While Republicans and Democrats may differ on tactics, concern over the control of the major oil producing region of the world is an issue that transcends party lines.
While the question of nuclear power has maintained a center piece of the case against Iran, more recently charges that it is funding and arming the Iraqi resistance have dominated coverage. The urgency implicit in much of the pro-intervention rhetoric is consistently undercut by assertions by the International Atomic Energy Agency and various American intelligence agencies that, even under the most favorable conditions, Iran is several years away from developing a nuclear weapon. The fact that little to no evidence that it is seeking such a weapon combined with its religious leaders condemning nuclear weapons as a crime against Islam futher undermines the case. The fact that it is supporting elements of the Iraqi resistance somewhat plausible, but, again, there is no evidence that demonstrates official support. Members of the Bush Administraiton have even had to concede this point. It also must mentioned that full-scale support for the resistance would, from the Iranian perspective, be completely counter-productive because the resistance is engaged in battle with an Iraqi government dominated by pro-Iranian Shiite parties.
Debunking the charges that Iran is seeking nuclear weapons or intervening in Iraqi political affairs should not, however, be taken to mean that intervention is justified if the charges are true. Iran is bordered by nuclear-armed Pakistan and US-occupied Afghanistan and Iraq with Israel and the US, both nuclear powers, openly threatening an attack. While nuclear weapons should not be tolerated anywhere, Iranian efforts at a nuclear deterent would make sense. As if it needs to be pointed out: wars, occupations, and open threats are not condusive to peaceful, non-nulcear coexistance. Like much of the case against Iran, the fact that American politicians can complain about Iranian interference in the internal affairs of Iraq with a straight face is astonishing. The US, not Iran, has nearly two hundred thousand troops occupying the country right now.
The charge that Iran represents a threat to Israel is also plausible, but not in the way that it is presented in the American media. The fact that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is a beligerant racist has been repeatedly confirmed. Sadly, much of his rhetoric does not represent a distinct break from past Iranian leaders. In the early years of the Islamic Republic, anti-Israeli rhetoric, much of it quite racist, dominated the official discourse on the Palestinian issue. At the same time Iranian leaders publicly blasted Israel, they were buying weapons from them to help in their war against Iraq. While Ahmadinejad is making his comments, the Iranian government has also made it quite clear that they would be willing to recognize Israel and even end support for Palestinian militants. These proposals were found in a 2003 Iranian offer for talks that was rejected by the Bush Administration. Iran is a threat to Israel in the same way that it is a threat to the US. It is able to undermine US hegemony in the region both by being able to sucessfully buck US power via Israel and by the fact that it exists outside the US sphere of influence. Last summer, Iranian support for Hezbollah in its defeat of the Israeli assault on Lebanon undermined the notion of Israeli invincibility. In doing this, it was able to undercut the coersive power of Washington’s number one enforcer in the region.
Like Iraq in 2003, the arguments made against Iran in 2007 are baseless. Also like Iraq, the primary reason for American beligerence is its oil resources. Many of the members of the Bush Administration, before coming to power, laid out a detailed strategy for maintaining and extending the American Empire. The paper, written under the auspices of The Project for the New American Century, was signed by such men as former United Nations Ambassador John Bolton, Vice President Dick Cheney, and former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Building on ideas and arguments made over the course of the previous decade, the men argued that the only way that the US could secure its place as the world’s only superpower was to reassert control over the Middle East, by any means necessary, and use the region’s oil reserves to force other nations to submit to American leadership. This overall strategy was made official policy in 2002, and has since come to be known as the Bush Doctrine. The basic tenents of this strategy have sense become more or less internalized by the political elite in Washington, shaping their world view and the parameters of official debate. Speaking of the nature of US-Iran policy the dissident academic Noam Chomsky commented, “Dick Cheney declared in Kazakhstan or somewhere that control over pipeline is a ‘tool of intimidation and blackmail.’ When we have control over the pipelines it's a tool of benevolence. If other countries have control over the sources of energy and the distribution of energy then it is a tool of intimidation and blackmail exactly as Cheney said. And that's been understood as far back as George Kennan and the early post-war days when he pointed out that if the United States controls Middle East resources it'll have veto power over its industrial rivals. He was speaking particularly of Japan but the point generalizes.”
RP