Why and how the United States wants to get Iran to give up its nuclear program
[Translated from the analysis of the GegenStandpunkt Publishers on Radio Lora, Munich — March 5, 2012]
While the American espionage and subversion agency, the CIA, announced just last week that, on the basis of their information, it would be unlikely that Iran is working on a nuclear weapon, President Obama used the visit of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as the occasion for an overt threat of war, which he garnished with a promise: “I do not bluff!”
The thereby further developed and upgraded war scenario against the Islamic Republic is determined by two protagonists: the United States and Israel. The legitimacy of their pursuit of the preventive nuclear disarmament of Persia is, as a matter of principle, not disputed by the local public, although one of them, America, wields nuclear weapons as an integral part of its armament, and not only does not exclude their use, but also tried them out twice with sweeping success and very lasting consequences. The other protagonist, Israel, has the bomb without reproaches having been made by its American protective power and Americas allies. In contrast to Iran, Israel can never be proved to have violated the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty — and indeed for one simple reason: it has just never entered into it.
This veto — imposed with a declaration of war on call — from two such notorious peace-loving powers averse to the use of violence as a political instrument as America and Israel, against the enrichment of uranium in Iran, that not just NATO members, but almost all of the relevant community of states with the exception of Russia and China support with their trade and financial boycott, is not based on a rejection of this terrible weapon, nor does it depend on whether Tehran really intends to acquire it.
Rather, it is that the Islamic Republic of Iran arose from an unauthorized overthrow of the Shah; it sees itself as a state committed to higher values, namely, the law of Allah, and it competes as an aggressive alternative to the world order demands and canon of values of democratic imperialism. Hence it has the nerve, with its avowedly anti-Western and Islamic constitution, to actually offer something of an opposing system, courting partners and offering itself as a partner to states that want to oppose U.S. domination. Iran denies the U.S. hegemony in a region in which it pursues “vital interests”: from energy supply, through the unsettled balance of power in the wake of the Arabellion,[*] to the currently announced overthrow of the Assad regime in Syria, not to mention the relics of the Iraq campaigns and its steadfast security partner, Israel, whose process of state foundation at the expense of the Palestinians is far from complete. Even more, what makes Iran dangerous in the eyes of the U.S. are the means at its disposal to enforce its anti-American activities. Through its oil revenues, it has economic and military capacities by means of which it not only can evade American directives, but also can rebel against them. For the US-led world of glorious, free, democratic imperialism, Iran is, therefore, a dangerous troublemaker and treated accordingly. This means that the U.S. together with its partners demand and promote regime change.
This is thus the context of Iran’s nuclear program or the hostility it arouses in the U.S. & Co. For them, it does not first become unbearable when it results in an atomic bomb; rather it is unacceptable from the beginning, because it is in the nature of building up nuclear power technology that there is always the opportunity to produce nuclear weapons alongside the operation of nuclear power plants. This opposition naturally does not apply to U.S. allies and partners. Germany, which, like the Ayatollahs, has officially and for all foreseeable circumstances renounced nuclear weapons, maintains, likewise for just as long, that which Iran is still working to develop: a weapons-grade nuclear technology at its finest. Japan or Canada, despite all their competition over the world market and world power, never run into difficulties with the supervisory authorities of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. On the contrary, America, as the self-proclaimed chief guardian of this treaty, has given them precisely the license to develop the full range of nuclear technology. In Iran, however, the core question of other possible uses of enriched uranium is taken as a reason to deny the authorization provided for by treaty for civilian use of nuclear energy. Instead, the treaty inspection regime is brought to bear as a harassing control regime, which takes place mainly as officially sanctioned international espionage. This constitutes the basis — openly admitted by the inspectors — of the proceedings whereby Tehran can only assuage the mistrust in its nuclear technology efforts by ceasing them.
Preventing Iran from developing its use of nuclear energy to the point that it gets the ability to build nuclear weapons is clearly a much more ambitious goal than simply preventing a nuclear arming from actually taking place. Accordingly, the work of destruction from a military strike would also have to be dimensioned for the Israeli Air Force either on its own, i.e., with only logistical and technical weapons support from NATO, or as a joint venture with the United States. No wonder that concerns all the way up to the General Staff of the Israeli army are still being raised against it.
For Obama, therefore, the world power’s repertoire of strategies for eliminating the Iranian malfunctioning state has not been exhausted, and its threat of military action as a last resort is supposed to restrain its Israeli friend from pressing ahead rashly with all the hard-to-foresee consequences. Unlike, for example, in the matter of getting rid of Gaddafi, the U.S., in the matter of Iran, expressly reserves for itself the leading role. It fabricates headings under which all measures are justified to the U.S. alone and by which the “international community” has to join the struggle against Iran, so that many a keen observer is reminded by their “obviousness” and “implausibility” of the memorable performance of Bush’s Secretary of State Colin Powell in the Security Council with his “irrefutable evidence” of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. An assassination plot allegedly from Iran against the Saudi ambassador to the United States conforms, in the American version, to the facts of planning a terrorist attack on American soil, and moves the case close to 9/11: the government of Iran is a “terrorist regime” that does not respect the sovereignty of other states and intends to attack the U.S. on its own soil. The Obama administration derives from that their justification to strike against Iran even without international participation or a UN mandate. To begin with, the U.S. creates far-reaching facts, leading the way with unilateral sanctions that amount to acts of war under international law, and thereby force Russia and China to decide whether they intend to put up with them. Germany and the EU are now smoothly lined up in the anti-Iran front. They participate in the “paralysis” of Iran with their own sanctions.
These attacks are aimed at ruining Iran: all resources at the disposal of this state are contested. In this manner, the forces of a superpower work to prepare the field for ultimately forcing Iran to its knees. The U.S. doesn’t pretend for a minute that the economic sanctions now in force are just supposed to block Iran’s nuclear program. They are supposed to wreck its domestic economy based on oil and gas sales, and cut it off from international monetary transactions, thus depriving it of all sources of money by which it can get in the way of the United States. This is how Iran is to be made unable to act internationally.
With the “Patriot Act,” the Obama administration has classified every economic transaction with Iranian banks as an act of money laundering and a threat to homeland security. Every firm from a third country — the American ones have been long since barred from this commerce anyway — that enters into trade agreements with Iran and at the same time maintains an account at a U.S. bank risks without prior warning being charged with a serious offense and excluded from business transactions with the U.S.
States in the overall region of the Middle East that under Bush still hesitated to line up in the front against Iran because they did not want — further — war in the region are being drawn in by the preparations for a “military situation.” It is not only Iran that suffers economic damage under the sanctions, but also its neighbors; by participating in the boycott measures against Iran, they make themselves frontline states against it. The Gulf states are being armed by the United States with all the necessary military means for that. As a staging area essential for the United States, Bahrain is allowed to put down the revolt of its population with the help of Saudi Arabian intervention troops, and even the friendly reminder of Saudi Arabia’s “deficient democracy” has ceased since the confrontation with Iran was put on the agenda. The civil war in Syria or the anti-government fighters, as the case may be, can be certain of the goodwill of the United States, since in this way an ally of Iran and its main support in the Middle East is being decisively weakened.
Rather callously, and critically merely in the technical details, the democratic public takes note of the transition of the U.S. administration from the “war on terror” to the running battle against terrorists: the CIA and Mossad are quite obviously engaged in preventive executions of leading Iranian scientists, and, like an accumulation of “accidents,” engaged as well in the shutdown of control software in military installations using Trojans, and also with direct sabotage.
When the government in Tehran speaks of nothing but acts of war on this matter, in agreement with the opposition that is otherwise very esteemed by us as the “democratic alternative” to Ahmadinejad and the mullahs, it is certainly right. The U.S. and its accomplices reinforce that, however, only in the hope of being on the road to success, because the enemy is obviously hurt when it acts in dismay.
Translators’ Note
[*]Arabellion: a term coined by the German press referring to the present-day revolts in the Arab world.
© GegenStandpunkt 2012