- Imagine for a moment that you are a senior official in
Iran's foreign ministry. It's hot outside on the dusty, congested streets
of Tehran. But inside the ministry, despite the air-conditioning, it's
getting stickier all the time. You have a big problem, a problem that Iran's
president, Mohammad Khatami, admits is "huge and serious". The
problem is the Bush administration and, specifically, its insistence that
Iran is running "an alarming clandestine nuclear weapons programme".
You fear that this, coupled with daily US claims that Iran is aiding al-Qaida,
is leading in only one direction. US news reports reaching your desk indicate
that the Pentagon is now advocating "regime change" in Iran.
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- Reading dispatches from Geneva, you note that the US
abruptly walked out of low-level talks there last week, the only bilateral
forum for two countries lacking formal diplomatic relations. You worry
that bridge-building by Iran's UN ambassador is getting nowhere. You understand
that while Britain and the EU are telling Washington that engagement, not
confrontation, is the way forward, the reality, as Iraq showed, is that
if George Bush decides to do it his way, there is little the Europeans
or indeed Russia can ultimately do to stop him.
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- What is certain is that at almost all points of the compass,
the unmatchable US military machine besieges Iran's borders. The Pentagon
is sponsoring the Iraq-based Mojahedin e-Khalq, a group long dedicated
to insurrection in the Islamic republic that the state department describes
as terrorists. And you are fully aware that Israel is warning Washington
that unless something changes soon, Iran may acquire the bomb within two
years. As the temperature in the office rises, as flies buzz around the
desk like F-16s in a dogfight and as beads of sweat form on furrowed brow,
it seems only one conclusion is possible. The question with which you endlessly
pestered your foreign missions before and during the invasion of Iraq -
"who's next?" - appears now to have but one answer. It's us.
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- So what would you do?
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- This imaginary official may be wrong, of course. Without
some new terrorist enormity in the US "homeland", surely Bush
is not so reckless as to start another all-out war as America's election
year approaches? Washington's war of words could amount to nothing more
than that. Maybe the US foolishly believes it is somehow helping reformist
factions in the Majlis (parliament), the media and student bodies. Maybe
destabilisation and intimidation is the name of the game and the al-Qaida
claims are a pretext, as in Iraq. Perhaps the US does not itself know what
it wants to do; a White House strategy meeting is due today. But who knows?
Tehran's dilemma is real: Washington's intentions are dangerously uncertain.
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- Should Iran continue to deny any present bomb-making
intent and facilitate additional, short-notice inspections by the International
Atomic Energy Agency to prove it? Should it expand its EU dialogue and
strengthen protective ties with countries such as Syria and Lebanon, India,
Russia and China, which is its present policy? The answer is "yes".
The difficulty is that this may not be enough. Should it then go further
and cancel its nuclear power contracts with Moscow? Should it abandon Hizbullah
and Palestinian rejectionist groups, as America demands? This doubtless
sounds like a good idea to neo-con thinktankers. But surely even they can
grasp that such humiliation, under duress from the Great Satan, is politically
unacceptable. Grovelling is not Persian policy.
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- Even the relatively moderate Khatami made it clear in
Beirut recently that there would be no backtracking in the absence of a
just, wider Middle East settlement. And anyway, Khatami does not control
Iran's foreign and defence policy. Indeed, it is unclear who does. Ayatollah
Ali Khamenei, ex-president Hashemi Rafsanjani, security chief Hassan Rohani,
and the military and intelligence agencies all doubtless have a say, which
may be why Iran's policies often appear contradictory. Tension between
civil society reformers and the mullahs is endemic and combustible. But
as US pressure has increased, so too has the sway of Islamic hardliners.
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- Iran's alternative course is the worst of all, but one
which Bush's threats make an ever more likely choice. It is to build and
deploy nuclear weapons and missiles in order to pre-empt America's regime-toppling
designs. The US should hardly be surprised if it comes to this. After all,
it is what Washington used to call deterrence before it abandoned that
concept in favour of "anticipatory defence" or, more candidly,
unilateral offensive warfare. To Iran, the US now looks very much like
the Soviet Union looked to western Europe at the height of the cold war.
Britain and West Germany did not waive their right to deploy US cruise
and Pershing nuclear missiles to deter the combined menace of overwhelming
conventional forces and an opposing, hostile ideology. Why, in all logic,
should Iran, or for that matter North Korea and other so-called "rogue
states" accused of developing weapons of mass destruction, act any
differently?
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- If this is Iran's choice, the US will be much to blame.
While identifying WMD proliferation as the main global threat, its bellicose
post-9/11 policies have served to increase rather than reduce it. Washington
ignores, as ever, its exemplary obligation to disarm under the nuclear
non-proliferation treaty (NPT). Despite strategic reductions negotiated
with Russia, the US retains enormous firepower in every nuclear weapons
category. Worse still, the White House is set on developing, not just researching,
a new generation of battlefield "mini-nukes" whose only application
is offensive use, not deterrence. Its new $400bn defence budget allocates
funding to this work; linked to this is an expected US move to end its
nuclear test moratorium in defiance of the comprehensive test ban treaty.
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- Bush has repeatedly warned, not least in his national
security strategy, that the US is prepared to use "overwhelming force",
including first use of nuclear weapons, to crush perceived or emerging
threats. It might well have done so in Iraq had the war gone badly. Bush
has thereby torn up the key stabilising concept of "negative security
assurance" by which nuclear powers including previous US administrations
pledged, through the NPT and the UN, not to use nuclear weapons against
non-nuclear states. Meanwhile the US encourages egregious double standards.
What it says, in effect, is that Iran (and most other states) must not
be allowed a nuclear capability but, for example, Israel's undeclared and
internationally uninspected arsenal is permissible. India's and Pakistan's
bombs, although recently and covertly acquired, are tolerated too, since
they are deemed US allies. Bush's greatest single disservice to non-proliferation
came in Iraq. The US cried wolf in exaggerating Saddam's capability. Now
it is actively undermining the vital principle of independent, international
inspection and verification by limiting UN access to the country. Yet would
Iraq have been attacked if it really had possessed nuclear weapons? Possibly
not. Thus the self-defeating, mangled message to Iran and others is: arm
yourselves to the teeth, before it it too late, or you too could face the
chop.
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- Small wonder if things grow sticky inside Tehran's dark-windowed
ministries right now. If Iran ultimately does the responsible thing and
forswears the bomb, it will not be for want of the most irresponsible American
provocation.
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- http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,963844,00.html
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