- No one knows whether the US is serious about attacking
Iran to destroy its alleged nuclear weapons programmes, and today's assertion
from Tehran that US spy planes have been overflying the country will have
done nothing to calm the jitters.
-
- But everyone is perfectly clear that if that should happen,
it will be a very big deal indeed - and one which might make the invasion
of Iraq look like quite a minor incident.
-
- It takes two to create a sense of crisis, and George
Bush deliberately used his state of the union address on February 2 to
depict Iran as "the world's primary state sponsor of terror",
as well as accusing it of secretly developing an atomic arsenal.
-
- In Washington's eyes, one of the central members of the
"axis of evil" of 2002 has now graduated to become an "outpost
of tyranny".
-
- Lest anyone imagined that Iran would take such charges
lying down, tens of thousands of people braved snowstorms a few days later
to turn out in central Tehran to mark the anniversary of the 1979 revolution,
and to hear a stern warning from President Mohammed Khatami that anyone
who dared attack his country would face a "burning hell".
-
- Decades of mutual animosity means that is no empty threat.
For some, memories go back to the CIA's overthrow of the nationalist prime
minister Mossadegh in 1953, and while many Iranians admire the US, it is
still known, as Ayatollah Khomeini famously dubbed it, as the "Great
Satan".
-
- Americans remember the 444-day hostage drama at their
embassy in Tehran. Nor have Iranians forgotten US support for Khomeini's
bitter foe Saddam Hussein during the eight bloody years of war with Iraq.
-
- Israel, physically far closer to Iran - and equipped
with its own undeclared nuclear arsenal - is banging the drum even louder.
-
- Its foreign minister, Silvan Shalom, warned on a visit
to London on Wednesday that Iran, supporter of groups like Lebanon's Hizbullah
and the Palestinian Hamas and Islamic Jihad, was now only six months away
from acquiring the knowledge to join the nuclear club.
-
- "This kind of extreme regime with a nuclear bomb
is a nightmare, not only for us," he said.
-
- So far, so bad. And if the rhetoric is to be believed,
things may be about to get worse.
-
- For the moment the US is grudgingly acquiescing in diplomatic
efforts by the EU3 - Britain, France and Germany - to persuade Iran to
permanently abandon its programme of enriching uranium, which can be used
to make bomb-grade material. So far, this has only been suspended "temporarily",
with more talks due next month.
-
- That was the conciliatory-sounding message conveyed by
Condoleezza Rice, the new US secretary of state, on her maiden visit to
Europe, though she left no doubt about basic US hostility, criticising
"the loathed" Tehran regime of "unelected mullahs"
and urging "those of us who happen to be on the right side of freedom's
divide" to encourage Iranians to win democracy.
-
- Whether this amounted to a call for regime change, as
seen in Baghdad, was tantalisingly unclear.
-
- President Bush will be closely monitored on this subject
when he arrives for his first second-term visit to the old continent next
week - taking in Brussels, the German city of Mainz, and the Slovak capital
Bratislava.
-
- Europeans are increasingly worried that options are being
closed off, with the distinct possibility that the issue will end up being
referred, as the Americans would like, to the UN security council - the
beginning of a path that could lead to sanctions, and, in the worst case,
military action.
-
- Joschka Fischer, Germany's foreign minister, has suggested
that sanctions could strengthen hardline elements in Tehran.
-
- "Iran is not Saddam Hussein," he argued. "We
have there a contradictory mixture of very dark elements and democratic
elements."
-
- International divisions, however, mean sanctions are
unlikely, as Russia and China, permanent members of the security council,
would be loath to agree.
-
- Alarmingly, there are signs that military options are
being explored by the US, with reports of unmanned drones, special forces
identifying targets (Seymour Hersh's recent New Yorker article on this
was reprinted in its entirety in the Iran News), as well as carefully-publicised
nods, winks and briefings that Israel might attack Iran's nuclear sites,
as it did Iraq's in 1981.
-
- None of this, however, is entirely convincing. With US
forces bogged down in Iraq and hunting al-Qaida and Taliban remnants in
Afghanistan, it requires a huge leap of the imagination to see the 82nd
airborne heading for Tehran and Qom.
-
- Thus the dismissive comment by Ali Yunesi, Iran's powerful
intelligence minister, that the very idea of US military action was "psychological
warfare".
-
- "The Americans," he insisted, "would not
dare to implement their threats."
-
- Still, Iran is playing hardball, robustly defending its
right to develop civilian nuclear energy under the terms of the nuclear
non-proliferation treaty and denying - though unconvincingly in the light
of well-documented concealment and evasion in the past - that it has any
plans to produce weapons.
-
- Its motivation may well be the same search for national
prestige and modernity that drove the shah - then backed by the US - to
build the country's first nuclear reactor at Bushehr, on the Gulf, back
in 1974. But it is no secret that the military option is an attractive
one.
-
- Experts warn of the danger of miscalculation and error
as Iran, cut off from the international community in so many ways since
the revolution, does not have a sophisticated nuclear or strategic community.
-
- Shahram Chubin, a veteran observer of Iranian nuclear
policy, argues that Tehran simply does not understand the complex doctrines
of deterrence developed and refined between east and west during the cold
war.
-
- Clearly, an Iranian nuclear capability would not pose
a threat to overwhelming US nuclear dominance, but it might force it to
keep large forces in the region. It could also encourage other countries
- Saudi Arabia and perhaps Egypt - to go down the nuclear path. That would
leave the non-proliferation treaty in tatters.
-
- Ironically, this crisis is deepening just as Iraq's elections
ended in clear victory for the Shia Muslim groups which were supported
by Iran during Ba'athist days. US officials have been quizzing them about
their current relationship with Tehran, and especially about the implications
of a confrontation over Iranian nuclear weapons.
-
- Iraq's painful and violent march towards democracy, for
all its shortcomings, holds some discomforting lessons for the Iranian
regime, dominated by conservatives and clerics whose record on human rights
is regularly lambasted.
-
- It is hard for them to say so publicly, but some frustrated
Iranian reformists - who lost their majority in the majlis last year -
agree with Joschka Fischer that a hardline US approach, combined with Israeli
sabre-rattling, will strengthen the hardliners and divert attention from
their failure to tackle a stagnating economy and high unemployment.
-
- Part of this riveting and volatile story is that American
credibility is in very short supply - at home as well as abroad. Is the
Bush administration, many wonder, likely to be more right about Iran than
it was about Iraq?
-
- "There is an eerie similarity to the events preceding
the Iraq war," commented David Kay, who led the search for banned
weapons of mass destruction in postwar Iraq, in a Washington Post article.
-
- "Nuclear weapons in the hands of Iran would be a
grave danger to the world. That is not what is in doubt. What is in doubt
is the ability of the US government to honestly assess Iran's nuclear status
and to craft a set of measures that will cope with that threat short of
military action by the United States or Israel."
-
- Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited
2005
-
- http://www.guardian.co.uk
|
