Doug Lorimer
The February 12 London Sunday Times reported that the US is drawing up plans for air and missile strikes against Iran's nuclear facilities. Giving the impression that such an attack was imminent, the paper reported that its source was "a senior Pentagon adviser". The next day, a similar story was run by Associated Press, with maps and detailed target lists.
Such stories have periodically appeared in the Western corporate media over the last 12 months, fed by leaks from the Bush administration. One of the first came from Scott Ritter, a former UN weapons inspector in Iraq and now an outspoken critic of Washington's Iraq policy. In an opinion piece on the Aljazeera website last April, Ritter announced that President George Bush had authorised "a massive aerial attack against Iran" to be carried out in June 2005. Ritter wrote that his source was "someone close to the Bush administration".
The June 2005 attack of course did not occur. This is because neither the political nor the military conditions are propitious for a US military attack on Iran.
In a January 22 article published by the US Knight Ridder Newspapers chain under the headline "Iran poses military dilemma", Cliff Kupchan, an Iran expert and former State Department official in the Clinton administration, observed that a US attack on Iran's nuclear facilities "wouldn't be that hard to do". But he warned that "You'd be picking a helluva fight, though. Iran ... has a range of retaliatory options that are extremely unpleasant."
While some independent analysts point out that Iran could close the Persian Gulf to shipping by mining it, thus seriously restricting the flow of Middle East oil to the West, others have highlighted the prospect of Iran's Shiite clerics encouraging attacks by Iraq's majority Shiites on the already overstretched US occupation forces in that country.
During a visit to Iran in January, Moqtada al Sadr, one of the most popular of Iraq's Shiite clerics, declared that his Mahdi Army militia would support Iran if it was attacked. In 2004, Sadr's Mahdi Army waged a six-month rebellion against US occupation troops.
As a result of Iran's capacity to take retaliatory action that could seriously damage Western interests, "anything short of a full military invasion would only embolden Iran", warned Sammy Salama of the Monterey Institute of International Studies. He told KRN that this is because "it will just make the regime stronger than it is now", since "almost everyone in Iran — on the streets, in the press, in literature — sees the Iranian nuclear program as a matter of national pride".
While Iran is Washington's next "strategic target" for "regime change", the US rulers' immediate goal is to get the UN Security Council to directly or indirectly endorse its claim that Iran's nuclear program poses a threat to "international peace and security".
It is this immediate objective that lies behind all of the noise from Washington about Iran's alleged development of nuclear weapons. Corporate media stories about US preparations for an imminent military attack on Iran's nuclear facilities are deliberately planted by the Bush administration.
These media stories keep up the public pressure on other countries to put demands upon Iran that, if acceded to, will supposedly avert a US military attack on Iran's nuclear facilities. However, the demands placed on Iran invariably call on it to renounce its legal rights under the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) to research and produce its own nuclear fuel (low-enriched uranium) — something Tehran refuses to do.
On February 4, Washington succeeded in getting a majority of the 35 members of the UN's Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency to adopt a resolution requesting that IAEA director-general Mohammed ElBaradei forward to the Security Council the report on Iran that he was to present to the March 6 IAEA board meeting.
In his 11-page report, which he sent to the Security Council on March 8, ElBaradei concluded that after three years of "go anywhere, see anything" inspections his agency "has not seen any diversion of nuclear material to nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices".
However, bending to Washington's and its allies' pressure, ElBaradei declared that there remain "uncertainties" about Iran's nuclear program and clearing these up would require much more time. He said Iran would also need to agree to "transparency" measures extending beyond its legal obligations under its NPT safeguards agreement with the IAEA.
Reuters reported on March 9 that Western diplomats at the UN "foresee up to a year of UN verbal warnings to Iran before the council even considers any sanctions, likely to start with measures aimed at Iranian leaders and their families, such as travel bans and freezing of bank accounts".
According to Reuters, an EU diplomat told it "the council could issue a statement this month urging Iran to comply with IAEA demands that it suspend all uranium enrichment activities and comply with its inquiries into whether its atomic programme is peaceful or not.
"A month or two later, the council could adopt a resolution setting a deadline for Iran to suspend all enrichment and reprocessing activities and ratify a protocol enhancing IAEA inspection powers. Only after that might sanctions be imposed.
"The diplomat acknowledged that gaining international agreement for any council resolutions would be an uphill task", given Russia's and China's publicly stated opposition to such a course of action.
"However", Reuters added, "US officials have mooted the idea of mustering a 'tough-minded' coalition of EU and other nations to impose targeted measures on Iran not mandated by the Security Council."
This "mooted" option, of course, would lay the basis for creating an Iraq-style "coalition of the willing" to carry out a US-led invasion of Iran under the pretext of preventing its acquisition of nuclear weapons. The big unknown is whether the US public will fall for the same trick twice.
As a result of the steady barrage of corporate media reports and White House statements claiming that Iran has a secret nuclear weapons program and that it is the "world's leading state sponsor of terrorism", according to a February 9-12 USA Today/CNN/Gallup poll, "Fully one-half of Americans think that if Iran does develop nuclear weapons, it is 'very likely' Iran would provide those weapons to terrorists to use against the United States".
However, only 9% favoured immediate US military action, while 68% preferred the use of favoured sanctions and diplomacy. If those methods failed, four in 10 said they would then exercise the military option, while about half were still opposed to military action. The warmongers in Washington still have a long way to go to rally US public opinion behind any "pre-emptive" military attack on Iran.
From Â鶹´«Ã½ Weekly, March 15, 2006.
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