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US Beefs Up Iran Dossier
By Simon Tisdall
03/10/06 "Mail&Guardian" -- -- George W Bush’s explanation of his
volte-face over a proposed Iran-India gas pipeline project appeared
slightly disingenuous. “Our beef with Iran is not the pipeline,” the
United States president said recently after withdrawing previous
objections and giving the go-ahead to Washington’s new friends in
Delhi. “Our beef with Iran is the fact that they want to develop a
nuclear weapon.”
But US fears about Iranian nukes are hardly the whole story.
Washington is compiling a dossier of grievances against Tehran
similar in scope and seriousness to the pre-war charge-sheet against
Iraq. Other complaints include Iranian meddling in Iraq, support for
Hamas in Palestine and Hizbullah in Lebanon, and human rights
abuses.
Bush regularly urges Iranians to seize the “freedom they seek and
deserve”. In Tehran’s ministries, that sounds like a call for regime
change. He has ignored past Iranian offers of talks and tightened US
economic sanctions.
Official Washington’s quickening drumbeat of hostility is beginning
to recall political offensives against Libya’s Moammar Gadaffi,
Panama’s Manuel Noriega and Saddam Hussein, which all ended in
violence. Rightwing American media are urging action, deeming Iran
“an intolerable threat” that is the “central crisis of the Bush
presidency”.
As was the case with Iraq, administration tub-thumping is
influencing public opinion -- notwithstanding subsequent debunking
of many of its Iraq claims. Polls suggest many Americans are now
convinced Iran is the new public enemy No 1. Forty-seven percent
told Zogby International they favoured military action to halt its
nuclear activities.
While hopes of avoiding confrontation are not yet dead, warnings by
John Bolton, the US ambassador to the United Nations, that Iran
could face “painful consequences” over its nuclear activities were a
reminder of Bush’s repeated refusals to eschew armed force. Iranian
officials believe the US is determined to undermine and if possible
overthrow Iran’s theocracy and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s
government -- regardless of whether a nuclear compromise is reached.
That helps explain Tehran’s hardline negotiating stance.
They cite a US decision to spend $75-million on funding potential
Iranian opposition forces, including NGOs, trade unions and human
rights groups, and local language propaganda broadcasts -- tactics
pioneered in Serbia, Georgia and Ukraine. Iran accuses the US of
stirring discontent among its Kurdish, Baluch and Azeri minorities,
suspicions fed by a US marine corps investigation to gauge the
strength of opposition to the central government among non-Persian
groups. Tehran also believes the US is using the People’s Mujahideen,
an anti-regime group once backed by Hussein and blamed for many
terrorist attacks, for intelligence-gathering and destabilisation.
It recently demanded that British troops quit Basra after linking
them to unrest among Arab Iranians in Khuzestan, abutting south-east
Iraq. Britain has rejected the claims.
The “EU three” -- Britain, France and Germany -- remain focused on
the nuclear controversy rather than on broader Iran-related issues.
A senior British official said they would, if necessary, support
“graduated” pressure on Iran via the UN Security Council, which
meets in New York next week, “possibly leading to trade restrictions
or more likely, travel and financial sanctions on individuals”. But
the official said the Europeans “do not have a clear view of what we
will do at a later stage” should Iran refuse to bend.
This lack of an agreed strategy may encourage US hawks, egged on by
Israel, to seize the initiative -- even at the risk of an Iraq-style
split with Europe. They have been biding their time for three years.
Now they want action. For starters, Bolton is expected to seek a
30-day UN deadline for Iran to back down or face counter-measures.
And on Wednesday the American ambassador to the International Atomic
Energy Agency, Greg Schulte, called for “special inspections’’ by
the UN nuclear teams in Iran, in effect giving them carte blanche in
their detective work. The mechanism has been used only once before,
unsuccessfully, in North Korea 13 years ago.
Resorting to special inspections would be “much more intrusive’’
than the IAEA’s ongoing inspections in Iran, said a diplomat. But
was up to the IAEA to decide.
Spinning a web for India
A world away from its self-declared international war on terror,
Washington has spied greater and more potent threats on the horizon,
argues Randeep Ramesh. India’s nuclear programme -- built in
isolation, from scratch, after American-imposed sanctions in the
1970s -- is such a threat.
Not only has a poverty-stricken country, without outside help, built
a nuclear industry, but its scientific community has also mastered
the technically difficult reprocessing cycle and achieved a series
of unique breakthroughs in nuclear technology. India might one day
be “free’’ to assemble as large an atomic arsenal as possible and,
even more problematic for Washington, end up with a monopoly on an
energy source of the future.
By comparison, the United States has not built a nuclear reactor for
three decades. Conscious of being dependent on oil in a time of
rising prices, George W Bush decided to reactivate the country’s
nuclear programme and capture the benefits of the labour of others.
It is this that informs American thinking on how to deal with
incipient risks to its global dominance, not some fuzzy talk of a
special relationship with India built on a sense of shared values.
Yet US propaganda continues. Condoleezza Rice neatly encapsulated
the Bush policy as a “balance of power that favours freedom’’, which
also appeals to Indians’ view of their country as a moral force in
the world. Casting India as a friend and Iran as a foe can also be
conveniently justified in such terms. However, American bullying of
smaller states undermines this moral consensus around democracy and
freedom. India’s size, geography and economic clout mean it is less
susceptible to the kind of tactics used to intimidate Tehran.
The US is determined to ensure that the rise of India, and its
neighbour China, will not mean the decline of the US. Washington may
be prepared to concede that there might be bigger economies in the
world, but aims to remain pre-eminent in industrial power.
To do so it is willing to restrict access to capital markets and
technology, promoting its national interest under the guise of a
moral foreign policy. The blocking of a Chinese oil company’s bid
for a US rival last year is one example of this new policy, and
Indian potential could be restrained by similar means. As Bush’s own
nuclear negotiating team has made clear in testimony to Congress,
the administration wants to “lock in’’ India to a deal before moving
to tie down and restrain the country’s nuclear potential in
non-proliferation discussions.
Unlike the cold war, where the US shut out its rivals from the world
market, its policy in the coming decades is to entangle rising
powers in a web of rules designed to favour itself. As India may
find to its cost, getting into a hot embrace with Washington is
easy; getting out may be much harder. --
© Guardian Newspapers 2006
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