Iran in the Crosshairs Again 

Sabre rattling against
Iran is nothing new, but that doesn't mean the threat
of war isn't real. 

Phyllis Bennis analyses the
situation in the wider Middle East

http://www.redpepper.org.uk/iran-in-the-crosshairs-again/

Here we go again with the Iran hysteria. It is tempting
to think this time will be just like previous periods
of sabre rattling against Iran. But there are
significant new dangers. The Arab Spring, Israel's
position, changes in the regional and global balance of
forces, and national election campaigns, all point to
this round of anti-Iranian hysteria posing potentially
graver risks than five or six years ago.

We have seen all this before. The US ratchets up its
rhetoric, Israel threatens a military attack,
escalating sanctions bite harder on the Iranian people,
Iran refuses to back down on uranium enrichment. But at
the same time, top US military and intelligence
officials actually admit Iran does not have a nuclear
weapon, is not building a nuclear weapon, and has not
decided whether to even begin a building process.

In 2004 Israel's prime minister denounced the
international community for not doing enough to stop
Iran from building a nuclear weapon. In 2005 the
Israeli military was reported to 'be ready by the end
of March for possible strikes on secret uranium
enrichment sites in Iran'. In 2006 the US House Armed
Services Committee issued a report drafted by one
congressional staffer (an aide to hard-line pro-war
John Bolton, then US ambassador to the UN), claiming
that Iran was enriching uranium to weapons-grade 90 per
cent. That same year a different Israeli prime minister
publicly threatened a military strike against Iran. In
2008, George W Bush visited Israel to reassure them
that 'all options' remained on the table.

The earlier crisis saw a very similar gap between the
demonisation, sanctions, threats of military strikes
against Iran, and the seemingly contradictory
recognition by US, Israeli, United Nations and other
military and intelligence officials that Iran actually
did not possess nuclear weapons, a nuclear weapons
programme, or even a decision to try to develop nuclear
weapons.

The 2005 US National Intelligence Estimate (NIE)
determined that even if Iran decided it wanted to make
a nuclear weapon, it was unlikely before five to ten
years, and that producing enough fissile material would
be impossible even in five years unless Iran achieved
'more rapid and successful progress' than it had so
far. By 2007, a new NIE had pulled back even further,
asserting 'with high confidence that in fall 2003
Tehran halted its nuclear weapons programme ... Tehran
had not started its nuclear weapons programme as of
mid-2007'. The NIE even admitted 'we do not know
whether it currently intends to develop nuclear
weapons'. That made the dire threats against Iran sound
pretty lame. So maybe it wasn't surprising that
Newsweek magazine described how, 'in private
conversations with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert
last week, the president all but disowned the
document'.

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA - the UN's
nuclear watchdog) issued report after report indicating
it could find no evidence that Iran had diverted
enriched uranium to a weapons programme. The UN
inspection agency harshly rejected the House committee
report, calling some of its claims about Iran's alleged
nuclear weapons activities incorrect, and others
'outrageous and dishonest'. And outside of the Bush
White House, which was spearheading much of the
hysteria, members of Congress, the neo-con think tanks,
hysterical talk show hosts, and much of the mainstream
media went ballistic.

Then and now

All of that sounds very familiar right now. Military
and intelligence leaders in Israel and the US once
again admit that Iran does not have nukes. (Israel of
course does, but no one talks about that.) Secretary of
Defense Leon Panetta asked and answered his own Iran
question: 'Are they trying to develop a nuclear weapon?
No.' Director of National Intelligence James R.
Clapper, Jr. admitted the US does not even know 'if
Iran will eventually decide to build nuclear weapons'.
The latest 2011 NIE makes clear there is no new
evidence to challenge the 2007 conclusions; Iran still
does not have a nuclear weapons programme in operation.

According to the Independent, 'almost the entire senior
hierarchy of Israel's military and security
establishment is worried about a premature attack on
Iran and apprehensive about the possible
repercussions.' Former head of the Israel Defense
Forces (IDF) said 'it is quite clear that much if not
all of the IDF leadership do not support military
action at this point.'

But despite all the military and intelligence experts,
the threat of war still looms. Republican candidates
pound the lecterns promising that 'when I'm
president...' Iran will accept international inspectors
- as if the IAEA had not maintained an inspection team
inside Iran for many years now. We hear overheated
rumours of Iranian clerics promising nuclear weapons to
their people - as if Iran's leaders had not actually
issued fatwas against nuclear weapons, something that
would be very difficult to reverse.

Some strategic issues are indeed at stake, but the
current anti-Iran mobilisation is primarily political.
It doesn't reflect actual US or Israeli military or
intelligence threat assessments, but rather political
conditions pushing politicians, here and in Israel, to
escalate the fear factor about Iranian weapons (however
non-existent) and the urgency for attacking Iran
(however illegal). And the danger, of course, is that
this kind of rhetoric can box leaders in, making them
believe they cannot back down from their belligerent
words.

Israel at the centre

One of the main differences from the propaganda run-up
to the Iraq war is the consistent centrality of Israel
and its supporters, particularly AIPAC in the US, in
this push for war against Iran. Israel certainly jumped
aboard the attack-Iraq bandwagon when it was clear that
war was indeed inevitable, but US strategic concerns
regarding oil and the expansion of US military power
were first and primary. Even back then, Israel
recognised Iran as a far greater threat than Iraq. And
now, Israelis using that alleged threat to pressure US
policymakers and shape US policy - in dangerous ways.
During this campaign cycle, Obama is under the greatest
pressure he has ever faced, and likely ever will face,
to defend the Israeli position unequivocally, and to
pledge US military support for any Israeli action,
however illegal, dangerous, and threatening to US
interests.

Iran simply is not, as former CIA analyst and
presidential adviser Bruce Reidel makes clear, 'an
existential threat' to Israel. Even a theoretical
future nuclear-armed Iran, if it ever chose that
trajectory, would not be a threat to the existence of
Israel, but would be a threat to Israel's longstanding
nuclear monopoly in the Middle East. That is the real
threat motivating Israel's attack-Iran-now campaign.
Further, as long as top US political officials, from
the White House to Congress, are competing to see who
can be more supportive of Israel in its stand-off with
Iran, no one in Washington will even consider pressure
on Israel to end its violations of international law
and human rights regarding its occupation and apartheid
policies towards Palestinians. Israel gets a pass.

Israel is more isolated in the region than ever before.
The US-backed neighbouring dictatorships Israel once
counted on as allies are being challenged by the
uprisings of the Arab Spring. Egypt's Mubarak was
overthrown, the king of Jordan faces growing pressure
at home, and the threats to Syria's regime mean that
Israel could face massive instability on its northern
border - something Bashar al-Assad and his father
largely staved off since Israel occupied the Syrian
Golan Heights in 1967.

Syria's two struggles in one

The calamity underway in Syria is also directly linked
to the Iran crisis. There are two struggles going on in
Syria, and unfortunately one may destroy the potential
of the other. First was Syria's home-grown popular
uprising against a brutal government, inspired by and
organically tied to the other risings of the Arab
Spring, and like them calling first for massive reform
and soon for the overthrow of the regime. Syria is a
relatively wealthy and diverse country, in which a
large middle class, especially in Damascus and Aleppo,
had prospered under the regime, despite its political
repression. As a result, unlike some other regional
uprisings, Syria's opposition was challenging a regime
which still held some public support and legitimacy.

The regime's drastic military assault on largely
non-violent protests led some sectors of the opposition
to take up arms, in tandem with growing numbers of
military defectors, which of course meant waging their
democratic struggle in the terrain in which the regime
remains strongest: military force. The government's
security forces killed thousands, injuring and
arresting thousands more, and in recent weeks even the
longstanding support for Assad in Damascus and Aleppo
began to waver. Simultaneously, attacks against
government forces increased, and the internal struggle
has taken on more and more the character of a civil
war.

The further complication in Syria, and its link to
Iran, is that it has simultaneously become a regional
and global struggle. Syria is Iran's most significant
partner in the Middle East, so key countries that
support Israel's anti-Iran mobilisation have turned
against Syria, looking to weaken Iran by undermining
its closest ally. Perhaps because the Assad regimes
have kept the occupied Golan Heights and the
Israeli-Syrian border relatively quiet, Israel itself
has not been the major public face in the
regionalisation of the Syrian crisis. But clearly Saudi
Arabia is fighting with Iran in Syria for influence in
the region. The Arab League, whose Syria
decision-making remains dominated by the Saudis and
their allied Gulf petro-states (such as Qatar and the
UAE), is using the Syria crisis to challenge Iran's
rising influence in Arab countries from Iraq to
Lebanon. And of course the US, France and other Western
powers have jumped on the very real human rights crisis
in Syria to try to further weaken the regime there - in
the interest again of undermining Iran's key ally far
more than out of concern for the Syrian people.

Diminishing US power

Facing economic crisis, military failures in Iraq and
Afghanistan, and the loss or weakening of key client
states in the Arab world, the US is weaker and less
influential in the Middle East. But maintaining control
of oil markets and US strategic capacity are still key
regional goals for the US, which means that military
power remains central. The nature of that military
engagement is changing - away from large-scale
deployments of ground troops in favour of rapidly
expanding fleets of armed drones, special forces, and
growing reliance on naval forces, navy bases and
sea-based weapons.

Thus the US backs Saudi intervention in Bahrain to
insure the US Fifth Fleet maintains its Bahraini base;
Washington's escalating sanctions give the West greater
leverage in control of oil markets; the Iranian
rhetorical threat to close the Strait of Hormuz (only
in desperation since it would prevent Iran from
exporting its own oil) is used to justify expansion of
the US naval presence in the region. Along with the
possibility of losing Syria as a major military
purchaser and regional ally, concerns about those US
strategic moves played a large part of Russia's veto of
the UN resolution on Syria.

In Iran, the pressure is high and the sanctions are
really starting to bite, with much greater impact felt
by the Iranian population, rather than the regime in
Tehran. The assassination of Iranian nuclear experts,
particularly the most recent murder of a young
scientist which was greeted by Israeli officials with
undisguised glee and barely-disguised triumph, are more
likely aimed at provoking an Iranian response than
actually undermining Iran's nuclear capacity. So far,
Iran has resisted the bait. But if Israel makes good on
its threat of a military strike - despite the virtually
unanimous opposition of its own military and
intelligence leadership - there is little reason to
imagine that Iran would respond only with words. The US
and Israel are not the only countries whose national
leaders face looming contests; Iran's supreme leader,
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and its president face huge
political challenges as well.

The consequences of a strike against Iran would be
grave - from attacks on Israeli and/or US military
targets, to going after US forces in Iran's neighbours
Afghanistan, Iraq, and Kuwait, to attacks on the
Pentagon's Fifth Fleet in Bahrain, to mining the Strait
of Hormuz ... and beyond. An attack by the US, a
nuclear weapons state, on a non-nuclear weapons state
such as Iran, would be a direct violation of the
Non-Proliferation Treaty. Iran might kick out the UN
nuclear inspectors. The hardest of Iran's hard-line
leaders would almost certainly consolidate ever greater
power - both at home and in the Arab countries, and the
calls to move towards greater nuclearisation, perhaps
even to build a nuclear weapon, would rise inside Iran.
Indeed, the Arab Spring's secular, citizenship-based
mobilisations would likely lose further influence to
Iran - threatening to turn that movement into something
closer to an 'Islamic Spring'.

Nuclear weapons-free zone

At the end of the day the crisis can only be solved
through negotiations, not threats and force.
Immediately, that means demanding that the White House
engage in serious, not deliberately time-constrained
negotiations to end the current crisis - perhaps based
on the successful Turkish-Brazilian initiative that the
US scuttled last year. That means that Congress must
reverse its current position to allow the White House
to use diplomacy - rather than continuing to pass laws
that strip the executive branch of its ability to put
the carrot of ending sanctions on the table in any
negotiations. And it means an Iran policy based on the
real conclusions of US intelligence and military
officials, that Iran does not have and is not building
a nuclear weapon, rather than relying on lies about
non-existent nuclear weapons, like the WMD lies that
drove the US to war in Iraq.

In the medium and longer term, we must put the urgent
need for a nuclear weapons-free zone in the Middle East
back on the table and on top of our agenda. Such a
multi-country move would insure Iran would never build
a nuclear weapon, that Israel would give up its
existing 200 to 300 high-density nuclear bombs and the
submarine-based nuclear weapons in its arsenal, and
that the US would keep its nuclear weapons out of its
Middle East bases and off its ships in the region's
seas. Otherwise, we face the possibility of the current
predicament repeating itself in an endless loop of
Groundhog Day-style nuclear crises, each one more
threatening than the last. Phyllis Bennis is a fellow
of the Institute for Policy Studies and of the
Transnational Institute in Amsterdam. Her books include
Before & After: US Foreign Policy and the War on
Terrorism

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