verbena-19

Tomgram: Michael Schwartz on Iranian Ironies; introduction by Tom Engelhardt

A project of the Nation Institute

TomDispatch.comTomgram: Michael Schwartz on Iranian Ironies

We have now reached another of those recurring tinderbox moments relating to Iran. Yesterday, the Iranians officially relaunched their nuclear program, beginning a suspended process of uranium conversion at a facility near Isfahan. In this, Iran's emboldened clerical regime defies the European troika -- France, Germany, England -- with which it has been in negotiations, and perhaps creates a moment for which Bush administration officials have longed, but whose challenging arrival they may now regret. The board of governors of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) met Tuesday essentially on an emergency basis and perhaps in the near future the matter of the Iranian nuclear program may even go to the UN Security Council with possible sanctions on the table. (Th! e passage of any sanctions measure there is unlikely indeed, given Russian and Chinese backing for the Iranians, not to speak of "the sympathy of other non-nuclear states on the 35-nation IAEA board"). And then...? Well, that's the $64 dollar (a barrel) question, isn't it?

The geopolitical fundamentalists of the Bush administration have been itching for a down-and-dirty "regime change" fight with the clerical fundamentalists of Iran at least since the President, in his 2002 State of the Union Address, linked Iran, Saddam Hussein's hated neighboring regime with which it had fought an eight-year war of the utmost brutality, and the completely unrelated regime in North Korea into an infamous "axis of evil." (Perhaps what the President meant was "excess of evil.") As we now know, Saddam's Iraq, with its non-existent nuclear program, was chosen as the administration's first target on its shock-and-awe "cakewalk" through the Middle East (and then, assumedly, the rest of the world) exactly because it was a military shell of its former self, a third-rate pushover compared to either Iran or North Korea. As it happened, the Second-Cousin-Twice-Removed of All Battles turned! into -- as Saddam Hussein predicted -- the Mother of All Battles and war against the rest of the "axis" fell into abeyance.

Now, we're back to a potential face-off with a country that at least has an actual nuclear program, if not (unlike the North Koreans) a weapon to go with it. The nuclear world as imagined by the Bush administration is, in fact, a jaggedly uneven place. On the one hand, you have Iran, considered (like Saddam's Iraq) an imminent proliferation threat (even while that proliferator-in-chief of a nation Pakistan remains our bosom buddy); and yet Iran has, for at least 17 years (yes, Virginia, that's years, not months!), had a secret nuclear program (as well as an above-board one) aimed (possibly) at creating the means to create nuclear weapons. A new U.S. National Intelligence Estimate (the first on Iran since 2001) was just leaked to the press. This is one of those documents brokered every now and t! hen among the 15 agencies that make up the official U.S. intelligence "community" -- there are more than 15 actually, but the others are fittingly "in the shadows." It evidently claims that Iran may need another ten years or so to create the means to make nuclear weapons (not even to have the weapons in hand). If that's accurate, then we have a 27-year-plus-long effort to create one bomb. That -- to my untutored mind -- is not exactly an overwhelming stat when it comes to threat deployment.

Just at this moment (shades of Iraq), Iranian exiles are releasing new information on supposedly secret and illegal nuclear work being done by the Iranians, while Donald Rumsfeld is claiming that U.S. forces have found new weaponry in the hands of the Iraqi insurgency that came "clearly, unambiguously" from Iran and that these will "ultimately [be] a problem for Iran." (Forget that it's quite illogical for the Iranians to be supporting the largely Sunni Iraqi insurgency against an allied, mainly Shiite government.) In the meantime, there's an 800-pound nuclear gorilla sitting starkly at the center of the Middle Eastern proliferation living room. That's Israel, of course, with its extra-legal, super-secret arsenal of nuclear weapons, an estimate! d 200-300 of them, ranging from city-busters to battlefield-sized tactical nukes, and yet no news piece on the Iranian nuclear danger would be complete without the absence of the Israeli arsenal. Go look yourself. A thousand articles are appearing right now in the U.S. press on the Iranian nuclear crisis and you would be hard-pressed to find a mention of the Israeli nuclear arsenal in any of them.

Israel and India, two nuclear weapons powers that have never signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty, are treated by the Bush administration with kid gloves -- in the Indian case, the President actually wants to turn over "peaceful" nuclear technology to its government (despite a prohibition against doing so in the NPT).

Meanwhile, back in Washington, the Bush administration has just gotten a new energy bill passed which does everything but dig the foundations for new nuclear plants in your backyard (and, should a Chernobyl or two happen, also lifts from the nuclear industry just about all responsibility for covering the costs of catastrophe). And of course, the administration in its shock-and-awe version of a nonproliferation policy simply forges ahead with its own plans to create new, more usable generations of U.S. nuclear weapons and to implant in its global-strike planning various nuclear options, including the option of taking out some of the Iranian nuclear program with nuclear weapons. It's de-lovely. Honestly it is.

Don't even try to make sense of it! Fortunately, at this crucial moment when rumors (and leaks) about administration plans for possible assaults on Iran are multiplying -- think what that might do to oil prices, already hovering at an unprecedented $64 a barrel -- Michael Schwartz offers us a soup-to-nuts discussion of Iran, Iraq, and the Bush administration's boomerang policies when it comes to both of them. Tom

Click here to read more of this dispatch.

posted by Annamarie at 11:28 PM