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Send a clear message to the Bush Administration: Don't Attack Iran! As a first and immediate step, we urge you to add your signature and comments to AfterDowningStreet's petition to President Bush and Vice-President Cheney opposing an attack on Iran.

Many UFPJ member groups, including AfterDowningStreet, Gold Star Families for Peace, CodePINK: Women for Peace, Progressive Democrats of America, Democracy Rising, and others, are all promoting this petition. UFPJ encourages you to circulate this message and help expand the growing list of signers.

Efforts to resolve any dispute with Iran should include promoting negotiations –- including Israel –- on a Weapons of Mass Destruction Free Zone in the Middle East. We call for the global elimination of nuclear weapons. The United States should stop blocking negotiations on abolition and demonstrate leadership by taking steps to fulfill its own nuclear disarmament obligation. We call for the development and promotion of sustainable energy alternatives. We need to stop going to war for oil.And we need to address climate change. But nuclear power is not the answer: Every nuclear power plant is a potential bomb factory and a source of radioactive waste that will remain deadly forever.

Additional Iran resources and action items will be available shortly on the UFPJ website.

And, be sure to join us in New York on April 29 in the national March for Peace, Justice and Democracy.

BACKGROUND
Seymour Hersh's stunning article in the April 17 New Yorker, "The Iran Plans," revealed that the Bush administration has intensified planning for bombing Iran, and that U.S. combat troops are already in Iran preparing for military operations and recruiting local supporters from minority groups. Of gravest concern, Hersh reported that the Bush administration is giving serious attention to the option of using nuclear weapons to attack buried targets.

From Hersh's article and other sources, it has become clear that the administration is prepared to launch an attack should Iran not accede to U.S. demands that it abandon its uranium enrichment activities. Regardless of whether the nuclear issues can be resolved, the administration seems committed to regime change in Iran.

An attack on Iran would be an act of aggression, barred by the UN Charter and prosecuted at Nuremberg. If executed, U.S. military action would apply the Bush doctrine of “preventive” war in an unprecedented way that would set the template for years or decades of regional and global violence, unrestrained by law. U.S. use of nuclear weapons against Iran would be an atrocious act violating the existing near taboo that has held since the U.S. devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. That would in turn make it far more likely that the weapons will be used elsewhere as well -- including against cities in the U.S.

While Washington accuses Iran of seeking nuclear weapons under cover of a civilian nuclear power program, in violation of its obligations as a non-nuclear nation under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT), the U.S. is itself in blatant violation of its own NPT obligation to eliminate its vast and sophisticated nuclear arsenal. There is no evidence that Iran has a nuclear weapons program. The U.S., however, retains a nuclear arsenal of more than 10,000 weapons, some 2,000 on hair-trigger alert. With nearly 500 tactical nuclear weapons deployed in 6 NATO countries, the U.S. is the only country with nuclear weapons deployed on foreign soil. And the U.S. is modernizing its existing nuclear weapons and publicly making plans to develop and produce new ones.