Next up, Iran?

According to a New York Times article today, the US government is pushing the UN Security Council for extremely severe sanctions against Iran for their supposed nuclear weapons program. Scott Ritter in his new book Target Iran argues that there is no evidence that such a weapons program exists and the the US government is gearing up for an unilateral assualt in the same way as they did in Iraq. A frightening proposition.

For anyone interested, I recently posted a review of Ritter's book. I saw him speak at the NY Ethical Culture Society, and can provide more deatils if anyone would like them.

Speaking of Scott Ritter, I heard a piece on media bias the other day and Scott Ritter was specifically mentioned as a person who was very hard to book during the run up to the war. There was a lot of self-censorship in the three to four years after 9/11 and no one wanted to risk alienation by putting Ritter on the air. I do remember listening to him on National Public Radio just before the war and I just could not fathom how anyone who listened to him would believe that Iraq had WMD.

I'd like to hear more of what he has to say.

Ritter has a new article in The Nation based on his experiences on a recent trip to Iran.

Link to article here

There's one very big difference between Iraq and Iran.

Iraq was America's war of choice. No one else was going to invade Iraq. Not Israel, not Iran, not the Saudis, no one. No one else had the desire, no one else had the means.

On the other hand the Israelis have being saying for years that unless others stopped the Iranian nuclear programme they would take action.

The Iranians have said they will treat an Israeli attack as an American one, and treat an American attack as an Israeli one.

Iraq was something America could have avoided. I dont know if that's true of Iran.

Copra, I'm not sure I understand your meaning.

Are you saying that if Israel attacks first the US will be inevitably drawn in because Iran will retaliate against the US? Iranians may sometimes talk tough but they have no real capacity to attack America. Moreover, if the US took a strong stand against Israeli attacks it would be against Iranian interest to attack the country with the most influence on Israeli policy.

Or are you simply saying that the US is unable to prevent an unilateral Israeli attack? This may be strictly true, however, if the US moved from a position of belligerence to one of negotiations and a return to IAEA oversight this would put strong pressure on Israel not to act on its own.

Israel was only recently turned back in its effort to rout Hezbollah right next door in Lebanon. Failing in this, how could Israelis possibly think they could successfully attack Iran without US support?

The US did itself no favours by not putting pressure on Israel during their Lebanon bombing campaign. By the time they did Israel had destroyed half the infrastructure of Lebanon. Whether you agree with this policy or not, it was a PR disaster for both countries. The US supported Israel throughout the attack on a democratic country. The smart move would have been to stop Israel and offer more support to the Lebanese govt.

This unfettered support for Israel is one of the biggest problems the US faces in the Middle East. If either country pre-emptively strikes against Iran then it will be hard for other Arab countries not to come to Iran's support. With no UN support the US could find itself embroiled in a much worse situation than Iraq.

The Iran situation just needs a realist approach, rather than an idealist approach. The Iranian govt may be jumping up and down, shouting this and that but they have no intention of going beyond rhetoric.

Part of the problem I have with the Iranian issue is the assumption that they MUST be trying to make nuclear weapons and not simply have nuclear power like they say. I don't understand why that assumption is there, other than the plain fact that U.S. policy is currently anti-Iran and therefore the U.S. doesn't believe anything they say. From what I've read, even if Iran does start enriching uranium, they don't own enough enriching machines right now to produce enough uranium for a bomb? And apparently their rocket technology is not up to the task either. I could be fuzzy on this, but if that is true, then what precisely is the problem here? Other than the fact that U.S. policy is anti-Iran?

eromsted, radiantarchangelus

Yes I am saying those things.

Iran has a range of means to retaliate in ways against the US for an Israeli attack.

Remember the majority of the world's oil passes through the Straits of Hormuz. Naval guerilla warfare that targeted US owned tankers could produce another oil shock given the tight supply. It would hurt the US economy AND make Iran a lot of money.

Dont forget Hezbollah/IJO either. They have the capability to conduct attack American targets throughout much of the Middle East, as well as Europe, SE Asia and parts of Latin America.

Most estimates range between 5 to 15 years for Iran to build the Bomb.

Given Iran's repeated calls for Israel's destruction, their funding of Hamas and Hezbollah, Israel's small size the Israelis see this as something threatening their very survival.

So for the Israelis Iran's nuclear programme is seen as a matter of national survival.

So whether or not the US does anything, Israel is going to act, and Iran is going to retaliate against the US.

Frankly, I dont think there is a damn thing we can do to stop the Israelis short of treating them like an enemy, which the American public is not going to do.

Realistically Israeli attack will not be the kind of prolonged month long campaign we saw in Lebanon.

It is going to be a quick series of raids over within 24 hours.

It wont destroy the Iranian programme because the Israelis dont have that kind of capability. It will instead try to hit key nodes in the programme and try to delay it by another 5-10 years.

For the Israelis it is the least attractive option, the most attractive being the rest of the world stopping the Iranian programme.

The really wierd thing is that none of the Arab states want to see Iran get nukes (if Iran succeeds, they are going to go for it too).

But they dont want to see ISRAEL attack another Muslim country - they would prefer that the US did it! Welcome to the wacky world of the Middle East.

Israel did do something similar in the past, Operation Opera, which damaged Iraq's nuclear program in 1981. I personally don't expect them to try to do the same thing to Iran in the foreseeable future, but it could be a possibility.

Iran's limited cooperation with international inspectors, and their rather blunt refusal to consider compromises like processing fuel across the border in Russia or exporting spent fuel makes many suspect the worst.

In many ways, it doesn't matter whether or not Iran is really planning to develop nuclear weapons, because none of its neighbors are going to trust Iran's intentions or restraint. An active Iranian nuclear program will undoubtedly lead to an intensification of arms races in the Middle East, the last thing that region needs.

I think another reason many people believe Iran is attempting to produce nuclear weapons is because it is exactly what they would do in Iran's place.

Switching into hopeless idealist mode, I think the only long-term solution to nuclear weapons problems is to get rid of them -- all of them -- all over the world, and get broad commitments to inspections and surveillance. The United States can't do this on its own, but it can become a much more positive force by actually supporting inspections, even of its own facilities, decommissioning more of its nuclear arsenal, and clearly halting dabbling with new nuclear weapons like the "bunker busters" and "mininukes" that have popped up occasionally in the last few years. Not invading other countries on flimsy pretexts would also be helpful, since it would undermine the argument that the rest of the world needs nuclear weapons to protect itself from American aggression.

If you will indulge a latecomer, I'd like to posit that U.S. policy toward Iraq and Iran has less to do with WMD than with the threat to US hegemony. What permits the US to dictate terms in almost all our relations with other nations is not our military might but our economic might. We have the world's biggest economy and have had since WWII. That the US dollar is the world currency is key to the success of that economy. What we have seen in recent years is a massive accumulation of debt. That debt is held by nations who now feel less than sanguine about our precipitous actions in the Middle East vis-a-vis the unprovoked and ill-conceived Iraq debacle. Given the absence of WMD and the increasingly convincing evidence that we knew there wasn't WMD, why would we have undertaken such a foolhardy action? One very good theory is laid out here: http://www.energybulletin.net/7707.html To summarize, the Iraqis were threatening to sell their oil in eurodollars instead of US dollars. Iran has similar ambitions. The intent is to establish the euro as an alternative world currency. If that were to happen, the effect on the US economy would be severe and nations financing our 9 trillion dollar debt would likley start calling in their markers and that could lead to a soviet-style economic collapse.

Dashaich - I think we can all agree with your idealist mode but the problem with science is that it can't be 'unlearned'. Even if everybody agrees to get rid of nuclear weapons will everybody trust each other, and what's to stop another state developing them. You end up with a double zero-sum game that produces the answer - a 'limited' nuclear capacity must remain.

It is hard to deny Iran the right to have nuclear power plants, especially since fossil fuels are running out, and at this time, nuclear power looks the only solution to large scale electricity production. But if you have nuclear power plants then there is always the possibility that the military can utilise the same technology to produce weapons. The other issue is that Israel has nuclear weapons. No other Middle Eastern country does, therefore, from a paranoid point of view, Israel could hold the rest of the area to ransom. Iran can therefore argue that in developing nuclear weapons they are merely leveling the playing field.

What's to stop another state from developing them? I had in mind the rest of the world, which is why I mentioned inspections and surveillance. I think this task would actually be made easier if nuclear weapons were uniformly disavowed. Instead of a double standard where, for instance, Israel can have nuclear weapons and Iran can't, there would be a consistent message: no weapons of mass destruction.

One of the things that is suspicious about Iran is its refusal to accept Russian proposal, where Iran would have enriched uranium in Russia under safeguards.

There have been other such European and Russian proposals that checked against the possibility of diversion, and they have all been turned down by the Iranians.

As far as 'leveling the playing field' - none of the Arab countries want to see Iran with nukes. In fact they are less willing to live with Iranian nukes than Israeli nukes!

Israeli nukes make me much less nervous than the idea of Saudi, Iranian, etc nukes.

What I worry about is the affect that the Iraq invasion ...and subsequent alienation of so many allies...would have on any action the US finds itself needing to take with regards to the Iranian nuclear situation.

In related news, I read that France has declared the UN will sanction Iran. I wonder how severe the sanctions will be.

The troops in Iraq seem more like a motivation than a deterrent. They have their hands full, and their presence in Iraq argues that the best way to avoid invasion is to acquire an effective (nuclear?) deterrent.

is not the iranian 'ascendancy' evident in this current period partially a result of US involvement in iraq which has effectively crippled the country and its ability to act as a counterweight to the diplomatic and political clout of the iranian state?

america seems to be continually fighting against itself in this respect - the taleban and bin laden are ironic examples of US foreing policy backfiring with nasty consequences.

I agree, scorpiorising. How often will we shoot ourselves in the foot by paying absolutely NO attention to the global scenario?

I seems to me that there is a singular lack of anthropological perspective in/among the "movers and the shakers" of our government and its military.