The two most likely winners, former
Florida Governor Jeb Bush and Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker,
are battling over whether to bomb Iran
immediately after being elected or after the
first Cabinet meeting.
The one candidate with some foreign
policy experience, Lindsey Graham,
describes the deal as "a death sentence for the state of
Israel," which will certainly come as a
surprise to Israeli
intelligence and strategic analysts - and which Graham knows
to be utter nonsense, raising immediate questions about actual
motives.
Keep in mind that the Republicans
long ago abandoned the pretense of functioning as a normal
congressional party.
They have, as respected conservative
political commentator Norman Ornstein of the right-wing American
Enterprise Institute
observed, become a "radical insurgency" that scarcely seeks
to participate in normal congressional politics.
Since the days of President Ronald
Reagan, the party leadership has plunged so far into the pockets
of the very rich and the corporate sector that they can attract
votes only by mobilizing parts of the population that have not
previously been an organized political force.
Among them are,
-
extremist evangelical
Christians, now probably a majority of Republican
voters; remnants of the former slave-holding states
-
nativists who are terrified that "they" are taking our white
Christian Anglo-Saxon country away from us
-
others who turn
the Republican primaries into spectacles remote from the
mainstream of modern society - though not from the mainstream of
the most powerful country in world history
The departure from global standards,
however, goes far beyond the bounds of the Republican radical
insurgency.
Across the spectrum, there is, for instance,
general agreement with the "pragmatic" conclusion of General
Martin Dempsey, chairman
of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, that the Vienna deal does not,
"prevent the United States from striking Iranian facilities if
officials decide that it is cheating on the agreement," even
though a unilateral military strike is "far less likely" if Iran
behaves.
Former Clinton and Obama Middle East
negotiator Dennis Ross typically recommends that,
"Iran must have
no doubts that if we see it moving towards a weapon, that would
trigger the use of force",
...even after the termination of the
deal, when Iran is theoretically free to do what it wants.
In
fact, the existence of a termination point 15 years hence is, he
adds,
"the greatest single problem with the agreement."
He also
suggests that the U.S. provide Israel with
specially outfitted B-52 bombers and bunker-busting bombs to
protect itself before that terrifying date arrives.
"The
Greatest Threat"
Opponents of the nuclear deal charge
that it does not go far enough.
Some supporters agree,
holding that,
"if the Vienna deal is to mean anything, the
whole of the Middle East must rid itself of weapons of mass
destruction."
The author of those words, Iran's Minister of
Foreign Affairs Javad Zarif, added that,
"Iran, in its national
capacity and as current chairman of the Non-Aligned Movement
[the governments of the large majority of the world's
population], is prepared to work with the international
community to achieve these goals, knowing full well that, along
the way, it will probably run into many hurdles raised by the
skeptics of peace and diplomacy."
Iran has signed "a historic
nuclear deal," he continues, and now it is the turn of Israel,
"the holdout."
Israel, of course, is one of the
three nuclear powers, along with India and Pakistan, whose
weapons programs have been abetted by the United States and that
refuse to sign the Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT).
Zarif was referring to the regular
five-year NPT review conference, which ended in failure in April
when the U.S. (joined by Canada and Great Britain) once again
blocked efforts to move toward a
weapons-of-mass-destruction-free zone in the Middle East.
Such
efforts have been led by Egypt and other Arab states for 20
years.
As Jayantha Dhanapala and Sergio Duarte, leading figures
in the promotion of such efforts at the NPT and other U.N.
agencies,
observe in "Is There a Future for the NPT?," an article in
the journal of the Arms Control Association:
"The successful
adoption in 1995 of the resolution on the establishment of a
zone free of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in the Middle
East was the main element of a package that permitted the
indefinite extension of the NPT."
The NPT, in turn, is the most
important arms control treaty of all. If it were adhered to, it
could end the scourge of nuclear weapons.
Repeatedly, implementation of the
resolution has been blocked by the U.S., most recently by
President Obama in 2010 and again in 2015, as Dhanapala and
Duarte point out,
"on behalf of a state that is not a party to
the NPT and is widely believed to be the only one in the region
possessing nuclear weapons" - a polite and understated reference
to Israel.
This failure, they hope,
"will not be the coup de grâce to the two longstanding NPT objectives of accelerated
progress on nuclear disarmament and establishing a Middle
Eastern WMD-free zone."
A nuclear-weapons-free Middle East
would be a straightforward way to address whatever threat Iran
allegedly poses, but a great deal more is at stake in
Washington's continuing sabotage of the effort in order to
protect its Israeli client.
After all, this is not the only
case in which opportunities to end the alleged Iranian threat
have been undermined by Washington, raising further questions
about just what is actually at stake.
In considering this matter, it is
instructive to examine both the unspoken assumptions in the
situation and the questions that are rarely asked. Let us
consider a few of these assumptions, beginning with the most
serious: that Iran is the gravest threat to world peace.
In the U.S., it is a virtual cliché
among high officials and commentators that Iran wins that grim
prize.
There is also a world outside the U.S. and although its
views are not reported in the mainstream here, perhaps they are
of some interest. According to the leading western polling
agencies (WIN/Gallup International), the prize for "greatest
threat" is
won by the United States.
The rest of the world regards it
as the gravest threat to world peace by a large margin. In
second place, far below, is Pakistan, its ranking probably
inflated by the Indian vote.
Iran is ranked below those two,
along with China, Israel, North Korea, and Afghanistan.
"The World's
Leading Supporter of Terrorism"
Turning to the next obvious
question,
-
What in fact is the Iranian threat?
-
Why, for example,
are Israel and Saudi Arabia trembling in fear over that
country?
Whatever the threat is, it can hardly be military.
Years ago, U.S. intelligence informed Congress that Iran has
very low military expenditures by the standards of the region
and that its strategic doctrines are defensive - designed, that
is, to deter aggression.
The U.S. intelligence community has
also
reported that it has no evidence Iran is pursuing an actual
nuclear weapons program and that,
"Iran's nuclear program and its
willingness to keep open the possibility of developing nuclear
weapons is a central part of its deterrent strategy."
The authoritative
SIPRI review of global armaments ranks the U.S., as usual,
way
in the lead in military expenditures.
China comes in second
with about one-third of U.S. expenditures. Far below are Russia
and Saudi Arabia, which are nonetheless well above any western
European state. Iran is
scarcely mentioned.
Full details are provided in an
April report from the Center for Strategic and International
Studies (CSIS), which finds,
"a conclusive case that the Arab
Gulf states have... an overwhelming advantage of Iran in both
military spending and access to modern arms."
Iran's military spending, for
instance, is a fraction of Saudi Arabia's and far below even the
spending of the United Arab Emirates (UAE).
Altogether, the
Gulf Cooperation Council states - Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Saudi
Arabia, and the UAE -
outspend Iran on arms by a factor of eight, an imbalance
that goes back decades.
The CSIS report adds:
"The Arab Gulf
states have acquired and are acquiring some of the most advanced
and effective weapons in the world [while] Iran has essentially
been forced to live in the past, often relying on systems
originally delivered at the time of the Shah."
In other words,
they are virtually obsolete.
When
it comes to Israel, of
course, the imbalance is even greater. Possessing the most
advanced U.S. weaponry and a virtual offshore military base for
the global superpower, it also has a huge stock of nuclear
weapons.
To be sure, Israel faces the
"existential threat" of Iranian pronouncements: Supreme Leader
Khamenei and former president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad famously
threatened it with destruction.
Except that
they didn't - and if they had, it would be of little
moment.
Ahmadinejad, for instance, predicted that,
"under God's
grace [the Zionist regime] will be wiped off the map."
In other
words, he hoped that regime change would someday take place.
Even that falls far short of the direct calls in both Washington
and Tel Aviv for regime change in Iran, not to speak of the
actions taken to implement regime change.
These, of course, go
back to the actual "regime change" of 1953, when the U.S. and
Britain organized a military coup to overthrow Iran's
parliamentary government and install the dictatorship of the
Shah, who proceeded to amass one of the worst human rights
records on the planet.
These crimes were certainly known to
readers of the reports of Amnesty International and other human
rights organizations, but not to readers of the U.S. press,
which has devoted plenty of space to Iranian human rights
violations - but only since 1979 when the Shah's regime was
overthrown.
(To check the facts on this, read
The U.S. Press and Iran, a carefully documented
study by Mansour Farhang and William Dorman.)
None of this is a departure from the
norm. The United States, as is well known, holds the world
championship title in regime change and Israel is no laggard
either.
The most destructive of its invasions of Lebanon in
1982 was explicitly aimed at regime change, as well as at
securing its hold on the occupied territories. The pretexts
offered were thin indeed and collapsed at once.
That, too, is
not unusual and pretty much independent of the nature of the
society - from the laments in the Declaration of Independence
about the "merciless Indian savages" to Hitler's defense of
Germany from the "wild terror" of the Poles.
No serious analyst believes that
Iran would ever use, or even threaten to use, a nuclear weapon
if it had one, and so face instant destruction. There is,
however, real concern that a nuclear weapon might fall into
jihadi hands - not thanks to Iran, but via U.S. ally Pakistan.
In the journal of the Royal Institute of International Affairs,
two leading Pakistani nuclear scientists, Pervez Hoodbhoy and
Zia Mian,
write that increasing fears of,
"militants seizing nuclear
weapons or materials and unleashing nuclear terrorism [have led
to]... the creation of a dedicated force of over 20,000 troops
to guard nuclear facilities.
There is no reason to assume,
however, that this force would be immune to the problems
associated with the units guarding regular military facilities,"
which have frequently suffered attacks with "insider help."
In
brief, the problem is real, just displaced to Iran thanks to
fantasies concocted for other reasons.
Other concerns about the Iranian
threat include its role as "the world's leading supporter of
terrorism," which primarily refers to its support for Hezbollah
and Hamas.
Both of those movements emerged in resistance to
U.S.-backed Israeli violence and aggression, which vastly
exceeds anything attributed to these villains, let alone the
normal practice of the hegemonic power whose
global drone assassination campaign alone dominates (and
helps to foster) international terrorism.
Those two villainous Iranian clients
also share the crime of winning the popular vote in the only
free elections in the Arab world.
Hezbollah is guilty of the
even more heinous crime of compelling Israel to withdraw from
its occupation of southern Lebanon, which took place in
violation of U.N. Security Council orders dating back decades
and involved an illegal regime of terror and sometimes extreme
violence.
Whatever one thinks of Hezbollah, Hamas, or other
beneficiaries of Iranian support, Iran hardly ranks high in
support of terror worldwide.
"Fueling
Instability"
Another concern,
voiced at the U.N. by U.S. Ambassador Samantha Power, is the,
"instability that Iran fuels beyond its nuclear program."
The
U.S. will continue to scrutinize this misbehavior, she
declared.
In that, she echoed the assurance Defense Secretary
Ashton Carter
offered while standing on Israel's northern border ,
"we
will continue to help Israel counter Iran's malign influence",
...in
supporting Hezbollah, and that the U.S. reserves the right to
use military force against Iran as it deems appropriate.
The way Iran "fuels instability" can
be seen particularly dramatically in Iraq where, among other
crimes, it alone at once came to the aid of Kurds defending
themselves from the invasion of Islamic State militants, even as
it is building a
$2.5 billion power plant in the southern port city of Basra
to try to bring electrical power back to the level reached
before the 2003 invasion.
Ambassador Power's usage is, however,
standard:
Thanks to that invasion, hundreds of thousands were
killed and millions of refugees generated, barbarous acts of
torture were committed - Iraqis have compared the destruction to
the Mongol invasion of the thirteenth century - leaving Iraq the
unhappiest country in the world according to WIN/Gallup polls.
Meanwhile, sectarian conflict was ignited, tearing the region to
shreds and laying the basis for the creation of the monstrosity
that is ISIS. And all of that is called "stabilization."
Only Iran's shameful actions,
however, "fuel instability."
The standard usage sometimes
reaches levels that are almost surreal, as when liberal
commentator James Chace, former editor of Foreign Affairs,
explained that the U.S. sought to "destabilize a freely
elected Marxist government in Chile" because "we were determined
to seek stability" under the Pinochet dictatorship.
Others are outraged that Washington
should negotiate at all with a "contemptible" regime like Iran's
with its horrifying human rights record and urge instead that we
pursue,
"an American-sponsored alliance between Israel and the
Sunni states."
So
writes Leon Wieseltier, contributing editor to the venerable
liberal journal the Atlantic, who can barely conceal
his visceral hatred for all things Iranian.
With a straight
face, this respected liberal intellectual recommends that Saudi
Arabia, which makes Iran look like a virtual paradise, and
Israel, with its vicious crimes in Gaza and elsewhere, should
ally to teach that country good behavior. Perhaps the
recommendation is not entirely unreasonable when we consider the
human rights records of the regimes the U.S. has imposed and
supported throughout the world.
Though the Iranian government is no
doubt a threat to its own people, it regrettably breaks no
records in this regard, not descending to the level of favored
U.S. allies. That, however, cannot be the concern of
Washington, and surely not Tel Aviv or Riyadh.
It might also be useful to recall -
surely Iranians do - that not a day has passed since 1953 in
which the U.S. was not harming Iranians.
After all, as soon as
they overthrew the hated U.S.-imposed regime of the Shah in
1979, Washington put its support behind Iraqi leader Saddam
Hussein, who would, in 1980, launch a murderous assault on their
country.
President Reagan went so far as to deny Saddam's major
crime, his chemical warfare assault on Iraq's Kurdish
population, which he blamed on Iran instead. When Saddam was
tried for crimes under U.S. auspices, that horrendous crime, as
well as others in which the U.S. was complicit, was carefully
excluded from the charges, which were restricted to one of his
minor crimes, the murder of 148 Shi'ites in 1982, a footnote to
his gruesome record.
Saddam was such a valued friend of
Washington that he was even granted a privilege otherwise
accorded only to Israel.
In 1987, his forces were allowed to
attack a U.S. naval vessel, the USS Stark, with
impunity, killing 37 crewmen. (Israel had acted similarly in
its 1967 attack on the USS Liberty.)
Iran pretty much
conceded defeat shortly after, when the U.S. launched Operation
Praying Mantis against Iranian ships and oil platforms in
Iranian territorial waters.
That operation culminated when the
USS Vincennes, under no credible threat, shot down an
Iranian civilian airliner in Iranian airspace, with 290 killed -
and the subsequent granting of a
Legion of Merit award to the commander of the Vincennes
for "exceptionally meritorious conduct" and for maintaining a
"calm and professional atmosphere" during the period when the
attack on the airliner took place.
Comments philosopher Thill Raghu,
"We can only stand in awe
of such display of American exceptionalism!"
After the war ended, the U.S.
continued to support Saddam Hussein, Iran's primary enemy.
President
George H.W. Bush even invited Iraqi nuclear engineers
to the U.S. for advanced training in weapons production, an
extremely serious threat to Iran. Sanctions against that
country were intensified, including against foreign firms
dealing with it, and actions were initiated to bar it from the
international financial system.
In recent years the hostility has
extended to sabotage, the murder of nuclear scientists
(presumably by
Israel), and
cyberwar, openly proclaimed with pride.
The Pentagon
regards cyberwar as an act of war, justifying a military
response, as does NATO, which affirmed in September 2014 that
cyber attacks may trigger the collective defense obligations of
the NATO powers - when we are the target that is, not the
perpetrators.
"The Prime
Rogue State"
It is only fair to add that there
have been breaks in this pattern.
President George W. Bush, for
example, offered several significant gifts to Iran by destroying
its major enemies,
Saddam Hussein and the Taliban.
He even
placed Iran's Iraqi enemy under its influence after the U.S.
defeat, which was so severe that Washington had to abandon its
officially declared goals of establishing permanent military
bases ("enduring
camps") and
ensuring that U.S. corporations would have privileged access
to Iraq's vast oil resources.
Do Iranian leaders intend to develop
nuclear weapons today?
We can decide for ourselves how credible
their denials are, but that they had such intentions in the past
is beyond question. After all, it was asserted openly on the
highest authority and foreign journalists were informed that
Iran would develop nuclear weapons,
"certainly, and sooner than
one thinks."
The father of Iran's nuclear energy program and
former head of Iran's Atomic Energy Organization was confident
that the leadership's plan "was to build a nuclear bomb."
The
CIA also reported that it had "no doubt" Iran would develop
nuclear weapons if neighboring countries did (as they have).
All of this was, of course, under
the Shah, the "highest authority" just quoted and at a time when
top U.S. officials -
Dick Cheney,
Donald Rumsfeld, and
Henry
Kissinger, among others - were urging him to proceed with his
nuclear programs and pressuring universities to accommodate
these efforts.
Under such pressures, my own university, MIT,
made a deal with the Shah to admit Iranian students to the
nuclear engineering program in return for grants he offered and
over the strong objections of the student body, but with
comparably strong faculty support (in a meeting that older
faculty will doubtless remember well).
Asked later why he supported such
programs under the Shah but opposed them more recently,
Kissinger responded honestly that Iran was an ally then.
Putting aside absurdities, what is
the real threat of Iran that inspires such fear and fury? A
natural place to turn for an answer is, again, U.S.
intelligence. Recall its analysis that Iran poses no military
threat, that its strategic doctrines are defensive, and that its
nuclear programs (with no effort to produce bombs, as far as can
be determined) are "a central part of its deterrent strategy."
Who, then, would be concerned by an
Iranian deterrent?
The answer is plain: the rogue states that
rampage in the region and do not want to tolerate any impediment
to their reliance on aggression and violence.
In the lead in
this regard are the U.S. and Israel, with Saudi Arabia trying
its best to join the club with its invasion of Bahrain (to
support the crushing of a reform movement there) and now its
murderous assault on Yemen, accelerating a growing humanitarian
catastrophe in that country.
For the United States, the
characterization is familiar.
Fifteen years ago, the prominent
political analyst Samuel Huntington, professor of the science of
government at Harvard, warned in the establishment journal
Foreign Affairs that for much of the world the U.S. was,
"becoming the rogue superpower... the single greatest external
threat to their societies."
Shortly after, his words were
echoed by Robert Jervis, the president of the American
Political Science Association:
"In the eyes of much of the
world, in fact, the prime rogue state today is the United
States."
As we have seen, global opinion supports this judgment
by a substantial margin.
Furthermore, the mantle is worn with
pride. That is the clear meaning of the insistence of the
political class that the U.S. reserves the right to resort to
force if it unilaterally determines that Iran is violating some
commitment. This policy is of long standing, especially for
liberal Democrats, and by no means restricted to Iran.
The
Clinton Doctrine, for instance, confirmed that the U.S. was
entitled to resort to the,
"unilateral use of military power"
even to ensure "uninhibited access to key markets, energy
supplies, and strategic resources," let alone alleged "security"
or "humanitarian" concerns.
Adherence to various versions of
this doctrine has been well confirmed in practice, as need
hardly be discussed among people willing to look at the facts of
current history.
These are among the critical matters
that should be the focus of attention in analyzing the
nuclear
deal at Vienna, whether it stands or is sabotaged by Congress,
as it may well be.
