Jeremy Corbyn
Deadly speculation (The Morning Star)
“It is wild speculation”, claimed a swivel-eyed and stressed President Bush when asked to respond to reports of a possible strike against Iran.
The current rise in tension between Iran and the US has led to vastly increased oil prices, fevered speculation, and has created an even greater gap between Bush and reality. On this occasion, the US President’s outrage had been prompted the publication of a balanced and clearly well-informed article for the New Yorker by respected columnist Seymour Hersh. Hersh is not just any journalist, he has a reputation on writing about Iraq and he has already painstakingly detailed the way in which the Bush administration has financed Iranian anti-regime groups.
Hersh claimed in the New Yorker that “current and former American military and intelligence officials said that air force planning groups are drawing up lists of targets and teams of American combat troops have been ordered into Iran, under cover, to collect targeting data and to establish contact with anti-government and ethnic minority groups.” Bush, it seems, is obsessed with denying Iran the opportunity to enrich uranium. This obsession is built on the contempt for both international law and the role of the United Nations that he revealed during the run-up to the Iraq war, and ever since. The US believes that it has an inalienable right to decide what happens next, and its calculations take into account only its own interests, and how consequences in the region will affect them.
The very fact that all of this is being debated so publicly, with no regard to international law, demonstrates the new “morality” of the US, and Blair’s support for it. The US has never been entirely comfortable with the concept of international law over-riding the nation state. It never ratified the League of Nations, was the most prolific user of the Security Council veto at the UN, has refused to endorse the Kyoto Treaty and, ominously, has failed to accede to the statutes of the International Criminal Court. Bush has, in the past, attempted a rather incoherent intellectual justification of the Project for a New American Century’s “moral crusade”.
Blair, in his Sedgefield address and his more recent forays on the subject, has claimed that the asymmetric nature of conflict creates responsibilities on the powerful and, goes the logic, therefore morally correct states to intervene around the world. In the bizarre post-Iraq invasion world, all this seems logical. In reality, it is no more than the bankrupt language of the bully and colonialists down the centuries.
Bush believes that he has a “duty” to interfere in Iran and is trying to portray its activities as being in the interests of regional security. It is the same old story that we heard from 2001 to September 2003, when over 150,000 US troops were assembled in Kuwait for an exercise. This time, the build-up to an attack on Iran is cleverer. Huge sums of money are being invested in Iranian exiled groups in the US, apparently on potential allies in Iran, and the region is being treated to US diplomacy and payouts. Bush’s recent visit to India and Pakistan was not coincidental. He went to embrace free market economics in India, and military action in Pakistan. Both countries have developed wholly illegal nuclear weapons within the terms of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. But, since neither has signed the NPT, the law does not apply. In four years, the world has seen minor sanctions against both countries replaced by positive rewards. At the conclusion of his visit, Bush offered India the enormous reward of access to US nuclear technology and approved Pakistan’s internal military activities as a contribution to his war on terror.
There is one major flaw in the whole approach of isolating Iran. It is the only country in the region that has signed the NPT. Therefore, it is the only one to be subject to International Atomic Energy Agency inspection and the only one obliged to co-operate with these visits. For all the US bluster and pressure from Washington on IAEA members to refer the case to the UN Security Council, the case against Iran remains thin. All Iran has done is to withdraw from the supplementary protocol of the NPT. The Iranian community in exile, like the Iranian people, has expressed a huge degree of unity in opposition to US policies in respect of any putative invasion. The human rights record of Iran over the past 30 years, from the time of the Shah to Ayatollah Khomeini, has been appalling, as was the record of Saddam Hussein in neighbouring Iraq. The experience of Iraq shows that the US intervention had little to do with democracy and much to do with oil, and an opportunity to demonstrate its military power. Tens of thousands of Iraqis and soldiers have paid the ultimate price for this vanity. An invasion or air strikes against Iran will have a terrifying effect in the whole region. Israel is being touted as the possible stooge to carry out the deeds of the US. Some US diplomats have even claimed that they have to act to prevent Israel taking premature and unilateral action against Iran. It is a strange turn of events when Israel, a nuclear power which is heavily funded and supported by the US and yet is not a signatory to the NPT, is supposedly allowed to control US policy. The situation is incredibly dangerous. The debate on how to invade, bomb, kill or destroy the country has become the subject of international examination, rather than condemnation. The BBC caught the mood with graphics on its news website outlining the relative merits of nuclear or conventional bombardment of the nuclear reactors. Any attack will kill thousands of wholly innocent people. It will spark an unpredictable regional reaction. It will encourage others to develop nuclear weapons.
Bush, wounded by Iraq and Afghanistan, is more dangerous than ever. How about his close ally, our Prime Minister, standing up to him for once and opposing any military action against Iran?
