29.03.2018
Attack on Iran could strengthen regime
Trump’s appointment of John Bolton can only mean more confrontation with Iran, writes Yassamine Mather
In some ways the appointment of John Bolton as president Donald Trump’s national security advisor was not a big surprise. In the last couple of weeks and following the unceremonious dismissal of Rex Tillerson as secretary of state - apparently over the Iran nuclear deal - there were rumours that Bolton, whose outbursts against Iran are well known, would replace general Herbert McMaster.
There were other alarming appointments. Tillerson is replaced by CIA chief Mike Pompeo, who is also known for his opposition to the Iran nuclear deal. Last year he suggested that Iran is responsible for the chaos in Iraq, Yemen and beyond, and that Tehran must be stopped by whatever means. It looks like Pompeo’s former post will go to Gina Haspel, the CIA deputy director who approves of waterboarding - I assume this will be considered a victory for neoliberal feminism: a woman who is more ruthless than many men!
Bolton is well known for his provocative statements, in particular about Iran and North Korea. He was an advocate of the 2003 invasion of Iraq and remains an unrepentant supporter of that war. Bolton likes to quote George Bush’s infamous ‘axis of evil’ speech connecting Iran and North Korea:
Little is known, at least publicly, about longstanding Iranian-North Korean cooperation on nuclear and ballistic-missile technology. It is foolish to play down Teheran’s threat because of Pyongyang’s provocations. They are two sides of the same coin.1
Immediately after the Iraq invasion, Bolton became known as a close ally and associate of vice-president Dick Cheney and one of the Bush administration’s main contacts with the Israeli government. According to Gareth Porter, writing on the American Conservative website,
… with Cheney’s backing, he was able to flout normal state department rules by taking a series of trips to Israel in 2003 and 2004 without having the required clearance from the state department’s Bureau for Near Eastern Affairs.
Thus, at the very moment that [Colin] Powell was saying administration policy was not to attack Iran, Bolton was working with the Israelis to lay the groundwork for just such a war. During a February 2003 visit, Bolton assured Israeli officials in private meetings that he had no doubt the United States would attack Iraq, and that, after taking down Saddam, it would deal with Iran too, as well as Syria.2
There was animosity between Bolton and not just Powell, but his successor as secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, and ultimately he fell out of favour with president George W Bush.
He has opposed the nuclear deal between Iran and the world’s six major powers (the ‘five plus one’). A few months before the deal was signed he wrote an article headed ‘To stop Iran’s bomb, bomb Iran’, in which he stated:
Iran will not negotiate away its nuclear programme. Nor will sanctions block its building a broad and deep weapons infrastructure. The inconvenient truth is that only military action like Israel’s 1981 attack on Saddam Hussein’s Osirak reactor in Iraq or its 2007 destruction of a Syrian reactor, designed and built by North Korea, can accomplish what is required. Time is terribly short, but a strike can still succeed.3
This article was written in March 2015, but three months later Iran signed the nuclear deal.
Unique
Bolton is also known for remarks, implying, for example, that Barack Obama was a Muslim. In August 2016 he referred to king Abdullah of Jordan as “the Muslim king of a Muslim country, unlike our president ...”
Like his boss, Bolton was a supporter of the UK’s exit from the European Union and in 2016 claimed that the UK would have the upper hand in Brexit negotiations (not quite what Jacob Rees-Mogg is saying in 2018)!
However, none of the above distinguishes Bolton from other rightwing neoconservatives around the current US administration. What makes him unique (alongside former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani) is his support for the loony Iranian religious cult known as the Mujahedin-e Khalq. Last March, he attended the exiled group’s gathering in Albania, much to the disapproval of the New Yorker, which referred to the “cult-like Iranian opposition group … which has been held responsible for the murder of multiple American military personnel, a kidnapping attempt of a US ambassador and other violent attacks in Iran before the 1979 revolution”. The same article complained: “In 1997, it was among the first groups cited on the US list of foreign terrorist organisations. It wasn’t removed until 2012.”4
However, one of Bolton’s main ‘achievements’ concerned his association with what became known as the ‘laptop document’. The American Conservative claimed:
… a large cache of documents, supposedly from a covert source within Iran’s nuclear weapons programme, surfaced in autumn 2004. The documents, allegedly found on the laptop computer of one of the participants, included technical drawings of a series of efforts to redesign Iran’s Shahab-3 missile to carry what appeared to be a nuclear weapon.5
But the entire story was a lie and it took another nine years for the truth to come out. The entire dossier was no ‘discovery’, but a fabrication given to German intelligence by none other than the Mujahedin-e Khalq.
According to American Conservative,
Mossad had been working on those documents in 2003 and 2004 when Bolton was meeting with [director of Mossad] Meir Dagan. Whether Bolton knew the Israelis were preparing fake documents or not, it was the Israeli contribution towards establishing the political basis for an American attack on Iran, for which he was the point man. Bolton reveals in his memoirs that this Cheney-directed strategy took its cues from the Israelis, who told Bolton that the Iranians were getting close to “the point of no return”.6
Effect in Iran
As a result of all this, conservative Islamists in Iran are looking forward to a possible confrontation with the ‘great Satan’. According to Shaol Mofaz, former Israeli defence minister, speaking on March 25, Bolton wanted to convince him that Israel should bomb Iran. Mofaz said he told Bolton that doing so would be a bad idea - certainly before the Iranian threat “becomes real”. However, he welcomed the news of Bolton’s appointment, which sends “an unequivocal message to Iran that the days of the terrible nuclear agreement are coming to an end”.7
Meanwhile, supreme leader Ali Khamenei, taking his cue from Trump’s protectionism, has declared this to be the year of ‘Iranian commodities’, when citizens are encouraged to buy only Iranian goods. But Khamenei seems to have forgotten that, thanks to decades of economic mismanagement, Iran imports large quantities of basic food items, as well as steel, copper, plastic …
In late March the rate of exchange with the dollar jumped to an all-time high, which was directly related to uncertainty about the future of the Iran nuclear deal. The assumption is that Trump will walk away from it and Iran will face further international sanctions or financial penalties imposed by the United States, which will stop European states investing in or even trading with Iran. In some ways it does not matter if the US does not abandon the nuclear deal: economic uncertainty is already causing additional hardship for the Iranian people.
Bolton has promised to end the rule of Shia clerics before the 40th anniversary of the Iranian revolution8 - ie, by the end of the year - but that is unlikely to happen. If the warmongers in and around the White House succeed, the United States or Israel will bomb Iran’s nuclear and ballistic facilities.
At this stage it is difficult to predict how the Iranian people would react to such an attack. It is possible that it might actually strengthen the clerical regime. After all, no-one inside the country, including opponents of the regime, wants Iran to become another Iraq or Syria l
yassamine.mather@weeklyworker.co.uk
Notes
1. https://edition.cnn.com/2018/03/23/politics/what-john-bolton-said-iraq-iran-north-korea/index.html.
2. www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/why-a-john-bolton-appointment-is-scarier-than-you-think-mcmaster-trump.
3. www.nytimes.com/2015/03/26/opinion/to-stop-irans-bomb-bomb-iran.html.
4. www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/john-bomb-iran-bolton-the-new-warmonger-in-the-white-house.
5. www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/why-a-john-bolton-appointment-is-scarier-than-you-think-mcmaster-trump.
6. Ibid.
7. www.jpost.com/Arab-Israeli-Conflict/Former-defense-minister-Mofaz-Bolton-tried-to-convince-me-to-attack-Iran-547019.
8. www.informationclearinghouse.info/49075.htm.