09.12.2010
Lions, foxes, and asses
Wikileaks confirms that the Tehran regime's nuclear programme is dangerous and ought to be opposed by socialists, writes Yassamine Mather
Iranians have known for a long time that Israel is calling for the bombing of the country’s nuclear installations and more. For months they have been talking of the possibility of air raids, alongside worsening sanctions. Yet what they did not know is the frightening thought that it is not just the Zionist state that called for such measures. As we reported last week, Wikileaks revealed that several Middle East states have been urging the US to take military action against Iran.
To repeat just a few quotations: “Saudi King Abdullah has frequently exhorted the US to attack Iran to put an end to its nuclear weapons programme”; or, as the Saudi ambassador to Washington put it, “Cut off the head of the snake.” Abu Dhabi’s crown prince, Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, referred to Iran as an “existential threat” and warned of the danger of “appeasing Iran”: “Ahmadinejad is Hitler,” he is alleged to have said. Bin Zayed urged Washington to consider sending ground forces into Iran if air strikes alone could not “take out” Iranian nuclear targets.
King Hamad of Bahrain told US general David Petraeus in November 2009: “That programme must be stopped ... The danger of letting it go on is greater than the danger of stopping it.” As for Kuwaiti interior minister Jaber Khaled al-Sabah, he believes “the US will not be able to avoid a military conflict with Iran, if it is serious in its intention to prevent Tehran from achieving nuclear weapons capability”.
According to the documents, French defence minister Hervé Morin asked US defence secretary Robert Gates if Israel had the capability to launch a strike against Iran without US assistance. Gates “responded that he didn’t know if they would be successful, but that Israel could carry out the operation”. The documents also reveal details of secret operations to disrupt Iranian smuggling of nuclear materials through the Persian Gulf and Turkey.
The UK’s role in all this looks like a bizarre scenario taken from an Iranian regime conspiracy theory about MI6 intervention in the country’s affairs. Apparently UK agents succeeded in breaking up a Dubai network of businessmen, who had been using the Gulf state as the “HQ of a worldwide spider’s web” to supply equipment for Iran’s nuclear programme. According to an unnamed Whitehall official, “Information was provided to the UAE authorities that was only procured by getting inside this group. It was a very successful effort of disruption carried out at some personal risk by our people.” He added: “It would not be good for any of this to come out.” Good for whom?
For its part, the US administration, like bin Zayed, refers to Ahmadinejad as Hitler. It is true that Ahmadinejad’s holocaust-denial statements and his recent pronouncements on Persian superiority are racist and anti-Semitic. However, calling a man of Jewish descent Hitler is perhaps taking things too far. But, of course, comparing him to Hitler is meant mainly to stand as a warning against the ‘threat to peace and democracy’ Ahmadinejad is said to pose.
Not all the Wikileaks have been accurate. According to documents released last week, Iran has obtained 19 advanced Musudan missiles from North Korea, and the Jerusalem Post is now repeating dubious >US claims that they are capable of hitting major cities in western Europe and Russia. However, military aerospace experts point out that there is no indication the Musudan, also known as the BM-25, is operational or has even been tested. Iran has never publicly displayed the missiles - which is odd for a country that often exaggerates its aerospace capabilities. More detailed reading of the claims show that the US based its “belief” that the BM-25 was sold to Iran by North Korea on reports published by German newspaper Bild Zeitung in 2005. In other words, claims in headlines such as “Iranian bombers can reach European cities” remain a fantasy.>
According to the US diplomatic correspondence now revealed by Wikileaks, the Chinese government does not consider Iran’s nuclear technology to be “as advanced as some believe” - this, together with the information about ayatollah Khamenei’s terminal cancer, will not be popular with the Iranian government. Yet, ironically for a dictatorship, most Iranians have had a pretty good idea of the true state of Iran’s nuclear programme and the Wikileaks material has just confirmed that it is not as advanced as the impressions given by the regime itself. The Iranian government, on the other hand, wasted no time denouncing Wikileaks as an agent of the “great Satan” - part of US psychological warfare against Iran!
Regime change
While it is perfectly clear that in reality the leaks are detested by the US, it is certainly true that Washington would like nothing more than the fall of the Islamic republic. Indeed the regime-change plans revealed by the leaks are almost exactly what we knew and what we feared. The tactics discussed by US and Israel have ranged from political pressure on the UN and US allies to a variety of covert measures, more sanctions and ‘forced regime change’. The latter includes the funding of insurrection amongst national minorities: the Azeris, Kurds and Baluchs. Iranians refer to this as the Balkanisation of their country: a policy that fits with long-term US/Israeli aims for the region, breaking up Iran into small, powerless nation-states constantly in dispute with one another.
However, the leaks also show that, far from orchestrating the protests in summer 2009, following Iran’s rigged elections, the “US scrambled to understand” what was going on. According to one document, a former Iran government official claims that the director of IT for the nation’s election supervision office was arrested by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard and executed after electronic projections of the election results showed Mahmoud Ahmadinejad coming third.
The important issue here is what the leaks signify. First and foremost, they are yet another sign of the weakness of the hegemonic world power, the US. The fact that such damaging information can be put in the public arena shows the inability of a major power to keep control over its own agents and its secrets. It also shows why unrestricted, real freedom of information is so important. These sanctimonious ‘world leaders’ would think twice before hatching the irresponsible and at times dangerous schemes if they knew their intentions would be revealed.
That applies to Iran also, of course, whose regime is currently pursuing a ‘Persian’ supremacist policy for the region, under the cover of anti-US posturing.
In a recently published book, Iran, the green movement and the USA: the fox and the paradox, Hamid Dabashi[1] uses a series of Persian animal fables from Masnavi molavi[2] to explain the dilemma that the west faces in dealing with the Islamic Republic of Iran’s attempts to develop a nuclear arsenal and how the opposition and the civil rights movement in Iran might be affected by imperialist action.
The first chapter, ‘The paradox’, is the story of the slumbering lion, the wily fox and the gullible ass. To cut a long story short, the fable is about an injured and weakened lion who cannot hunt for his food. He is duped by the fox, who tells him that if he eats the heart and ear of an ass he will be rejuvenated. The fox lures an ass, but the old lion needs two attempts to kill it. It is the fox who eats the heart and ear of the ass and when the lion asks him what happened the fox replies: “The ass had neither ears nor a brain. If he had, do you think he would have come here a second time?”
Dabashi compares the US to the lion and Iran to the fox, while the victims are the peoples of the Middle East. In all this he is probably right in that, as far as foreign policy is concerned, Iran is in a win-win situation. However, unlike the fox Iran’s leaders are neither clever nor shrewd. Their current dominance in the region is mainly thanks to US foreign policy - the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have eliminated Iran’s two main rivals, replacing them with occupation governments close to Tehran. However, if Obama now negotiates with the regime, he will further strengthen Iran’s regional prestige, while if he opts for military strikes or further economic sanctions he will strengthen the regime by destroying the domestic opposition.
Some misguided individuals in the Campaign Against Sanctions and Military Intervention in Iran and some sections of the British left will use Wikileaks’ exposure of the obvious animosity of corrupt, pro-western Arab states against Iran as a sign of the latter’s ‘anti-imperialism’.[3] But no-one in their right mind should take seriously the rhetoric of a brutal capitalist dictatorship. It is terribly simplistic to consider Ahmadinejad’s popularity amongst lumpen bazaari Arabs as a sign of his radicalism or anti-imperialism.
Today more than ever since 1979 the dominant feature of the Islamic Republic of Iran’s foreign policy remains that of a fervent ‘Persian’ nationalist Shia expansionism, not very dissimilar to the foreign policy ambitions of the shah. Analysts such as Olivier Roy, author of Sous le turban la couronne (‘The crown under the turban’), exposed this long before the US’s ruinous 21st century wars in Iraq and Afghanistan made Iran a regional power. The analysis is absolutely accurate today, when Ahmadinejad and his close advisers talk of Persian Shia Islam dominating the region. No wonder his regime is hated by its Arab neighbours - even among the corrupt Shia dictators of Iraq and the Karzai government, recipients of suitcases of money sent from Tehran.
According to the leaks, “Many former Iraqi fighters who flew sorties against Iran during the Iran-Iraq war are now on Iran’s hit list.” The confidential US cable of December 14 2009 concluded that Iran had “already assassinated 180 Iraqi pilots”. This systematic elimination took place during the chaos that ensued in the aftermath of the US invasion of Iraq, it is alleged. In newly released cables Nouri al-Maliki and Ayad Allawi - the current and former Iraqi prime ministers - are quoted as expressing “grave concern” about Tehran’s continued meddling in Iraqi politics.
Nuclear opposition
Opposition to Iran’s military nuclear programme should be seen in the light of this reactionary foreign policy. However, some of us have also argued against Iran’s civilian nuclear programme. This year’s Stop the War Coalition conference passed a motion defending it against foreign criticism. At the conference I tried to explain that the majority of Iranians, including some in the regime (in both the reformist and government factions - and indeed the supreme religious leader himself), are now questioning aspects of Iran’s current civilian nuclear policy, given its economic and political cost. However, the conference organisers had already decided to support the motion, which echoed the views of Ahmadinejad’s foreign affairs advisers.
There are many reasons why any sane person should oppose Iran’s nuclear policy - I will only list economic and safety reasons.
The economic argument is obvious. Building reactors and acquiring the control rods they use is expensive enough, but buying them on the black market - at times via the Ukrainian and Russian mafia at extortionate prices - seems, to say the least, unwise for a country not only in the grip of a major economic crisis, but paralysed by crippling financial and banking sanctions, and whose government regularly fails to pay the salaries of public service employees.
As far as security is concerned, the recent debacle around Stuxnet, and the confirmation that the Stuxnet worm disrupted the country’s uranium enrichment efforts, shows the cavalier attitude of both Russian and Iranian nuclear scientists regarding safety in these plants (if Stuxnet was devised by Israeli agents, one can assume this was part of ‘counterproliferation’ plans to prevented Iran obtaining nuclear “know-how and technology”). Nor is it just computer safety. It is all other aspects - from the bizarre choice of building reactors on known earthquake lines (presumably to precipitate the end of the world and the appearance of the 12th Shia imam) to allowing staff to wander around the plant without necessary radiation protection badges. And now we have the transfer of USBs infected by Stuxnet from one computer to another, from one plant to another.
Then there is the whole issue of Iranian reactor design. In the construction of reactors, control rods are attached to the lifting machinery by electromagnets as a safety measure, rather than as a direct mechanical linkage. This means if there is an earthquake or power failure, or if they are manually invoked, the control rods will automatically fall, under gravity, shutting down the reaction. Mismanagement or control rod failure has often led to nuclear accidents, including the SL-1 explosion and the Chernobyl disaster. Given the history of nuclear accidents in Russia, most Iranians are concerned about the prominent role played by Russian ‘experts’ in Iran’s nuclear industry.
One particularly interesting Wikileak document, quoting a source within Iran’s nuclear industry, reported a serious nuclear accident at Natanz, the primary location of Iran’s nuclear enrichment programme, in 2009. A week later, the head of Iran’s atomic energy organisation, Aghazadeh, resigned under mysterious circumstances. In 2004 there were reports that the Revolutionary Guards tried to cover up a nuclear accident triggered when weapons-grade uranium was being shipped from North Korea. The accident caused Tehran’s new international airport to be sealed off by Revolutionary Guard commanders within hours of its official opening on May 9 2004. The fact that the authorities used a civilian airport for such a shipment is another indication of the cavalier way the Iranian authorities deal with nuclear safety.
Wikileaks has certainly exposed the animosity of Arab rulers towards Iran’s military nuclear ambitions. However, socialists should be concerned about the cost of this programme to the ordinary civilians in Iran - victims of sanctions and economic mismanagement at a time of world economic crisis. We should be alarmed by the lack of safety in Iran’s nuclear plants - an issue that can affect all the peoples of the region. Contrary to the position of STWC and Casmii, opposing Iran’s nuclear programme has nothing to do with support for US foreign policy. It has everything to do with protecting the lives of Iranian, Arab, Turkish, Iraqi, Afghan, etc, citizens.
Notes
- Hamid Dabashi is the professor of Iranian studies and comparative literature at Columbia University, New York.
- ‘Masnavi, Masnavi-I Ma’navi’ is an extensive poem written in Persian by Jalal al-Din Muhammad Rumi, the celebrated Persian poet. It is one of the best known and most influential works of Persian literature.
- See, for example, E Rostami-Povey Iran’s influence across the Middle East and the world London 2010.