14.09.2011
Israel and Iran talk up threats
Iran is keen to divert attention onto the 'foreign enemy', writes Yassamine Mather
The world is only just beginning to realise the international consequences of the Arab awakening. Of course, Israel was the first to express concerns in the first days of the protests against president Hosni Mubarak in Egypt. It joined Saudi Arabia in warning the Obama administration that Mubarak’s downfall would endanger the ‘peace process’ with the Palestinians.
Events in the last few weeks have proved them both right. First came the deterioration of Israeli-Turkish relations. For decades Turkey has been the single most important economic partner of the Zionist state. However, relations between this key Nato ally and Israel broke down after Israel refused to apologise for its deadly 2010 raid on a Gaza-bound aid flotilla that resulted in the death of eight Turks and a Turkish-American. In response, Turkey expelled several senior Israeli diplomats, suspended military cooperation and boosted naval patrols in the eastern Mediterranean.
To prevent a repeat of the provocation, Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan warned Turkey would send warships to escort future aid boats leaving its territory for Gaza. His comments to Al Jazeera television were the first time Turkey had made clear its willingness to use force to protect ships attempting to break Israel’s blockade of coastal Palestinian territory - a significant ratcheting up of tensions. Sensing its growing international isolation, Israel stated that such a move would be “grave and serious”.
All this in a week when the storming of the Israeli embassy in Cairo created further serious difficulties between the two sides of the so-called ‘peace process’. The move recalls the takeover of the US embassy in Tehran following the revolution of 1979 - something the clerical regime in Tehran was quick to recognise, as it rushed to praise the demonstrators.
While the new Egyptian government is doing its best to mend relations, there is no doubt that that the US-sponsored Middle East ‘peace process’ is now dead and buried.
Following the fall of Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi, and the rocky nature of president Bashar Assad’s Syrian dictatorship, the ‘rogue state’ Iran remains the US’s main headache in the region. So it is no surprise that Tehran’s nuclear programme is once again making headlines - Israel supporters Tony Blair and Dick Cheney cynically used the 10th anniversary of 9/11 to exaggerate the threat posed by Iran’s nuclear developments. According to Cheney, “Iran represents an existential threat, and [Israel] will do whatever they have to do to guarantee their survival and their security.”
The new director of the International Atomic Energy Agency, general Yukiya Amano, contributed to the scaremongering when he once again raised the issue of Iran’s non-cooperation with inspectors. President Nicolas Sarkozy of France warned last week that “military, nuclear and ballistic ambitions constitute a growing threat that may lead to a preventive attack against Iranian sites, which would provoke a major crisis that France wants to avoid at all costs.”
Sarkozy’s intervention must have been music to the ears of Israeli leaders, who are once more openly talking of air raids against Iran’s nuclear facilities. Of course, this is not the first time that Israeli officials have made such threats. However, like the politicians of that other religious state in the Middle East, Iran, Zionist leaders have a pressing need to divert attention from growing protests in their own country by identifying a foreign enemy for the nation to unite against - for Israel it is Iran’s nuclear programme; for Iran, it is Israel’s very existence (along with its ‘secret’ nuclear programme).
At the end of August, as the number of protestors in Tel Aviv could be counted in the hundreds of thousands, Israeli leaders urged the United States and other western countries to “present Tehran with a credible military threat to back up economic sanctions already in place”.[1] On September 6, Israeli major-general Eyal Eisenberg said: “The Middle East is on the brink of a full-scale, cataclysmic war that will feature weapons of mass destruction. After the Arab spring, we predict that a winter of radical Islam will arrive. As a result, the possibility of a multi-front war has increased, including the potential use of weapons of mass destruction.”[2]
Of course, all this is nonsense. One of the most remarkable characteristics of the Arab awakening is the absence of any prominent Islamic slogans in the protests. The only places where Islamic fundamentalism has been given any breathing space has been in post-Mubarak Egypt, courtesy of its US-backed military rulers. Secret negotiations are underway with the fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood in Libya, where US, UK and French imperialism have switched support from Gaddafi to forces that include their supposed mortal enemy.
For its part, Iran is also keen to divert attention onto the ‘foreign enemy’ at a time when renewed protests on the streets of major cities in Azerbaijan province echo recent demonstrations in Arab capitals. Tens of thousands have demonstrated in the Azerbaijani cities of Tabriz and Orumieh in protest at the government’s failure to protect lake Orumieh, which has already lost half of its water volume over the last few years, with grave implications for the region’s agricultural land.
The extent to which this has become a hot issue was illustrated on September 9 when slogans about this ecological disaster were chanted by football fans. Larger, more conventional protests had taken place on September 3, for which the government blamed ‘foreign agents’ and their attempts to politicise an environmental issue! As if the disappearance of the lake and the potential displacement of 14 million people could be considered a non-political issue. Security and anti-riot forces used caged vehicles to house arrested protestors, while witnesses in Tabriz told reporters that security forces stormed a hospital to arrest those injured during street clashes.
The ructions in Azerbaijan were only a small part of the Iranian government’s problems. In Kurdistan, the civil war that started 33 years ago continues to cost lives. Meanwhile, protests against the government’s mismanagement of the economy has even spread to the bazaar, that bastion of the religious state.
This week the deputy head of the Workers’ House, the only workers’ organisation officially authorised by the Islamic state, warned that if job creation plans are not properly managed, the country will face a crisis of 1.5 million unemployed workers in the next two years. The state tried to ban the publication of the annual rate of inflation. However, this week Iran’s central bank governor informed the press that it had climbed to 17.3% in August. In addition, according to the director of the supreme audit court, Abdolreza Rahmani Fazli, the government has so far borrowed 148,000 billion rials (some $13.8 billion) to implement the subsidy reform plan.
So, like the Zionist state, Iran is desperate to divert attention from internal economic and political problems. Its elaborate 10-day air force exercise, entitled ‘Defenders of the Skies of Velayat 3’, is just being concluded. These ‘war games’ were devised to test equipment, tactics and the ammunition of fighter jets in four stages. Iran’s leaders are not planning on an actual conflict breaking out. However, they know the political value of talking up the danger of war.
Another major threat is represented by the latest proposed sanctions against Iran’s central bank. On August 9, more than 90 US senators signed a letter to Barack Obama pressing him to approve the imposition of sanctions on this financial institution. The American legislators claim that the measure could potentially freeze Iran out of the global financial system and make it nearly impossible for Tehran to clear billions of dollars in oil sales every month.
This would amount to all-out economic warfare and if the sanctions were implemented (Iran has appealed to international financial institutions to try and prevent that), it is difficult to see the country’s embattled economy surviving such an onslaught. This is happening in the context of the western intervention in Libya, which has once more encouraged Iranian supporters of ‘regime change’ from above. As this paper predicted, the imperialist intervention in Libya could have disastrous consequences for Iran - the social-imperialist left, such as the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty, who supported this in the name of ‘humanitarian’ aid for the Libyan people, will bear their share of responsibility if this turns out to be the case.
The Arab awakening has created an upheaval throughout the Middle East and neither Iran nor Israel is immune from its consequences. Let us hope the Nato intervention in Libya does not herald the beginning of the end of the Arab/Middle Eastern revolutionary uprisings.
Notes