'Iran' as a weapon of
subordination By Vijay Prashad
The United States has taken steps to
pressure its allies outside Europe to move away
from imports of Iranian oil. US State Department
spokesperson Victoria Nuland specifically
mentioned India and China when saying on February
21 that her government was "having talks with
countries around the world about the implications
of the [sanctions/embargo] legislation with regard
to our expectation that countries will
increasingly wean themselves of dependence on
Iranian oil."
Asked about an opinion piece
from former Under Secretary of State Nicholas
Burns, who wrote that India's decision to continue
trade with Iran "isn't just a slap in the face for
the US - it raises questions about its ability to
lead", Nuland brushed Burns off as "a private
citizen".
The commercial pressure on India
has begun to show. The Indian Export Credit
Guarantee Corporation, which underwrites the risk
of Indian exporters,
said that it would not halt insurance cover for
exports to Iran but that it is become "very
cautious" and "will try to keep our exposure at
the minimum level."
With the Turkiye Halk
Bankasi unable to provide third-party financial
intermediation and with Dubai-based middlemen
unable to easily deal with Iranian firms, about
US$3 billion in Iranian arrears against Indian
traders have built up since December 2010. These
commercial headaches have soured India-Iran
business relations.
On February 24, SWIFT,
the main financial messaging service for
international money transfers, threatened to cut
Iran out of its network. The Society for Worldwide
Interbank Financial Telecommunications (as SWIFT
is less commonly known) deals with about 10,000
member banks and transmits 17 million financial
messages per day. In 2010, 19 banks and 25
financial institutions in Iran transmitted 2
million messages through the SWIFT network.
Based in Brussels, SWIFT is vulnerable to
the upcoming European embargo of Iran. Its
corporate leaders, Yawar Shah (Citigroup) and
Stephan Zimmermann (UBS), are ingrained in the
Atlantic financial architecture and unwilling to
stand up to the political pressure from their
capitals. Avi Jorisch, a former US Treasury
official told Bloomberg, "This is a financial
equivalent of warfare." SWIFT has never before
expelled a country in this fashion.
Commercial fears among Indian traders and
political pressure from Washington has moved the
Indian government to seek refuge in Saudi Arabia.
Saudi Assistant Minister for Petroleum Affairs
Abdul Aziz Bin Salman bin Abdulaziz came to India
and met India's Minister of State for Petroleum
and Natural Gas, R P N Singh, on February 23.
Abdulaziz noted that Saudi would be glad to
increase sales of oil to India, and that if India
were to approach Saudi Aramco, its needs would be
covered.
India has already begun to "wean"
itself off Iran's oil - it imported 22 million
tonnes in 2009-10 and 16 million tonnes in
2010-11. India's imports from Iran spiked in
January because crude to China had to be
redirected over a market price dispute. In the
short term, India will continue to buy from Iran
because its refineries are adjusted to Iranian
crude. It will require a financial and
technological investment to alter the refining
designs. There has been as yet no public
discussion about this problem.
IAEA's
"serious concerns" Pressure on India ramped
up after the International Atomic Energy Agency
(IAEA) team returned from Tehran and delivered its
report on February 24. The report does not offer
any smoking gun. Iran continues to enrich uranium,
which it is technically allowed to do by the
nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), "under
Agency safeguards". The problem lies in "Iraq
Territory": "Since 2002, the Agency has become
increasingly concerned about the possible
existence in Iran of undisclosed nuclear related
activities involving military related
organizations, including activities related to the
development of a nuclear payload for a missile,
about which the Agency has regularly received new
information."
The IAEA finger points to
one location: Parchin, only 20 kilometers
southeast of Tehran (not an ideal place to have a
nuclear weapons testing site). The IAEA caviled,
"Iran did not provide access to Parchin, as
requested by the Agency during its two recent
visits to Tehran."
The IAEA director
general's report is disingenuous in its silence on
the previous visits of inspectors to Parchin, as
Gareth Porter has noted. (See The
cadence behind Iran's atomic block, Asia
Times, February 25). The November 2011 report
pointed out that an undisclosed source said that
the Iranians have conducted tests at Parchin since
2000. In January and in November 2005, IAEA teams
visited Parchin, took environmental samples and
left satisfied that the complex did not have any
relationship to nuclear weapons. After the second
visit, the IAEA noted that there was "no relevant
dual-use equipment or materials in the location
visited". Yet, the bugbear of Parchin remains.
Until 1992, the IAEA was a modest
investigatory and verification body in the UN
system that made sure that nuclear materials in
NPT states did not slip from energy production to
the making of nuclear weapons. Article IV of the
IAEA Treaty guarantees that a member state might
"develop research, production and use of nuclear
energy for peaceful purposes without
discrimination."
At a Security Council
Summit in January 1992, the Atlantic powers
dragooned the IAEA into becoming its "nuclear
watchdog". Non-proliferation of nuclear weapons
became its main goal, and not twinned with nuclear
disarmament. In other words, the IAEA operated
within the confines of "nuclear apartheid", no
longer challenging the nuclear weapons states to
roll back their nuclear arsenals.
In
addition, the IAEA investigations began to
question the right of certain countries to enrich
uranium for energy purposes. The US-EU position is
to deny Iran its own enrichment and reprocessing
infrastructure, even if it fulfills the IAEA
safeguard requirements for verification. Iran's
deliberations with the IAEA are part of an attempt
to keep some room for it to negotiate around the
maximalist demands of the Atlantic powers.
Fearmongering about military strikes might
be theater for the intensification of the
sanctions regime into a full-blown embargo. White
House spokesperson Jay Carney's interpretation of
the IAEA report is that Iran has refused "to abide
by international obligations". Actually, it has
refused to accept the maximum demands of the
Atlantic powers.
The White House does not
seem keen on military action on Iran, with the
director of national intelligence telling a
Congressional committee on January 31 that Iran
has no designs to weaponize its nuclear program.
The Obama administration has, however, used
dangerous rhetoric ("all options on the table") to
hornswoggle countries like India into the embargo
that it wishes to set up by the summer of 2012.
Burns' statement that India does not show
its "ability to lead" is a threat that the US
might not endorse India's bid for a permanent seat
on the UN Security Council. This is a political
game, with "Iran" used as a weapon to subordinate
countries like India to the economic and political
domain of the US. The US is playing with fire,
pushing the "Iraq option" in Iran not for regime
change necessarily, but in a Cold War against the
emergent states (Brazil, Turkey, India, China).
Vijay Prashad is Professor and Director
of International Studies at Trinity College,
Hartford, United States. This spring he will
publish two books: Arab Spring, Libyan Winter
(AK Press) and Uncle Swami: South Asians in
America Today (New Press). He is the author
of Darker Nations: A People's History of the
Third World (New Press), which won the 2009
Muzaffar Ahmed Book Prize.
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