|
|
|
|
Nuclear
face-off
By Tom Engelhardt
We have now reached another of those
recurring tinderbox moments relating to Iran. On
Tuesday, the Iranians officially relaunched their
nuclear program, beginning a suspended process of
uranium conversion at a facility near Isfahan. In
this, Iran's emboldened clerical regime defies the
European troika - France, Germany and Britain -
with which it has been in negotiations, and
perhaps creates a moment for which Bush
administration officials have longed, but whose
challenging arrival they may now regret.
The board of governors of the
International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) met
Tuesday essentially on an emergency basis and
perhaps in the near future the matter of the
Iranian nuclear program may even go to the UN
Security Council with possible sanctions on the
table. (The passage of any sanctions measure there
is unlikely indeed, given Russian and Chinese
backing for the Iranians, not to speak of "the
sympathy of other non-nuclear states on the
35-nation IAEA board"). And then ...? Well, that's
the $64 dollar (a barrel) question, isn't it?
The geopolitical fundamentalists of the
Bush administration have been itching for a
down-and-dirty "regime change" fight with the
clerical fundamentalists of Iran at least since
President George W Bush, in his 2002 state of the
union address, linked Iran, Saddam Hussein's hated
neighboring regime with which it had fought an
eight-year war of the utmost brutality, and the
completely unrelated regime in North Korea into an
infamous "axis of evil". (Perhaps what the
president meant was "excess of evil".)
As
we now know, Saddam's Iraq, with its non-existent
nuclear program, was chosen as the
administration's first target on its shock-and-awe
"cakewalk" through the Middle East (and then,
assumedly, the rest of the world) exactly because
it was a military shell of its former self, a
third-rate pushover compared to either Iran or
North Korea. As it happened, the
second-cousin-twice-removed of all battles turned
into - as Saddam predicted - the mother of all
battles and war against the rest of the "axis"
fell into abeyance.
Now we're back to a
potential face-off with a country that at least
has an actual nuclear program, if not (unlike the
North Koreans) a weapon to go with it. The nuclear
world as imagined by the Bush administration is,
in fact, a jaggedly uneven place. On the one hand,
you have Iran, considered (like Saddam's Iraq) an
imminent proliferation threat (even while that
proliferator-in-chief of a nation Pakistan remains
our bosom buddy); and yet Iran has, for at least
17 years, had a secret nuclear program (as well as
an above-board one) aimed (possibly) at creating
the means to create nuclear weapons.
A new
US National Intelligence Estimate (the first on
Iran since 2001) was just leaked to the press.
This is one of those documents brokered every now
and then among the 15 agencies that make up the
official US intelligence "community" - there are
more than 15 actually, but the others are
fittingly "in the shadows". It evidently claims
that Iran may need another 10 years or so to
create the means to make nuclear weapons (not even
to have the weapons in hand). If that's accurate,
then we have a 27-year-plus-long effort to create
one bomb. That - to my untutored mind - is not
exactly an overwhelming stat when it comes to
threat deployment.
Just at this moment
(shades of Iraq), Iranian exiles are releasing new
information on supposedly secret and illegal
nuclear work being done by the Iranians, while
Pentagon Donald Rumsfeld is claiming that US
forces have found new weaponry in the hands of the
Iraqi insurgency that came "clearly,
unambiguously" from Iran and that these will
"ultimately [be] a problem for Iran". (Forget that
it's quite illogical for the Iranians to be
supporting the largely Sunni Iraqi insurgency
against an allied, mainly Shi'ite government.)
Exiled Iranian dissident Alireza
Jafarzadeh, who runs Strategic Policy Consulting,
a Washington-based think-tank, on Tuesday told The
Associated Press that Iran had manufactured about
4,000 centrifuges capable of enriching uranium to
weapons grade. He said that the centrifuges -
which he said are unknown to the IAEA - are ready
to be installed at Iran's nuclear facility in
Natanz. In 2002, Jafarzadeh helped uncover nearly
two decades of covert nuclear activity in Iran.
Jafarzadeh said the information - which he
described as "very recent" - came from sources
within the Tehran regime who had proven accurate
in the past.
In the meantime, there's an
800-pound nuclear gorilla sitting starkly at the
center of the Middle Eastern proliferation living
room. That's Israel, of course, with its
extra-legal, super-secret arsenal of nuclear
weapons, an estimated 200-300 of them, ranging
from city-busters to battlefield-sized tactical
nukes, and yet no news piece on the Iranian
nuclear danger would be complete without the
absence of the Israeli arsenal. Go look yourself.
A thousand articles are appearing right now in the
US press on the Iranian nuclear crisis and you
would be hard-pressed to find a mention of the
Israeli nuclear arsenal in any of them.
Israel and India, two nuclear weapons
powers that have never signed the nuclear
Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), are treated by the
Bush administration with kid gloves - in the
Indian case, Bush actually wants to turn over
"peaceful" nuclear technology to its government
(despite a prohibition against doing so in the
NPT).
Meanwhile, in Washington, the Bush
administration has just gotten a new energy bill
passed that does everything but dig the
foundations for new nuclear plants in your
backyard (and, should a Chernobyl or two happen,
also lifts from the nuclear industry just about
all responsibility for covering the costs of
catastrophe). And of course, the administration in
its shock-and-awe version of a non-proliferation
policy simply forges ahead with its own plans to
create new, more usable generations of US nuclear
weapons and to implant in its global-strike
planning various nuclear options, including the
option of taking out some of the Iranian nuclear
program with nuclear weapons.
Don't even
try to make sense of it.
Tom
Engelhardt is editor of Tomdispatch and the
author of The End of Victory Culture.
(Copyright 2005 Tomdispatch. Used by
permission.) |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
|
|
|
|
|
All material on this
website is copyright and may not be republished in any form without written
permission.
© Copyright 1999 - 2005 Asia Times
Online Ltd.
|
|
Head
Office: Rm 202, Hau Fook Mansion, No. 8 Hau Fook St., Kowloon, Hong
Kong
Thailand Bureau:
11/13 Petchkasem Road, Hua Hin, Prachuab Kirikhan, Thailand 77110
|
|
|
|
