Security Council presidential statements
are non-binding. But despite the toothless nature
of the one under consideration at United Nations
headquarters this week, it's a slippery slope.
The current US administration has a record
of seeing a mandate where no one else can, and the
gnomic comments of its members, refusing to
exclude any possibilities and hinting at
unilateral action if the UN
fails to satisfy, should send chills down anyone's
spine.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei
Lavrov put his finger on it last week when he
talked about a sense of deja vu, referring to his
time as ambassador when the US was trying to push
the other members of the Security Council into
authorizing an attack on Iraq for allegedly having
weapons of mass destruction.
Now the UN is
being invited to another Snark hunt, this time to
authorize action against the future possibility of
nuclear weapons, since not even the US Central
Intelligence Agency has been elbow-twisted into
manufacturing evidence of a proximate threat.
There is no doubt that the United States
is trying to enlist the world into a crusade of
sorts against Iran, which is all the more worrying
since the outcome of this diplomatic campaign is
so vague. Both the US and Israel are hinting at
military strikes, and then burst into indignation
when an Iranian delegate of the International
Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) threatened "harm and
pain" if they try.
It is worrying that the
administration of US President George W Bush has
browbeaten the IAEA council as far as it has,
including the reference of Iran to the Security
Council. Far from adding leverage to the IAEA's
efforts, it is provoking more nationalist
stubbornness from Iran.
In fact, while
China and Russia are currently saying no to
sanctions and to military attacks, one cannot be
sure they will hold to their principles on the
issue.
Who would have thought six months
ago that China and Russia, or even the European
Union, would have gone so far to accommodate
Washington on Iran?
It has not helped Iran
that almost every statement President Mahmud
Ahmadinejad has made since he took office has
given excuse for desertion of the few friends Iran
had. In the end, regardless of the legal niceties,
no one really wants atomic ayatollahs, or
certainly not enough to tangle with the US over
it. In the end, I suppose none of them wanted to
get into a fight with a 900-pound gorilla on
behalf of a cheeky monkey.
If it approves
military action when it next considers the IAEA
report, possibly in less than month, then the
Security Council may as well dissolve itself and
hand a rubber stamp to the White House. If it does
not, then, in the end, the US may well take action
and claim it was acting to enforce UN and IAEA
decisions anyway, as it did only three years ago
in Iraq.
Nobody is saying what he actually
wants or means, although one would have to be deaf
and blind not see and hear the subtext in the US
statements. For example, to believe that this is
about stopping nuclear proliferation in abstract
is close to believing in the tooth fairy and Santa
Claus. This is not about nukes. It is a grudge
fight against Iran.
US Ambassador to the
UN John Bolton and the US government succeeded in
sabotaging attempts to strengthen the
Non-Proliferation Treaty in 2004. The NPT review
conference, for example, was considering making
the voluntary additional inspections compulsory,
and also locking up the door through which North
Korea bolted by renouncing the treaty. This
weekend, Iranian leaders started threatening to
withdraw from the treaty, which, like the North
Koreans, they are perfectly entitled to do.
This month Bolton announced firmly that
the Indians had acquired their nuclear weapons
legally because they had done so outside the NPT
regime. "The only completely consistent people are
the dead," Aldous Huxley once said, and on that
basis Bolton is very much alive.
One can
feel sure that if Iran were to quit the treaty,
Bolton would not give it the same indulgence, no
matter how legal. To compound the double
standards, to ensure that India voted the right
way on Iran in the IAEA council, the US has ridden
a juggernaut through the NPT by signing a
nuclear-cooperation deal with India. It would
almost be churlish to mention Israel's nukes. John
Bolton certainly won't, because if he did, it
would imply sanctions against his best friends in
the region.
We should remember that the
Iranians have consistently denied that they
actually want to build nuclear weapons.
Officially, they claim they want to enrich fuel
for a civil nuclear program.
Strangely
enough, both the current British and US
governments have been pushing for nuclear
solutions to energy shortages and emissions.
Personally, I think they and the Iranians are
guilty of serious miscalculations about the
long-term risks and costs of radioactive waste,
but it is observable that proximity to nuclear
power has strange mental effects on rulers, who
all start behaving as if central casting has sent
them to audition for a remake of Doctor
Strangelove.
French President Jacques
Chirac, part of the team currently beating up on
Iran, has been threatening to use nukes in
retaliation for terrorism. Last year, Chinese
General Zhu Chengdu was threatening to nuke the
United States if it protected Taiwan. And of
course it would be churlish not to mention the
plans in the basement of the Pentagon for new
nuclear weapons.
I suspect that Iran began
by using the nuclear issue as a bargaining point,
but in the long negotiations with the Europeans it
found they were not living up to their promises
and, more to the point, they were not bringing the
Americans to the table.
Iran's previous
reformist administration, in particular, wanted
some tokens of appreciation from Washington. Iran
had cooperated in the removal of the Taliban in
Afghanistan, and could, at the very least, have
made things much, much worse in Iraq for the US -
difficult although that is to imagine. In return,
of course, the Iranians discovered that - apart
from Bush's acknowledgement that they were the
first victims of Saddam Hussein's aggression -
they were still a member of the "axis of evil" as
far as Washington was concerned.
Like the
Palestinians, the Iranian electorate seems to have
decided that if the price for accommodation is a
kick in the teeth, let's go with the straight
shooters. By now, the whole issue of nuclear
enrichment has become an intense symbol of
national pride, which it would be difficult for
the Ahmadinejad government to relinquish without
some large concession. And that concession has to
be larger than what the Russians are offering.
Mired in their demonization of Iran, it is
difficult to see what the Americans could offer
without falling foul of the domestic indignation
that the administration has already fired up.
Apart from the hostage incident 30 years ago,
there is an irrational element about the US
obsession with Iran, as indeed there was about
Bush's dynastic feud with Saddam Hussein.
It probably does not help that Israeli
politicians and their supporters in the US have
been pushing hard for action. They have been
saying that air strikes will do the job, and
anti-missile defenses in Israel will cope with
Iranian retaliations. One would like to think that
this White House would be too sane to launch a
ground war on Iran while still mired in Iraq, but
no gambler has made money recently betting on
Washington's rationality.
There was an
intriguing hint in a Bolton interview with the
British Broadcasting Corp, about the so-called
Proliferation Security Initiative, an alliance of
the bullied that he much prefers to the UN anyway.
Could it mean that the US would do some
Cuban-missile-crisis-type interdiction of ships
heading to and from Iranian ports? And could it be
that they do not anticipate Iranian
reaction?
It is clear that any action
against Iran will have serious blowback throughout
the region, beginning with the Shi'ites in Iraq,
who have so far functioned as expedient allies of
the US occupation. Seeing the disruption caused by
a minority in a small part of Iraq, it is chilling
to think of the consequences if the majority gets
involved.
As usual, a collateral casualty
is likely to be the United Nations. The Security
Council has already allowed itself to be dragged
into an intensely political and partisan issue,
but it can expect no more gratitude than the
Iranians received from the Americans. While there
is a certain irony seeing two conservative,
nationalistic and religiously fundamentalist
presidents confront each other, it is really the
job of the Security Council members to avoid
giving any encouragement or cover to the slide to
war. It is supposed to be protecting the world's
peace and security, not providing a fig leaf to US
attempts to rock the globe.
It would not
be an anti-American thing. On the contrary,
looking at what is happening in Iraq, the real
friends were not Britain and Australia, but
Germany and France. If they had been listened to,
2,300 young Americans would be alive and the US
would not be ranking below China in most
international popularity polls.
Ian
Williams is author of Deserter: Bush's War
on Military Families, Veterans and His Past,
Nation Books, New York.
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2006 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved.
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