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US and Iran: Squint-eyed double-dealing
By Kaveh L Afrasiabi
standards, met a stern reaction from both Israeli and US officials. They walked
out in protest and, hypocritically, accused Iran of making "outrageous"
statements.
Iran is not alone, however, and nearly all other NPT member states who are part
of the Non-Aligned Movement have expressed similar sentiments with respect to
the hypocritical double standards displayed by the nuclear have-states.
Meanwhile, the Israelis are busy rationalizing their nuclear
posture, which for several decades has been used to blackmail the Muslim Middle
East, using the bogey of Iran's nuclear threat. Thus, in a new report by the
British Chatham House titled "Israel and Iran Report: War of Words or Words of
War", Yosi Mekelberg calls for an Israeli policy of "open nuclear deterrence"
with regard to Iran should diplomacy fail.
While some improvement over the jingoistic noise in the Israeli press, this
policy paper nonetheless has the faults of (a) adopting as fact the
yet-to-be-substantiated allegations that Iran is making nuclear bombs, and (b)
providing an implicit justification for the use of nuclear weapons.
The latter, also reflected in the United States' nuclear posture adopted by
President Bush, is particularly dangerous, as it implicitly if not explicitly
plays with the feasibility of a nuclear assault by the new generation of smart
tactical nuclear weapons. It is also against international law, which has
clearly and unequivocally proclaimed illegal threat of the use of nuclear
weapons in any circumstances. This was embodied in an opinion of the
International Court of Justice in July 1996 regarding the illegitimacy of the
threat or use of nuclear weapons.
Instead of trying to sell the legitimacy of Israel's nuclear posturing,
pro-Israel pundits should pay attention to the desperate need for a
nuclear-weapons-free zone in the Middle East, which has been endorsed by the
United Nations.
As for the United States, it does not bode well for its aggressive public
relations offensive in the Middle East and the Muslim world to ignore Muslim
concerns about Israel's nuclear capabilities and to focus selectively on Iran
and, even worse, to threaten Iran with military action even though, by the
admission of military experts such as Anthony Cordesman of the Center for
Strategic and International Studies, Iran is "10-15 years" away from producing
nuclear bombs.
What the US may actually achieve by its hurried approach to heightened
sanctions against Iran is to break the Baghdad ice-breaker, to immerse the
Iranians further in their nationalistic defiance of pressure to divest them of
their "inalienable" nuclear rights, no matter how high the price.
Ali Akbar Valayati, a former foreign minister and now adviser to Iran's Supreme
Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and increasingly a prominent voice on Iran's
nuclear policy, has stated that Iran may have to "pay a price" for the sake of
its pursuit of nuclear technology.
It is therefore futile to blame Ahmadinejad for the nuclear row that preceded
him but has reached new heights. Ahmadinejad has in fact put forward sufficient
conciliatory measures, such as the idea of a regional or international
consortium to fabricate nuclear fuel for Iran, and other similar "objective
guarantees" warranting attention. Yet with the exception of few sporadic
voices, such as European Union foreign-policy chief Javier Solana and former UN
weapons inspector Hans Blix, no one in Europe or at the Security Council has
paid much attention, and that includes the Chinese and Russians.
Anonymous Russian officials have told the Russian press that Iran should not
expect Moscow to "play Iran's anti-US game". That is odd, seeing how Russia is,
like it or not, involved in a mixed-motive game of simultaneous cooperation and
competition with the US that partly relies on regional players such as Iran as
critical support.
Or should we forget the recent statements of some Russian policymakers about
the adverse consequences of havoc in Russia's Muslim-dominated regions if a war
breaks out between the US and Iran? And this is not to mention President
Vladimir Putin's own stern warnings in Munich last month about how the US is
exploiting the Iran nuclear row to form an anti-Russia alliance in (eastern)
Europe.
Surely, no one in Moscow is sufficiently comforted by US Defense Secretary
Robert Gates' assurance that "one cold war is enough". The United States'
actions speak louder than words, and it would be pure folly on Moscow's part to
continue bandwagoning with a US-Israeli anti-Iran geostrategy that represents
the outer ring of a grander strategy once described as the "New Great Game" for
the control of the Eurasia landmass.
Compared with the US, which sees in parted eyes, the trouble with Russia is
even deeper and more endemic: it is being pure blind.
Kaveh L Afrasiabi, PhD, is the author of After Khomeini: New
Directions in Iran's Foreign Policy (Westview Press) and co-author of
"Negotiating Iran's Nuclear Populism", Brown Journal of World Affairs, Volume
XII, Issue 2, Summer 2005, with Mustafa Kibaroglu. He also wrote "Keeping
Iran's nuclear potential latent", Harvard International Review, and is author
of
Iran's Nuclear Program: Debating Facts Versus Fiction.
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