Page 2 of 2 Dialogue amid rattling
sabers By Kaveh L
Afrasiabi
Dershowitz and Louis Rene
Beres, whose penmanships have landed on the side
of condoning an "anticipatory" military strike on
Iran in the name of "self-defense".
The
basic flaws in their argument include a legal
nihilism cloaked by their unfounded generalization
regarding international law and the dubious notion
of anticipatory self-defense. Contrary to Beres'
and Dershowitz' claim, international law hardly
confers an endorsement of this dangerous idea that
only leads to greater
violence by lowering the
threshold of unilaterally determined contingencies
that warrant acts of self-defense.
The UN
Charter, Article 2.4, expressly prohibits member
states from using or threatening force against one
another, and Article 51 has clearly restricted the
right to self-defense to cases when an armed
attack occurs, an interpretation upheld by the
Nuremberg International Military Tribunal (1947):
"Preventive action in foreign territory is
justified only in case of an instant and
overwhelming necessity for self-defense, leaving
no choice of means, and no moment for
deliberation."
As the late scholar of
international law Abram Chayes put it in the case
of the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, "It is a very
different matter to expand Article 51 to include
threatening developments or demonstrations that do
not have imminent attacks as their purpose or
probable outcome."
Sadly, such basic
insights about international law are foreign to
some respected professors of international law.
The case against a military strike on
Iran From the prism of international law,
it is abundantly clear that short of UN
authorization, no country or coalition of
countries has the legal permit to attack Iran.
Thus the net result of such an impermissible
attack would be to spread global anarchy and a
Hobbesian lawlessness, deemed intolerable by the
international community still grappling with the
dire consequences of the illegal invasion of Iraq.
On the practical side, a US demolition of
Iran's key nuclear facilities would only culminate
in an immediate exit of Iran from the
non-proliferation regime and a vigorous push to
acquire nuclear weapons by setting aside its
declared antipathy toward nuclear weapons.
Contrary to what has been adopted as an
article of faith in the West, there is no
consensus in Iran about "going full nuclear", and
the country's leadership appears to have settled
on being "nuclear-ready" via mastering the
nuclear-fuel cycle, but nothing more.
By
making illicit inferences about "Iran's nuclear
ambition", the proponents of the military option
assume to know the full spectrum of Iran's
national-security mindset, some, such as US
presidential hopeful Mitt Romney, focusing instead
on Iran's "irrationality".
Calling for
tough sanctions and Iran's diplomatic isolation,
Romney has rejected any comparison to the Cold War
and "living with a nuclear Iran", following the
argument that "for all of the Soviet Union's deep
flaws, they were never suicidal. A Soviet
commitment to national survival was never in
question. And that assumption simply can't be made
about an irrational regime that celebrates
martyrdom like Iran."
The irrationality
argument falls by the wayside, however, once we
scrutinize Iran's foreign-policy behavior since
the 1979 Islamic Revolution, as Iran's regional
cooperation policy, or its "sphere of influence"
politics, clearly demonstrate. Supreme Leader
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has repeatedly, as late as
this month, prioritized Iran's "national
interests" and warned that no one in the country
is allowed "to act against national interests".
Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki told
the author in a recent interview that "our
priority is to protect our rights and interests".
But Iran's pro-Israel critics in the US
are sold to the demonization and characterization
of the Iranian government, marketing their
warmongering recipes (for disaster) by projections
of military action that pin the hope on a limited
warfare not eliciting any exaggerated response by
Iran. They champion "surgical" strikes and fail to
connect the dots and see the serious
ramifications, eg in Iraq, where Iran wields
considerable influence.
Unfortunately,
this is a delicate point bypassed by seasoned
analysts such as Anthony Cordesman, in his recent
interview on Iran with the Council on Foreign
Relations. Yet to his credit, Cordesman admits
that there is no military solution with respect to
Iran.
In conclusion, the schizophrenic US
policy toward Iran, offering the olive branch of
dialogue with one hand and, with the other hand,
the stick of military action, simply poisons the
environment for fruitful US-Iran dialogue and
hampers any meaningful cooperation with respect to
Iraq, the focal point of their coinciding
interests.
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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