Iran, Israel ratchet up
tensions By Kaveh L Afrasiabi
With so much talk of "red October"
promising more fireworks instead of peace in the
troubled Middle East, the world leaders gathering
at the United Nations headquarters in New York
would be excused for focusing on war prevention
and peaceful settlement of Middle East conflicts,
seemingly spiraling out of control on all fronts,
particularly between Iran and Israel.
Trading barbs at last Friday's meeting of
the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the
Israelis have once again accused Iran
of
telling lies about its nuclear program, with
Iranian officials calling on the IAEA to dispatch
inspectors to Israel, which remains a clandestine
nuclear-weapons state beyond the purview of any
international scrutiny of its program.
Israel's powerful friends in the US have
exploited the controversy surrounding President
Mahmud Ahmadinejad's request to lay a wreath at
New York's Ground Zero to launch a virulent public
campaign against him, with various dailies in the
US bandwagoning together to attack Iran's
president as a "lunatic" and "madman", among other
names.
At the same time, France and the US
have announced common cause against Iran, but not
so Germany, which has distanced itself from Paris
by stating that it will only back UN sanctions,
and not any European Union sanctions, on Iran.
This is definitely a setback for President Nicolas
Sarkozy and his outspoken Foreign Minister Bernard
Kouchner, the latter using his White House visit
last week to wipe out any memory of once-proud
French diplomatic independence from the United
States.
White House spokeswoman Dana
Perino has lambasted Iran's latest statements
against Israel, calling Tehran's pledge to strike
back at Israel if attacked by the Jewish state as
"totally unprovoked". Perino said, "I can't tell
you why someone in Iran would say something like
that about Israel. It's totally unprovoked and
unnecessary."
One must wonder about the
closed universe that White House officials such as
Perino inhabit, since even a cursory look at the
nearly daily threat of attacks on Iran by Israeli
officials and pundits leaves no doubt that Iran's
reaction has, indeed, been provoked by such
threats.
Israel's threats against Iran
What is remarkable about this issue is the
depth, extensiveness and consistent recycling of
military threats against Iran, both veiled and
unveiled, by the Israelis. Having convinced
themselves, and a good part of the Western world,
that Iran is about to reach the "point of no
return" in its nuclear program, Israeli civilian
and military leaders and their allies in the
Israeli and US media have ratcheted up the threat
of a military strike on Iran as a rational and
feasible option.
This is in complete
disregard for international law and the principles
of the UN Charter, which forbids member states
"from using the threat or use of force" against
each other. (Incidentally, even a liberal paper
such as Ha'aretz, on April 21, 2006, explicitly
endorsed the idea of Ahmadinejad's assassination,
arguing that "his elimination is likely to
contribute more to stability than to detract from
it".)
On June 9, Israeli Deputy Prime
Minister Saul Mofaz stated that "the military
option is on the table". On January 21, 2006,
Mofaz had stated publicly: "We are preparing for
military action to stop Iran's nuclear program."
His boss, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, told the
press in April that "nobody is ruling out" a
military strike on Iran by Israel, adding: "It is
impossible perhaps to destroy the entire nuclear
program, but it would be possible to damage it in
such a way that it would be set back years ... it
would take 10 days and involve the firing of 1,000
Tomahawk cruise missiles."
Olmert's
foreign-policy speeches are increasingly filled
with blunt threats against Iran, continuing a
trend. Last October 19, Olmert was quoted by the
Israeli press as stating that Iran will have a
"price to pay" for its nuclear program and Iran's
leaders "have to be afraid" of the actions that
Israel might undertake against Iran's nuclear
program.
Regarding the latter, a clue was
given by Moshe Ya'alon, former Israeli chief of
military staff, in an address to the Hudson
Institute in Washington, DC, in which he spelled
out some of the details of the "Israeli military
option" on Iran. These include extensive use of
"bunker busting" bombs purchased from the US for
the specific purpose of demolishing Iran's nuclear
targets.
The Israeli attitude makes some
sense in the context of a report in the US
magazine Newsweek on Monday that US Vice President
Dick Cheney had considered provoking an exchange
of military strikes between Iran and Israel to
give the US a pretext to attack Iran.
The
magazine said that David Wurmser, who had served
since 2003 as Cheney's Middle East adviser before
leaving recently, said Cheney had mulled the idea
of pushing for limited Israeli missile strikes
against the Iranian nuclear site at Natanz to
provoke Tehran into striking back. The Iranian
reaction would then give Washington a pretext to
launch strikes against military and nuclear
targets in Iran, Newsweek reported.
Iran's
stern reaction to Israel's blunt military threats
can hardly be dismissed as "totally unprovoked and
unjustified". Following the same perverse logic,
any Iranian missile fired at Israel in response to
Israeli carpet-bombing of Iran's facilities would
also be deemed "outrageous" or "unprovoked".
This is a recipe for disaster,
particularly if right-wing presidential hopefuls
such as former New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani,
who has called for Israel's inclusion as a North
Atlantic Treaty Organization member, get their
wishes. There would be potential dire
ramifications for NATO in the event of Israel
joining and dragging the Western alliance into an
unwanted conflict in the Middle East, in light of
Israel's tensions with its Arab neighbors and the
collective security provisions of NATO.
NATO is already in sufficient trouble,
seeing how its eastward expansion has caused a
backlash on the part of China and Russia, who have
banded together to thwart its expansion through
their military pact within the Shanghai
Cooperation Organization, and Israel's membership
in NATO would only translate into much greater
hostility against NATO in any part of the Muslim
world, such as Afghanistan, where NATO has gained
a foothold. One thing is sure, any NATO siding
with Israel in its Middle East conflicts with a
Muslim state will further alienate the sizable
Muslim population of Europe, which yearns for an
even-handed European Union policy toward the
Middle East.
But instead of a balanced
approach, the victory of right-wing, staunchly
pro-Israel Sarkozy in France has heralded a new
anti-Arab, anti-Muslim drift in European politics
that ironically goes against the wealth of
interdependencies between Europe and the
Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries'
Middle East.
Concerning the latter, the US
has called on Turkey to seek alternative sources
of energy instead of importing gas from Iran,
which is then funneled to other parts of Europe.
Turkey's leaders have rebuffed the call. It
remains to be seen whether India, which is also
under pressure to forfeit the "peace" pipeline
(from Iran to Afghanistan and then on to Pakistan
and India), will do the same, or cave in to
Washington's pressure and make a mockery of its
post-independence political identity and
membership in Non-Aligned Movement. Indian leaders
who are currently entertaining the United States'
request to back away from economic deals with Iran
must be asking why Europe is not exerting the same
pressure on Turkey.
But Iran is the
"enemy", as this tense moment in international
politics shows.
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.
(Copyright 2007 Asia Times Online Ltd. All
rights reserved. Please contact us about sales, syndication and republishing.)
Head
Office: Unit B, 16/F, Li Dong Building, No. 9 Li Yuen Street East,
Central, Hong Kong Thailand Bureau:
11/13 Petchkasem Road, Hua Hin, Prachuab Kirikhan, Thailand 77110
