COMMENT War on
Iran: Law the first casualty By Kaveh L Afrasiabi
"So foul a sky
shall not clear without a storm," wrote William
Shakespeare in the play King John and,
indeed, the deafening saber-rattling against Iran
by the United States and Israel increasingly
reveals a coming storm that will likely dwarf the
magnitude of the Iraq war, in light of Iran's
military prowess and ability to strike back
throughout the Middle East.
The US's and
Israel's decision to escalate the threat levels
against Iran, reflected in President George W
Bush's statement in Europe this week that all
options remain on the table, has been matched by
an equally resolute defiance by Iran. As a result,
the growing anxiety over a summer war with Iran
threatens to send
already rocketing oil
prices to unimaginable levels.
This is not
"new realism" in US foreign policy, as US
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice
self-congratulatingly narrates in the latest issue
of Foreign Affairs [1], but rather a new level of
American "dumb power" that harms its own
self-interest by the pursuit of warmongering
policies.
The official Washington
discourse is presently overwhelmed with platitude
about America's "new Wilsonian" commitment to
spread freedom and democracy in the Middle East.
But, for example, the mere thought that "Iraq's
freedom" may also mean freedom from foreign
hegemonic domination is simply foreign to the
discourse and understanding of US officials such
as Rice. She is, nonetheless, on the mark when
writing, in the article cited above, that "our
policy in the Middle East is, in reality, an
extension of traditional tenets".
But,
looking at Iraq, where the US is desperately
trying to shove down the throat of Iraqi political
leaders an imperialistic "security pact" that
would allow upwards of 50 or 60 US military bases
in Iraq, together with the judicial immunity of US
personnel, the picture reminds of another
tradition - the US's gun-boat diplomacy of the
19th century. In 1854, for instance, Commodore
Matthew Calbraith Perry forced open Japan,
prompting Japan to sign the shameful "Ansei
Treaties" that provided a system of
"extraterritoriality" for foreign residents in
that country, aptly detailed in Michael Auslin's
Negotiating With Imperialism.
Instead of charting a post-hegemonic, new
liberal course of action for US foreign policy,
Rice's "new realism" is in many ways the old
realism of empire realpolitik, using liberal
semantics to give a nice cover to the US's
hegemonic motives and intentions.
Paradoxically, precisely when the US has
put full steam behind its efforts to finalize the
controversial security agreement with Iraq, that
would put US bases near Iranian borders, the US
and its allies in the "Iran Six" group are now
poised to dispatch the European Union's foreign
policy chief Javier Solana to Iran to present an
"incentive package" to Iran that supposedly
contains references to "security". (The "Iran Six"
includes the United Nations Security Council's
permanent five members - the US, France, China,
Russia and Britain - and Germany.)
Washington is oblivious to the linkage
between the two issues, that is, that the US
cannot expect Iran's compliance with nuclear
demands made on it when the US is exacerbating
Iran's national security worries through its
military projections in Iraq. US policymakers and
various US pundits have simply preoccupied
themselves with a villain image of Iran, out to
"subvert Persian Gulf states", to paraphrase Rice,
without an iota of concern about separating fact
from fiction. Rice writes about a "new political
realignment" in the Middle East, yet glosses over
the perceived role and image of US imperialism on
the part of many people in the Middle East who
regard this as the empire's "divide and conquer"
tactic.
The benign American hegemon has,
in a word, become self-imprisoned in make-believe
altruism and Jeffersonian idealism, unwilling or
unable to come to terms with the underlying
reasons for "why we are losing the war on terror".
This invokes the title of a recent book by Paul
Rogers, who deconstructs the post-September 11,
2001, security discourses of the US, tracing them
to the pre-September 11 prescriptions of the
neo-conservative agenda known as the Project for
the New American Century.
Any wonder then
that international law does not warrant any
mention in Rice's prominent article, and mention
is equally missing in the hawkish "attack Iran"
narratives of known pro-Israel pundits such as
Daniel Pipes and Thomas Friedman. The answer is
that it is hardly surprising and, in fact, makes a
lot of sense, given that Iran has not breached its
nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty obligations, just
as former Russian president (now premier)Vladimir
Putin told the European press recently.
Consequently, another unjustified, illegal
war in the Middle East is being plotted openly
before our eyes, with the warmongering voices
enjoying a great deal of media latitude, basking
in the glory of vilifying Iran and rationalizing
their incendiary viewpoints while, simultaneously,
branding Iran as being "completely outside the
norms of the international community".
But, what norm of international community
condones an unprovoked war that will claim many
innocent lives no doubt, not to mention collateral
damage on the world economy? The answer is that a
legal frame of reference is simply missing and
hawkish warmongers in the US and Israel simply
operate in a vacuum of legal foundation in their
increasingly unabashed recommendations for
immediate war on Iran.
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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