Orwell revisited: Iran and dirty bombs
By Kaveh L Afrasiabi
Dirty bombs. There is definitely something Orwellian about this term, which
gives the impression that the far more deadly nuclear bombs are cleaner, more
respectable, reminding one of how United States military planners who dropped
the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan in World War II had kept those
cities "virgin". That is, without the prior taint of bombardments to do a
precision analysis of the atomic explosions. In military lexicon, the sanitized
often stand for the horrific and vice versa, just as truth and falsehood stand
on their head in George Orwell's 1984.
At year's end, lest we forget exactly one year ago the US
government released its National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran that
caused a firestorm of controversy by its conclusion that Iran had since 2003
not pursued a nuclear weapons program. A chief architect of that report, Thomas
Fingar, is stepping down and has defended the NIE report, telling the
Washington Times that he "stands by that estimate".
Little wonder then, that Iran fear-mongers in the US are now desperately
seeking any scintilla of evidence to disprove the NIE, to force the US
intelligence community to recant or revise its important conclusions, and also
hoping to find new hammers with which to beat Iran on the head; seemingly some
of them have settled on the next best alternative, Iran's threat of dirty
bombs.
A figment of the author's imagination? Hardly, all one needed to do was listen
to the blistering Iran-phobic rhetoric at a recent conference of mayors held by
the American Jewish Congress that was well timed with growing anxieties about
Iran's "cunning mullahs" resorting to dirty bombs.
At the same time, there have been a number of reports focusing on precisely
this threat, one being about an Iranian merchant ship hijacked by Somali
pirates; the ship has been described by some Israeli reports as a "giant
floating dirty bomb" that had been on its way to the coastal waters of Israel
with the sinister intention of detonating and covering a vast swath of Israeli
towns and cities with "radioactive sand" - assuming that Mother Nature would
cooperate by sending the winds in the right, or rather wrong, direction.
This is pure rubbish and reflects another Orwellian disinformation ploy to
smear Iran, at a time when Washington neo-conservatives are on the defensive
after the recent presidential elections and, as in a new report by the
conservative Heritage Foundation, dread president-elect Barack Obama's idea of
dialogue with Tehran without any preconditions. Perhaps the purpose of this new
disinformation is to impose a whole new demand on Iran that ostensibly no one
in the new White House could possibly disagree with: Iran must not manufacture
dirty bombs.
But, where is the evidence that Iran is in any way in the business of making
dirty bombs? So far, the only answer is, much like the one on the nuclear
threat, simply that Iran has the "capability" to do so.
Never mind that dirty bombs can be made by using material from literally tens
of thousands of sources used in doctors' offices, food-processing plants,
hospitals, laboratories, mines, factories, etc. According to a Harvard nuclear
expert, Matthew Bunn, a powerful dirty bomb can be made out of "machines that
kill bacteria in food processing plants". A US website on nuclear issues
informs us that even "medical supplies ... used in cancer treatment" can be
used to make dirty bombs, as well as material used in metallurgy, and in
mining, not to mention the tens of thousand of "well-loggers" that are
currently in use around the world, many of which use radioactive material.
Some of the US media now want us to focus on one of the most sophisticated
versions of those well-loggers that could make a "nasty" neutron bomb that,
with sufficient explosive, could contaminate "several city blocs". This is the
storyline of a high-profile, widely-quoted article in the Boston Globe [1] that
is full of harsh words for an international oil service company for its sin of
"sidestepping sanctions" and potentially imperiling US national security by
providing Iran with a high-tech drilling tool called the azimuthal density
neutron tool. Implicit in this is that "terrorist-sponsoring" Iranians cannot
be trusted with this tool and the article goes to great pains in establishing
the need in the US to "close the loopholes" that allow the export of such
technology by international firms.
Using this argument, there should be a call to ban from Iran all medical
sterilization equipment, or thousands of pieces of other equipment, such as
those used in food irradiation plants. In a word, practically everything that
can possibly be misused by Iran to make dirty bombs.
In its pure form, this Iran-phobia is relatively straightforward and has
figured out answers for every question, such as why would Iranians risk using
those bombs when they know that their targets would strike back, perhaps 10 or
100 times harder at them? Answer: it's their salvific, martyristic ideology,
one that makes them impervious to their own destruction for the sake of the
greater divine cause. Underlying this is that there should be no appeasement
with Iran.
Such narratives as the Globe's fall by the wayside when one confronts their
silences on pertinent counter-facts as well as their one-sided presentation of
"expert" views. A case in point, the Globe article is silent on relevant
history, that is, the fact that Iran did not use chemical weapons on Iraq
during the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, despite the deaths and injuries of tens
of thousands of Iranians as a result of Iraq's use of chemical weapons. Iran
did not do so not because that did not make military sense, it did, but rather
because it was prohibited by the country's religious ideology that, militant
and all, contains elements of religious humanism.
Shi'ite humanism, this is the great unknown in the West today, which has been
completely sold to the Iran-phobic false image of Iranians as "militant",
"revolutionary" and so on, without realizing that underneath the militant or
revolutionary facade there is also an Islamist "reverence for life" principle
that militates against weapons of mass destruction.
As a result of this ignorance, Western pundits have portrayed the Iranian
regime as engaging in public deception by issuing a religious declaration,
fatwa, against weapons of mass destruction, attributing this instead to a
Shi'ite practice of dissimulation, taghieh, which Shi'ism developed as a
repressed minority facing persecution for centuries. Thus, misinterpreting taghieh
goes hand-in-hand with misinterpreting the post-revolutionary regime's embrace
of Shi'ite humanism, a double mistake seen in the writings of, among others,
Harvard nuclear expert Graham Allison.
Yet, what Allison and other Western pundits overlook is that the norm-binding
fatwa by Iran's supreme religious leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has
significant ramifications for the community of believers in Iran and the
followers of the ayatollah simply do not distinguish between one or another
fatwa, but rather treat them equally as issuing certain obligations on them. In
other words, if it were a mere case of state expediency, and Iran was actively
pursuing a nuclear bomb, the ayatollah would never have gone as far as putting
his seal on a fatwa that forbids the manufacturing, stockpiling and use of
nuclear weapons (deemed explicitly as anti-humanity, zede bashariyat).
On a broader level, this fatwa is part and parcel of the Islamic revolution's weltanschauung,
world-view, that can be better understood philosophically as a (Edmund)
Husserlian "world-disclosing subjectivity", one that is religious humanist to
the core. This is reflected in Iran's constitution's mandating support for
liberation movements, and Iranian leaders' constant lament about global
injustice, reflecting Iran's Shi'ite version of a religious humanist liberation
theology.
This brings us back to the subject of dirty bombs and the Boston Globe article
that operates on a basic false assumption about today's Iran, as a terroristic
state that feeds and supports other terrorists, etc. One man's terrorist is
another man's freedom fighter, and it would obviously be too much to expect the
newspaper to question the official Washington line that designates such groups
enjoying mass support as terrorist pure and simple, or to pin the same label on
Israel. As American author Noam Chomsky has aptly put it, Israel is usually
exonerated of its "terrorism" by depicting its actions as acts of
"self-defense".
Does Israel have dirty bombs? The Globe article does not address this issue,
yet that is a relevant question that may be linked to the above-mentioned
propaganda about the hijacked Iranian ship. Israel may be looking for more
pretexts to attack Iran, now that Bush is on his way out and about to be
replaced by a less hawkish president who might one day even agree to a public
debate with an Iranian leader.
Who knows, maybe in the closing window of the next month or so, before Obama is
sworn in on January 20, Israel senses an opportunity to pull off something
spectacular against Iran. The Israelis are the masters of pre-emptive strikes
and now the twin fears of nuclear and dirty bombs have sufficiently rattled the
Israeli public to rally them behind any military campaign launched against
Iran's "mad mullahs".
The Israelis have recently said they might go it alone without the US, and the
issue is whether the US could stand up to Israel. This partly depends on how
successful the Orwellian Iran-phobic spin proves to be, seeing that when it
comes to Iran-bashing, the sky is limit; a recent Wall Street Journal piece
raises the specter of a single Iranian outerspace detonation sending the US
"back to the 19th century".
In comparison, the Globe article shows that with potentially deadly
well-cloggers operating in Iran, although under foreign control, even the deep
underground is not the limit. The evisceration of any limits in demonizing the
"hostile other" is after all 1984's greatest insight. Note
1.
Oil firm sidesteps sanctions on Iran.
Kaveh L Afrasiabi, PhD, is the author of After Khomeini: New
Directions in Iran's Foreign Policy (Westview Press) . For his Wikipedia entry,
click here. His
latest book,
Reading In Iran Foreign Policy After September 11 (BookSurge Publishing
, October 23, 2008) is now available.
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