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The
Next War - Crossing the Rubicon
Has Tony Blair, the minuscule Caesar, finally crossed his Rubicon?
Having subverted the laws of the civilized world and brought carnage to
a defenseless people and bloodshed to his own, having lied and lied and
used the death of a hundredth British soldier in Iraq to indulge his
profane self-pity, is he about to collude in one more crime before he
goes?
Perhaps he is seriously unstable now, as some have suggested. Power
does bring a certain madness to its prodigious abusers, especially
those of shallow disposition. In The March of Folly: From Troy to
Vietnam, the great American historian Barbara Tuchman described Lyndon
B Johnson, the president whose insane policies took him across his
Rubicon in Vietnam. "He lacked [John] Kennedy's ambivalence, born of a
certain historical sense and at least some capacity for reflective
thinking," she wrote. "Forceful and domineering, a man infatuated with
himself, Johnson was affected in his conduct of Vietnam policy by three
elements in his character: an ego that was insatiable and never secure;
a bottomless capacity to use and impose the powers of his office
without inhibition; a profound aversion, once fixed upon a course of
action, to any contradictions."
That, demonstrably, is Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and the rest of the cabal
that has seized power in Washington. But there is a logic to their
idiocy - the goal of dominance. It also describes Blair, for whom the
only logic is vainglorious. And now he is threatening to take Britain
into the nightmare on offer in Iran. His Washington mentors are
unlikely to ask for British troops, not yet. At first, they will prefer
to bomb from a safe height, as Bill Clinton did in his destruction of
Yugoslavia. They are aware that, like the Serbs, the Iranians are a
serious people with a history of defending themselves and who are not
stricken by the effects of a long siege, as the Iraqis were in 2003.
When the Iranian defence minister promises "a crushing response." you
sense he means it. Listen to Blair in the House of Commons: "It's
important we send a signal of strength" against a regime that has
"forsaken diplomacy" and is "exporting terrorism" and "flouting its
international obligations." Coming from one who has exported terrorism
to Iran's neighbor, scandalously reneged on Britain's most sacred
international obligations and forsaken diplomacy for brute force, these
are Alice-through-the-looking-glass words.
However, they begin to make sense when you read Blair's Commons
speeches on Iraq of 25 February and 18 March 2003. In both crucial
debates - the latter leading to the disastrous vote on the invasion -
he used the same or similar expressions to lie that he remained
committed to a peaceful resolution. "Even now, today, we are offering
Saddam the prospect of voluntary disarmament ..." he said. From the
revelations in Philippe Sands's book Lawless World, the scale of his
deception is clear. On 31 January 2003, Bush and Blair confirmed their
earlier secret decision to attack Iraq.
Like the invasion of Iraq, an attack on Iran has a secret agenda that
has nothing to do with the Tehran regime's imaginary weapons of mass
destruction. That Washington has managed to coerce enough members of
the International Atomic Energy Agency into participating in a
diplomatic charade is no more than reminiscent of the way it
intimidated and bribed the "international community" into attacking
Iraq in 1991. Iran offers no "nuclear threat." There is not the
slightest evidence that it has the centrifuges necessary to enrich
uranium to weapons-grade material. The head of the IAEA, Mohamed
ElBaradei, has repeatedly said his inspectors have found nothing to
support American and Israeli claims. Iran has done nothing illegal; it
has demonstrated no territorial ambitions nor has it engaged in the
occupation of a foreign country - unlike the United States, Britain and
Israel. It has complied with its obligations under the
Non-Proliferation Treaty to allow inspectors to "go anywhere and see
anything" - unlike the US and Israel. The latter has refused to
recognize the NPT, and has between 200 and 500 thermonuclear weapons
targeted at Iran and other Middle Eastern states.
Those who flout the rules of the NPT are America's and Britain's
anointed friends. Both India and Pakistan have developed their nuclear
weapons secretly and in defiance of the treaty. The Pakistani military
dictatorship has openly exported its nuclear technology. In Iran's
case, the excuse that the Bush regime has seized upon is the suspension
of purely voluntary "confidence-building" measures that Iran agreed
with Britain, France and Germany in order to placate the US and show
that it was "above suspicion." Seals were placed on nuclear equipment
following a concession given, some say foolishly, by Iranian
negotiators and which had nothing to do with Iran's obligations under
the NPT.
Iran has since claimed back its "inalienable right" under the terms of
the NPT to enrich uranium for peaceful purposes. There is no doubt this
decision reflects the ferment of political life in Tehran and the
tension between radical and conciliatory forces, of which the bellicose
new president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is but one voice. As European
governments seemed to grasp for a while, this demands true diplomacy,
especially given the history.
For more than half a century, Britain and the US have menaced Iran. In
1953, the CIA and MI6 overthrew the democratic government of Muhammed
Mossadeq, an inspired nationalist who believed that Iranian oil
belonged to Iran. They installed the venal shah and, through a
monstrous creation called Savak, built one of the most vicious police
states of the modern era. The Islamic revolution in 1979 was inevitable
and very nasty, yet it was not monolithic and, through popular pressure
and movement from within the elite, Iran has begun to open to the
outside world - in spite of having sustained an invasion by Saddam
Hussein, who was encouraged and backed by the US and Britain.
At the same time, Iran has lived with the real threat of an Israeli
attack, possibly with nuclear weapons, about which the "international
community" has remained silent. Recently, one of Israel's leading
military historians, Martin van Creveld, wrote: "Obviously, we don't
want Iran to have nuclear weapons and I don't know if they're
developing them, but if they're not developing them, they're crazy."
It is hardly surprising that the Tehran regime has drawn the "lesson"
of how North Korea, which has nuclear weapons, has successfully seen
off the American predator without firing a shot. During the cold war,
British "nuclear deterrent" strategists argued the same justification
for arming the nation with nuclear weapons; the Russians were coming,
they said. As we are aware from declassified files, this was fiction,
unlike the prospect of an American attack on Iran, which is very real
and probably imminent.
Blair knows this. He also knows the real reasons for an attack and the
part Britain is likely to play. Next month, Iran is scheduled to shift
its petrodollars into a euro-based bourse. The effect on the value of
the dollar will be significant, if not, in the long term, disastrous.
At present the dollar is, on paper, a worthless currency bearing the
burden of a national debt exceeding $8trn and a trade deficit of more
than $600bn. The cost of the Iraq adventure alone, according to the
Nobel Prizewinning economist Joseph Stiglitz, could be $2trn. America's
military empire, with its wars and 700-plus bases and limitless
intrigues, is funded by creditors in Asia, principally China.
That oil is traded in dollars is critical in maintaining the dollar as
the world's reserve currency. What the Bush regime fears is not Iran's
nuclear ambitions but the effect of the world's fourth-biggest oil
producer and trader breaking the dollar monopoly. Will the world's
central banks then begin to shift their reserve holdings and, in
effect, dump the dollar? Saddam Hussein was threatening to do the same
when he was attacked.
While the Pentagon has no plans to occupy all of Iran, it has in its
sights a strip of land that runs along the border with Iraq. This is
Khuzestan, home to 90 per cent of Iran's oil. "The first step taken by
an invading force," reported Beirut's Daily Star, "would be to occupy
Iran's oil-rich Khuzestan Province, securing the sensitive Straits of
Hormuz and cutting off the Iranian military's oil supply." On 28
January the Iranian government said that it had evidence of British
undercover attacks in Khuzestan, including bombings, over the past
year. Will the newly emboldened Labor MPs pursue this? Will they ask
what the British army based in nearby Basra - notably the SAS - will do
if or when Bush begins bombing Iran? With control of the oil of
Khuzestan and Iraq and, by proxy, Saudi Arabia, the US will have what
Richard Nixon called "the greatest prize of all." But what of Iran's promise of "a crushing response"? Last year, the Pentagon delivered 500 "bunker-busting" bombs to Israel. Will the Israelis use them against a desperate Iran? Bush's 2002 Nuclear Posture Review cites "pre-emptive" attack with so-called low-yield nuclear weapons as an option. Will the militarists in Washington use them, if only to demonstrate to the rest of us that, regardless of their problems with Iraq, they are able to "fight and win multiple, simultaneous major-theatre wars," as they have boasted? That a British prime minister should collude with even a modicum of this insanity is cause for urgent action on this side of the Atlantic. |