AN IMMORAL WAR COALITION

. The Peace Movement has a Chance to Prevent an Aggression against Iran

By Mohssen Massarrat

[This article published in: Freitag 07, 2/17/2006 is translated from the German on the World Wide Web, www.freitag.de/2006/07/06070601.php.]

Nuclear weapons would intensify the regional arms race in the Middle East without bringing more security. A war would probably cause the Iranian leadership to abandon the Non-Proliferation Treaty (Nuclear Test Ban Treaty) to gain possession of nuclear bombs – as Israel, India and Pakistan have done. The countdown is on. EU (European Union) diplomacy has handed over authority to the UN Security Council, in a word to the US. Now George Bush can and will act: first sanctions of the Security Council then increased tensions through conflict escalation and finally an air war. Defense secretary Rumsfeld pleaded openly at the recent Munich security conference for “a military option if the diplomatic instruments do not bring any solution.” The US government is intent on the media agreeing that actions “against Iran are possible even without the approval of the UN.” Western states have clearly enlarged their strategic oil reserves. According to “confidential reports” (Nr 3840) of a magazine close to German business, the financial world has diligently worked out plans since October 2005 to prevent a crisis of the leading oil currency, the dollar, in case of war. Western central banks were urged to hold onto extensive dollar reserves since US plans suggest that a war against Iran “could be necessary next March.”

The psychological war preparation is full underway. As before the Iraq war, this includes constantly new “disclosures” about secret plans to build nuclear bombs and accusations that Iran is a “leading state sponsor of terrorism.” Long stigmatized as a notorious liar, Teheran has always been in the dock and its counter-explanations meet deaf ears. Germans are participants. With her unspeakable comparison of the Islamic state with the Nazi regime and indirectly of president Ahmadinedschad with Hitler, the German chancellor rang in a new stage in psychological war preparation at the Munich security conference. The parallels to similar Hitler comparisons with Milosevic and Saddam Hussein weeks before the Yugoslavia and Iraq wars are amazing. Angela Merkel dealt as carelessly with truth as Mahmoud Ahmadinedschad with his denial of the holocaust and his anti-Israel verbal attacks.

Ahmadinedschad mobilizes the Islamic world for Day X, for an offensive war, as Merkel hammers knowingly or unknowingly. If one takes up Chirac’s threat of nuclear war and Blair’s diverse explanations, the following question is raised: Have the three UU states already agreed with US war plans? Are then taking the lead in the psychological war preparation?

The evidence for an imminent air war is gradually condensing into a certainty. Unlike Iraq, the US strategy has successfully drawn the UE, Russia, China and bloc-free states like India to its side for an escalation concept. Russia and China changed fronts to avoid confrontation with Washington on possible trade sanctions against Iran. If there is further escalation, the US – presumably with Israel – could cover Iran with bombs even without the approval of the UN Security Council.

Contrary to a widespread opinion, the US would be capable of this in military technology. Troop deployments would not be needed. All necessary military capacities have long been positioned around Iran. The US could attack military targets from the air from its bases in Saudi Arabia or Qatar, from war ships anchored off Bahrain, with long-range bombers of the B52 type stationed of the Diego Garcia island in the Indian Ocean or from its bases in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The official justification for war, that Iran must be hindered from building nuclear bombs, is unbelievable. Pakistani nuclear weapons that have long existed and could easily fall into the hands of extremists represent a far greater danger that the West has hardly begun to face. Waging a new war that would exceed all the wars since the Vietnam War with the reason that Iran could produce nuclear bombs in ten years is even more absurd than the lie of weapons of mass destruction with which the Iraq war was justified. For Washington, more is on the hegemonial agenda with Iran than with Iraq:

Firstly, Iran’s nuclear program should be interrupted by the targeted destruction of all nuclear facilities in ten to fifteen locations to make Israel’s nuclear supremacy in the region and the hegemonial position of the US permanently inviolable.

Secondly, Iran should be bombed to pieces as a regional force and power factor. Conventional military equipment like tanks, aircraft, weapon factories – even in densely populated residential areas -, war ships, missile bases, strategically important bridges and barracks will also be targets of air attacks in addition to nuclear facilities. A powerful Iranian state is certainly out of place in America’s plan for the Greater Middle East.

Thirdly, chaos will be triggered by a war leading to a revolt of dissatisfied Iranians and ethnic minorities, bringing about a regime change in Teheran and installing a government dependent on the US. To this end, the destruction of oil refineries paralyzing Iran’s economy and infrastructure is not excluded. The division of Iran’s four-people-stat is also in no way excluded. If its calculation proves right, the US would completely control the oil- and gas-reserves of the Middle East. The Iranian plan to replace the dollar as the leading oil currency through an oil bourse planned for March 2006 would be destroyed. Saddam’s policy of selling Iraqi oil in Euros was also a decisive reason for overthrowing him in an invasion.

Fourthly, a precedent for a new interpretation of the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty should be established to sanction the enrichment of uranium as an exclusive privilege of the five legal nuclear powers. The hands of all other states, particularly the threshold countries, would be tied to prevent an independent nuclear fuel cycle. Instead they would be forced to renounce themselves – in dependence on the nuclear powers, especially the US, that can develop new generations of small nuclear reactors for the post-oil era and enforce this worldwide as a strategic alternative to renewable energy. On the other hand, decentralized renewable energy would be superfluous all the dependencies necessary for hegemony.

The substantive interests for a global hegemony of the US explain many things. After Afghanistan and Iraq, Iran is the last obstacle on the way to a US-Middle East. According to US neo-conservatives, people will shrink back from an extensive fire. In all probability, radical Shiites in Iraq would side with Iran and Arab states that are Sunni like Saudi Arabia would go over to the Iraqi Sunnis. A new civil war in Lebanon cannot be excluded any more. Syria that has the second-strongest army in the Middle East after Israel and has signed a military pact with Iran would also be drawn into the fighting. Thus a war against Iran would have fatal consequences for the people in the Middle East, for the existence of Israel, for Europe, for the expansion of terrorism and for world peace. Therefore Bush – different from the Iraq war – needs a broad consensus and the moral legitimation of the EU. Washington has been working systematically and masterfully on this consensus for one-and-a-half years.

The EU was dumb enough to forfeit itself – either accepting American fear mongering or threatening war – in the stranglehold of American plans for Iran. The EU had to run aground with its so-called compromise offer of August 5, 2005 to Teheran because it had nothing substantial for the other side. Instead serious concessions like permanent renunciation on enriching uranium or withdrawal from the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty were demanded from Iran – very comparable to the 1999 Rambouillet dictate against Yugoslavia. Europe acted like a useful idiot as the hawks in the US government dreamt. Seymour Hersh revealed the tactic of the US in January 2005. The US would advance “as soon as the EU failed with its diplomacy.” In fact, this diplomacy had failed for a long time. At their joint press conference recently in Washington, Angela Merkel was a hundred-percent agreed with president Bush to prevent Iran’s nuclear program. Merkel did not distance herself or exclude the war option.

The “moral” war alliance that is now compounded is a strength and a weakness of Bush’s war strategy. If the German peace movement succeeds in fixing Merkel to an unmistakable “no war in any case,” the “moral” front would crumble and Bush’s war plan would collapse like a house of cards. The chance of the peace movement lies here in actually preventing an Iran war – unlike the Iraq debacle.