Assuming that the committee truly believed that the Obama presidency would signal a meaningful change in American nuclear policy, they did not have long to wait for a clear refutation of that thesis. Having learned in advance that Obama would be visiting Japan ahead of last week’s APEC summit in Singapore, the mayors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki extended formal invitations for Obama to visit their cities. Had he done so, he would have become the first U.S. president to visit the cities since they were the victims of the world’s first nuclear attacks. However, Obama turned down the requests, citing scheduling concerns and offering vague promises to visit the cities sometime in the future.

While such a move may come as a surprise to the Nobel committee, it is decidedly less shocking to those who have been studying American nuclear policy for decades. One such man is Motofumi Asai, the President of the Hiroshima Peace Institute, who noted in a recent interview with The Corbett Report that, while surprised that Obama says he intends to visit Hiroshima one day, “anyhow, it is clearly not now.”

“In a very long historical term, his speech in Prague in April may be remembered as a departure from the nuclear century to the non-nuclear century,” Asai said about the nuclear rhetoric that won Obama the Peace Prize. But, he added, “I am rather sober about the prospects of a change of U.S. nuclear policy.”

Observers of the Obama administration’s actions on the nuclear front would indeed have good reason to be ’sober’ about the prospects of Obama living up to his nuclear disarmament rhetoric. As the Washington Times reported last month, the Obama administration has reaffirmed an unspoken decades-old U.S. policy to officially ignore Israel’s nuclear stockpile. This support ensures that Israel does not have to sign the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which would require them to relinquish their hundreds of nuclear bombs. As the Washington Times report makes explicit, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu accidentally revealed in a television interview that Obama’s rhetoric about a nuclear-free world is not meant to apply to America or its allies:

“It was utterly clear from the context of the speech that he was speaking about North Korea and Iran,” the Israeli leader said. “But I want to remind you that in my first meeting with President Obama in Washington I received from him, and I asked to receive from him, an itemized list of the strategic understandings that have existed for many years between Israel and the United States on that issue. It was not for naught that I requested, and it was not for naught that I received [that document].”

The report exposing Obama’s nuclear hypocrisy was printed just one week before he received the Nobel Prize for his valiant efforts to bring about a “nuclear-free world”. Even Obama’s most logical political allies have questioned the sincerity of his “commitment” to the abolition of nuclear weapons. As Joseph Gerson wrote on CommonDreams.org earlier this year:

…there appears to be less to Obama’s ‘perhaps not in my lifetime’ commitment to nuclear weapons abolition than the adoring press has let on. It is no accident that in his message to the NPT Preparatory Conference earlier this month that he made no reference to abolition. Similarly, the subject did not arise when President Obama and former Secretary of State George Shultz spoke with the press following their meeting at the White House.

Now Obama’s most fervent supporters are noting that his actual actions on nuclear disarmament so far have amounted to a series of token gestures and empty platitudes. Even basic steps like affirming a no-first strike nuclear policy have not been forthcoming. Obama’s nuclear promise, it seems, can be added to the bonfire of dashed hopes along with his broken promise to end warrantless wiretapping, his broken promises to close Guantanamo and end secret detentions, his broken promise to not use signing statements, his broken promise to allow voters time to read legislation before it gets signed, and his broken promise not to appoint lobbyists to his administration.

Sadly, this is not the first time the Nobel committee has erred so badly in its judgement of a world leader promising nuclear eradication. In 1974, Japan’s Prime Minister Eisaku Sato won the prize for his formulation of the so-called Three Non-nuclear Principles that every Japanese government has paid lip service to since they were first adopted by the Diet in 1971: that Japan will neither develop nor possess nuclear weapons, nor allow them in their territory.[16] It has since come to light that Sato himself broke the third principle when he negotiated secret agreements with the Nixon administration that allowed the U.S. to bring nuclear weapons into Japanese territory.

Now, with President Obama’s nuclear abolition rhetoric turning out to be more hot air, it seems the Nobel Peace Prize committee once again has egg on its face. Unless of course it is the intention of the committee not to reward Obama for his non-nuclear words, but to shame his administration into living up to its lofty language. Perhaps the Nobel committee is in fact using their prize as a tool for offering an ultimatum to the Obama administration: Follow through on your promises or be exposed as a fraud for all the world to see. If this is indeed the case, then Obama’s White House should be shamed into peace and disarmament. The fact that this “man of peace” is in fact every bit the warmonger his presidential predecessor was presents perhaps the largest chink in his fast-disintegrating corporate media-supplied “president of the world” armour. Those who are truly interested in bringing about a nuclear-free world can start simply enough by condemning Obama for his failure to visit Hiroshima.

But the latest report on Iran’s nuclear programme by the agency appeared to reject Iran’s account of how and when it had decided to build the Qom enrichment plant and implied that it believed Iran was hiding the construction of other facilities.

The report provides new evidence that the Qom enrichment facility was constructed on one of many sites where tunneling had been prepared as early as 2002 to protect various kinds of facilities from a possible U.S. air attack.

The apparent Iranian decision to begin preparations for a U.S. attack on Iran in 2002 came after President George W. Bush had declared in his Sep. 20, 2001 speech to a joint session of Congress that any nation that “continues to harbor or support terrorism” would be regarded as a “hostile regime” and then named Iran as part of the “Axis of Evil” with Iraq and North Korea in January 2002.

The new evidence contradicts the U.S. charge that Iran had been working on constructing a covert enrichment plant for several years – well before March 2007, when Iran announced that it would no longer inform the agency of new facilities as soon as the decision had been made to construct them.

The Iranian account documented in the report puts the decision to build the Qom enrichment facility in mid-2007.

The report quotes from an Oct. 28 Iranian letter to the IAEA stating, “As a result of the augmentation of the threats of military attacks against Iran, the Islamic Republic of Iran decided to establish contingency centers for various organizations and activities…[elipses in original].”

No date is cited for that decision, but the IAEA report refers to satellite imagery of the site indicating construction began at least as early as 2002. The agency said it had “informed Iran that it had acquired commercially available satellite imagery of the site indicating that there had been construction at the site between 2002 and 2004, and that construction activities were resumed in 2006 and had continued to date.”

The IAEA apparently intended to convey the idea that this was construction on a second enrichment plant. In a story published Nov. 13 – three days before the report was circulated to IAEA Governing Council members – Associated Press reporter George Jahn reported unnamed diplomats as saying Iran had started building the plant in 2002, that the construction had paused for two years in 2004 because of Iran’s suspension of enrichment and had resumed in 2006, when enrichment had been resumed openly.

Independent analysis of satellite imagery has shown, however, that those earlier images were of construction on the general purpose “contingency centres” rather than an enrichment facility. Paul Brannan, a satellite imagery analyst for the Institute for Science and International Security who has analysed imagery of the same site from 2004 and 2005, concluded in a Sep. 29 report that it was probably a tunnel facility for a purpose other than an enrichment facility.

Brannan noted that the Qom site was only one of “many throughout the country” with similar characteristics. Contrary to the IAEA’s account, he observed that construction had continued between June 2004 and March 2005, although it was at a slow pace.

Brannan’s analysis is consistent with the account in the Iranian letter of Oct. 28 of a decision to construct a whole system of “contingency centres” for various purposes in the event of a U.S. air attack.

The Iranian letter quoted by the IAEA said Iran’s Atomic Energy Agency had requested one of the already constructed centres for a “contingency enrichment plant”, which would assure continuation of enrichment should the Natanz Enrichment Plant be attacked. The Qom tunnel facility was made available for that purpose in the second half of 2007 and construction on the enrichment facility then began, according to the letter.

Contradicting the Jahn story, however, the IAEA report says “a number of Member States” have “alleged that design work on the facility had started in 2006″. If design work was only started in 2006, the construction work seen in the earlier years obviously could not have been on an enrichment facility.

A senior official of the Barack Obama administration charged in the Sep. 25 briefing on the Qom site that actual construction of the facility had begun before March 2007. The language of the new report indicates for the first time that the United States has taken a much more nuanced approach to the history of the Qom site in its communications with the IAEA.

The IAEA report seems to imply that it does not believe the Iranian account that construction began on the enrichment facility only in 2007. It said the agency has “indicated that Iran’s declaration of the new facility reduces the level of confidence in the absence of other nuclear facilities under construction and gives rise to questions about whether there were any other nuclear facilities in Iran which had not been declared to the Agency.”

Iran has told the IAEA it has no other nuclear facilities “currently under construction or in operation that had not been declared to the Agency”, according to the report. But it has not yet responded to a Nov. 6 letter from the agency asking whether it is planning to build any other nuclear sites.

The report, which is the last to be published under outgoing Director General Mohamed ElBaradei, appears to reflect his waning influence over the agency’s political position on Iran in relation to the director of the Safeguards Department, Olli Heinonen.

After IAEA inspectors had visited the Qom site and discussed the background of its construction, ElBaradei had commented Nov. 5 that they had found “nothing to be worried about” and that the facility was indeed a backup to the Natanz plant as Iran had maintained. “It’s a hole in a mountain,” ElBaradei said.

The spin in the report itself takes the opposite approach from ElBaradei’s suggestion that the Qom facility is not a threatening development.

It also appears to reflect a common Western view that treating the Qom site as evidence of a covert nuclear weapons-related programme is useful to increase the pressure on Iran to reach agreement with the West to give up the bulk of its low enrichment uranium (LEU) supplies until they could be replenished through more enrichment nearly a year later.

After senior officials of the Obama administration had briefed reporters Sep. 25 on the allegation that Iran had been working on the site secretly for several years, U.S. officials said the discovery of the site would give the United States “leverage” in the talks with Iran that were to start in Geneva Oct. 1.

Western governments proposed at the Oct. 1 meeting that Iran agree to ship up to 80 percent of its LEU to Russia in return for eventual shipments of 20 percent enriched uranium to fuel a small medical reactor in Tehran. That would have allowed the Obama administration to declare a diplomatic victory in regard to Iran’s nuclear capabilities and tamp down Israeli pressures to allow it to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities.

At negotiations in Vienna last month under IAEA auspices, outgoing IAEA Director General ElBaradei presented a draft agreement based on that Western proposal. Iran has effectively rejected that deal, however, and made a counterproposal that would allow it to husband its LEU supplies.

Pres. Obama warned Iran on Sunday, “We are now running out of time,” in regard to negotiations on the ElBaradei draft. The United States and other negotiating partners have ignored Iran’s counterproposal.

The Iranian decision to withdraw from the earlier agreement with the IAEA was prompted, moreover, by the campaign of threats to Iran’s nuclear facilities mounted by the George W. Bush administration in early 2007, as a reconstruction of the sequence of events shows.

A senior administration official who briefed reporters Sep. 25 said, “We know construction of the facility began even before the Iranians unilaterally said they did not feel bound by that [IAEA] obligation.”

The U.S. intelligence assessment of the period, however, makes it clear that Iran did not begin construction on the Qom enrichment facility until long after its public change of policy on informing the IAEA.

The published key judgments of the November 2007 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran’s nuclear programme contained a little-noticed statement that the intelligence community judged that Iran’s “covert” uranium conversion and enrichment activity had “probably been halted in response to the fall 2003 halt”, and “probably had not been restarted through at least mid-2007″.

That clearly implied that U.S. intelligence had found no evidence of any undeclared covert enrichment facility.

An intelligence source familiar with the text of the full unpublished NIE has confirmed to IPS that the estimate does not refer to any evidence of a second enrichment site, even though it discusses the central importance of covert enrichment in any Iranian nuclear breakout scenario.

The estimate made no mention of such evidence despite the highly publicised fact that that the Qom site was one of many which were under constant surveillance by U.S. intelligence because of the tunneling system already dug into the side of the mountain.

Despite the claim that construction on the Qom facility began before April 2007, the senior administration official conceded in the Sep. 25 briefing that it was only in early 2009 that U.S. intelligence had seen construction activity consistent with an enrichment facility.

That is consistent with the statement by the Iranian vice president and head of the Atomic Energy Organisation of Iran, Al Akbar Salehi, that his agency took over a military ammunition dump in 2008 and only then began construction on an enrichment facility.

The Iranian decision to withdraw from the “subsidiary agreement” to which it had agreed in February 2003 requiring it to inform the IAEA of any new nuclear facilities as soon as the construction decision was made occurred in the context of a series of moves by the Bush administration to convince Iran that an attack on its nuclear facilities was a serious possibility.

In December 2006, major U.S. news media reported that a second U.S. carrier task group was being sent to the Persian Gulf to send a message to Iran.

The U.S. campaign of threats intensified in January, when Bush accused Iran and Syria of “allowing terrorists and insurgents to use their territory to move in and out of Iraq” and charged Iran was “providing material support for attacks on American troops”. That formulation appeared to be aimed at establishing a legal basis for an eventual U.S. attack on Iranian territory.

The Guardian reported Jan. 31, 2007, “Senior European policy-makers are increasingly worried that the U.S. administration will resort to air attacks against Iran to try to destroy its suspect nuclear programme.”

Then the Washington Post reported Feb. 11 that a foreign diplomat had been told by Vice President Dick Cheney’s national security adviser John Hannah that a U.S. attack on Iran was “a real possibility” in 2007.

A few days later Newsweek reported that it was “likely” a third carrier task group would overlap for a period of months with the two existing task forces. The story recalled that the presence of three carrier task groups in the Gulf simultaneously was the same level of U.S. striking power as the administration had in place during the air campaign against Iraq in 2003.

Finally, on Mar. 27, the United States began a naval exercise in the Gulf involving both aircraft carriers and a dozen more warships already in the Gulf, along with about 100 aircraft. The exercise, which took several days to complete, was the first joint naval and air operation since the air campaign against the Saddam Hussein regime.

A front-page article in the New York Times called it a “calculated show of force” which was “part of a broader strategy to contain Iranian power in the region”.

Just two days later, on Mar. 29, Iran notified the IAEA that it was suspending its implementation of the modified version of its “subsidiary arrangement” with the IAEA, signed in February 2003, which required that it provide “preliminary design information” to the agency as soon as the decision to construct a nuclear facility has been taken.

Instead, Iran said, it was reverting to its commitment under the older version of the subsidiary arrangement. That called for Iran to inform the agency of any new nuclear facility no less than 180 days before the introduction of nuclear material into the facility.

Iran was evidently determined to leave no ambiguity about why it was making that change. On Apr. 3, the chief of staff of the Iranian Armed Forces, Maj. Gen. Hassan Firoozabadi, predicted publicly that the United States and Israel would launch a massive attack on the region that summer.

And that same day, Hamidreza Taraghi, the international affairs chief of the Islamic Coalition Party, which was part of the pro-government coalition of the conservative parties, explicitly linked the Iranian shift on its IAEA agreement with the heightened threat from the U.S. military.

U.S. military deployments in the Persian Gulf were “very similar to those before the Iraq invasion”, said Taraghi, and therefore, “We should not volunteer information regarding our nuclear sites, as they may be misused by the Americans.”

Taraghi was referring to the fact that any design information on Iranian nuclear facilities would help the U.S. and Israeli air forces prepare for an attack on those targets.

On Apr. 13, Iran sent another letter to the IAEA rejecting the agency’s right to verify design information previously provided on the IR-40 heavy water reactor at Arak.

The sequence of events surrounding the Iranian policy change and the subsequent beginning of construction on a second enrichment facility suggests that Iran was hedging its bets against a U.S. air attack, while retaining the obligation to provide detailed information six months before the introduction of nuclear material – if the threat of an attack were to subside.

The Iranian decision to inform the IAEA of the existence of the Qom site in September appears to reflect a much lower perception of threat of an U.S. attack compared with the perception in early 2007.

News coverage of the Qom site was dominated by the story told by the senior U.S. official at the Sep. 25 briefing that Iran had decided to inform the IAEA of the Qom site on Sep. 21 only because it knew the site had been discovered by U.S. intelligence.

In fact, however, U.S. intelligence was in the dark about why Iran had done so.

An unclassified set of Questions and Answers on the Qom enrichment facility issued by the U.S. government the same day as the press briefing, and later published on the website of the Institute for Science and International Security, included the following:

Q: Why did the Iranians decide to reveal this facility at this time?

A: We do not know.

Contrary to sensational stories by the Associated Press and the New York Times, the excerpts on the website of the Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS) reveal that the IAEA’s Safeguards Department, which wrote the report, only has suspicions – not real evidence – that Iran has been working on nuclear weapons in recent years.

The newly published excerpts make it clear, moreover, that the so-called “Alleged Studies” documents brought to the attention of the agency by the United States five years ago are central to its assertion that Iran had such a programme in 2002-03.

Whether those documents are genuine or were fabricated has been the subject of a fierce struggle behind the scenes for many months between two departments of the IAEA.

Some IAEA officials began calling for a clear statement by the agency that it could not affirm the documents’ authenticity after the agency obtained hard evidence in early 2008 that a key document in the collection had been fraudulently altered, as previously reported by this writer. As journalist Mark Hibbs reported last week in Nucleonics Week, opposition to relying on the intelligence documents has come not only from outgoing Director General Mohamed ElBaradei but from the Department of External Relations and Policy Coordination.

Since September 2008, however, the Safeguards Department, headed by Olli Heinonen, has been pressing for publication of its draft report as an annex to a regular agency report on Iran.

Heinonen leaked the draft to Western governments last summer, and in September it was leaked to the Associated Press and ISIS. That has generated sensational headlines suggesting that Iran can already build a nuclear bomb.

The draft report says the agency “assesses that Iran has sufficient information to be able to design and produce a workable implosion nuclear device”. But other passages indicate the authors regard such knowledge only as a possibility, based on suspicions rather than concrete evidence.

It says the “necessary information was most likely obtained from external sources and probably modified by Iran”. But it cites only the 15-page “uranium metal document” given by the A. Q. Khan network to Iran when it purchased centrifuge designs in 1987.

“Based on the information in the document,” it says, “it is possible that Iran has knowledge regarding the contents of a nuclear package.”

The IAEA “suspects” that the 15-page document was part of “larger package that Iran may have obtained but which has not yet come to the Agency’s attention”, according to the leaked excerpts.

But that document only outlines procedural requirements for casting uranium into hemispheres, not the technical specifications, as the IAEA report of Nov. 18, 2005 noted. No evidence has ever surfaced to challenge the Iranian explanation that Khan’s agents threw in the document after a deal had been reached on centrifuges in an effort to interest Iran in buying the technology for casting uranium.

The IAEA affirmed that it has found no evidence that Iran ever acquired such technology.

The only external “nuclear package” ever reported to have been provided to Iran is a set of flawed technical designs for a “high-voltage block” for a Russian-designed nuclear weapon, which was slipped under the door of the Iranian mission in Vienna by a Russian scientist working for CIA’s Operation Merlin in February 2000.

Another far-reaching claim in the draft report is that the IAEA “has information, known as the Alleged Studies, that the Ministry of Defence of Iran has conducted and may still be conducting a comprehensive programme aimed at the development of a nuclear payload to be delivered using the Shahab 3 missile system.”

It does not explain how the “Alleged Studies”, which are documents on work done in 2002 and 2003, could have any bearing on whether Iran is now conducting work on nuclear weapons.

Using the same language found in published IAEA reports, the draft suggests that the Alleged Studies intelligence documents represent credible evidence. “The information, which has been obtained from multiple sources, is detailed in content and appears to be generally consistent,” it says.

But that characterisation of the intelligence first shown to the IAEA by the United States in 2005 has been contested by sceptics in the agency. A senior IAEA official familiar with the documents suggested in an interview with IPS last month that the claim of “multiple sources” may be misleading.

Given the existence of “intelligence sharing networks”, the official said, “one can’t rule it out that one organisation got the intelligence and shared it with others.” That would explain the reference to “multiple sources consistent over time”, he said.

The initial U.S. account, according to the official, was that the documents came from the laptop computer of one of the Iranian participants in the alleged nuclear weapons research programme. Later, however, that account was “walked back”, he said.

“There are holes in the story,” said the official.

The introduction by ISIS to the excerpts from the report, evidently based on conversations with the IAEA personnel, confirms that the documents did not come from Iran on a laptop computer, as U.S. officials had claimed in the past. It suggests that the documents were smuggled out of Iran as “electronic media” by the wife of an Iranian who had been recruited by German intelligence and was later arrested.

That new explanation is highly suspect, however, because an intelligence agency would not confirm the identity of one of their agents, even if he were arrested. Asked about the ISIS account, Paul Pillar, who was national intelligence office for the Middle East when the “laptop documents” surfaced, said it “sounds unusual”.

The draft report also argues that the information in the documents is credible, because it “refers to known Iranian persons and institutions under both the military and civil apparatuses, as well as to some degree to their confirmed procurement activities”.

But the senior IAEA official cast doubt on that claim as well. The names of people working in the relevant Iranian military and civilian organisations are readily obtainable, he observed. “It’s not difficult to cook up such a document,” the official told IPS.

The draft paper states that the agency “does not believe that Iran has yet achieved the means of integrating a nuclear payload into the Shahab 3 delivery system with any confidence that it would work”.

That statement hints at the fact that the reentry vehicle studies were found to have serious technical problems. The senior IAEA official told IPS that the Sandia National Laboratories, which ran computer simulation analyses of the plan, not only found that none of them would have worked, but had expressed doubt that they were genuine.

The paper makes an indirect reference to a plan for a bench-scale facility for uranium conversion, but does not mention that it had several technical flaws, as acknowledged by Heinonen in a February 2008 briefing for members.

Nor do the draft report’s conclusions deal with the fact, confirmed by the senior IAEA official to IPS, that none of the intelligence documents have any security markings, despite the fact they are purported to be part of what presumably would have been Iran’s most highly classified programme.

From Iran’s perspective, the meeting could not have gone better. Iran didn’t agree to suspend its enrichment of uranium, or even to suspend construction of a new underground uranium enrichment plant near the city of Qom. According to Iranian news media, the suspension of uranium enrichment was never even discussed, and appears to have been a de facto precondition for talks. This, Iran argues, is a tacit recognition of Iran’s right, as a sovereign nation and as a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), to develop nuclear energy for peaceful purposes.

Likewise, the threat of “crippling sanctions” was never made, at least within the confines of the meeting. Economic sanctions seem unlikely to have any effect, and this is probably why they were never on the table. With so few economic ties between the countries, America has little economic leverage over Iran. The US has already confiscated all possible Iranian assets and sold them off to compensate victims of “state sponsors of terrorism,” and that’s about as tough as a sanctioner can get. Public threats to block the sale of refined gasoline to Iran were met by offers from Venezuela and China to take up the slack. Most likely, crippling sanctions weren’t proposed simply because Iran would recognize such threats as a bluff.

Barack Obama also declared the meeting a success, although it’s unclear what he has actually achieved, other than a slight change in tone in US-Iranian relations. Obama has held off neoconservative warhawks for the time being, if that was his goal. Whatever other game plan he may have had went out the window when Iran disclosed the Qom facility just days before the Geneva meeting. This shifted the debate, from how to convince Iran to change its course, to demanding that the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) be allowed to inspect the facility “within two weeks.”

The American reaction to the disclosure was both hasty and defensive. Officials argued that they’d known about the Qom facility for years, and had intended to surprise the Iranians with their knowledge at the Geneva meeting. Iran must have gotten wind of their plans, they said, and disclosed the facility to avoid embarrassment. This story doesn’t hold water, though. First of all, there’s no denying the benefit Iran received to its negotiating position. Practically nothing was discussed except for whether and when Iran would allow the IAEA to inspect the facility. And, of course Iran will allow IAEA inspections. Iran highly values its relationship with the IAEA, its first line of defense against the kind of disaster precipitated by Hans Blix’ inconclusive search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Excavation of the underground facility was obvious from satellite imagery, and its purpose could not have remained a secret indefinitely. The timing of the disclosure turned what might have been a problem into a negotiating advantage. It was clearly meant to influence the Geneva meeting. That’s more likely than believing Iran was able to discover the P5+1’s strategy going into Geneva.

There is some debate over whether Iran was legally obligated to disclose the facility six months before it went online, or when construction of the facility first began. According to the original terms of the NPT, which were signed and ratified by Iran, Iran only needed to give six months notice. Iran says that the Qom facility is still 18 months away from completion, and it has met its legal obligations. The legal history is a little more complex, though. An additional protocol to the NPT, Section 3.1, requires all signatories to inform the IAEA at the time construction of any new facilities began, and Iran initially agreed to the amendment. Iran’s parliament refused to ratify it, and Iran informed the IAEA that it did not consider itself bound by Section 3.1. Iran did not, then, violate its legal obligations by not disclosing the Qom facility when construction first began, since the amendment never became binding law, but it did put itself on “the wrong side of the law,” as outgoing IAEA chief Mohammad ElBaradei put it. Or, at least on the wrong side of the other signatories of the NPT.

Obama prepared for Geneva by making his own surprise announcement: the US would be scrapping a nascient missile defense system in Eastern Europe. The program might have been cancelled for budgetary reasons, or to improve relations with Russia in order to secure Russian support for crippling sanctions. Nevertheless, the reason given to the public was that “western intelligence” had determined that Iran was not as far along in its missile development program as originally thought, and was no longer believed to be capable of striking Europe. This was answered within days by an Iranian missile test, clearly demonstrating Iran’s ability to strike Eastern Europe, if that was ever an issue. The missile test was misperceived by many as a threatening gesture, but seems to have been intended to put the lie to Obama’s stated reason for trash-canning the missile shield.

Initial news reports seemed disappointed that the two sides had had an amicable meeting, and that another one would be scheduled in two weeks time. No frightening options on the table, and no scandalous insults to report. A typical headline reads “Iran agrees to let in inspectors.¹ Buried within this particular article was a quote from Javier Solana, the European Union’s foreign policy chief, saying that Iran had agreed to export low-enriched uranium from a small research facility in Tehran producing isotopes for medical purposes, for further enrichment outside of Iran. According to Mr. Solana, this tentative agreement did not apply to the main Iranian enrichment facility in Natanz.

Some hours later, Barack Obama gave a press conference and broke the big news: Iran had agreed, “in principle” to transfer the majority of its stockpile of low enriched uranium to Russia, and then to France, where it would be enriched to 19.75%, a level needed for the medical isotope reactor.² This was widely seen as a breakthrough in the negotiations. As Iran continued enriching uranium and building another enrichment plan, the international community would buy up its supply,

refine it to the level needed to make medical isotopes (but not enough to make weapons), and everyone would be happy. Well, almost everyone, anyway. Neoconservative commentator John Bolton argues that rather than being a clever way to reduce Iran’s stockpile, Iran could simply enrich the material in 19.75% fuel rods to weapons grade at a later date.

A day later, Peyman Jebelli, Press Secretary for Iran’s Supreme National Security Council told Iranian Press TV that Obama’s story was untrue. Iran had offered to purchase 19.75% refined uranium from the West, he said, not to transfer its own stockpile for offshore processing. Press TV reiterated the denial in another story the following day, citing unnamed Iranian officials.³ One of Iran’s threats all along has been to increase its enrichment from 3.5% to 19.75%, inching its way towards High Enriched Uranium (HEU), the fuel for nuclear weapons, if the West refused to provide it. So, between Javier Solana, Barack Obama, and the Iranian Press Secretary, the main issue in the next round of negotiations would seem to be that of the medical isotopes. Iran seems likely to go along with this idea, although it may be uneasy about putting its entire uranium stockpile in the hands of the French, even for a short time.

Several other aspects of Obama’s press conference are worth noting. Obama gave Iran a two week deadline to allow the IAEA to inspect the Qom facility. But when Mr. ElBaredei visited Tehran two days later, he agreed with the Iranians that inspections would occur on October 25.⁴ This not only snubbed Obama’s deadline. It also placed the inspection a week after the next P5+1 meeting, scheduled for October 19th. This preserves the inspection of the Qom facility as an distracting issue, such that Iran will probably not have to make any real concessions at the next meeting, either.

This is not to say that Iran is getting everything it wanted in the negotiations. The West has successfully narrowed the agenda of the meetings to Iran’s nuclear program. The meetings don’t look like a prelude to more general discussions about nuclear disarmament, which Iran would love to be involved in. But the hawks have been outmaneuvered for now, and absent some further provocation from Iran’s President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Western press may soon grow bored with the Iranian nuclear story. After all, this has been going on for years and years. There is really nothing new about it, and still no indication that Iran is trying to develop nuclear weapons.

Many people do believe that Iran is developing nuclear weapons, though, and there seems to be a mad rush to prove it. But there is a far simpler explanation, which is self-evident when you think about it. If Iran has the capability to enrich uranium to weapons-grade, and has a significant stockpile of low enriched uranium, it could further enrich the stockpile and produce nuclear weapons on fairly short notice. This is sometimes referred to as “the Japan option,” although Brazil also has this capability. Having a Japan option is a deterrence in itself. Just as no one needs to actually use nuclear weapons to realize their political leverage, if you’re always six months away from having a nuclear weapon, you already have a significant deterrent capability. Case in point: a few months ago, the Japanese parliament debated whether to develop nuclear weapons in response to threatening gestures made by North Korea. I’m sure the Japanese debate was heard loud and clear in Pyongyang.

Considering what happened to its neighbors in Iraq and Afghanistan, Iran’s desire for a nuclear Japan option is understandable. We shouldn’t automatically side with the “international community” against Iran. We should balance the goal of nuclear nonproliferation against the legitimate concerns of the Iranian people. These include both security and technological development. The Japan option may be safer than we think.

1. ”Iran agrees to let in inspectors,” by Jason Koutsoukis, The Age, Oct 3, 2009.
2. ”Iran, Major Powers Reach Agreement On Series of Points: Obama Sees a ‘Constructive Beginning’,” by Glenn Kessler, Washington Post, October 2, 2009.
3. ”Iran: We reached no deal to ship nuclear fuel,” Press TV, Oct 3, 2009.
4. ”IAEA to inspect Fordo facility late October,” Press TV, Oct 4, 2009.

At a Sep. 25 briefing on the site, senior administration officials refused to provide any specific information to back up the claim that construction had begun before the March 2007 Iranian withdrawal from an agreement requiring that it inform the IAEA immediately of any decision to build a nuclear facility.

The U.S. charges on the Qom facility, coming a week before the first opportunity for negotiations with Iran on a full range of issues since 1981, appear to have been a deliberate ploy to make the Obama administration appear tough and on the offensive when the talks started.

Iran’s Vice President Ali Akbar Salehi, who is also the head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organisation, told a news conference Tuesday that his agency took over a military ammunition dump in 2008 to begin work on the enrichment facility near Qom.

Meanwhile, a new photo analysis by the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS) of the Qom site in 2004 and 2005 suggests it was not dedicated to building a uranium enrichment facility at that time.

In a brief analysis posted on the ISIS webpage Tuesday, Paul Brannan, a specialist in interpreting satellite photography at ISIS, said he believed that the site on which the Qom enrichment facility was later constructed was “originally a tunnel facility associated with Iran’s military” rather than a “construction site for a uranium plant”.

Brannan wrote that there was evidence of some construction between June 2004 and March 2005, but that the pace appeared “slow”. That tunneling activity, Brannan wrote, “may not have been originally associated with the later construction activity for the suspected uranium enrichment site”.

Brannan told IPS it is “technically possible” that the relatively slight changes he saw from 2004 to 2005 were associated with the enrichment facility, but said the images of the site at that stage appear similar to many other tunnel facilities built into a mountain that are maintained by the Iranian military.

“The Iranian military has hundreds of these around Iran,” Brannon said.

Brannan said he is now in the process of obtaining satellite imagery for 2006 through 2008 in order to establish more clearly when the construction on the facility began.

In his press conference, Salehi described the second enrichment facility as “a small version of Natanz” – Iran’s large-scale commercial enrichment plant – and explained it as a measure aimed at ensuring the continuity of the programme if its nuclear sites were attacked.

If construction on the Qom site did not begin until 2008, as Salehi claimed, it would have been long after Iran had withdrawn from an agreement with the IAEA — the so-called “modified Code 3.1″ — obligating it to report design information on nuclear facilities as soon as the decision is made.

That would further suggest that Iran is serious about remaining in compliance with its obligations under the Safeguards Agreement.

Iran notified the IAEA in March 2007 that it intended to revert to the earlier version of the “Code 3.1″ Subsidiary Arrangement with the agency, which obligated it to provide design information at least 180 days before introduction of nuclear material into the facility. Subsidiary Arrangements are codicils to the Safeguards Agreement – the document which defines the basic transparency and other obligations of each IAEA member state.

In a briefing for reporters last week a “senior administration official” asserted that Iran had begun construction on the Qom enrichment facility “with the intent that it be secret”, thus giving Iran “an option of producing weapons-grade uranium without the international community knowing about it”.

A key element of that charge was that Iran had violated the “modified Code 3.1″ agreement at the very time it had been ostensibly implementing that agreement.

“We know construction of the facility began even before the Iranians unilaterally said they did not feel bound by that obligation,” the official declared.

But the briefing official seemed to confirm the conclusion of the ISIS analysis of the satellite imagery by suggesting that the site was considered as an enrichment site even though there was evidence that it had a different function. “[A]t a very early stage of construction,” the official said, “a facility like this could have multiple uses.”

There were other hints as well that the U.S. charge was not based on visual evidence of construction but on the supposition that the site was intended for the enrichment facility, even though little or no construction was actually taking place.

“[W]e wanted to wait until the actual construction caught up with that intent,” said the official at one point.

The unnamed senior official declined on three different occasions during the briefing to answer questions on when construction on the facility had started.

When a reporter asked directly, “Do you have a clear idea of when the construction started?” the official flatly refused to answer. The official also refused to answer when asked if the construction was started before President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad took office in August 2005.

The official also said, “These kinds of things are always a matter of degree.”

If the satellite imagery for 2006, 2007 and 2008 shows that construction did not begin until after the Iranian withdrawal from its commitment to modified Code 3.1, it would provide new evidence that Iran intended to remain within the letter of its safeguards agreement and was not planning a covert enrichment facility.

President Obama called the second enrichment facility “a direct challenge to the basic foundation of the non-proliferation regime”, saying Iran had broken “rules that all nations must follow”.

Outgoing IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei declared in New Delhi Wednesday that Iran is “on the wrong side of the law… insofar as informing the agency about the construction.”

Although it has remained unreported in the news media, however, Iran has a legal case that it has remained in compliance with its Safeguards Agreement.

In March 2009, the director of the IAEA Office of Legal Affairs, Johan Rautenbach, called Iran’s reversion to implementation of the earlier version of the Code 3.1 “inconsistent with its obligations under the Subsidiary Arrangements”.

But he went on to say that it was “difficult to conclude that providing information in accordance with the earlier formulation in itself constitutes non-compliance with, or a breach of, the Safeguards Agreement as such.”

The Safeguards Agreement itself clearly forbids unilateral “modification” of a Subsidiary Arrangement, but it says nothing about withdrawal from such an agreement, which is what Iran is asserting it did in March 2007.

The distinction between “modification” and “withdrawal” from provisions of an international agreement is well established in the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties.

Unilateral withdrawal is permitted under that Convention, provided that the provision in question is separable from the remainder of the agreement, is not the essential basis of consent by the other party and continued performance of the remainder of the agreement would not be “unjust”.

The head of the IAEA Legal Department appears to have accepted that those three conditions applied to the case of Iran’s “Modified Code 3.1″ agreement.

“The U.S. intelligence community is reporting to the White House that Iran has not restarted its nuclear-weapons development program, two counter-proliferation officials tell Newsweek. U.S. agencies had previously said that Tehran halted the program in 2003.

“The officials, who asked for anonymity when discussing sensitive information, said that U.S. intelligence agencies have informed policymakers at the White House and other agencies that the status of Iranian work on development and production of a nuclear bomb has not changed since the formal National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran’s ‘Nuclear Intentions and Capabilities’ in November 2007. Public portions of that report stated that U.S. intelligence agencies had ‘high confidence” that, as of early 2003, Iranian military units were pursuing development of a nuclear bomb, but that in the fall of that year Iran ‘halted its nuclear weapons program.’ The document said that while U.S. agencies believed the Iranian government ‘at a minimum is keeping open the option to develop nuclear weapons,’ U.S. intelligence as of mid-2007 still had ‘moderate confidence’ that it had not restarted weapons-development efforts.

“One of the two officials said that the Obama administration has now worked out a system in which intelligence agencies provide top policymakers, including the president, with regular updates on intelligence judgments like the conclusions in the 2007 Iran NIE. According to the two officials, the latest update to policymakers has been that as of now — two years after the period covered by the 2007 NIE — U.S. intelligence agencies still believe Iran has not resumed nuclear-weapons development work. ‘That’s the conclusion, but it’s one that—like every other—is constantly checked and reassessed, both to take account of new information and to test old assumptions,’ one of the officials told Newsweek.”

In this connection, National Intelligence Director Dennis Blair — the insider’s insider — testified before Congress in February that there was no evidence Iran is producing the highly enriched uranium required for nuclear weapons.

The September-October issue of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists contained an interview with Mohamed El Baradei, the retiring long time director of the IAEA, in which he declared: “We have not seen concrete evidence that Tehran has an ongoing nuclear weapons program …. But somehow, many people are talking about how Iran’s nuclear program is the greatest threat to the world….

“In many ways, I think the threat has been hyped. Yes, there’s concern about Iran’s future intentions and Iran needs to be more transparent with the IAEA and the international community …. But the idea that we’ll wake up tomorrow and Iran will have a nuclear weapon is an idea that isn’t supported by the facts as we have seen them so far.”

The Sept. 21 issue of Newsweek reported that “quarrels concerning the ultimate aim of Iran’s secretive nuke program have become so heated that some UN officials are making comparisons to the proliferation of misinformation in the run-up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq.” The article continued:

In a private email sent last week to nuclear experts and obtained by Newsweek, Tariq Rauf, a senior official with the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency, wrote that the mainstream media are repeating mistakes from 2003, when they ‘carried unsubstantiated stories on Iraq and WMD — the same mistakes are being repeated re IAEA and Iran.’ Rauf added that ‘the hype is likely originating from certain (known) sources.’ The message does not specify the sources, but U.S. and European officials have previously accused Israel of exaggerating Iran’s nuclear progress.

On Feb. 22, India’s mass circulation daily The Hindu reported:

Iran has not converted the low-grade uranium that it has produced into weapon-grade uranium, inspectors belonging to the International Atomic Energy Agency have said. The Austrian Press Agency quoted an IAEA expert as saying that the uranium substances that Iran has produced at its Natanz enrichment facility have been carefully recorded and remote cameras have been installed to supervise part of the stockpile. ‘If the Iranians intend to transport these uranium substances to a secret location for further processing, the agency’s inspectors will find out,‘ he said. The expert added that ‘so far, Iran has carried out good cooperation with us in relevant verifications.’

The French news agency AFP reported Sept. 20:

Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei today denied the West’s charge that Tehran aims to develop nuclear weapons under a covert program, insisting the Islamic Republic bans such activity. ‘They falsely accuse [Iran] of producing nuclear weapons. We fundamentally reject nuclear weapons and prohibit the production and the use of nuclear weapons,’ Khamenei said in a speech broadcast by state television. ‘They know themselves that it’s not true … but it is part of Iran-phobia policy that controls the behavior of these arrogant governments today.’

Iran is no danger to Israel, the United States, or the Sunni Arab world. It wants to protect its revolution, independence and what it considers its precious Islamic Republic. The Ahmadinejad government and Ayatollah Khamenei fully understand that heavy U.S. sanctions are capable of causing extreme agony for the masses of its people and would lead to a weakening of the state. Tehran is also aware that if it produces one nuclear weapon it may be mercilessly attacked.

Iran’s leadership is not suicidal, and is well aware that if Tehran not only produced a weapon but actually launched a nuclear missile toward Israel, the massive retaliation from the U.S. and Israel would obliterate most of Iranian society, whether or not its weapon was deflected by the U.S. anti-missile system that the Obama Administration is now going to place aboard Navy ships in the Mediterranean. (President Bush wanted to deploy the system to Poland and the Czech Republic to threaten Russia, not to defend Europe against an Iranian attack. By moving the ABMs south, Obama achieved two objectives: He got Russia off his back, while assuring Israel of yet another layer of U.S. protection.)

For all its fiery international rhetoric, Iran’s leadership is essentially cautious, and its military intentions are defensive. The country hasn’t started a war in almost 200 years, and the Iranian people have no desire to replicate the horror of the defensive war they waged against the Iraqi aggressor for most of the 1980s.

Developing nuclear weapons in today’s world makes a country a recognized power, and is a great defense against imperial aggression, particularly for a country that has long been on Washington’s hit list and narrowly avoided an invasion during the Bush years.

Iran — even if it knows how to produce a nuclear bomb — will not weaponize because it wishes to demonstrate its adherence to the Non-Proliferation Treaty, and because it desires to survive the hostility of America and Israel. At the same time, Iran does not intend to be humiliated and hampered by hugely excessive restrictions and intrusive surveillance that is not applied to other countries in compliance with the NPT. Nor does it intend to turn tail because of threats from those who object to its support of the Palestinian people and its opposition to imperialism.

If the United States genuinely wishes to resolve its dispute with Iran, it is possible to do so rationally and without violence. But this means President Obama must treat Iran as an equal, accept the reality that Tehran and Washington see the world differently, and negotiate in good faith.

Most Americans and virtually the rest of the world have high hopes about Obama, especially after the dreadful Bush Administration. We certainly recognize the improvement, but have doubts, not high hopes, when it comes to the direction of American foreign policy. We see little difference, other than the cosmetic, between the Obama Administration’s international strategy and the strategy of American global domination and hegemony based on military power that has prevailed in Washington in its present incarnation since the end of World War II.

We’d like nothing better than to be proven wrong. But that would take the development of a massive progressive movement in this country, focused in this instance on world peace, the equality of peoples, and justice for all, a not unreasonable goal worth struggling for, in our view. And as far as nuclear proliferation is concerned, the only true solution is total nuclear disarmament, a position, by the way, that Iran appears to be putting forth these days.

Read Part 1 and Part 2.

But an analysis of the transcript of that briefing by senior administration officials that was the sole basis for the news stories and other evidence reveals damaging admissions, conflicts with the facts and unanswered questions that undermine its credibility.

Iran’s notification to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) of the second enrichment facility in a letter on Sep. 21 was buried deep in most of the news stories and explained as a response to being detected by U.S. intelligence. In reporting the story in that way, journalists were relying entirely on the testimony of “senior administration officials” who briefed them at the G20 summit in Pittsburgh Friday.

U.S. intelligence had “learned that the Iranians learned that the secrecy of the facility was compromised”, one of the officials said, according to the White House transcript. The Iranians had informed the IAEA, he asserted, because “they came to believe that the value of the facility as a secret facility was no longer valid…”

Later in the briefing, however, the official said “we believe”, rather than “we learned”, in referring to that claim, indicating that it is only an inference rather than being based on hard intelligence.

The official refused to explain how U.S. analysts had arrived at that conclusion, but an analysis by the defence intelligence consulting firm IHS Jane’s of a satellite photo of the site taken Saturday said there is a surface-to-air missile system located at the site.

Since surface-to-air missiles protect many Iranian military sites, however, their presence at the Qom site doesn’t necessarily mean that Iran believed that Washington had just discovered the enrichment plant.

The official said the administration had organised an intelligence briefing on the facility for the IAEA during the summer on the assumption that the Iranians might “choose to disclose the facility themselves”. But he offered no explanation for the fact that there had been no briefing given to the IAEA or anyone else until Sep. 24 — three days after the Iranians disclosed the existence of the facility.

A major question surrounding the official story is why the Barack Obama administration had not done anything — and apparently had no plans to do anything — with its intelligence on the Iranian facility at Qom prior to the Iranian letter to the IAEA. When asked whether the administration had intended to keep the information in its intelligence briefing secret even after the meeting with the Iranians on Oct. 1, the senior official answered obliquely but revealingly, “I think it’s impossible to turn back the clock and say what might have been otherwise.”

In effect, the answer was no, there had been no plan for briefing the IAEA or anyone.

News media played up the statement by the senior administration official that U.S. intelligence had been “aware of this facility for years”.

But what was not reported was that he meant only that the U.S. was aware of a possible nuclear site, not one whose function was known.

The official in question acknowledged the analysts had not been able to identify it as an enrichment facility for a long time. In the “very early stage of construction,” said the official, “a facility like this could have multiple uses.” Intelligence analysts had to “wait until the facility had reached the stage of construction where it was undeniably intended for use as a centrifuge facility,” he explained.

The fact that the administration had made no move to brief the IAEA or other governments on the site before Iran revealed its existence suggests that site had not yet reached that stage where the evidence was unambiguous.

A former U.S. official who has seen the summary of the administration’s intelligence used to brief foreign governments told IPS he doubts the intelligence community had hard evidence that the Qom site was an enrichment plant. “I think they didn’t have the goods on them,” he said.

Also misleading was the official briefing’s characterisation of the intelligence assessment on the purpose of the enrichment plant. The briefing concluded that the Qom facility must be for production of weapons-grade enriched uranium, because it will accommodate only 3,000 centrifuges, which would be too few to provide fuel for a nuclear power plant.

According to the former U.S. official who has read the briefing paper on the intelligence assessment, however, the paper says explicitly that the Qom facility is “a possible military facility”. That language indicates that intelligence analysts have suggested that the facility may be for making low-enriched rather than for high-enriched, bomb-grade uranium.

It also implies that the senior administration official briefing the press was deliberately portraying the new enrichment facility in more menacing terms than the actual intelligence assessment.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s offer the day after the denunciation of the site by U.S., British and French leaders to allow IAEA monitoring of the plant will make it far more difficult to argue that it was meant to serve military purposes.

The circumstantial evidence suggests that Iran never intended to keep the Qom facility secret from the IAEA but was waiting to make it public at a moment that served its political-diplomatic objectives.

The Iranian government is well aware of U.S. capabilities for monitoring from satellite photographs any site in Iran that exhibits certain characteristics.

Iran obviously wanted to make the existence of the Qom site public before construction on the site would clearly indicate an enrichment purpose. But it gave the IAEA no details in its initial announcement, evidently hoping to find out whether and how much the United States already knew about it.

The specific timing of the Iranian letter, however, appears to be related to the upcoming talks between Iran and the P5+1 — China, France, Britain, Russia, the United States and Germany — and an emerging Iranian strategy of smaller back-up nuclear facilities that would assure continuity if Natanz were attacked.

The Iranian announcement of that decision on Sep. 14 coincided with a statement by the head of Iran’s atomic energy organisation, Ali Akbar Salehi, warning against preemptive strikes against the country’s nuclear facilities.

The day after the United States, Britain and France denounced the Qom facility as part of a deception, Salehi said, “Considering the threats, our organisation decided to do what is necessary to preserve and continue our nuclear activities. So we decided to build new installations which will guarantee the continuation of our nuclear activities which will never stop at any cost.”

As satellite photos of the site show, the enrichment facility at Qom is being built into the side of a mountain, making it less vulnerable to destruction, even with the latest bunker-busting U.S. bombs.

The pro-administration newspaper Kayhan quoted an “informed official” as saying that Iran had told the IAEA in 2004 that it had to do something about the threat of attack on its nuclear facilities “repeatedly posed by the western countries”.

The government newspaper called the existence of the second uranium enrichment plan “a winning card” that would increase Iran’s bargaining power in the talks. That presumably referred to neutralising the ultimate coercive threat against Iran by the United States.

As we proceed with our analysis, here are a few things that should be kept in mind.

• So far there is absolutely no evidence Iran is going to “weaponize” its nuclear power program and build atomic bombs. So far it has been abiding by the NPT, has pledged not to produce nuclear weapons, is under very close scrutiny by the IAEA, and obviously its program is the target of intensive surveillance by the United States. There is no secret way in which it can construct nuclear weapons under such circumstances.

• Israel possesses an arsenal of up to 200 nuclear weapons and thumbs its nose at the IAEA and the NPT, with which it is notoriously non-compliant. If President Obama must sternly castigate Iran, which does not have nuclear weapons, for “breaking rules that all nations must follow … and threatening the stability and security of the region and the world,” why does he protect Israel from international sanction and subsidize its military machine? Pakistan and India are also non-compliant, but they too are allies of Washington and thus have been granted immunity.

• In this connection it must be noted that the far right wing Tel Aviv government appears to be on the verge of launching an attack on Iran and has made this well known to the world. But it receives no censure for such threats from the U.S. and its European allies, or for the horror it inflicted on Gaza a few months ago. Imagine the outcry if Iran threatened to attack Israel, or its army entered the territory of a neighboring society and inflicted terrible cruelties largely upon its civilian population for not submitting to national oppression. And yet Tel Aviv calls Iran an “existential” threat despite Israel’s nuclear weapons, it’s superior military force and its support from the entire American military apparatus, including 2,600 strategic nuclear warheads on hair-trigger readiness. But as we’ve noted before, the only concrete threat to Israel’s existence would be if the U.S. government withdrew its political, military and financial support.

• Washington’s geopolitical interests are key to America’s relationship to Iran and the Middle East in general. The U.S. desires to control — or at minimum to keep out of “unfriendly” hands — the immense oil reserves possessed by Iran and neighboring Iraq. It fears a future alliance between these resource rich developing countries, who also happen to be the only two nations in the world governed by Shi’ite Muslims. The U.S. invaded to overthrow the “unfriendly,” Sunni-backed Iraqi government of Saddam Hussein. But it can neither rely totally on its selected successor regime in Baghdad, nor has it yet been able to remove the theocratic government in Tehran, which is conservative domestically but puts forward an anti-imperialist foreign policy that drives the world’s remaining superpower to distraction.

Washington’s objective at the talks beginning Oct. 1 is to coerce Iran to accept extremely intrusive controls on its nuclear development, combining dire threats for refusal with small rewards for agreement. The Tehran government said it will reject demands that it halt uranium enrichment, a main concern of the five members of the Security Council plus Germany, but indicated without elaboration that “Iran is ready to … help ease joint international concerns over the nuclear issue.” (Enriched uranium is required to power nuclear plants for civilian uses. Much greatly enriched uranium is required for weapons.)

Washington wants to confine the seven-party discussions to Tehran’s nuclear project, but the Iranian government put forward it own proposal in early September for “comprehensive, all-encompassing and constructive negotiations.” The U.S. rejected the proposal, but accepted it with seeming reluctance the next day. (We don’t know what happened to change things.) The Iranian suggestions include hastening global nuclear disarmament, ending nuclear proliferation and working toward world peace. Theoretically, Washington agrees with these goals, but doesn’t really want to discuss them with Iran.

The White House knows that in a broader discussion of nonproliferation issues Iran would draw attention to the three U.S. allies presently defying the NPT and getting away with it, and also show that the U.S. itself is non-compliant because it was supposed to have made more progress by now in reducing the Pentagon’s nuclear arsenal. Further, the U.S. will hardly discuss an Iranian proposal for a comprehensive agreement to achieve “global peace and security based on justice” that includes an inquiry into America’s aggression in Iraq and Afghanistan, and Israel’s astonishingly disproportionate violence against Gaza and Lebanon.

The Obama Administration wants at minimum to impose stringent sanctions on Iran if no progress is made to its satisfaction in the next few months as demanded by U.S. neoconservatives, the right wing in general and those influenced by AIPAC, which describes itself as “America’s Pro-Israel Lobby.”

One reason for harsh sanctions would be to hasten the downfall of the Ahmadinejad government, if possible, by creating a serious economic crisis, unemployment, and suffering to exacerbate existing social tensions within the Islamic Republic. The last time Washington engaged in deep sanctions was from 1991-2003 when it has been verified that over a million Iraqis, including a huge number of children, died from various deprivations from hunger to unclean drinking water.

If sanctions are the minimum, the maximum response would be unleashing Israel to attack Iran — an action that would backfire as surely as there is water in the Hudson River.

After his Pittsburgh speech Obama told the press he wasn’t “taking any options off the table,” a phrase he has used a number of times in relation to Iran. It means war remains an option for the U.S., even over the relatively petty issue of an empty building still under construction that’s probably intended to produce energy, not violence. This same statement was a favorite of Bush II as well, and he used it repeatedly in relation to Iran. In April 2006, at a time when Dick Cheney, the neoconservatives and their supporters were pushing hard for war against Iran, the BBC reported that “Bush says all options, including the use of force, are on the table.” As they say, the more things change….

Although some in Washington are hopeful that Ahmadinejad will be weakened in the nuclear talks because of opposition claims that he “stole” the June 12 election in Iran, we don’t believe this is a factor. So far, more than three and a half months later, there has not been any concrete evidence to support the opposition allegations of electoral fraud.

While the U.S. mass media depicts Ahmadinejad as being under virtual siege from a majority of Iranians, other information shows this is exaggerated. Inter-Press Service reported the following Sept. 19 in an article by Jim Lobe headlined, “New Poll Finds Strong Domestic Support for Iran Regime.”:

“A new survey of Iranian public opinion released here [today] suggests majority domestic support for both him [Ahmadinejad] and the country’s basic governing institutions. Four out of five of the 1,003 Iranian respondents interviewed in the survey released by WorldPublicOpinion.org, a project of the highly respected Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) of the University of Maryland, said they considered Ahmadinejad to be the legitimate president of Iran.

“Sixty-two percent of respondents said they had ‘a lot of confidence’ in the declared election results, which gave Ahmadinejad 62.6% of the vote within hours of the polls’ closing Jun. 12 and which were swiftly endorsed by the Islamic Republic’s Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Three of four respondents said Khamenei had reacted correctly in his endorsement.”

No mass demonstrations have taken place from early August until Sept. 18, when thousands of protestors marched in Tehran in an attempt to rival much larger government-sponsored annual rallies in solidarity with the Palestinian struggle on what is called “Jerusalem Day” in Iran. Coming just two weeks before the opening of the nuclear talks, it was obviously intended to convey the impression internationally that Ahmadinejad did not really represent the will of the Iranian people. Police handled the dissenters with kid gloves.

A number of the demonstrators and signs seemed to oppose the Tehran government’s support for the Palestinians as well as Ahmadinejad’s re-election. The Economist reported chants of “Not Gaza, Not Lebanon, I’ll only give my life for Iran,” although Jerusalem Day observances never suggested Iranians should give their lives for either Gaza or Lebanon, both of which have been targets of Israeli military aggression. There were also chants of “Death to Russia” and “Death to China,” evidently a reference to their refusal to join the U.S. and Israel in denunciations of the Tehran government.

In a speech that day, Ahmadinejad in effect pulled the rug from under his own feet in terms of international opinion by once again charging that the Holocaust was a “lie.” Wisely, the Iranian leader did not repeat the preposterous allegation during his 35 minute speech to the UN General Assembly in New York Sept. 23. He mainly discussed building durable world peace and “elimination of all nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons to pave the way for all nations to have access to advanced and peaceful technology.”

He criticized the U.S. and Israel, but seemed somewhat subdued. According to Sarah Wheaton in the New York Times blog that evening, he “said the United States was aiding Israel in ‘racist ambitions,’ called Israel’s attack on Gaza in December ‘barbaric’ and said the economic blockade of Palestinians amounts to ‘genocide’” — comments that provoked the U.S. and 10 other delegations to walk out. Israel didn’t attend in the first place.

Soon after Ahmadinejad’s speech, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told the General Assembly that “The most urgent challenge facing this body is to prevent the tyrants of Tehran from acquiring nuclear weapons,” and urged the delegates to oppose Iranian “barbarism.”

Back in Israel Sept. 26, according to an AP dispatch from Jerusalem, “Netanyahu spoke with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and a number of unidentified U.S. senators and told them that now is the time to act on Iran. Israel maintains the Islamic republic is seeking nuclear weapons. ‘If not now then when?’ the official quoted Netanyahu as saying. He spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not allowed to speak with the media. He did not disclose what kind of action Netanyahu recommended be taken.

“Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman said earlier in the day that the Iranian nuclear facility proves ‘without a doubt’ the Islamic republic is pursuing nuclear weapons. ‘This removes the dispute whether Iran is developing military nuclear power or not and therefore the world powers need to draw conclusions,’ Lieberman told Israel Radio. ‘Without a doubt it is a reactor for military purposes not peaceful purposes.’”

Read Part 1.

And at the United Nations we saw the process swing into action as Netanyahu tried to whip up support for another Middle East war for Israel’s benefit.

“Yesterday, the man who calls the Holocaust a lie spoke from this podium… To those who gave this Holocaust-denier a hearing, I say on behalf of my people, the Jewish people, and decent people everywhere: Have you no shame? Have you no decency?”

Who with a speck of decency would have given Netanyahu a hearing after the atrocities of the Gaza blitzkrieg and the Goldstone Report condemning Israel’s war crimes?

“This Iranian regime is fueled by an extreme fundamentalism… anyone not deemed to be a true believer is brutally subjugated.”

Netanyahu could be describing the Israeli regime.

“…The greatest threat facing the world today is the marriage between religious fanaticism and the weapons of mass destruction.”

He should know. Israel is bristling with both.

“The most urgent challenge facing this body is to prevent the tyrants of Tehran from acquiring nuclear weapons.”

That would be nice for the warmongers in Tel Aviv, who already have them.

“Will the international community thwart the world’s most pernicious sponsors and practitioners of terrorism?”

I do hope so. But are we all agreed who they are?

“Rather than condemning the terrorists and their Iranian patrons, some here have condemned their victims. That is exactly what a recent UN report on Gaza did, falsely equating the terrorists with those they targeted.”

Substitute American for Iranian and it begins to make sense.

“In 2005, hoping to advance peace, Israel unilaterally withdrew from every inch of Gaza… We didn’t get peace. Instead we got an Iranian backed terror base fifty miles from Tel Aviv. Life in Israeli towns and cities next to Gaza became a nightmare. You see, the Hamas rocket attacks not only continued, they increased tenfold. Again, the UN was silent.”

Defenceless Gazans know all about nightmares. Israel, camped on their doorstep and still occupying Gaza’s airspace and coastal waters, lobs high explosives into the tiny enclave’s 1.5 million starving civilians, and there’s no escape.

“There is only one example in history of thousands of rockets being fired on a country’s civilian population. It happened when the Nazis rocketed British cities during World War II. During that war, the allies leveled German cities, causing hundreds of thousands of casualties.”

The Nazis launched sophisticated rockets with huge destructive power at London and Southern England from territory they had invaded and occupied. They weren’t firing makeshift missiles built in a garden shed to defend their homeland.

“Israel… tried to minimize casualties by urging Palestinian civilians to vacate the targeted areas. We dropped countless flyers over their homes, sent thousands of text messages and called thousands of cell phones asking people to leave. Never has a country gone to such extraordinary lengths to remove the enemy’s civilian population from harm’s way.”

How considerate. But where were Gaza’s terrified civilians supposed to run to? Into the sea? Bombing their homes was the ultimate terror act. There’s no excuse.

“…If Israel is again asked to take more risks for peace, we must know today that you will stand with us tomorrow. Only if we have the confidence that we can defend ourselves can we take further risks for peace.”

What exactly are these “risks for peace” Israel has so bravely taken? In 61 years what peace dividends has Israel’s risk-taking delivered?

The pot calls the kettle black

Netanyahu has a rare genius for irony, except that he himself doesn’t see it. That’s what makes him such a comedian. The irony of what he says is totally lost on him. Nearly every offensive remark he makes about Iran and Palestine can be flung back in his face because Israel is no better and in most respects far worse. Netanyahu’s speech to the UN was the most hilarious example in history of the pot calling the kettle black.

His scriptwriters evidently feed off the Zionists’ propaganda training manual, which teaches the art of lying and distortion and how to sugar-coat it all for easy swallowing by gullible audiences. Notice how everything Israel dislikes, and everything that thwarts their lust for domination, is now labeled “Iranian-backed”… and how everyone else, too, is in mortal danger from Iran and must therefore huddle together in Israel’s axis of aggression. Also note how situations are defined in language that suit only Israel’s case.

Less amusing is Netanyahu’s arrogant rejection of the UN Human Rights Council’s Goldstone report condemning Israel’s conduct.

By these twisted standards… [they] would have dragged Roosevelt and Churchill to the dock as war criminals. What a perversion of truth. What a perversion of justice… Will you accept this farce? If this body does not reject this report, it would send a message to terrorists everywhere: Terror pays; if you launch your attacks from densely populated areas, you will win immunity. And in condemning Israel, this body would also deal a mortal blow to peace. Here’s why.

When Israel left Gaza, many hoped that the missile attacks would stop. Others believed that at the very least, Israel would have international legitimacy to exercise its right of self-defense. What legitimacy? What self-defense?

The same UN that cheered Israel as it left Gaza and promised to back our right of self-defense now accuses us — my people, my country — of war crimes? And for what? For acting responsibly in self-defense. What a travesty!

Israel justly defended itself against terror. This biased and unjust report is a clear-cut test for all governments. Will you stand with Israel or will you stand with the terrorists?

The false choice in that last sentence is a propaganda favourite. Why would anyone with any sense wish to stand alongside either?

And how dare Netanyahu equate Roosevelt and Churchill’s epic struggle against the rampaging Nazis with Israel’s brutal crushing of Palestinian resistance against the illegal occupation of the Holy Land?

What has the UN come to when a regime that is armed to the teeth with nuclear weapons and not even a signatory to the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty can call on the world’s nations to gang up against another country for starting its own nuclear programme? Israel itself refuses to submit to inspection and poses an alarming nuclear threat. It hasn’t signed the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention either, nor the Chemical Weapons Convention.

And is it not an insult to everyone’s intelligence to hear the UN being lambasted by the leader of a regime that is in open defiance of international law and countless UN resolutions?

The UN Human Rights Council is due to debate the Goldstone report today, when a vote will be taken on how its recommendations should be acted on. There are fears that the British government plans to reject the report’s key recommendations. If that’s the case and others follow suit, Israel will be let off the hook and allowed to continue its crime spree.

It will hand Israel’s comic genius a personal triumph. The Zionist network will no doubt show their gratitude in the usual way.

Iran says it looks forward to the talks and promises to be forthcoming. But judging by the stance of the United States, Great Britain, France and Germany last week at the UN conferences in New York and the G20 meeting in Pittsburgh, draconian sanctions may be enacted against Iran in a few months. This would result in yet another crisis that the world doesn’t need just now.

Russia and China — which hold veto power in the Security Council that can weaken or prevent additional sanctions — have up to now resisted the Obama Administration’s drive for tough new UN punishments. President Barack Obama met separately during the week with Russian President Dmitri Medvedev and Chinese President Hu Jintao in an effort to obtain their agreement to threaten more stringent sanctions should Iran procrastinate during the talks.

The White House later suggested to the press that Medvedev may be coming around to Obama’s point of view, but this seems to be based on very skimpy evidence — a remark that “in some cases sanctions are inevitable.” Hu evidently didn’t even go that far. China opposes sanctions in principle as a means of resolving international disputes.

Moscow and Beijing do not subscribe to the negative depiction of Iran promoted by Washington, Tel Aviv, London, Paris and Bonn. They understand the situation to be far more complex than the U.S. and its allies publicly acknowledge.

The Iran question suddenly took center stage Sept. 25 during a week of hectic political activity. The White house set up a hastily arranged and theatrically produced press conference at the start of the G20 meeting in order to detonate a political bombshell intended to destroy Tehran’s contention that it is only interested in nuclear power, not nuclear weapons.

The conference opened with Obama standing at the microphone with French President Nicholas Sarkozy and British Prime Minister Gordon Brown positioned solemnly to his left and right. It was explained that German Chancellor Angela Merkel would have joined the trio but was delayed.

Obama then declared that Iran had for several years been secretly building an underground plant in mountainous terrain to manufacture nuclear fuel near the city of Qom about 100 miles from Tehran, in addition to the plant and facilities in Natanz already known to the world. He suggested the new plant was intended to produce weapons without the world’s knowledge, though that was not proven.

Obama then charged that “Iran’s decision to build yet another nuclear facility without notifying the IAEA [International Atomic Energy Agency] represents a direct challenge to the basic compact at the center of the non-proliferation regime … Iran is breaking rules that all nations must follow … and threatening the stability and security of the region and the world.” Refusal to “come clean,” he said, “is going to lead to confrontation.”

Sarkozy and Brown followed Obama and seemed to go even further than the American leader in denouncing Iran, explicitly demanding harder sanctions. Said Brown: “The level of deception by the Iranian government, and the scale of what we believe is the breach of international commitments, will shock and anger the entire international community.”

The New York Times reported that “after months of talking about the need for engagement, Mr. Obama appears to have made a leap toward viewing tough new sanctions against Iran as an inevitability … American officials said that they expected the announcement to make it easier to build a case for international sanctions.”

The majority of House and Senate members have long been critical of Iran’s government and the new allegations have only fanned the flames of their hostility. Right wing Florida Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, the leading Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, declared: “The U.S. and other countries must immediately impose crippling sanctions on the Iranian regime, including cutting off Iran’s imports of gasoline. The world cannot stand by and watch the nightmare of a nuclear-armed Iran become reality.” Massachusetts Democrat John Kerry, chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, stated “now is the time to supplement engagement with more robust international sanctions.”

As intended, the hyped disclosure created headlines around the world. It probably convinced many Americans, already primed to detest Iran, that Tehran is building nuclear bombs to obliterate the U.S. and Israel. This is not an unlikely conclusion for many people to accept after 30 years of Washington’s incessant campaign to demonize the government that overthrew and replaced America’s puppet, the dreaded Shah of Iran. The U.S. broke diplomatic relations with Iran after this act of lèse majesté and the subsequent “hostage crisis,” and has nourished a grudge to this day.

If push does come to shove with Iran it is important to remember how effortless it was to hoodwink the majority of American politicians and the masses of people into backing a completely unnecessary war against Iraq. As in the buildup to the unjust invasion of Iraq, today’s U.S. corporate mass media is playing its principal part to perfection — uncritically echoing government distortions about the danger of Iran’s nonexistent nuclear weapons. The Iran situation is different, but yet similar in terms of mass public manipulation and the possibility of a future confrontation getting out of hand.

Can this be, once again, a situation of high-stakes geopolitics where things are rarely as they seem? We think so. Let’s look at the immediate charge against Iran, based on the “revelations” of the last week, then take on the bigger picture in Parts 2 and 3.

The “shocking” news may have been delivered with a sense of surprise and high urgency, but U.S. intelligence agencies, joined by their counterparts in some allied countries, were aware since 2006 that Iran was constructing a second uranium processing plant that still remains under construction and is not operational. According to a Sept. 26 article circulated by the McClatchy newspaper group quoting a U.S. intelligence official, “There was dialogue with allies from a very early point.”

Bush Administration Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnel first informed Obama about the facility soon after he won election. He has been kept up to date since then. Before going public with the information last week, the president saw to it that several other governments were told in advance, as was the IAEA and others.

Washington officials claimed Iran became aware “in late spring” that the U.S. was spying on the “secret” facility. They said Iran then informed the International Atomic Energy Agency Sept. 21 about the existence of its project, implying Tehran did so because its cover was blown. In a statement Sept. 24 the IAEA acknowledged that Tehran had informed them that a “pilot fuel enrichment plant is under construction in the country,” and that it “also understands from Iran that no nuclear material has been introduced into the facility.”

Iran insisted to the Vienna-based IAEA and the world that the enrichment plant under construction is designed only for fueling nuclear power installations. Soon after Obama’s G20 speech, Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization declared the new “semi-industrial enrichment fuel facility” was “within the framework of International Atomic Energy Agency’s regulations.” Press reports said “The head of Iran’s nuclear program suggested UN inspectors would be allowed to visit the site.” The invitation was extended before Washington’s demand that it do so.

A quite unruffled Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad appeared at a press conference in New York after Obama’s disclosures. He seemed to regard the American president’s allegations, and the staged manner in which they were delivered, not only the making of a mountain out of a molehill but an act of bad faith just before the talks are to begin, suggesting non-threateningly that Obama will come to regret his confrontational demeanor.

Ahmadinejad told the press that the plant in question wouldn’t be operational for 18 more months and that it did not violate the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). He went further and said nuclear weapons “are against humanity [and] they are inhumane,” comments in keeping with his recent calls for eliminating all nuclear weapons. The Iranian leader also said that Iran informed the IAEA about the plant only a few days ago instead of when ground was broken because construction had reached the stage where it should be reported, not because it found out that a U.S. spy agency was watching.

What are we to make of this? First it must be understood there is a dispute over the IAEA’s safeguard provisions governing the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

Iran considers itself to be in total compliance with the NPT, and this appears to be true. Inter-Press Service reporter Jim Lobe wrote Sept. 25 that “Under the basic Safeguards Agreement of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty of which Iran is a signatory, member states are required to declare their nuclear facilities and designs at least 180 days before introducing nuclear materials there.”

According to an article in the Sept. 26 New York Times by Neil MacFarquhar, “Tehran’s stance hinges on different interpretations of the agency’s regulations, said Graham Allison, the director of Harvard University’s Belfer Center and an Iran nuclear expert.

“For two decades, the agency required Iran to report only when nuclear material [for uranium enrichment] was introduced to a facility. By 2003 it rescinded that, in line with the guidelines for most [but not all] countries, demanding reporting when construction began, Mr. Allison said. But the agency never declared Iran out of compliance when Tehran claimed the old agreement was still in place.”

In talking to the press after Obama’s speech, Ahmadinejad said that the new facility would be completed in 18 months, so under Iran’s understanding of its responsibilities, the notification was a year in advance. The U.S. maintains that Iran informed the IAEA when it learned U.S. spy agencies had become aware of the plant, but if that were so, why did Tehran wait three months before contacting the nuclear agency? Had they acted out of fear of being exposed as non-compliant wouldn’t they have contacted IAEA immediately?

“What we did was completely legal, according to the law,” the Iranian president said. “We have informed the agency, the agency will come and take a look and produce a report and it’s nothing new.” According to the Associated Press Tehran’s notice to the IAEA specified that the enrichment level would be up to 5%, suitable only for peaceful purposes. Weapons-grade material is more than 90% enriched.”

The AP also noted that the IAEA now “says Iran is obliged to make such a notification when it begins design of such facilities” and that “a government cannot unilaterally abandon such an agreement.” This is confusing, of course. But since Iran was never designated as non-compliant and was allowed to proceed under the previous rules for years after it registered its rejection of the new terms, the thunderous criticism emanating from the U.S., Britain and France appears to have no serious merit.

On 23 September, many western delegates walked out of the United Nations General Assembly chambers during Ahmadinejad’s speech. The United States accused Ahmadinejad of using “hateful, offensive and anti-Semitic rhetoric.” Canada boycotted the address because, according to Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper, Ahmadinejad had said “absolutely repugnant” things about Israel. Neither country quoted what was repugnant or anti-Semitic.

A JTA article stated, “The lowlight, I suppose, would be this portion, where he attacks the ‘Zionist regime,’ accuses Jews of controlling the world and then blasts the United States, too.”²

From another JTA article:

Ahmadinejad spoke of “the elimination of all nuclear, chemical and biological weapons,” during his speech to the UN, but otherwise didn’t mention his country’s nuclear program. Instead, he criticized Israel’s “inhuman policies in Palestine” and said the Jewish state had committed “genocide” in a speech that led to walkouts by numerous other countries in the General Assembly.³

First, Ahmadinejad never mentions the word “Jewish” in his speech. Second, the only time he uses the word “Jews” is when he talked about “prepar[ing] a conducive ground for all Palestinian populations, including Muslims, Christians and Jews to live together in peace and harmony…”

Third, as for “genocide,” Ahmadinejad said: “How can the crimes of the occupiers against defenseless women and children and destruction of their homes, farms, hospitals and schools be supported unconditionally by certain governments, and at the same time, the oppressed men and women be subject to genocide and heaviest economic blockade being denied of their basic needs, food, water and medicine.”

JTA does not deny the charges by Ahmadenejad.

There are plenty of Jews that acknowledge the “Jewish state” is committing “genocide.” There are plenty of Israeli academics who acknowledge the Nakba.⁴

The Goldstone report — as mitigating of Israeli war crimes as it may be in equating the violence of the oppressor with the violence of the oppressed — is further acknowledgment of Israeli massacres of Palestinian civilians.⁵

JTA mentions an “apparent reference to Jews, ‘It is no longer acceptable that a small minority would dominate the politics, economy and culture of major parts of the world by its complicated networks, and establish a new form of slavery, and harm the reputation of other nations, even European nations and the U.S., to attain its racist ambitions.’”³

JTA conflates Zionism with Jewry. It is Zionism that is the enemy of Jews.⁶ It is Zionists who collaborated with Nazis during WWII.⁷ It is Zionists who practice racism. Ahmadinejad made an apparent reference to Zionists.

Without a doubt Zionism is rife in Israel,⁸ and it is much supported by Jews outside Israel, but there is also significant opposition to Zionism among Jews outside Israel. Humanity is diverse and so are Jews.

Double Standards in the West

The Iranian disclosure of a second uranium enrichment facility in Iran has raised the hackles of neoliberal politicians in the West.

Stephen Harper called it a “grave threat to international peace and security.”

At a G20 news conference in Pittsburgh, Harper said, “Iran, the combination of its abhorrent ideology and its interest in nuclear technology, combined with increasing evidence of its obvious disregard for international law and for its obligations, constitutes a grave threat to international peace and security.”

Since when is “interest in nuclear technology” a crime or something bad? To pursue nuclear technology is a right of all nations. Canada has a nuclear program; it enriches uranium. Does Canada mention its nuclear program in speeches to the United Nations? Does Israel mention its nuclear program?

As for “obvious disregard for international law,” is that unlike Israel with a string of condemnatory UN Security Council resolutions on record against it and numerous others vetoed by the US?⁹ Or is this not obvious disregard?

What is the “abhorrent ideology”? He couldn’t mean the pursuit of nuclear weapons because that would include the US, Britain, France, and Israel. And certainly Zionism is not an “abhorrent ideology” for Harper. He promised Israel would always have a “steadfast friend” in his government. Erstwhile Canadian prime minister Paul Martin once remarked, “Israel’s values are Canada’s values.”

US president Barack Obama stated that Iran must “be held accountable to international standards and international law.”

Are all states states to be held equally accountable by Obama? What about Israel? Will the state cited several times as a violator of international law by UN Security Council resolutions “be held accountable to international standards and international law”? Will Israel’s nuclear weapons be dismantled and its nuclear facilities subjected to IAEA inspection? Will the US — the aggressor of Iraq, frequent violator of international law, found guilty by the World Court in 1987 of terrorism — “be held accountable to international standards and international law”?¹⁰

Obama threatened, “When we find that diplomacy does not work, we will be in a much stronger position to, for example, apply sanctions that have bite.”

Diplomacy (if one can call it that) hasn’t worked for many decades in historical Palestine, and the only US sanctions are against the oppressed Palestinians for daring to resist dispossession and genocide. Conversely, the oppressor state receives billions in US “aid” and diplomatic cover in the UN.

Obama added, “I would love nothing more than to see Iran choose the responsible path.”

One wonders if that is like the “responsible path” that the US took in aggressing Iraq on pretext of possessing weapons-of-mass-destruction and killing over a million people? Or is the “responsible path” the one Obama took in deciding to up the military ante in Afghanistan, thereby increasing the violence and killing?

British prime minister Gordon Brown said, “The international community has no choice today but to draw a line in the sand.”

One wonders: is that like the lines the imperialist British regime drew in the Middle East when it carved up the Arab world, breaking its promise to its World War I allies? Is it like how the British decided to give away Arab land to Occidental Jews without asking permission from the Oriental inhabitants of the land? It would seem that Britain has a far from marvelous history of drawing lines in the sand.

French president Nicolas Sarkozy charged that Iran’s enrichment facility is “a challenge made to the entire international community… We cannot let Iranian leaders gain time while the motors are running.”

Yet France is the country that helped Israel develop the Dimona nuclear facility and become a nuclear power.¹¹ What about the Israeli “challenge made to the entire international community”?

Furthermore, the US, Britain, and France have a responsibility under the NPT to dismantle their nuclear weaponry. So what moral weight do such pronouncements from western leaders have? Is there something about the US, Britain, France, Canada, and Israel (this bellwether of colonizing or colonized states) that gives them some superiority in rights over other states?

Moreover, what does this reveal about the western corporate media, which merely serve as mouthpieces for the state’s interests rather than scrutinizing concentrations of power?

Choosing the Responsible Path

The US and other nuclear-armed states could gain much legitimacy if they act henceforth to eliminate stockpiles of nuclear weapons.

CBC warned, “Beyond sanctions, the leaders’ options are limited and perilous. Military action by the United States or an ally such as Israel could set off a dangerous chain of events in the Islamic world.”¹²

Would that be, as Obama puts it, choosing “the responsible path”?

1. Western media purports the revelation is because the US and its allies were aware of its existence. David E. Sanger and William J. Broad, “U.S. and Allies Warn Iran Over Nuclear ‘Deception’,” New York Times, 25 September 2009.
2. Eric Fingerhut, “Ahmadinejad’s speech to the General Assembly,” JTA, 23 September 2009.
3. JTA Staff, “Ahmadinejad slams Israel as world powers turn up heat,” JTA, 24 September 2009.
4. For example, Ilan Pappe, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (Oneworld Publications, 2006). Does Pappe go far enough? See Kim Petersen, “Nakba: The Israeli Holocaust Denial,” Dissident Voice, 18 March 2007. Ethnic cleansing is argued to be genocide: Rony Blum, Gregory H. Stanton, Shira Sagi and Elihu D. Richter, “‘Ethnic cleansing’ bleaches the atrocities of genocide,” The European Journal of Public Health Advance Access, 18 May 2007. See also Kim Petersen, “Bleaching the Atrocities of Genocide,” Dissident Voice, 7 June 2007.
5. Richard Goldstone, “Report of the United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict,” Human Rights Council, 15 September 2009.
6. See Alan Hart, Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews, Volume One: The False Messiah (Clarity Press, 2009). I will write a review upcoming.
7. Lenni Brenner, Zionism in the Age of the Dictators: A Reappraisal (1983).
8. Etgar Lefkovits, “Overwhelming Israeli support of Gaza op,” Jerusalem Post, 15 January 2009.
9. ”List of United Nations resolutions concerning Israel,” Wikipedia.
10. See Nils Andersson, Daniel Iagolnitzer, and Diana G. Collier (Eds), International Justice and Impunity: The Case of the United States (Clarity Press, 2008). Review.
11. Peter Pry, Israel’s Nuclear Arsenal (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1984): 11.
12. ”Iranian nuclear revelation a grave threat: Harper,” CBC News, 25 September 2009.

The United States and other Western states have cited Iran’s refusal to cooperate with the IAEA on resolving issues related to intelligence documents on a purported covert nuclear weapons programme as further evidence of its guilt.

“They’ve been asking for Shahab-3 drawings for about a year,” Iran’s ambassador to the United Nations in Vienna, Ali Asghar Soltanieh, told IPS in an interview. “We found out a year ago and that’s when we stopped the meetings with IAEA.”

A senior official of the IAEA familiar with the Iran investigation, who insisted on anonymity as a condition for being interviewed, confirmed to IPS that the agency had requested not only that Iranian officials discuss the details of the Shahab-3’s reentry system, but access to the actual engineering designs for the missile.

“We want them to explain to us that the design studies are not for nuclear weapons,” said the official. “We’re saying, you say you’ve done reentry vehicle reengineering [on Shahab-3], so show us some documentation.”

The latest IAEA report, dated Aug. 28, notes that the agency “has been unable to engage Iran in any substantive discussions about these outstanding issues for over a year”, but it does not link the Iranian disengagement to the demand for military secrets.

The Sep. 15, 2008 report said, however, that in a Sep. 5 letter Iran had “expressed concern that the resolution of some of these issues would require Agency access to sensitive information related to its conventional military and missile related activities.”

Asked whether this request would not compromise Iran’s national security secrets, the official conceded to IPS, “Yes there will have to be some compromise on their part, because the charges are serious. If someone is accused of nefarious crimes, it is in their interest to share a little of their security to show they are baseless.”

Defending the IAEA’s request, the official said, “All verification is a compromise of national security. Natanz [the Iranian uranium enrichment facility] is the most heavily verified enrichment plan in the world. It’s a compromise of national sovereignty.”

Soltanieh said he had protested the demand for such conventional military secrets at meetings of the IAEA Governing Board in 2008 and 2009. “They denied they asked for this information,” said Soltanieh.

The Iranian ambassador first expressed concern about being asked to give the IAEA access to national security secrets about its missiles and other conventional military technology in a letter to ElBaradei Sep. 5, 2008.

The September 2008 IAEA report strongly implied without saying so explicitly that the agency was seeking access to actual plans for the missile. It said the IAEA had “proposed discussions with Iranian experts on the contents of the engineering reports examining in detail modeling studies related to the effects of various physical parameters on the reentry body from the time of the missile launch to payload detonation.”

The most recent report of the IAEA, dated Aug. 28, 2009, referred to “the need to hold discussions with Iran on the engineering and modeling studies associated with the re-design of the payload chamber referred to in the alleged studies documentation to exclude the possibility that they were for a nuclear payload.”

In a letter to IAEA director general Mohamed ElBaradei Sep. 4, 2009, Soltanieh complained that the report which had just been released had “reflected the unjustified previous requests by your staff in Tehran [for] discussing with Iranian military staff the issue of missiles and explosives!”

He noted that the director general had on several occasions “emphasised that the Agency is not intending to enter into the domain of the national security of Member States”.

The agency also requested “additional information and documentation, and access to individuals, in support of [Iran's] statement about the civil and conventional military applications of its work in the area of EBW detonators,” according to the September 2008 IAEA report.

The IAEA further asked to meet individual scientists named in one of the intelligence documents as being part of the purported Iranian nuclear weapons research programme. The senior IAEA official acknowledged in the interview with IPS, however, that it would be relatively easy for an outside agency to identify individuals who belonged to an organisation.

“It’s not difficult to cook up such a document,” the official said.

In his letter to ElBaradei, Soltanieh said these IAEA requests represented “interference in confidential conventional military activities of a Member State, related to its national security…”

The IAEA has offered to “discuss modalities that could enable Iran to demonstrate credibly that the activities referred to in the documentation are not nuclear related, as Iran asserts, while protecting sensitive information related to its conventional military activities.”

But the senior IAEA official interviewed by IPS made it clear that such modalities would not preclude access to the documentation on the Shahab design.

Iran’s enemies, especially the United States and Israel, are eager for intelligence on the design of the Shahab-3’s reentry vehicle.

According to a detailed analysis by the Armed Combat Information Group (ACIG), the upgraded version of the Shahab-3 has an improved guidance system and warhead, as well as completely new re-entry vehicle with a different guidance system based on rocket-nozzle steering rather than a spin-stabilised re-entry vehicle.

The new reentry vehicle is smaller than the previous version, according to the former head of Israel’s Ballistic Missile Defense Organisation. That gives the improved version greater precision.

But the most significant feature of the new variant, according to the ACIG analysis, is the capability for changing trajectory repeatedly during re-entry and in the missile’s terminal phase. That capability allows the Shahab-3 to evade the radar systems associated with Israel’s Arrow 2 missile.

If Israeli and the United States were able to get more information on the design of the reentry vehicle, they would be able to make adjustments in the Arrow 2 system to increase its effectiveness against the Iranian missile.

The IAEA secretariat is well-known to be major source of intelligence on Iran for the United States and Israel. In the 1990s, 10 of the 35 members of the U.S. mission to the United Nations in Vienna were Central Intelligence Agency personnel, according to the 2007 book The Italian Letter, by journalists Peter Eisner and Knute Royce.

Ambassador Soltanieh told IPS that the IAEA safeguards department, to which the Iranians pass much sensitive information, has repeatedly leaked that information — usually out of context — to journalists for stories portraying the Iranian nuclear programme in a menacing light.

“Leakage of confidential information is a matter of serious concern,” said Soltanieh. “In many cases, we give information to inspectors and soon it is in the media.”

A Western diplomatic source in Vienna who insisted on not being identified said, “I don’t think it would help a lot to get the specific plans of Shahab-3.” For one thing, he observed, “They could be working on other studies and we wouldn’t know about it.”

The official admitted that it was “always difficult to prove that something is nonexistent”.

Nevertheless, it would be “much safer for Iran to compromise on these issues than to keep its present attitude,” the official said.

But the IAEA has refused to acknowledge publicly significant evidence brought to its attention by Iran that the documents were fabricated, and has made little, if any, effort to test the authenticity of the intelligence documents or to question officials of the governments holding them, IPS has learned.

The agency has strongly suggested in its published reports that the documentation it is supposed to be investigating is credible, because it “appears to have been derived from multiple sources over different periods of time, is detailed in content and appears to be generally consistent”.

IAEA Safeguard Department chief Olli Heinonen signaled his de facto acceptance of the “alleged studies” documents when he presented an organisational chart of the purported secret nuclear weapons project based on the documents at a February 2008 “technical briefing” for member states.

Meanwhile, the IAEA has portrayed Iran as failing to respond adequately to the “substance” of the documents, asserting that it has focused only on their “style and format of presentation”.

In fact, however, Iran has submitted serious evidence that the documents are fraudulent. Iran’s permanent representative to the United Nations in Vienna, Ambassador Ali Asghar Soltanieh, told IPS in an interview he had pointed out to a team of IAEA officials in a meeting on the documents in Tehran in spring 2008 that none of the supposedly top secret military documents had any security markings of any kind, and that purported letters from defence ministry officials lacked Iranian government seals.

Soltanieh recalled that he had made the same point “many times” in meetings of the Board of Governors since then. “No one ever challenged me,” said the ambassador.

The IAEA has never publicly acknowledged the problem of lack of security markings or official seals in the documents, omitting mention of the Iranian complaint on that issue from its reports. Its May 26, 2008 report said only that Iran had “stated, inter alia, that the documents were not complete and that their structure varied”.

But a senior official of the agency familiar with the Iran investigation, who spoke with IPS on condition that he would not be identified, confirmed that Soltanieh had indeed pointed out the lack of any security classification markings, and that he had been correct in doing so.

The “alleged studies” documents include purported correspondence between the overall “project leader” in Iran’s Defence Ministry and project heads on what would have been among the regime’s most sensitive military secrets.

Even though the official conceded that the lack of security markings could be considered damaging to the credibility of the documents, he defended the agency’s refusal to acknowledge the issue.

“It’s not a killer argument,” said the official.

The official suggested that the states that had provided the documents might claim that they had taken the markings out before passing them on to the IAEA. It is not clear, however, why an intelligence agency would want to remove from the documents markings that would be important in proving their authenticity.

“We don’t know whether the original letters were marked confidential or not,” he said, indicating that the IAEA had not questioned the United States and other states contributing documents on the absence of the confidential markings.

The IAEA’s apparent lack of concern about the absence of security markings and seals on the documents contrasts sharply with the IAEA’s investigation of the Niger uranium documents cited by the George W. Bush administration as justification for invading Iraq in 2002-2003.

In the Niger case, the agency concluded that the documents were fabricated based on a comparison of the “form, format, contents and signature” of the documents with other relevant correspondence, according to IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei’s Mar. 7, 2003 statement to the U.N. Security Council.

Iran has also provided the IAEA with evidence that the handwritten notes on a May 2003 letter, which supposedly link a private Iranian contractor to the “alleged studies”, were forged by an outside agency. The letter was from an engineering firm to the private company Kimia Maadan, which other documents in the collection identify as responsible for part of the alleged covert nuclear weapons programme called the “green salt project”.

The letter itself has nothing to do with any “green salt” project, but handwritten notes on the copy of the letter given to the IAEA by an unidentified government referred to individuals who are named in other intelligence documents as participants in the “alleged studies”, according to the latest IAEA report.

But the original letter, which Iran has provided to the IAEA, has no handwritten notes on it. Amb. Soltanieh recalled that he showed that original letter to an IAEA team led by the deputy director of IAEA’s Safeguards Department, Herman Nackaerts, in Tehran Jan. 22-23, 2008.

He said the IAEA team was able to compare the original document with the copy that they had been given as part of the alleged studies documents and that Nakaerts declared that his team accepted the authenticity of the original they were shown.

The IAEA confirmed in its Aug. 28, 2009 report that it had been given access to the original letter. But the report suggested that the existence of the original letter supports the authenticity of the alleged studies documents, because it “demonstrates a direct link between the relevant documentation and Iran”.

That argument appears to have deliberately conflated the original letter, which the agency admits has nothing to do with the alleged studies, and the copy with the allegedly incriminating handwritten notes on it.

The senior official sought to discredit the original letter by suggesting that the Iranians might have “whited out the handwritten notes”. But the official then offered an alternative theory, asserting that there were two original letters, one of which was kept by the sender, and that the handwritten notes had been found on the second original.

But the IAEA could have checked with the engineering firm that sent the letter to ascertain whether a second original exists and whether the Iranian government had obtained the letter from it.

The senior IAEA official gave no indication that the IAEA had done so.

Iranian officials have also claimed other inaccuracies in the documents, involving technical flaws and names of individuals who they say do not exist.

The IAEA has not referred in its reports to any specific efforts to subject the “alleged studies” documents to forensic tests or to get data about such tests from governments holding the documents.

The senior IAEA official recalled that Washington Post reporter Dafna Linzer had written that the documents had been sent to three different labs, and that two had said they were credible, whereas the third had expressed doubt about their authenticity.

But Linzer’s February 2006 story reported only that the Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico had run computer simulations on the studies of a Shahab-3 reentry vehicle — which suggested that they were aimed at accommodating a nuclear weapon — and had concluded that none of the plans would have worked.

Contacted by phone last week, Linzer, now a senior reporter for the public interest journalism organisation Pro Publica, told IPS she had never reported that two other labs ran tests on the documents.

Linzer expressed doubt that any other national labs would have had the capabilities to do the kind of tests carried out at Sandia labs.

When asked if the IAEA had sought to obtain the Sandia simulation results, the official refused to comment, except to say, “Our people follow up.”

The Israeli moves

In their annual meeting, on February 18th 2009, The Israeli military leaders had officially declared Iran as their number one strategic enemy in the region, and that the alleged Iranian nuclear arms program constitutes an “existential threat” to the state of Israel. They declared the elimination of the Iranian nuclear threat a top priority for the Israeli military and political leaderships.

Yet the Israelis seem to differ in the method of dealing with the Iranian threat. One group, represented by Barak, Netanyahu, Olmert, and Lieberman, called for a military strike on the Iranian nuclear facilities. Such strike, they claim, would at least set the Iranian nuclear program back by ten years. They site Israel’s bombing of Iraq’s Osirak nuclear facility in June 1981, and the bombing of alleged Syrian Al-Kibar nuclear facility in September 2007 as safe and effective solution to any nuclear threat. They claim that since Western countries, especially US, and the neighboring Arab states are opposed to Iran’s nuclear program, Israel’s attack would receive tacit approval, and similar to Iraqi and Syrian bombings Israel would not face any military or political consequences.

The second group, represented by the Israeli intelligence agencies, warns that Israel, alone, is not capable of dealing with the Iranian nuclear threat, and is in dire need of American help. They remind the Israelis of the events of previous wars such as 1973 war against Egypt and 1982 and 2006 wars against Lebanon, both countries are not as strong as Iran. They recommend that Israel should be only a partner in a joint military strike against Iran.

Third group, represented by Israeli President Shimon Perez, seemingly wants a political solution. Perez stated to George Mitchell, the American special envoy to the Middle East, last April 2009 that Israel has no plans to strike Iran. He urged for an international alliance against Iran to be formed in order to politically deal with the Iranian nuclear program.

Despite Perez’s seemingly political approach the Israeli military leaders are preping the army for a coming strike against Iran. They have purchased and acquired the most sophisticated American fighter planes, 100 advanced LJDAM (Laser Joint Direct Attack Munition) smart bombs, and small tactical (nuclear) bombs. The Israeli army has been testing the Arrow interceptor missile defensive shield in the Mediterranean Sea as well as in the American missile range in the Pacific Ocean west of California. The Israeli air forces sent their F16C fighter jets to participate with the Americans in war exercises, named Red Flag, at American Nillis Air Force base in Nevada, and their C130 Hercules aircraft to compete in the Rodeo 2009 competition at McChord Air Force base in Washington.

The Israeli navy has sent one of its six Dolphin class nuclear missiles carrier submarines accompanied by two Saar class missile boats through Suez Canal ostensibly heading towards the Persian Gulf.

Israeli leaders are crying wolf everywhere they go. Distorting Ahmadinejad’s speeches they declared him the new Hitler, who wants to wipe Israel off the map. They accused Iran of sponsoring terror by arming Hezbollah and Hamas. They keep claiming that Iran is only few months away from building its first nuclear bomb and such a weapon in the hands of the mad Mullahs is an existential threat to Israel. Such a threat, they keep claiming, endangers the whole region including the oil producing Gulf States, and could expand to endanger the rest of the world.

The American moves

The American administration, on the other hand, seems to favor a diplomatic solution for now. Yet like the previous Bush administration the Obama administration has also declared that all options, including a nuclear military strike, are still on the table if Iran did not respond positively to the diplomatic solution. Obama is also pressuring Israel to freeze its illegal settlements in Palestinian occupied territory, at least for the time being, in order to gain the support of Arab countries (Egypt, Jordan, and Gulf States). Putting Israel, the American watchdog in the region, on a leach has always worked to garner the Arab support for attacking a neighboring country.

Although a US National Intelligence Estimate of 2007 concluded that Iran had abandoned its nuclear arms research program in 2003, Obama issued a deadline of mid September for Iran to respond to the American offer. He had also warned Israel not to surprise his administration with a strike against Iran that might sabotage his diplomatic approach, and could drive the whole region into wider conflict.

At the same time Obama’s administration had sent Iran many hostile messages such as American determination not to allow Iran to build its bomb, expressing America’s strong support and commitment to the security of Israel, supplying Israel with the most advanced weapons and fighter planes, conducting joint military training with the Israelis in preparation for possible strike, having many congressmen and military experts stating openly that an Israeli strike is the only and best solution, sending American aircraft carriers to the Persian Gulf to flex its muscles in war games, and openly broadcasting America’s own military preparation to strike Iran such as accelerating the development of the largest bomb ever dubbed “MOP”; Massive Ordnance Penetrator. With its 20 feet long, 30,000 pounds weight, and 5,300 pounds of explosives this bomb is designed to penetrate through 200 feet of hardened surfaces before detonation in order to destroy underground structures such as the Iranian Natanz nuclear facility.

The Iranian moves

Iran, on the opposite side, is adamant on exercising its own legal right of developing its own peaceful nuclear program similar to any other nuclear member countries in the NPT. Since 2003 Iran had been harassed by the Bush Administration over its nuclear program. Being a member of the NPT the IAEA was sent several times to inspect Iran’s nuclear facilities, but found no evidence of a nuclear weapons program. Refusing to accept the outcome the Bush administration pushed the UN to impose economical sanction on Iran until it suspends its nuclear program.

In order to address any concern about its nuclear program Iran offered to place additional restrictions on its enrichment program including ratifying the Additional Protocol to allow more stringent inspections by the IAEA, open its nuclear program to foreign private and public participation, and allow the participation of foreign representatives within its Natanz facility among others. But the Bush administration rejected the Iranian offer, pushed the UN to impose the sanctions, and in a threatening move sent American military fleet into the Persian Gulf.

Putting Iran under real existential threat, being surrounded on the four sides by American troops, and continually being threatened by the Israelis and the Americans of being hit by nuclear bombs, Iranians had no choice but to exhibit their deterring muscles through their own war games on land, sea, and air. They also purchased the most sophisticated Russian missiles, and recently had joined the Russian navy in their military maneuvers in the Caspian Sea dubbed “Regional Collaboration for a Secure and Clean Caspian”.

Besides Russia the Iranians formed an alliance with Syria and Turkey, and gained the support of the Non-Aligned countries, and lately signaled its readiness to improve cooperation with North Korea.

As for the threat of the Israeli strike the Iranians warned that such a strike would only come as a joint effort with the US, and that Iran’s “firm and precise” response would reach all American assets in the Gulf region and the Israeli nuclear sites.

The real intentions behind the moves

Israelis know very well that they cannot strike Iran. They fully recognize that decisions concerning the Iranian issue are exclusively American due to Iran’s strength and geopolitical importance in the region. Iran is a large and a strong military country. Economic sanctions did nothing but helped Iranian rely on their own resources. The threats of possible attacks forced the Iranians to strengthen their military forces. Netanyahu’s “Iran first”, “Israel’s existential threat”, and “striking Iran” messages are directed towards the international political community first and towards the Israeli population second.

With the convening of the UN General Assembly this September, Netanyahu is trying to divert and engage the Assembly’s attention into the alleged Iranian nuclear threat. He hopes that such diversion would not give the Assembly enough time to discuss Israel’s war crimes and human rights violations in Palestine and especially in Gaza Strip as reported by Human Rights Watch groups. Netanyahu’s “Iran first” message is also meant to freeze re-opening any peace negotiations with the Palestinians and to escape American and European pressure to suspend colonial settlements in the West Bank.

Internally Netanyahu, like all previous Israeli Prime Ministers, is manipulating the media to bombard the Israeli population with a propaganda campaign filled with the images of the monstrosity of the enemy (Israel’s existential threat) to incite the feelings of fear and hatred of others and of elitecism (God’s chosen people) to unite and to rally the Israelis behind his leadership.

Israelis have come from different countries with different nationalities, social norms, backgrounds, and political ideologies. To unite them together Israeli leaders resort to tactics of fear, hatred, elitecism and war to create some type of national bond among them.

The US wants to control all the energy resources in the Middle East and South East Asian regions. The US has firm footings in the Gulf States, and after the collapse of the Soviet Union it started expanding in South East Asia starting with Afghanistan, jumping to Iraq then back into Pakistan. Now Iran is left in between as a gab in the US continuum presence.

The US wants also to control and manipulate the nuclear technology. After securing Indian and Pakistani nuclear bombs and facilities, the US is now directing its attention towards North Korean and Iranian nuclear facilities. It seems hypocritical of the still nuclear arms producing US to deny the Iranians peaceful nuclear technology. This is especially so since the US had agreed to provide India with nuclear fuel for its reactors, and had entered into agreements with Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan to help them build their own peaceful nuclear facilities.

The US knows very well that it could not stop Iranian nuclear program especially with the present Iranian government. To delay Iranian nuclear program the US is threatening to use the UN to impose economic sanctions not only on Iran alone, but also on countries who would continue dealing with Iran on any level especially those selling refined oil products to Iran. The effectiveness of such sanctions is still to be seen since a lot of countries have trade and business dealings with Iran.

The endgame

Since the US is heavily involved in at least three open military confrontations, and since many of the American military assets are sitting ducks in the Persian Gulf region for possible Iranian retaliatory strike, and since Iran is a large country that is not weak militarily or been weakened yet by economical sanctions, and since Iran might withdraw from the NPT and might pursue an accelerated nuclear military program if faced with more pressure and more existential threats, the US has no viable solution but to accept Iran as a nuclear country compliant to the NPT and subject to IAEA monitoring.

The nuclear threat or attack of the US, a nuclear country, against Iran, a non-nuclear country, would be a fatal attack on the NPT itself. Other NPT-member countries might withdraw from the treaty and start developing their own nuclear arsenals as a deterrent weapon against nuclear threats from nuclear countries. The NPT would be annulled and nuclear proliferation would become world spread.

An attack, even surgical, on Iran would not happen for it has a catastrophic consequences on the whole world. A draw seems to be the most reasonable endgame.

Concluding remarks

Accepting Iran as a nuclear country would not stop the US and Israel from supporting terrorist attacks within Iran as they have been doing for the last six years. The two countries have been supporting terrorist organizations such as Mujahedeen Khalg, Jundallah, and Kurdish groups within Iran. These terrorists are responsible for attacks against Iranian military targets, interrupting power and communication lines to the nuclear facilities, and assassinations of some Iranian nuclear scientists such as Ardeshire Hassanpour. The US will also continue funneling American tax money to the Iranian opposition, as was done during the Iranian election (as confessed by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in an interview with CNN’s reporter Fareed Zakaria) to topple down, to weaken, and to hinder the operation of the Iranian government.

Meanwhile the US is planning to take full advantage of the Iranian threat in the region in order to strengthen its grip on the oil producing Gulf States, and to siphon their oil money into the budgets of the American military companies under the guise of security. Hillary Clinton touched briefly on that plan during a televised interview in Thailand stating that nuclear Iran could be contained by an American so-called “defensive nuclear umbrella” over the region. The notion of this nuclear umbrella, if there is such a thing, was the brainchild of Patrick Clawson, deputy director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, and Dennis Ross, then senior editor of Middle East Quarterly in 2004. Of course such an umbrella would be developed, built, and paid for by oil money from the Gulf States.

Clinton in her remark had acknowledged the inevitability of Iran, faced with existential nuclear threats from both US and Israel, gaining a nuclear arsenal, and the inevitable American acceptance of this fact.

You confront evil, you do not negotiate with it.

– Natan Sharansky

While it may be a long way from Tel Aviv to Pyongyang, Israel bears considerable responsibility for North Korea’s increasingly fraught relations with the world. Indeed, through its small but influential support network in the United States, the self-styled Jewish state has played a rarely acknowledged but arguably decisive role in undermining progress towards a peaceful resolution of America’s longest running conflict. Though totally oblivious to this unwarranted intervention by a seemingly distant and irrelevant power, hundreds of millions of Koreans, Chinese and Japanese could have paid, and may yet pay, a terrible price for Israel’s covert meddling in East Asian politics.

In his State of the Union Address delivered on 29 January, 2002, George W. Bush called Iraq, Iran and North Korea an “Axis of Evil” that was allegedly supporting terrorism and seeking weapons of mass destruction. It later emerged that the provocative phrase which arbitrarily linked Pyongyang to Israel’s two greatest regional rivals had been written by David Frum, Bush’s Canadian speechwriter. An ardent Zionist, Frum recently said that the occupied West Bank belongs to Israel but that Palestinians living there shouldn’t have the vote. He is also the co-author with Richard Perle of An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror, in which the Likudnik neo-conservatives advocated a confrontational approach to North Korea.

Even more threatening from a North Korean perspective than being officially designated “evil” was the National Security Strategy of the United States announced by Bush in September 2002. Charles Krauthammer, a neo-conservative columnist for the Washington Post, coined the phrase “Bush doctrine” to describe the policy of preemptive strikes, which specifically targeted Iraq, Iran and North Korea. However, Philip Shenon, a New York Times reporter, claims in his book The Commission that it was Philip Zelikow, a neo-conservative member of Bush’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board later appointed executive director of the 9/11 Commission, who wrote the policy that was used to justify the invasion of Iraq on the pretext that its supposed “weapons of mass destruction” posed a threat to the United States.

Yet, on the eve of the first anniversary of the September 11 attacks, Zelikow told a crowd at the University of Virginia, “I’ll tell you what I think the real threat is, and actually has been since 1990. It’s the threat against Israel.” No doubt because this would not be, as Zelikow admitted, a “popular sell” to the American people, the grandiose words given Bush to read were somewhat less candid: “Our responsibility to history is clear: to answer these attacks and rid the world of evil.”

The “Zelikow doctrine” had an immediate, and probably foreseeable, catalysing effect on an already fearful North Korean regime. Bruce Cumings, a specialist in modern Korean history, wrote, “From October 2002 onward they acted as if their only deterrent to this irresponsible administration was a nuclear one, a decision that any general sitting in Pyongyang (or Tehran) would have made.” Writing in 2004, Cumings predicted that if North Korea were to develop a nuclear deterrent, it would be known as “Bush’s bomb.” But since it was the Israel-centered neo-conservatives in the Bush administration that scuttled the 1994 Agreed Framework which had frozen Pyongyang’s nuclear developments for eight years, perhaps it might be more accurate to call it “the neo-con bomb.”

If the North Koreans really had the capacity to hit America with a missile — and if Kim Jong-Il were sufficiently “crazy” (as the pro-Israeli media portrays him) to start a war with a global superpower that has up to 5,000 nuclear warheads in its arsenal — they may have considered their own preemptive strike against one particular target in Washington D.C. For the building at 1150 17th Street, home to such neo-con strongholds as the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), the now defunct Project for the New American Century (PNAC) and The Weekly Standard, is the source of much of Washington’s apparent animus toward Pyongyang.

It was there on November 22, 2004, for example, that William Kristol, the editor of the Murdoch-owned Weekly Standard, wrote a PNAC memo to “opinion leaders” entitled “Toward Regime Change in North Korea.” In the memo, Kristol praised an article in The Weekly Standard by Nicholas Eberstadt, “one of AEI’s in-house hawks on North Korea.” In “Tear Down This Tyranny,” Eberstadt had called for the ouster of Kim Jong-Il, to be achieved in part by “working around the pro-appeasement crowd in the South Korean government.”

For neo-cons like Kristol and Eberstadt, it is seemingly preferable to risk provoking war with North Korea than to “appease” an “evil tyrant” like Kim Jong-Il — as if Kim were another genocidal Hitler and the then South Korean leader Roh another naive Chamberlain. Such “moral clarity” presumably comes easier to those who live at a comfortably safe distance from the firing zone.

Eberstadt is also the author of The End of North Korea, whose title summed up the Bush administration’s policy toward Pyongyang, as a New York Times reporter was once told by Eberstadt’s AEI colleague John Bolton, Bush’s Under Secretary of State for Arms Control, whose hawkishness did much to wreck arms control. Bolton, described by the Zionist Organization of America as “one of Israel’s truest friends in the world,” sabotaged Secretary of State Colin Powell’s attempts to start nuclear disarmament negotiations with North Korea.

Project for the New Israeli Humanitarianism

While the infamous militarist policies of the pro-Israel neo-conservatives undoubtedly intimidated Pyongyang, the Israel lobby’s lesser known “humanitarian” activism played a complementary role in provoking the North Korean nuclear crisis.

The appointment of Bill Kristol’s friend and fellow neo-con Jay Lefkowitz as special envoy for human rights was one of the Bush administration’s more provocative acts toward North Korea.Lefkowitz, who considers legitimate criticism of Israel to be “anti-Semitism,” was not slow to criticize Pyongyang’s abuses, however. In January 2008, speaking at the AEI, he said, “The way the North Korean government treats its own people is inhumane and therefore deeply offensive to us. It should also offend free people around the world.” Leaving aside the hypocrisy of Lefkowitz’s selective condemnation, his undiplomatic language was hardly calculated to promote a smooth dialogue with the North Koreans.

Drawing on a study entitled “The Hidden Gulag: Exposing North Korea’s Prison Camps,” Lefkowitz advocated linking humanitarian aid to human rights issues, a counterproductive strategy opposed by career diplomats in the State Department. As chief U.S. negotiator Christopher Hill put it, “We have no interest in weaponizing human rights.” The same, however, could not be said for Lefkowitz. As Suzy Kim and John Feffer wrote in Foreign Policy in Focus, “Lefkowitz deliberately overstepped his bounds to undermine the nuclear talks by linking them to human rights.”

“The Hidden Gulag” report had been published by the U.S. Committee on Human Rights in North Korea, an NGO which has among its officers and directors more than a fair share of pro-Israelis. It should, of course, strike people as a little odd to see the likes of Nicholas Eberstadt, Rabbi Abraham Cooper of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, Congressmen Stephen Solarz and Gary Ackerman, and Carl Gershman, the president of the National Endowment for Democracy, championing North Koreans’ human rights while at the same time condoning Israel’s human rights abuses against Palestinians.

Lefkowitz’s appointment as human rights envoy came about as a result of the U.S. Congress passing the North Korea Human Rights Act in 2004, legislation which his cousin, Michael Horowitz, played a key role in instigating. Horowitz, a senior fellow at the hawkishly pro-Israel Hudson Institute, hailed the passing of the bill as a “miracle” in an interview with Christianity Today. As director of Hudson’s Project for International Religious Liberty, he had mobilized Christian evangelicals to support the legislation based on the religious persecution of North Korea’s approximately 10,000 Christians.

Meanwhile, the plight of the rapidly dwindling Christian population in Israel and occupied Palestine, down from 350,000 in 1948 to about 175,000 today, goes unheeded by Horowitz’s evangelicals, many of whom are misled by Christian Zionist leaders like John Hagee to believe that the Bible endorses the modern state of Israel’s appropriation of Palestinian land.

But the prize for chutzpah in Israel’s human rights advocacy for North Koreans must surely go to Natan Sharansky. In 2005, the “acclaimed human rights activist” told a Freedom House sponsored symposium advocating regime change in North Korea, “The people of North Korea must be free!” That same year Sharansky resigned from the Israeli cabinet in protest over then Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s removal of Jewish settlers from Gaza. As Housing Minister, Sharansky had, according to Israeli peace activist Uri Avnery, “systematically enlarged the settlements on expropriated Arab land in the West Bank, trampling on the human and national rights of the Palestinians.”

Nevertheless, Sharansky was such a major influence on George W. Bush’s foreign policy that he has been dubbed “Bush’s guru.” The thought that someone more extreme than Sharon helped shape the worldview of the world’s once most powerful leader is, as Avnery put it, “rather frightening.”

“You confront evil,” Sharansky told the Freedom House symposium, “you do not negotiate with it.” And that in a nutshell is the policy prescription pushed by Frum, Perle, Zelikow, Kristol, Eberstadt, Bolton (proof that you don’t have to be Jewish to be a Zionist), Lefkowitz, Horowitz, et al. on the Bush administration in its dealings with “evil” North Korea. The result of heeding that dangerously simplistic advice — a nuclear North Korea — has been an unmitigated failure for American diplomacy in East Asia.

But does Israel’s American lobby see its efforts to undermine negotiations with Pyongyang as a failure? Or to put it another way, does Israel actually benefit from the North Korean nuclear crisis?

With the U.S. having been induced by neo-con lies about weapons of mass destruction to eliminate the Iraqi threat to Israel, the focus of Israeli security concerns has shifted to the alleged Iranian threat. And the threat that an “unpredictable” nuclear-armed North Korea now supposedly poses to the United States is invariably cited by pro-Israelis in their efforts to push Washington toward war with Iran before its “mad Mullahs” too acquire nuclear weapons.

The real threat to Israel, however, is not that Iran is going to “wipe it off the map” (a mistranslation endlessly repeated by the media), but that its monopoly on nuclear weapons in the Middle East might end. For without that monopoly on the ultimate weapons of mass destruction, not only would Israel’s regional hegemonic ambitions be forestalled, but the apartheid Jewish state might be forced to pay a little more attention to the egregious human rights abuses closer to home.

The aim of the pressure for publication of the document appears to be to discredit the November 2007 U.S. National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on the Iranian nuclear programme, which concluded that Iran had ended work on nuclear weapons in 2003.

The story by Reuters United Nations correspondent Louis Charbonneau reported that “several” officials from those states had said the IAEA has “credible information” suggesting that the U.S. intelligence estimate was “incorrect.”

The issue of credibility of the NIE is particularly sensitive right now because the United States, Britain, France and Germany are anticipating tough negotiations with Russia and China on Iran’s nuclear programme in early September.

The two parallel stories by Charbonneau and Associated Press correspondent George Jahn in Vienna, both published August 20, show how news stories based on leaks from officials with a decided agenda, without any serious effort to provide an objective historical text or investigation of their accuracy, can seriously distort an issue.

Reflecting the hostile attitude of the quartet of Western governments and Israel toward ElBaradei, the stories suggested that ElBaradei has been guilty of a cover-up in refusing to publish information he has had since last September alleging that Iran has continued to pursue research on developing nuclear weapons.

Charbonneau referred without further analysis to U.S. and Israeli accusations that ElBaradei has deliberately underplayed the case against Iran to “undermine the U.S. sanctions drive.”

Jahn explained ElBaradei’s refusal to publish the intelligence summary as the result of his eagerness to “avoid moves that could harden already massive Iranian intransigence on cooperating with the agency” and his worry that it would increase the chances of a U.S. or Israeli strike on Tehran’s nuclear sites.

He also suggested ElBaradei had made “barely disguised criticisms of U.S. policy” in the past and that some of his statements on Israel and Gaza were viewed by the West as “overtly political.”

In fact, however, the tensions between ElBaradei and the George W. Bush administration were directly related to ElBaradei’s public declaration in March 2003 that the documents on alleged Iraqi efforts to obtain uranium from Niger — later known as the “Niger forgeries” — were not authentic, after he received no response from Washington to an earlier private warning to the White House.

Charbonneau quoted a “senior Western diplomat” as confirming that some of the information the four Western countries want published in the coming IAEA report relate to intelligence documents concerning an alleged Iranian nuclear weapons research programme, which the IAEA has referred to as “alleged studies”.

What the anti-ElBaradei coalition is now demanding, as Charbonneau’s report confirms, is that ElBaradei attach a report prepared by the IAEA safeguards department which reflects the slant of the quartet and Israel on the issue, as an “annex” to the coming report.

What AP and Reuters failed to report, however, is that there has long been a deep division within the IAEA between those who support the “alleged studies” documents, led by safeguards department chief Olli Heinonen, and those who have remained sceptical about their authenticity.

The doubts of the sceptics were reinforced, moreover, when new evidence came to light last year suggesting that some of the key documents were fabricated or doctored to support the accusation that Iran was working on nuclear weapons.

A Vienna-based diplomatic source close to the IAEA told IPS that the reason ElBaradei has never endorsed the “alleged studies” documents is that they have not met his rigorous standards of evidence.

The United States and other governments refused to give the documents to the IAEA, because ElBaradei had insisted that all the “alleged studies” documents should be shared with Iran and should be authenticated. U.S. officials, supported by Israel, argued that allowing Iran to study the documents carefully would compromise intelligence “sources and methods”, according to a U.S.-based source who has been briefed on the matter.

The most important such document to be denied to the IAEA and Iran is a one-page letter from an Iranian engineering firm to an Iranian private company, Kimia Maadan, which is identified as having participated in the alleged Iranian nuclear weapons project.

The letter reportedly had handwritten notes on it referring to studies on the redesign of a missile reentry vehicle, and is thus a primary piece of evidence for the claim that the missile reentry documents were genuine.

However, Iran turned over to the IAEA a copy of the same May 2003 letter with no handwritten notes on it, as Heinonen confirmed in a February 2008 briefing for member states.

That suggested that the copy of the letter with handwriting on it was a fabrication done by an outside intelligence agency in order to prove that Iran was working on nuclear weapons.

There were other problems with the one-page flowsheets showing a plan for a “green salt” conversion facility, which were attributed to Kima Maadan and said to be part of the military-run nuclear weapons project.

According to a February 22, 2008 IAEA report, Iran submitted documentary evidence to the IAEA showing that Kimia Maadan had been created in 2000 solely to plan and construct a uranium ore processing facility under contract with Iran’s civilian atomic energy agency, and that it was in financial difficulty when it closed its doors in 2003.

The IAEA, which had been investigating whether the company was working for the Iranian military, as charged by the United States and other Western countries, declared in its February 2008 report that it “considers this question no longer outstanding at this stage”.

Furthermore, Iran pointed out that the flowsheets for a “green salt” conversion facility portrayed in the documents as done by Kimia Maadan have “technical errors,” and IAEA safeguards director Heinonen conceded that point in his February 2008 briefing.

Questions had also been raised about the technical quality of the alleged Iranian designs for a missile reentry vehicle that was apparently aimed at accommodating a nuclear weapon. Experts at Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico who ran computer simulations on the studies determined none of them would have worked, according to Washington Post investigative reporter Dafna Linzer in February 2006.

After the new information surfaced, some IAEA officials, including experts involved in the investigation, argued privately that the agency should now state publicly that it could not authenticate the documents, according to a Vienna-based source close to the IAEA.

The AP’s Jahn cited as further evidence of Iran’s intention to manufacture nuclear weapons its alleged refusal to cooperate on IAEA demands for more cameras at the Natanz enrichment facility. “Iran’s stonewalling of the agency on increased monitoring,” he wrote, “has raised agency concerns that its experts might not be able to make sure that some of the enriched material produced at Natanz is not diverted for potential weapons use.”

Unfortunately for that argument, however, IAEA officials revealed August 20 that Iran had already agreed the previous week to allow increased IAEA monitoring of the Natanz enrichment facility through additional cameras.

In Mumbai, Hillary Clinton first had a meeting with a selective group of Indian business executives. Later she stayed at Taj Mahal Palace & Tower, one of the two hotels that had been attacked by terrorists in November 2008. At a news conference she subtly brought India’s 11/26 and US’ 9/11 together: “Just as India supported America on 9/11, these events are seared in our memory….”² The reason for this, probably, was to direct Indian public’s attention to the common perpetrator: Islamic extremism. In her op-ed in The Times of India, Clinton clearly made her point. She mentioned about security: “Our countries have experienced searing terrorist attacks. We both seek a more secure world for our citizens,” and therefore, “We should intensify our defense and law enforcement cooperation to that end.” In the same breath she identified the common enemy as the extremism that Pakistan is confronting.¹

The two events – Clinton’s meeting with Indian business executives and her stay at Taj hotel – are steeped in a powerful, but unfortunate, symbolism, as 11/26 is linked with 9/11.

US’ 9/11 and Weapons’ Trade

On September 11, 2001 there was a significant shift in security trend. For the first time since the British burned down Washington in 1814, US experienced death and destruction on its land through an enemy attack.³ Till then death and destruction have always been suffered on foreign lands. George W. Bush, then President of the US, in his State of the Union address on January 28, 2003 recognized this: “In two years, America has gone from a sense of invulnerability to an awareness of peril.” This challenge to its hegemony and attack on its land, instead of leading to introspection of its foreign policy and actions on foreign lands, resulted in the US’ “war on terror.” US failed to acknowledge that the terrorist attack on its land was a blowback. In an interview on the Mike Malloy radio show, former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds said that the US maintained “intimate relations” with Osama Bin Laden and Taliban “all the way until that day of September 11.”⁴ The goals of American “statesmen” using these “intimate relations” with al-Qaida included control of Central Asia’s vast energy supplies and new markets for US military-industrial complex.⁴

Recently in a very rare acknowledgement by Hillary Clinton, she confessed that the US’ present enemy in Afghanistan and Pakistan was once its friend. To a question of the Congressman Adam Shciff in a Subcommittee of the House of Appropriations Committee on April 23, 2009, Clinton explained how the militancy was linked to the US-backed proxy war against the Soviets in Afghanistan:

Let’s remember here…the people we are fighting today we funded them twenty years ago…and we did it because we were locked in a struggle with the Soviet Union. They invaded Afghanistan…and we did not want to see them control Central Asia and we went to work…and it was President Reagan in partnership with Congress led by Democrats who said you know what it sounds like a pretty good idea…let’s deal with the ISI and the Pakistan military and let’s go recruit these mujahedeen…let them come from Saudi Arabia and other countries, importing their Wahabi brand of Islam so that we can go beat the Soviet Union…they (the Soviets) retreated…they lost billions of dollars and it led to the collapse of the Soviet Union. So there is a very strong argument which is…it wasn’t a bad investment in terms of Soviet Union but let’s be careful with what we sow…because we will harvest.⁵

Therefore, the early foundations of al-Qaida were built, mainly, on relationships and weaponry that came from the billions of dollars in US support for the Afghan mujahedeen during the war to expel Soviet forces from that country. The US has long relied on weapons supplies and sales to prop up allies or enhance collective defense arrangements. According to the report titled “Conventional Arms Transfers to Developing Nations,”: “For decades, during the height of the Cold War, providing conventional weapons to friendly states was an instrument of foreign policy utilized by the United States and its allies.”⁶

The US Cold War foreign policy of supplying weapons to maintain strategic relationship continued even after 9/11. In fact, the US’ response to the terror attacks was that it was more willing than ever to sell or supply high technology weapons to countries that have pledged assistance in the global war on terror, regardless of their past behavior or current status. Under the guise of the global war on terror, George W. Bush fast-tracked weapon sales, released countries from arms embargoes, and pumped more money into foreign military aid. US sanctions were lifted on Armenia, Azerbaijan, India, Pakistan, Tajikistan, and Yugoslavia. These countries have been identified as key allies in the global war on terror.⁷

US-India Relationship

After initial confidence building measures, on January 12, 2004 US and India signed an agreement called the “Next Steps in Strategic Partnership” (NSSP) with the aim of implementing a shared vision to expand cooperation, deepening the ties of commerce and friendship between the two nations, and increasing stability in Asia and beyond. This “strategic partnership” has grown into “global partnership” with the ratification of the US-India Agreement for Cooperation on Peaceful Uses of Nuclear Energy in July 2005. Bush signed the Henry J. Hyde United States-India Peaceful Atomic Energy Cooperation Act of 2006 (or “Hyde Act”) into law in December 2006 (P.L. 109-401).⁸ Commenting on the nuclear deal Nicholas Burns, then Under Secretary of State, said that it was “positive for United States national security interest because it will help us cement our strategic partnership with India, which is very important for our global interests.”⁸

In October 10, 2008 Condoleezza Rice, then US Secretary of State, and Pranab Mukherjee, then External Affairs Minister of India, signed the nuclear deal after three years of negotiations. Called the 123 Agreement after a section in the U.S. Atomic Energy Act, the pact allowed India to buy vital nuclear fuel and technology from American companies.

Right from the beginning corporate interests led by the nuclear industry and arms makers in the US lobbied for the nuclear deal. They saw the possibilities for nuclear trade, weapons sales, and selling spare parts and other services to India.⁹ According to the Washington Post, American companies saw a vast market in India for nuclear reactors and conventional weapons, after having been largely frozen out of that market for decades.¹⁰ The US-India Business Council hired the high-powered firm of Patton Boggs to work on Congress, and the Indian government a powerful US lobbying firm, Barbour Griffith & Rogers LLC, for which Robert Blackwill — US ambassador to India from 2001 to 2003 — is president, as well as the law firm of Venable LLP. The Confederation of Indian Industry and the India-American Friendship Council were also involved.

US politicians, both Democrats and Republicans, overwhelmingly supported the US-India nuclear deal. Because they either have investments in or received financial contributions from the arms industry.

US’ Interests in the Deal

US has acknowledged India’s growing global economic, political, and geo-strategic clout. So it wanted to court India through US-India nuclear deal to further its global interests.

1. To Contain China

US perceives China to be the larger threat to its hegemony. According to the 2008 annual report to Congress from the Office of the Secretary of Defense on the Military Power of the People’s Republic of China, “China’s expanding and improving military capabilities are changing East Asian military balances; improvements in China’s strategic capabilities have implications beyond the Asia-Pacific region.”¹¹ US sees India as a new emerging power of the 21st century, one that can be an ally of the United States and help it balance and contain the rise of China. India also directly faces the Chinese military along a four thousand kilometer northern border.

There has been some speculation regarding US’ intention to create an Asian NATO. During the Cold War era, US forged the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) comprising of pro-western countries such as Pakistan, Philippines, Thailand, Australia and New Zealand as well as France and UK. However, this organization was dissolved in 1977.¹² The speculation about US’ intention to forge Asian NATO has been substantiated with the proposals of some American politicians such as Rudolph Giuliani and John McCain. Giuliani proposed that India, Japan, Singapore, Israel and Australia should be included in NATO. Whereas McCain suggested the establishment of US-led League of Democracies. Trabanco opines that McCain’s proposal was a euphemism for the inclusion of nonEuropean US allies in a global military coalition.¹² The reason for this seems to be the rise of China as an economic power. The US National Intelligence Council called it “the unprecedented transfer of wealth from west to east.”¹²

In order to contain China’s power and to preserve its control over strategic sea routes, US strategists have acknowledged the strategically significant geographic location of India. This could be the reason why US has forged an alliance with India in maritime cooperation.

Therefore, the US’ willingness to make nuclear deal with India is perceived, by some, to gain latter’s strategic and geopolitical loyalty.¹² “(It) would buttress (India’s) potential utility as a hedge against a rising China, encourage it to pursue economic and strategic policies aligned with U.S. interests, and shape its choices in regard to global energy stability….” said Tellis.¹³

   1. To Involve India in the “Reconstruction” of Afghanistan

There is also a talk about US’ intention to involve India in Afghan “reconstruction” and ask for Indian troops.¹¹ India, in the past, refused to send its troops to Iraq. However, the US-India “global partnership” might give the US leverage over India. As the relationship deepens, it would be difficult for India to reject US’ request for its partnership in the “reconstruction” of Afghanistan, which includes alignment of Indian troops with the NATO troops under the leadership of US.

During her three day visit to India, Hillary Clinton, US Secretary of State, mentioned about security cooperation: “Our countries have experienced searing terrorist attacks. We both seek a more secure world for our citizens,” and therefore, “We should intensify our defense and law enforcement cooperation to that end.” And this cooperation is against the extremism that Pakistan is tackling at present.

The US strategy seems to be to draw India (as a “partner”) into “Afghan trap”, as it did Russia (its enemy). Admitting that an American operation to infiltrate Afghanistan was launched long before Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Zbigniew Brzezenski boasted, “We actually did provide some support to the Mijahedeen before (Soviet) invasion.”¹⁴ “We did not push the Russians into invading, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would,” Brzezenski bragged. “That secret operation was an excellent idea. The effect was to draw the Russians into the Afghan trap.”¹⁵

   2. Market for US Military-Industrial Complex

The US-India nuclear deal not only links India more closely to US and its global interests, but also boosts US trade in a profitable sector, nuclear industry. It also creates market for US conventional weapons. Till now Russia is the largest supplier of weapons to India (second is Israel). US expects that the nuclear deal will change this scenario.

India is a huge market for weapons sales. In 2005 it was the largest buyer of arms in the developing world with purchases of $5.4 billion. US’ intention to profit from this market is evidenced by recent visits to India by US officials, including Robert Gates, the Defence Secretary, in February 2008 to strengthen military ties and promote weapons sales. Lt. Gen. V.K. Kapoor, a defence analyst, said, “Other than obvious commercial interests, the US is keen to invest militarily in India….”¹⁶ At DefExpo 2008 in New Delhi in February 2008 at which major US weapons companies were well represented, William Cohen, former US Defence Secretary under Bill Clinton, declared, “The promise of deeper US-India defence co-operation is now a reality, with collaborations and joint ventures between US and India firms already under way.”¹⁶ India is projected to spend more than $30 billion by 2012 as the country seeks to modernize its military. By 2022 spending is expected to reach $80 billion.

The US-India nuclear deal has opened a huge market for the US weapons industry. For US weapons companies foreign sales mean the biggest bucks. Also, sales are often accompanied by lucrative deals for accessories, spare parts, and eventual upgrades. There is growing evidence that weapons sales are more about money for the US military-industrial complex and other major military economies. According to the congressional report “Conventional Arms Transfers to Developing Nations,”: “Where before the principal motivation for arms sales by foreign suppliers might have been to support a foreign policy objective, today that motivation may be based as much on economic considerations as those of foreign policy or national security policy.”⁶

Weapons Deals during Hillary Clinton’s Visit to India

The burgeoning “global partnership” between US and India is gradually laying bare its contents. India has dramatically increased its defence budget up over 34% alone this year. Hillary Clinton’s visit to India in July 2009 resulted in defence, space and nuclear power agreements. It is the payoff resulting from the US-India nuclear deal.

On July 20, 2009 an accord, known as an end use monitoring agreement, between India and US has been reached in New Delhi to clear the way for the sale of US weapons to India. “We have agreed on the end-use monitoring arrangement which would refer to…Indian procurement of US defence technology and equipment,” said S.M. Krishna, Indian External Affairs Minister, in a joint news conference with Clinton. India is now holding a tender for the order of 126 multi-purpose lightweight fighters for the Air Force. US company Lockheed Martin stands as the front runner to sell F-16. The other three bidders are companies from Russia, France and Sweden. According to the tender terms, a winner should launch licensed production of its aircraft in India. The Indian-assembled F-16 would be a lot cheaper than its equivalent put together in the US or Europe. There is qualified labor in India, and labor costs are low. For the first time in history the US is making such an offer to a country that is neither a NATO member state nor has it Americans troops deployed on its territory.

Hillary Clinton said that India has also approved two sites for the construction of two US nuclear reactors. She said, “I am also pleased that Prime Minister Singh told me that sites for two nuclear parks for US companies have been approved by the government.” That means, it provides about $10 billion business for the US nuclear reactor builders such as General Electric Company and Westinghouse Electric Company, a subsidiary of Japan’s Toshiba Corporation. However, what is not clear is whether India has agreed to the US’ demand for legal immunity to its companies, if there is an accident.

India has already bought $2.1 billion worth of anti-submarine planes from Boeing earlier this year, the largest US arms transfer to India to date.¹⁷ Arms deals between India and US will pull the military of the two countries together and foster interoperability.¹¹

At a May 2009 Defense Writers Group convened by the Center for Media and Security, to the question “whether the Obama administration will follow the general policy of supporting (weapons) exports?” and “do you anticipate any change in terms of where US arms will be sold?” Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Michele Flournoy responded, “We don’t have a sort of arms sale policy as much as more a sense of commitment to building partner capacity.”⁷ Vice Admiral Jeffrey Wieringa, the head of the Pentagon agency that administers weapons exports, was more candid: “We sell stuff to build relationships.”⁷

Not surprisingly, Loren Thompson of the Lexington Institute, a consultant to Lockheed Martin, said, “Weapons could be the single biggest U.S. export item over the next 10 years.”¹⁷ Increased weapons sales will certainly help the US Military-Industrial Complex weather the current economic crisis.

Conclusion

Not surprisingly, in the “global partnership” between US and India, the people who are missing are the poor of both the countries. In the op-ed in The Times of India Hillary Clinton, former Wal-Mart Board Director, made no mention of India’s poor. According to the World Bank poverty line of $1.25 (Rs. 56.13) per day, the number of poor in India during 2004-2005 was 456 million, that is, 41.6% of the population. The official figure of number of poor in the US in 2007 was 37.3 millions.¹⁸ However, Katherine Newman, professor of Sociology and Public Affairs at Princeton University, says that apart from 37.3 million poor, there are over 50 million Americans, who belong to what she calls “the missing class”. In her book The Missing Class: Portraits of the Near Poor in America, co-authored with Victor Tan Chen, she says that the Americans who belong to “the missing class” are those who are living on the edge — one sudden illness, one pink slip (i.e., loss of job), one divorce away from free fall.¹⁹

The impact of arms trade between US and India has on the lack of economic development among the poor in both the countries, as more and more resources are directed into production and acquisition of new deadly weapons. “We’ve put this money down a black hole of so-called security,” says David Krieger, President of the California-based Nuclear Age Peace Foundation. “In a more just and humane society, that money would be spent on health care, housing and the alleviation of poverty.”²⁰

Therefore, the single most pressing “security” issue of the 21st century will be assuring the essentials of a healthy, dignified life for the millions of people in India and US, who are left out of the global economy. Poverty continues to be the main human rights issue in both the countries.

What needs to be done is, try and reduce the drive for production and acquisition of more and more weapons systems, so that resources may be used for education, healthcare, and to fight against poverty.

1. Hillary Rodham Clinton, “Encourage Pakistan as It Confronts Extremism,” in The Times of India (July 17, 2009).
2. Mark Landler, “Seeking Business Allies, Clinton Connects with India’s Billionaires,” in New York Times (July 18, 2009).
   
3. Chomsky, Noam, “September 11th and Its Aftermath: Where is the World Heading?” Public Lecture at the Music Academy, Chennai (Madras), India (November 10, 2001).
4. Lukery, “Bombshell: Bin Laden Worked for US until 9/11: Sibel Edmonds on the Mike Malloy Radio Show,” in Global Research (August 1, 2009).
5. Anwar Iqbal, “US Created Taliban and Abandoned Pakistan: Clinton,” in Dawn.Com (April 25, 2009) and see Youtube.
6. Bryan Bender, “US Is Top Purveyor on Weapons Sales List Shipments Grow to Unstable Areas,” in worldproutassembly.org (November 13, 2006).
7. Frida Berrigan, “Weapons: Our No#1 Export?” in Foreign Policy In Focus (July 1, 2009).
8. Michael F. Martin and K. Alan Kronstadt, CRS Report for Congress: India-U.S. Economic and Trade Relations, August 31, 2007.
9. Andrew Lichterman and M.V. Ramana, “Rushing into the Wrong Future: The U.S.-India Nuclear Deal, Energy and Security,” in Dissident Voice.org (September 20, 2008).
10. Steven Mufson, “New Energy on India: Companies and Lobbyists Throw Support behind U.S. Participation in the Countries Nuclear Sector,” in Washington Post (July 18, 2006).
11. William R. Hawkins, “Bush’s Legacy in India,” in FrontPageMagazine.com (November 24, 2008).
12. Jose Miguel Alonso Trabanco, “Is an ‘Asian NATO’ Really on the US Agenda?” in Global Research (January 28, 2009).
13. Siddharth Varadarajan, “The Truth behind the Indo-U.S. Nuclear Deal,” in Global Research (July 29, 2005).
14. Noor Ali, “US-UN Conspiracy against the People of Afghanistan,” in Online Center for Afghan Studies (February 21, 1998).
15. J.W. Smith, “Simultaneously Suppressing the World’s Break for Freedom,” in Economic Democracy: The Political Struggle for the 21st Century, ed. by M.E. Sharpe (New York: Armonk, 2000). Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, “Afghanistan, the Taliban and the United States: The Role of Human Rights in Western Foreign Policy.”
16. “India and US Defence Ties Grow Stronger,” in india-defence.com (June 25, 2008).
17. “Weapons Makers Look Overseas as DoD Cuts Back,” in USAToday (June 13, 2009).
18. ”Poverty in the United States, 2007.”
19. Katherine S. Newman and Victor Tan Chen, The Missing Class: Portraits of the Near Poor in America (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2007).
20. Craig Kielburger and Marc Kielburger, “Invest in People, Not Weapons,” in Toronto Star (March 24, 2008).

So Russia’s agreement, announced at Obama’s summit in Moscow 6-8 July, to ferry primarily US troops and arms through Russian land and air space to Afghanistan to accelerate the slaughter there – without any reciprocation on other outstanding issues – comes as a bit of a surprise. Obama faces a reservoir of resentment among Russians who believe that the US has rarely followed through on its occasional peace gestures. “At this point, there is a little bit of hope and a lot of distrust,” said talk show host Vladimir Pozner on Channel One.

If the object is to stem the flood of opium, there is lots of evidence that the current Afghan government and the US occupiers themselves actually benefit from this lucrative business, and that the only conceivable endgame which the US can salvage there – a secular military dictatorship propped up by the US – will never deal with this albeit serious problem for Russia. True, Russia also fears the catalysing effect of a Taliban victory on its Muslim Central Asian neighbours. It apparently wants any kind of secular government in Afghanistan, come hell or high water.

But the humiliation of so directly supporting the US military campaign in Afghanistan after the earlier US-sponsored campaign there which destroyed the Soviet Union and led to the deaths of 15,000 Soviet soldiers is surely not lost on the Kremlin. And to drop this plum in Washington’s lap as it continues to insist that Ukraine and Georgia will soon join NATO and that Poland will have its missiles looks too good to be true from the US perspective. Maybe the Kremlin is deriving some satisfaction from abetting the US in what it sees as a losing battle in Afghanistan, letting the Taliban give US troops some of the medicine inflicted on Soviet troops in yesteryear?

In addition to his meetings with President Dmitri Medvedev, Obama met Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, though he publicly scolded him prior to the summit. “It’s important that even as we move forward with President Medvedev, Putin understands that the old Cold War approach to US-Russian relations is outdated … I think Putin has one foot in the old ways of doing business and one foot in the new, and to the extent that we can provide him and the Russian people a clear sense that the US is not seeking an antagonistic relationship but wants co-operation on nuclear non-proliferation, fighting terrorism, energy issues, that we’ll end up having a stronger partner overall.”

This is diplo-speak for “Take us or leave us.” Special assistant to the president and senior director for Russian affairs on the National Security Council Michael McFaul made the point less nicely when he said, “We don’t need the Russians.” This taunting of Putin was formalised by a US suggestion to establish a Biden-Putin working group to renegotiation the START treaty which expires in December, named after the Gore-Chernomyrdin task force that negotiated the 1991 treaty when Al Gore was VP and Viktor Chernomyrdin was Russian PM. That suggestion was immediately brushed aside. “I am not a vice president,” said Putin coldly.

Obama also visited Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev. None of the three presidents gave any ground on the missile bases, including Gorbachev, who told talk-show host Pozner the missile bases are aimed at creating a situation that makes it possible for NATO to be first to launch a nuclear strike while staying under its own shield. “There is a need for a common European security, which was written at a conference in Paris in 1990.” The USSR was preparing its answer to Reagan’s 1983 Strategic Defense Initiative, Gorbachev said. “I did not agree then and do not agree now with the opinions that it is a bluff and that one should not pay attention to it.”

The Obama camp may not be as united on the missile issue as the Russians are. Obama acknowledged “Russian sensitivities” in a Novaya Gazeta interview but made clear he would not link arms-control talks to missile defence. Grasping at straws, Medvedev said, “The current administration is prepared for discussions. I think we are smart enough to find a reasonable solution here. Really, to get this problem solved, one must not necessarily cross out the decisions made earlier.”

Obama threw him a bone by reiterating his readiness to draw a line between offensive and defensive weapons, something that Bush had refused to do since America withdrew from the 1972 ABM Treaty in 2001. The sides agreed to limit their nuclear arsenals to 1,500-1,675 warheads with the cap on the number of delivery vehicles set as low as 500-1,100 units.

No public mention was made of Georgia and Ukraine actually joining NATO, with Obama stressing, “NATO seeks collaboration with Russia, not confrontation.” But he nonetheless sent (allowed?) Vice President Joseph Biden to fly directly from Moscow to Georgia and Ukraine after the summit. “We’re not going to reassure or give or trade anything with the Russians regarding NATO expansion or missile defense,” warned McFaul.

Here again, the US administration is not united, with Obama having made no firm commitment to further NATO expansion. Just how much say he actually has in such strategic decisions is a moot point.
Obama was hoping to throw the Russians another bone by assuring them admission to the World Trade Organisation. But Putin unexpectedly suspended Moscow’s membership bid in June, deciding to approach the issue jointly through a customs union with Belarus and Kazakhstan, without the need for US “help”.

After years of increasing strain, Moscow clearly did its best to ensure the summit was a success, giving Obama lots of rope. But Obama’s apparent attempt to drive a wedge between Putin and Medvedev will not bear fruit. If the US pushes ahead with its missile bases, it is unlikely that even a cowed Moscow will go along with START II, despite its own desire to rid itself of costly, useless weapons. Maybe McFaul’s crack about not needing the Russians means the US really doesn’t give a damn about START.

The new Russian WTO plan, in light of the recent BRIC and SCO summits in Russia, suggests that the Russian government is more concerned about putting flesh on its project of creating a multipolar world than with confronting the US directly anymore. Perhaps planners are willing to let the US continue its Afghan gambit, gambling that it will merely sap US strength while helping to fill Russian coffers, a kind of poor man’s revenge on Russia’s Cold War enemy. Analyst Fyodor Lukyanov sees the establishing of a customs union with Russian neighbours as part of Russian plans to “transform itself into a centre of integration.”

There has indeed been a significant change in Russia’s relations with the rest of the world in the past few years, but it is not necessarily the one Washington would like. It’s not so much a question of Russia ceding to US hegemony, as Obama’s hawks think, but of acknowledging that Russia is not the powerful player that the Soviet Union was, and that the best Russia can do is help usher in a non-US centric multipolar world, which will include disparate allies from all but the North American continent and act to limit the US empire’s wilder plans.

It’s one of realism on the Kremlin’s part, faced with an array of tinpot “democracies” around it, ready to sell out to what they see as the highest bidder. The most glaring example of this is Kyrgyzstan’s President Kurmanbek Bakiyev, who played Russia and the US off against each other over its Manas airbase, first telling the US to get lost when Russia promised $2.15 billion in aid, and then last month reversing the decision and allowing the US to stay, tripling the rent and extracting other goodies in the process. Even Russophile Lukashenko in Belarus plays the same game with Russia and Europe. And then there’s Uzbekistan’s President Islam Karimov, who said yes and then no an agreement on the Collective Rapid Reaction Forces, not to mention Turkmenistan, Georiga, Armenia, Azerbaijan or Lithuania, and on and on. “A game of chance has developed in the post-Soviet space: Who can swindle the Kremlin in the coolest way?” wrote analyst Aleksandr Golts when news of the Manas decision broke.

Russia cannot compete with NATO, certainly not without strengthening the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation and the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), and certainly not with Afghanistan a black hole threatening to suck in its Central Asian neighbours. The CSTO is important less as a counterbalance to NATO than as a viable guarantor of regional security and it’s only a matter of time for Russia’s neighbours to realise this.

It looks like Washington has won this stand-off with Moscow, getting its Afghanistan yellow-brick road and its Polish cake. The market value of allying with flashy but fair-weather Washington outshines the more reliable but less alluring Moscow for the present. But US support is for local elites willing to do its bidding. Local populations will gain nothing, and they are wiser than their leaders, with fond memories of their Russian bulwark. The US may have won the battle. Let the US and NATO play out their lethal games in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere. “Progress must be shared,” Obama said in his “Moscow speech” to university students. Let’s see what fruits his policies bear that we can divvy up.

“the growing missile threat from North Korea and Iran” — article in the Washington Post and other major newspapers, May 26

“Iran’s threat transcends religion. Regardless of sectarian bent, Muslim communities need to oppose the attempts by Iran … to extend Shia extremism and influence throughout the world.” — op-ed article in Boston Globe, May 27

“A Festering Evil. Doing nothing is not an option in handling the threat from Iran” — headline in Investor’s Business Daily, May 27, 2009

This is a very small sample from American newspapers covering but two days.

“Fifty-one percent of Israelis support an immediate Israeli strike on Iran’s nuclear sites” — BBC, May 24

After taking office, on Holocaust Memorial Day, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said: “We will not allow Holocaust-deniers [Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad] to carry out another holocaust.” — Haaretz (Israel), May 14, 2009

Like clinical paranoia, “the threat from Iran” is impervious to correction by rational argument.

Two new novels have just appeared, from major American publishers, thrillers based on Iran having a nuclear weapon and the dangers one can imagine that that portends — Banquo’s Ghosts by Rich Lowry & Keith Korman, and The Increment by David Ignatius. “Bomb, bomb, bomb. Let’s bomb Iran,” declares a CIA official in the latter book. The other book derides the very idea of “dialogue” with Iran while implicitly viewing torture as acceptable.¹

On May 12, in New York City, a debate was held on the proposition that “Diplomacy With Iran Is Going Nowhere” (English translation: “Should we bomb Iran?”). Arguing in the affirmative, were Liz Cheney, former State Department official (and daughter of a certain unindicted war criminal) and Dan Senor, formerly the top spokesman for Washington’s Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad. Their “opponents” were R. Nicholas Burns, former undersecretary of state, and Kenneth Pollack, former National Security Council official and CIA analyst and author of The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq, a book that, unsurprisingly, did not have too long a shelf life.²

This is what “debate” on US foreign policy looks like in America in the first decade of the 21st century AD — four quintessential establishment figures. If such a “debate” had been held in the Soviet Union during the Cold War (”Detente With The United States Is Going Nowhere”), the American mainstream media would unanimously have had a jolly time making fun of it. The sponsor of the New York debate was the conservative Rosenkranz Foundation, but if a liberal (as opposed to a progressive or radical leftist) organization had been the sponsor, while there probably would have been a bit more of an ideological gap between the chosen pairs of speakers, it’s unlikely that any of the present-day myths concerning Iran would have been seriously challenged by either side. These myths include the following, all of which I’ve dealt with before in this report but inasmuch as they are repeated on a regular basis in the media and by administration representatives, I think that readers need to be reminded of the counter arguments.

• Iran has no right to nuclear weapons: Yet, there is no international law that says that the US, the UK, Russia, China, Israel, France, Pakistan, and India are entitled to nuclear weapons, but Iran is not. Iran has every reason to feel threatened. In any event, the US intelligence community’s National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) of December 2007, “Iran: Nuclear Intentions and Capabilities”, makes a point of saying in bold type and italics: “This NIE does not assume that Iran intends to acquire nuclear weapons.” The report goes on to state: “We judge with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program .”
• Ahmadinejad is a Holocaust denier: I have yet to read of Ahmadinejad saying simply, clearly, unambiguously, and unequivocally that he thinks that what we know as the Holocaust never happened. He has instead commented about the peculiarity and injustice of a Holocaust which took place in Europe resulting in a state for the Jews in the Middle East instead of in Europe. Why are the Palestinians paying a price for a German crime? he asks. And he has questioned the figure of six million Jews killed by Nazi Germany, as have many other people of all political stripes.
• Ahmadinejad has called for violence against Israel: His 2005 remark re “wiping Israel off the map”, besides being a very questionable translation, has been seriously misinterpreted, as evidenced by the fact that the following year he declared: “The Zionist regime will be wiped out soon, the same way the Soviet Union was, and humanity will achieve freedom.”³ Obviously, he was not calling for any kind of violent attack upon Israel, for the dissolution of the Soviet Union took place peacefully.
• Iran has no right to provide arms to Hamas and Hezbollah: However, the United States, we are assured, has every right to do the same for Israel and Egypt.
• The fact that Obama says he’s willing to “talk” to some of the “enemies” like Iran more than the Bush administration did sounds good: But one doesn’t have to be too cynical to believe that it will not amount to more than a public relations gimmick. It’s only change of policy that counts. Why doesn’t Obama just state that he would not attack Iran unless Iran first attacked the US or Israel or anyone else? Besides, the Bush administration met with Iran on several occasions.

The following should also be kept in mind: The Washington Post, March 5, 2009, reported: “A senior Israeli official in Washington” has asserted that “Iran would be unlikely to use its missiles in an attack [against Israel] because of the certainty of retaliation.” This was the very last sentence in the article and, according to an extensive Nexis search, did not appear in any other English-language media in the world.

In 2007, in a closed discussion, Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni said that in her opinion “Iranian nuclear weapons do not pose an existential threat to Israel.” She “also criticized the exaggerated use that [Israeli] Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is making of the issue of the Iranian bomb, claiming that he is attempting to rally the public around him by playing on its most basic fears.” This appeared in Haaretz.com, October 25, 2007 (print edition October 26), but not in any US media or in any other English-language world media except the BBC citing the Iranian Mehr English-language news agency, October 27.

Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it’s Changeman!

In January 2006 I was invited to attend a book fair in Cuba, where one of my books, newly translated into Spanish, was being presented. All my expenses were to be paid by the Cuban government, and I was very much looking forward to the visit. Only one problem — the government of the United States would not give me permission to go. My application to travel to Cuba had also been rejected in 1998 by the Clinton administration. (On that occasion I went anyhow and was extremely lucky to avoid being caught by the American Travel Police on the way back and being fined thousands of dollars.) I mention this because Obama supporters would have us believe — as they themselves believe — that their Changeman has been busy making lots of important changes, Cuba being only one example. But I still don’t have the legal right to travel to Cuba.

The only real change made by the Obama administration in regard to Cuba is that Cuban-Americans with family on the island can travel there and send remittances without restrictions. The April 13 White House announcement listed several other provisions concerning telecommunications companies, but what this will actually mean in practice, if anything, is unknown, particularly as it affects Cuba’s access to the Internet. American anti-Castroites have long blamed Cuban’s deficient Internet access on the proverbial “communist suppression,” when the technical availability and prohibitive cost were to a large extent in the hands of American corporations. Microsoft, for example, bars Cuba from using its Messenger instant messaging service.⁴ And Google has long blocked Cuban access to many of its features.⁵ Venezuela and Cuba have been working on an underwater cable system that they hope will make them less reliant on the gringos.

The multifarious US economic embargo, which causes unending hardship and expense for the Cuban people, remains in place. Here is Changeman in a recent press conference:

Reporter: Thank you, Mr. President. You’ve heard from a lot of Latin America leaders here who want the U.S. to lift the embargo against Cuba. You’ve said that you think it’s an important leverage to not lift it. But in 2004, you did support lifting the embargo. You said, it’s failed to provide the source of raising standards of living, it’s squeezed the innocent, and it’s time for us to acknowledge that this particular policy has failed. I’m wondering, what made you change your mind about the embargo?

The President: Well, 2004, that seems just eons ago. What was I doing in 2004?

Reporter: Running for Senate.

The President: Is it while — I was running for Senate. There you go.⁶

Yes, there you go; you shouldn’t confuse campaign rhetoric with the real world and the real Changeman.

The case of the Cuban Five is another chance for Changeman to come to the rescue. This outrageous perversion of justice whereby Cubans were sent to the United States to try to learn of further terrorist attacks in Cuba planned by anti-Castroites in Florida and were themselves arrested by the FBI on information partly supplied to the US by the Cuban government as their contribution to the War On Terrorism.⁷

The Cuban Five have been in US prisons for more than 10 years. Around June 15 the Supreme Court is expected to issue a decision on whether or not they will hear the appeal of the Five. The Clinton administration arrested them. The Bush administration continued the awful, mindless, crimeless persecution for eight more years. But now comes the Changeman administration. Hooray! Oh, in late May, the Changeman administration filed a brief urging the Court to deny the Five a hearing, and on June 2, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told an Organization of American States meeting: “I want to emphasize the United States under President Obama is taking a completely new approach to our policy toward Cuba.”⁸

Another opportunity for Changeman to come to the rescue also involves Cuba — closing the Guantanamo prison. But our hero is once again displaying a woeful lack of political courage and imagination. If there’s good evidence that certain detainees are a danger to anyone, then try them in US civilian courts with full rights, a decent defense team, and excluding secret evidence and coerced confessions. If they’re found guilty — and with an American jury sitting in judgment of “terrorists”, this, in almost all cases, would be the verdict — then imprison them in one of America’s maximum security prisons, which already houses about 355 men labeled as “terrorists.”⁹ The new ones will not be any more of a danger in prison than the ones already there.

However, if they’re found innocent, then declare them free men. It would be much easier then to find a country to accept them, including the United States. Until now, the world has been told repeatedly by Washington that these men are “the worst of the worst.” Small wonder that no country or community wants them near. But if they’ve been tried and acquitted, this situation should change markedly.

So Mr. Obama, we’re waiting for you to step into a phone booth.

It’s part of America’s ideology to pretend that it doesn’t have any ideology.

Oh, a woman nominated to be a Supreme Court justice. A woman whose parents are from Puerto Rico. A Latina! A Latina Supreme Court justice! Oh, hooray for America!

Who cares? Clarence Thomas is a Supreme Court justice. He’s black. He’s as hopelessly reactionary as they come. No one should give a damn that Sonia Sotomayor is a woman with a Latin American background. All that counts is her politics. Her ideology. Her positions on important social and political issues. Yes, I know, we’re talking about the Law, the Majesty of the Law, judges who are scholars, impartial scholars, who study the fine points and the history of a law, experts on the Constitution of the United States, not swayed by today’s partisan squabbles but take the long view, looking at precedent, considering what precedent may be set for the future.

Don’t believe it. That may be true in the infrequent Supreme Court case where no ideological question at all is raised. Otherwise the judges are all biased human beings, appointed by a biased president, confirmed by biased members of the Senate.

Patrick Martin recently observed on the World Socialist Web Site: “For the past 12 years … under two Democratic presidents and one Republican, the post of US Secretary of State has been occupied by, in succession, a white woman, a black man, a black woman, and a white woman.”¹⁰ And they all loved the empire. When the empire called for it, they bombed, invaded, and killed; they overthrew, occupied, tortured, and lied; and swore allegiance to Israel and the corporations.

And now we have a black president. Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, or Stokely Carmichael he’s not. His policies and his appointments have all fallen in that area that runs from ever so slightly to the left of center to clear conservative and imperialist on the right. He’s more loath to being identified as, or collaborating with, progressives than with right-wingers. Team Obama sees the left as an eccentric old aunt who keeps showing up at family functions, making everyone uncomfortable and wishing she’d just go away.

America, and the world, have to grow up. Forget color. Forget ethnicity. Forget gender. Forget sexual orientation. Forget even the class the person comes from. Look at the class they serve. And understand that the person wouldn’t be in the position they are, or be nominated for the position, if there was any serious question about their loyalty to the capitalist ethic or American world domination.

It also matters not whether the president is comically inarticulate or whether he speaks in complete grammatical sentences. Keep your eye on the policies.

Obama

To the numerous fans of Barack Obama, on the left, in the middle, on the right, and to the apolitical Obamaniacs, my advice is to read Being There by Jerzy Kosinski, or see the film version of the same name starring Peter Sellers.

Also read The Emperor’s New Clothes by Hans Christian Andersen.

“Men go mad in herds, but only come to their senses one by one.” — Charles Mackay, 19th century Scottish journalist

1. Washington Post, May 26, 2009 book review
2. Washington Post, May 15, 2009
3. Associated Press, December 12, 2006
4. Associated Press, June 2, 2009
5. ”Does Google Censor Cuba?“
6. White House Press Office, April 19, 2009
7. ”Cuban Political Prisoners … in the United States“
8. Washington Post, June 3, 2009
9. ”There Are Already 355 Terrorists in American Prisons,” Slate Magazine, May 29, 2009
10. ”The fundamental social division is class, not race or gender,” World Socialist Web Site, May 28, 2009