January 23, 2010
On 16 November, the attempts by Israel and the US Administration to open the way to new sanctions against Iran ended with a new failure due to Russia and China´s rejection. China sent a low-level official to the meeting of the “Iran Six” and everybody saw this gesture as a negative to discuss US-sponsored sanctions. For its part, Rusia has made it clear that the time of the negotiations is not over and that it wants to debate Iranian proposals on fuel exchange. Of course, Germany, the UK and France followed US stance. Since Nicolas Sarkozy became French President, France has just become a docile Israeli and US puppet.
Fortunately, Russia and China have understood that US interests are opposed to theirs and they are not ready to sell out a country which plays a significant role in the strategic balance in the Middle East and the world. Well aware that Washington is using the nuclear issue for its own strategic purposes, both Moscow and Beijing have been resistant to further UN sanctions. United States Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has tried to shore up Russian support for tougher sanctions but she has openly rebuffed by Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, who labeled as “counter-productive” even the mere threat of sanctions at this delicate moment in the Iran nuclear standoff.
Lavrov reiterated this stance on 22 January and called for more diplomacy on Iran, warning against imposing fresh sanctions against the country's nuclear energy section for delays over a fuel exchange deal. Actually, Iran has not opposed to a UN-sponsored proposal to send 75% of its stockpile of low-enriched uranium (LEU) to Russia and France for conversion into fuel for a research reactor in Tehran. Russia was supposed to enrich Iran’s LEU to 20% (Iran’s LEU is at 3.8% level), and France to convert it into fuel rods. Iran is open to a simultaneous exchange of fuel rods for its research reactor of Tehran with Iran’s LEU although the Iranian government has demanded a phased exchange in order to guarantee that it will receive the fuel without problems or delays. However, for some reason, the Western countries have rejected this phased exchange.
“If our logic is to punish Iran or if we take up the posture of the offended … this will not be a sober approach,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told reporters. “We must not take any steps that could open up risks to the work of the (International Atomic Energy) Agency in this country,” he said.
For his part, Russian state-owned nuclear corporation Rosatom head Sergei Kiriyenko told reporters on 21 January that Russia definitely would complete Iran’s Bushehr nuclear power plant in 2010, and that “everything is going according to schedule.” Russia says the plant is purely civilian and cannot be used for any weapons program as it will come under International Atomic Energy Agency supervision. Moreover, according to a bilateral agreement, Iran will return all spent fuel rods to Russia.
Iran has always claimed that its nuclear program is only for peaceful purposes. The country has signed the Non Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which allows signatory members to develop a civilian nuclear program, including uranium enrichment. Therefore, Iran has done nothing illegal. Its nuclear sites are under the strict control of the International Atomic Energy Agencia (IAEA). Both current IAEA head Yukiya Amano and his antecessor Mohamed ElBaradei have clearly claimed that there is no evidence Iran is manufacturing nuclear weapons.
Actually, Iran is seeking to transform the world towards a more just order. In other words, it is an inherent logic of the post-revolutionary state to resist the unjust global hegemony and join other nations seeking to restructure the world order to make it more equitable. One of the aspects of the world order, according to Iran, is the destruction of the nuclear stockpiles that big powers, which have been accumulating for decades and failed to heed their own nuclear NPT commitments.
Iran’s late Leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini disavowed any ambition of the country to join the nuclear club. Recently, the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad have reiterated that possessing nuclear weapons goes against the principles of the Islamic Revolution.
In contrast, Israel is the only country in the Middle East having nuclear arms -more than 200 warheads according to international experts and analysts- and has refused to sign the NPT or to allow the IAEA to inspect its nuclear sites. However, all this is not an obstacle for the political, economic and military cooperation between Israel and Western countries. The US continues strengthening its partnership with Israel and refuses to encourage Israel in any way to eliminate its nuclear weapons and delivery capabilities, or even to talk about the matter.
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, on a visit to Iran in October, was sharply critical of the West’s double standards on the nuclear issue. “Those who criticise Iran’s nuclear programme continue to have nuclear weapons,” he observed. Erdogan demanded that those countries calling for “arrogant sanctions” should first give up their own nuclear arsenals.
Taking into account that the United States will probably be unable to persuade China and Russia to pass sanctions against Iran in the UN Security Council, the best course for the United States would be now recognize Iran´s rights as long as the country fulfill its obligations as a member of the NTP treaty, but it would mean a significant change for a state, which normally acts as thug in the international sphere and only knows the language of threats and coercion.
Many American experts who support a rational Iran policy feel disappointed by the “take-it-or-leave it” Western approach, which belies Barack Obama´s early statements about a honest diplomacy towards Iran based on mutual respect and mutual interests. Obama declared in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech that nations like Iran and North Korea could not be allowed to “game the system”. As he escalated the US-led war in Afghanistan and maintained the huge US nuclear arsenal, the president hypocritically declared: “Those who seek peace cannot stand idly by as nations arm themselves for nuclear war.”
Obama has bowed to the hawks, who are pressuring him to move towards harsher measures and to keep the nuclear crisis open. Obama even said in the past that he would even support embargo on refined oil and gasoline, a move which has been seen by some experts as a first step towards a military conflict with Iran. According to a recent New York Times report, “the Obama administration is talking with allies" about “the possibility of imposing an extreme economic sanction against Iran” if the country doesn't respond to US demands.
The Senate Banking Committee held a series of hearings on the economic sanctions on Iran and to evaluate the pros and cons of the so-called Refined Petroleum Sanctions Act (RPSA), a bill designed to limit Iran's access to gasoline and other refined petroleum products. The hearings were chaired by Senator Evan Bayh, the lead sponsor of the RPSA. Two of the four panelist were neocon scholars, Mathew Levitt of the Washington Institute and Danielle Pletka of the American Enterprise Institute. The panel concluded that a “crippling sanctions” policy was the best way to deal with the Iranian government.
The pro-Israeli lobby and neocons in the Congress, think tanks and media are also working hard for the approval of the “crippling” sanctions on Iran if this country does not renounce its nuclear rights. The main organization of the pro-Israeli lobby, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), stressed that “Iran's continued defiance of UN Security Council resolutions demanding immediate suspension of Tehran's nuclear fuel work ... calls for concerted and forceful sanctions to compel (it) to change its behavior.” Mark Kirk, an RPSA co-sponsor, is a top recipient of campaign funds from political action committees closely linked to AIPAC.
Peter Symonds denounced in the World Socialist Web Site that in its anti-Iranian campaign, the US is using the propaganda of some Iranian exile opposition groups, such as the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) which recently told the New York Times that Iran had “a group of factories” buried in mountains east of Tehran that specialize in “manufacturing nuclear warheads”. All this recalls the way in which the Bush administration and US media used “intelligence” provided by Iraqi exiles on the non existent “weapons of mass destruction” to justify the 2003 invasion of Iraq. The NCRI is connected to the People’s Mujahideen or MEK, a terrorist group that has carried out deadly attacks inside Iran. UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter has pointed out in his book “Target Iran” that the NCRI has extensive links with the Israeli intelligence, which no doubt continues to provide disinformation about Iran through these groups of by other means.
Nevertheless, there are no hopes that sanctions can be effective. Iran does not have significant economic links with the United States but it has deep and large economic and energy relations with many countries in the world. The last Iranian success in this area was the recent signature of an agreement with Turkmenistan to build a pipeline which will link Turkmen gas fields with Iranian facilities. Iran is certainly going to play a decisive role in the new Eurasian energy architecture and this will be a good shield against any punitive sanctions of a declining power as the United States. “We have always thought that the way to avoid this type of problem is multilaterally. If you cannot bring Russia and China into the fold it won't accomplish anything,” reckoned Bill Reinsch, president of the US National Foreign Trade Council, who was quoted by Inter Press Service (IPS).
This reality is also recognized by former senior US Treasury official and Zionist Jew Avi Jorisch, who has recently written an article in the neocon paper The Wall Street Journal where he claimed that the time had come to declare a financial war against the Islamic Republic in order to hinder its nuclear efforts. However, he regretted that the US can do nothing without “enlisting the international community to the cause” and said with dismay that India, a US ally, “might be helping Iran in the process of circumventing US sanctions” and that China “will likely curb the imposition of sanctions through the UN Security Council.”
The escalating campaign against Iran is not limited to economic sanctions, but includes discussion of the “military option”. Like the Bush administration, Obama has not taken any options off the table and is recklessly setting course for a conflict that would not only further inflame the region but risk pushing the US into an unprecedented disaster.
Some US media outlets are also openly promoting a US military aggression against Iran. The neoconservative editorial board at The Wall Street Journal is supporting a extremely harsh line, even “military strikes,” against Iran. “Until the president, his advisers, and the Europeans realize that only punitive sanctions or military strikes will force Iran to reconsider its nuclear ambitions, an emboldened Islamic Republic will continue to march confidently toward a bomb over the wreck of … Barack Obama’s best intentions,” the Journal wrote.
However, the United States, which is incapable of winning the Afghanistan war, is seeing a reactivation of the anti-US insurgency in Iraq and has an economy that is getting weaker due to a disastrous recession and an acute social crisis, is not certainly in a position to threaten Iran seriously with both sanctions or a war, especially taking into account Iran´s influence in the Middle East and the world. Therefore, the US should have second thoughts on its Iran policy, which has proved to be a resounding failure as the recent meeting of the P5+1 group in New York has showed.
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