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WHO RULES: THE ISRAEL LOBBY
OR UNCLE SAM?
The answer
at last! Uri Avnery, former Knesset member, assesses the Lobby's
power. "If the Israeli government wanted a law tomorrow
annulling the 10 Commandments, 95 U.S. Senators (at least) would
sign the bill forthwith." But, yes, in the end the dog wags
the tail.Fifty
years ago Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" blew the cobwebs
out of millions of young minds and drove a stake through the
heart of Eisenhower's America. Lenni Brenner remembers Ginsberg
in the East Village.Dr Mengele died in exile, in disguise. Dr Ishii
died rich and recognized, in his own Tokyo home. Christopher
Reed on Japanese WW2 medical tortures and how the U.S. covered
them up.CounterPunch
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Now!
Ringed
by Nuclear States, Iran's Atomic Program is Scarcely Unreasonable.
So Why has Bush Manufactured a Crisis?
High-Octane Rocket-Rattling
Against Tehran Won't Work
By TARIQ ALI
Till now, what has prevented the crisis
in Iraq from becoming a total debacle for the United States has
been the open collaboration of the Iranian clerics. Iranian foreign
policy - fragmentary and opportunist - has always been determined
by the needs and interests of the clerical state rather than
any principled anti-imperialist strategy. In the past, this has
led to a de facto collaboration with Washington in Afghanistan
and Iraq. During the Iran-Iraq war, the clerics had no hesitation
in buying arms from the Israeli regime to fight Iraq, then backed
by Britain and the US. In the wake of the Anglo-American invasion
of Iraq - hoping, no doubt, that clearing the path for the overthrow
of Saddam Hussein and Mullah Omar might have won them a respite
- the regime took a tougher stance on the nuclear question.
The Bush administration appears
to be psyching itself up for a safe strike against Iran either
by itself or via the Israelis, whose new leaders have referred
to the Iranian president as a psychopath and a new Hitler. Why
has Washington manufactured this crisis? The hypocrisy of Bush,
Blair, Chirac or Olmert - their own states armed with thousands
of nuclear weapons - making a casus belli of what are, by all
accounts, primitive gropings on Iran's part towards the technology
necessary for the lowest grade of nuclear self-defence, hardly
needs to be spelled out. So long as these powers are allowed
to enlarge their nuclear armouries unimpeded, why should Tehran
not?
The country is not only ringed
by atomic states (India, Pakistan, China, Russia, Israel), it
also faces a string of American bases with potential or actual
nuclear stockpiles in Qatar, Iraq, Turkey, Uzbekistan and Afghanistan.
Nuclear-armed US aircraft carriers and submarines patrol the
waters off its southern coast. Historically, Iran has every reason
to fear outside threats. Its elected government was overthrown
with covert Anglo-American
aid in 1953, and the secular opposition destroyed. From 1980
to 1988, the western powers abetted Saddam Hussein's onslaught,
in which hundreds of thousands of Iranians died. More than 300
Iraqi missiles were launched at Iranian cities and economic targets,
especially the oil industry. In the war's final stages, the US
destroyed nearly half the Iranian navy in the Gulf and, for good
measure, shot down a crowded civilian passenger plane.
For the clerical state, the
war on terror has been the best and the worst of times. Oil prices
have soared. Enemy regimes on both sides, Baghdad and Kabul,
have been overthrown. The Iraqi Shia parties that they have been
fostering for years are now in office. Washington has been reliant
on their help to sustain its occupations both there and in Afghanistan.
Yet social tensions in Iran are high. In this context, the nuclear
issue is one of the regime's few unifying projects. It is worth
recalling that the Iranian nuclear programme began under the
Shah with technology offered by the Americans. Khomeini put the
project on hold, considering it un-Islamic. Operations were restarted,
with Russians later taking over construction of the light-water
reactors at Bushehr begun by the West Germans in the 1970s. From
the start, Iran, like Germany, the Netherlands or Japan, has
wanted its programme to take in the full nuclear cycle, including
uran! ium enrichment; Russia has several times threatened to
impose conditions on fuel deliveries. Enrichment centrifuges
were surreptitiously imported from neighbouring Pakistan; not
the process, but the failure to report it, was in contravention
of International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) agreements.
There is no evidence that Iran
is much closer to nuclear weapons now than was Iraq in September
2002, when Blair and Cheney assured the world that Baghdad represented
a "genuine nuclear threat". Reports in 2003 by a somewhat
demented sect, the Mojahedin e-Khalq, of preliminary nuclear
research at the Natanz installation were no such proof. But in
the competitive scramble by European powers to enhance their
standing with Washington after the invasion of Iraq, France,
Germany and Britain were keen to prove their mettle by forcing
extra agreements on Tehran. The Khatami regime immediately capitulated.
In December 2003, they signed the "Additional Protocol"
demanded by the EU3, agreeing to a "voluntary suspension"
of the right to enrichment guaranteed under the Non-Proliferation
Treaty (NPT).
Within three months, the IAEA
was condemning them for having failed to ratify it; in June 2004,
its inspectors produced examples of Iranian enrichment work,
perfectly legal under the NPT, but ruled out by the Additional
Protocol. Israel has boasted of its intention to "destroy
Natanz" - the contrast to its stealth bombing of Iraq's
Osirak reactor in 1981 a measure of the new balance of forces.
In the summer of 2004, a large bi-partisan majority in the US
Congress passed a resolution for "all appropriate measures"
to prevent an Iranian weapons programme and there was speculation
about an "October surprise" before the 2004 presidential
poll. Plans were thus well advanced before Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's
victory in the June 2005 Iranian presidential election.
Ahmadinejad reaped the vote
against Khatami's miserable record between 1997 and 2005. Economic
conditions had worsened and Khatami was prepared to defend the
rights of foreign investors, but not those of independent newspapers
or protesting students. Manoeuvring ineffectually between contradictory
pressures, he exhausted his moral credit. Contrary to some reports,
Ahmadinejad has not so far imposed any new puritanical clampdown
on social mores. Instead, the most likely constituency to be
disappointed is Ahmadinejad's own: the millions of young, working-class
jobless, crammed into overcrowded living conditions, in desperate
need of a national development policy that neither neoliberalism
nor Islamist voluntarism will provide.
Nor is fundamentalist backwardness
exhibited in the denial of the Nazi genocide against the Jews
and the threat to obliterate Israel, a basis for any foreign
policy. To face up to the enemies ranged against Iran requires
an intelligent and far-sighted strategy - not the current rag-bag
of opportunism and manoeuvre, determined by the immediate interests
of the clerics.
Clearing the way for the overthrow
of the Iraqi Ba'ath and Afghan Taliban regimes and backing the
US occupations has bought no respite. The US undersecretary of
state has spoken of "ratcheting up the pressure". Israeli
defence minister Shaul Mofaz has said that "Israel will
not be able to accept an Iranian nuclear capability, and it must
have the capability to defend itself with all that this implies,
and we are preparing." Hillary Clinton accused the Bush
administration of "downplaying the Iranian threat"
and called for pressure on Russia and China to impose sanctions
on Tehran. Chirac has spoken of using French nuclear weapons
against such a "rogue state". Perhaps it is simply
high-octane rocket-rattling, the aim being to frighten Tehran
into submission. Bullying is unlikely to succeed. Will the west
then embark on a new war? If so, the battlefield might stretch
from the Tigris to the Oxus and without any guarantee of success.
CounterPunch
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