Don’t Bomb Iran

• Bush does not want to be “the president who let Iran get the bomb”
• The US, through John Bolton, has been trying to kick the Non-Proliferation Treaty to death for some years, and to diminish the power of the UN, insisting that unilateral (or coalition) action is the way to maintain international peace.
• There are 35 or 40 countries which have nuclear power and could build a bomb within a few years, according to the IAEA, because the technologies of bombs and power plants are very similar. As North Korea did, there is little to stop a country from building a power station under the NPT, then leaving the NPT and building a bomb. Commentators in the US believe that US military power might deter proliferators where the NPT does not. But such deterrence will only work if the US has actually blown up a reactor somewhere, and Iran would be a perfect example
• The US says it has secured G8 approval, EU approval, and Australian approval, for the use of force to prevent nuclear proliferation.
• Israel has threatened for years to bomb Iran’s Bushehr reactor, before it is commissioned, concerned that it could produce a plutonium bomb. No doubt the US shares this concern. But if, somehow, Iran is pressured to stop it current uranium enrichment plans by the UN, the ‘threat’ from the Bushehr reactor will remain. Only a ‘preventive’ air strike will remove that ‘threat’.
• An air-strike could be a ‘quick and easy win’ in the war on terror, popular at home with a sceptical populace, involving no long-term and deadly commitment of US troops, successfully demonstrating the might and effectiveness of the biggest armed forces on the planet.
• The Bush Administration has developed a new force for ‘instant’ global strike capacity which the US armed forces have never exercised. Previously, only the nuclear Strategic Command (STRATCOM) was ready for a quick hit, with thousands of nuclear warheads at hair-trigger alert. As Bill Arkin reported, in 2004 STRATCOM was tasked with instant readiness for conventional AND nuclear attacks, especially on countries of proliferation concern.
• The US believes that Iran supports Palestinian groups it considers to be “terrorist” organisations, and it is US policy under the War on Terror to use preventive strikes against terrorist groups and the countries which support them.
• The Bush Doctrine of pre-emptive strikes (more correctly preventive strikes) is currently illegal under international law because it is unprovoked agression, completely contrary to the UN Charter. But International law is customary law – if preventive wars become common, the law will change; so it is in US interests to do more of them. Unprovoked attack went unchallenged with the Clinton/NATO attack on Kosovo, as the Australian foreign minister Downer happily noted. It was used in Iraq, and the US has not been punished by the international community for that. Further usage of preventive strikes will help turn the Bush Doctrine into international law.
• The Beiruit bombings of US Marines: Iran has recently been found guilty in a US court of organising it.
• The Iran hostage crisis, which remains an open sore in US politics.
• The Bush doctrine of regime change in middle eastern states, through destablisation and military action.
• Oh, and Iran’s oil… they have a lot of it. And Iran is talking of starting, in March 2006, a new international trading market for oil contracts, to be traded in both Euros and dollars,which some economists see as a potential threat to the US economy, given the huge national debt and the fact that almost all oil is traded in dollars.

Even more alarming than the above list of indications that an air attack on Iran is planned are two more indications.

• US nuclear weapons policy has also recently been redefined – among other things, to allow the President to use nuclear weapons to prevent proliferation, and also to allow the use of nuclear weapons simply to demonstrate that the US is prepared to use nuclear weapons. The US debate urge to make nukes ‘usable’ is undeniably there. In which light, a small nuclear bunker buster attack on a remote nuclear facility, or perhaps to ‘prevent’ an Iranian counterattack on US forces in Iraq with chemical weapons could justify opening the age of ‘usable nukes’.
• There are reports in neo-conservative think tanks that the Bush administration has plans to nuke Iran if there is another 9/11 style attack on the USA – even if Iran is not implicated. If true, this would be a strong indication of a willingness to use any excuse to attack Iran, just as it seems there was such a willingness on Iraq.