Who Rules the World? (32 page)

To be sure, Israel faces the “existential threat” of Iranian pronouncements: Supreme Leader Khamenei and former president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad famously threatened it with destruction. Except that they didn’t—and if they had, it would have been of little moment.
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They predicted that “under God’s grace [the Zionist regime] will be wiped off the map” (according to another translation, Ahmadinejad says Israel “must vanish from the page of time,” citing a statement by the Ayatollah Khomeini during the period when Israel and Iran were tacitly allied). In other words, they hope that regime change will someday take place. Even that falls far short of the direct calls in both Washington and Tel Aviv for regime change in Iran, not to speak of the actions taken to implement regime change. These, of course, go back to the actual “regime change” of 1953, when the United States and Britain organized a military coup to overthrow Iran’s parliamentary government and install the dictatorship of the shah, who proceeded to amass one of the world’s worst human rights records. These crimes were known to readers of the reports of Amnesty International and other human rights organizations, but not to readers of the U.S. press, which has devoted plenty of space to Iranian human rights violations—but only since 1979, when the shah’s regime was overthrown. The instructive facts are documented carefully in a study by Mansour Farhang and William Dorman.
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None of this is a departure from the norm. The United States, as is well-known, holds the world championship title in regime change, and Israel is no laggard either. The most destructive of its invasions of Lebanon, in 1982, was explicitly aimed at regime change as well as at securing its hold on the occupied territories. The pretexts offered were thin and collapsed at once. That too is not unusual and pretty much independent of the nature of the society—from the laments in the Declaration of Independence about the “merciless Indian savages” to Hitler’s defense of Germany from the “wild terror” of the Poles.

No serious analyst believes that Iran would ever use, or even threaten to use, a nuclear weapon if it had one, and thereby face instant destruction. There is, however, real concern that a nuclear weapon might fall into jihadi hands—not from Iran, where the threat is minuscule, but from U.S. ally Pakistan, where it is very real. In the journal of the (British) Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House), two leading Pakistani nuclear scientists, Pervez Hoodbhoy and Zia Mian, write that increasing fears of “militants seizing nuclear weapons or materials and unleashing nuclear terrorism [have led to] … the creation of a dedicated force of over 20,000 troops to guard nuclear facilities. There is no reason to assume, however, that this force would be immune to the problems associated with the units guarding regular military facilities,” which have frequently suffered attacks with “insider help.”
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In brief, the problem is real, but is displaced to Iran thanks to fantasies concocted for other reasons.

Other concerns about the Iranian threat include its role as “the world’s leading supporter of terrorism,” which primarily refers to its support for Hizbollah and Hamas.
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Both of those movements emerged in resistance to U.S.-backed Israeli violence and aggression, which vastly exceeds anything attributed to these organizations. Whatever one thinks about them, or other beneficiaries of Iranian support, Iran hardly ranks high in support of terror worldwide, even within the Muslim world. Among Islamic states, Saudi Arabia is far in the lead as a sponsor of Islamic terror, not only through direct funding by wealthy Saudis and others in the Gulf but even more by the missionary zeal with which the Saudis promulgate their extremist Wahhabi-Salafi version of Islam through Koranic schools, mosques, clerics, and other means available to a religious dictatorship with enormous oil wealth. ISIS is an extremist offshoot of Saudi religious extremism and its fanning of jihadi flames.

In generation of Islamic terror, however, nothing can compare with the U.S. war on terror, which has helped to spread the plague from a small tribal area in the Afghanistan-Pakistan borderlands to a vast region from West Africa to Southeast Asia. The invasion of Iraq alone escalated terror attacks by a factor of seven in the first year, well beyond even what had been predicted by intelligence agencies.
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Drone warfare against marginalized and oppressed tribal societies also elicits demands for revenge, as ample evidence indicates.

Those two Iranian clients, Hizbollah and Hamas, also share the crime of winning the popular vote in the only free elections in the Arab world. Hizbollah is guilty of the even more heinous crime of compelling Israel to withdraw from its occupation of southern Lebanon in violation of Security Council orders dating back decades, an illegal regime of terror punctuated with episodes of extreme violence, murder, and destruction.

“FUELING INSTABILITY”

Another concern, voiced at the United Nations by U.S. Ambassador Samantha Power, is the “instability that Iran fuels beyond its nuclear program.”
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The United States will continue to scrutinize this misbehavior, she declared. In that, she echoed the assurance offered by Defense Secretary Ashton Carter while standing on Israel’s northern border that “we will continue to help Israel counter Iran’s malign influence” in supporting Hizbollah, and that the United States reserves the right to use military force against Iran as it deems appropriate.
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The way Iran “fuels instability” can be seen particularly dramatically in Iraq, where, among other crimes, it alone came at once to the aid of Kurds defending themselves from the ISIS invasion and where it is building a $2.5 billion power plant to try to bring electrical power back to its level before the U.S. invasion.
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Ambassador Power’s usage is standard: when the United States invades a country, resulting in hundreds of thousands killed and millions of refugees, along with barbarous torture and destruction that Iraqis compare to the Mongol invasions, leaving Iraq the unhappiest country in the world according to WIN/Gallup polls, meanwhile igniting sectarian conflict that is tearing the region to shreds and laying the basis for the ISIS monstrosity along with our Saudi ally—that is “stabilization.”
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Iran’s shameful actions are “fueling instability.” The farce of this standard usage sometimes reaches levels that are almost surreal, as when liberal commentator James Chace, former editor of
Foreign Affairs
, explained that the United States sought to “destabilize a freely elected Marxist government in Chile” because “we were determined to seek stability” under the Pinochet dictatorship.
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Others are outraged that Washington should negotiate at all with a “contemptible” regime like Iran’s, with its horrifying human rights record, and urge instead that we pursue “an American-sponsored alliance between Israel and the Sunni states.” So writes Leon Wieseltier, contributing editor to the venerable liberal journal the
Atlantic
, who can barely conceal his visceral hatred for all things Iranian.
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With a straight face, this respected liberal intellectual recommends that Saudi Arabia, which makes Iran look like a virtual paradise, and Israel, with its vicious crimes in Gaza and elsewhere, should ally to teach that country good behavior. Perhaps the recommendation is not entirely unreasonable when we consider the human rights records of the regimes the United States has imposed and supported throughout the world.

Though the Iranian government is no doubt a threat to its own people, it regrettably breaks no records in this regard, and does not descend to the level of favored U.S. allies. That, however, cannot be the concern of Washington, and surely not Tel Aviv or Riyadh.

It might also be useful to recall—as surely Iranians do—that not a day has passed since 1953 when the United States was not harming Iranians. As soon as Iranians overthrew the hated U.S.-imposed regime of the shah in 1979, Washington at once turned to supporting Saddam Hussein’s murderous attack on Iran. President Reagan went so far as to deny Saddam’s major crime, his chemical warfare assault on Iraq’s Kurdish population, which he blamed on Iran instead.
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When Saddam was tried for crimes under U.S. auspices, that horrendous crime (as well as others in which the United States was complicit) was carefully excluded from the charges, which were restricted to one of his minor crimes, the murder of 148 Shiites in 1982, a footnote to his gruesome record.
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After the Iran-Iraq war ended, the United States continued to support Saddam Hussein, Iran’s primary enemy. President George H. W. Bush even invited Iraqi nuclear engineers to the United States for advanced training in weapons production, an extremely serious threat to Iran.
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Sanctions against Iran were intensified, including against foreign firms dealing with it, and actions were initiated to bar it from the international financial system.
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In recent years the hostility has extended to sabotage, the murder of nuclear scientists (presumably by Israel), and cyberwar, openly proclaimed with pride.
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The Pentagon regards cyberwar as an act of war, justifying a military response, as does NATO, which affirmed in September 2014 that cyberattacks may trigger the collective defense obligations of the NATO powers—when we are the target, that is, not the perpetrators.
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“THE PRIME ROGUE STATE”

It is only fair to add that there have been breaks in this pattern. President George W. Bush provided several significant gifts to Iran by destroying its major enemies, Saddam Hussein and the Taliban. He even placed Iran’s Iraqi enemy under its influence after the U.S. defeat, which was so severe that Washington had to abandon its officially declared goals of establishing permanent military bases (“enduring camps”) and ensuring that U.S. corporations would have privileged access to Iraq’s vast oil resources.
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Do Iranian leaders intend to develop nuclear weapons today? We can decide for ourselves how credible their denials are, but that they had such intentions in the past is beyond question, since it was asserted openly on the highest authority, which informed foreign journalists that Iran would develop nuclear weapons “certainly, and sooner than one thinks.”
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The father of Iran’s nuclear energy program and former head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization was confident that the leadership’s plan “was to build a nuclear bomb.”
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The CIA also reported that it had “no doubt” Iran would develop nuclear weapons if neighboring countries did (as they have).
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All of this was under the shah, the “highest authority” just quoted—that is, during the period when high U.S. officials (Cheney, Rumsfeld, Kissinger and others) were urging the shah to proceed with nuclear programs and pressuring universities to accommodate these efforts.
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As part of these efforts, my own university, MIT, made a deal with the shah to admit Iranian students to the nuclear engineering program in return for grants from the shah—over the very strong objections of the student body, but with comparably strong faculty support, in a meeting that older faculty will doubtless remember well.
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Asked later why he supported such programs under the shah but opposed them more recently, Kissinger responded honestly that Iran was an ally then.
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Putting aside absurdities, what is the real threat of Iran that inspires such fear and fury? A natural place to turn for an answer is, again, U.S. intelligence. Recall its analysis that Iran poses no military threat, that its strategic doctrines are defensive, and that its nuclear programs (with no effort to produce bombs, as far as intelligence can determine) are “a central part of its deterrent strategy.”

Who, then, would be concerned by an Iranian deterrent? The answer is plain: the rogue states that rampage in the region and do not want to tolerate any impediment to their reliance on aggression and violence. In the lead in this regard are the United States and Israel, with Saudi Arabia trying its best to join the club with its invasion of Bahrain (to support the crushing of a reform movement there) and now its murderous assault on Yemen, accelerating a growing humanitarian catastrophe in that country.

For the United States, the characterization is familiar. Fifteen years ago, the prominent political analyst Samuel Huntington warned in the establishment journal
Foreign Affairs
that for much of the world the United States was “becoming the rogue superpower … the single greatest external threat to their societies.”
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Shortly after, his words were echoed by Robert Jervis, the president of the American Political Science Association: “In the eyes of much of the world, in fact, the prime rogue state today is the United States.”
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As we have seen, global opinion supports this judgment by a substantial margin.

Furthermore, the mantle is worn with pride. That is the clear meaning of the insistence of the leadership and the political class that the United States reserves the right to resort to force if it determines, unilaterally, that Iran is violating some commitment. This policy is of long standing for liberal Democrats, and by no means restricted to Iran. The Clinton doctrine affirmed that the United States is entitled to resort to the “unilateral use of military power” even to ensure “uninhibited access to key markets, energy supplies, and strategic resources,” let alone alleged “security” or “humanitarian” concerns.
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Adherence to various versions of this doctrine has been well confirmed in practice, as need hardly be discussed among people willing to look at the facts of current history.

These are among the critical matters that should be the focus of attention in analyzing the nuclear deal at Vienna.