- With the United States having initiated
wars in violation of the UN Charter, and hence engaged in the "supreme
international crime,"1 against Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, and Iraq
in 1999, 2001, and 2003, one might have expected that its commencement
of a fourth aggression only a few years later against Iran would arouse
the UN, EU, other international institutions and NGOs, and even the supposedly
moral and independent Free Press, to serious protest and counter-action,
including referral to the UN Security Council under Chapter VII's "threat
of peace" articles and support of possible diplomatic and economic
sanctions. This has not happened, and in fact the Bush administration has
successfully mobilized the UN, whose "primary responsibility"
is the "maintenance of international peace and security," and
the EU, as well as the Free Press, to facilitate its fourth attack.
-
- We say that the fourth aggression is
already underway, because once again, as in the Iraq case, the United
States has been attacking Iran for many months, and not just with verbal
insults and threats. It has been flying unmanned aerial surveillance drones
over Iran since 2004; it has infiltrated combat and reconnaissance teams
into Iran "to collect targeting data and to establish contact with
anti-government ethnic minority groups" (Seymour Hersh);2 it has
bestowed an ambiguous "protected" status upon the Mujahedin-e
Khalq, a group which, since 1997, the U.S. Department of State has designated
a Foreign Terrorist Organization, but a group that the Washington regime
now uses to launch cross-border attacks on Iran from within U.S.-occupied
Iraq;3 and it and its Israeli client have repeatedly threatened larger
scale and more open attacks. This pre-invasion aggression was an important
feature of the overall aggression against Iraq, where the US and British
greatly increased their "spikes of activity" with massive bombing
well before the March 19, 2003 invasion4-major acts of war and aggression
begun as early as April 2002, that were almost wholly ignored by the Free
Press and "international community."
-
- What is mind-boggling in all this is
that new attacks and threats by a country that is in the midst of a serial
aggression program, that runs a well documented and widely condemned global
gulag of torture,5 that has committed major war crimes in Iraq-Fallujah
may well replace Guernica as a symbol of murderous warfare unleashed against
civilians6-and that openly declares itself exempt from international law
and states that the UN is only relevant when it supports U.S. policy,7
is not only not condemned for its Iran aggression, but is able to enlist
support for it in the EU, UN and global media. This enlistment of support
occurs despite the further fact that it is now generally recognized that
the Bush and Blair administrations lied their way into the Iraq invasion-occupation
(but still quickly obtained UN and EU acceptance of the occupation and
ensuing ruthless pacification program),8 and that they cynically misused
the inspections program, all of which makes the new accommodation to the
aggression-in-process and planned larger attack truly frightening.
-
- The mechanism by which this is accomplished
by the aggressor state is to cry-up an allegedly dire threat that Iran
might be embarking on a program to obtain nuclear weapons-it might be
doing this secretively, and although it has submitted itself to IAEA inspections
for the past three years, it has not been 100 percent cooperative with
the Agency.9 Combining this with demonization,10 intensive and repeated
expressions of indignation and fear, and threats to do something about
the intolerable threat, the Washington regime has managed to produce
a contrived "crisis," with huge spikes in media attention and
supportive expressions of concern and actions by the UN, IAEA, and international
community.11 These groups join the aggressor partly to avoid offending
it, but also to try to constrain its determination to get its way-but
in the process they accept its premises that there is a real threat and
hence give at least tacit support to its aggression program, and sometimes
more. On the home front, with the acceptance of the seriousness of the
manufactured crisis by the mainstream media and Democrats, and with leading
politicos like Hillary Clinton and Evan Bayh even egging Bush on, the
noise creates its own self-fulfilling pressures on the leadership that
manufactured the crisis, who now must "do something" about it
to avoid political loss.12
-
- This time, the EU appears to be cooperating
even more fully in the developing aggression against Iran than it did
in the Iraq case. Although Iran has an absolute and "inalienable"
right to enrich uranium under NPT rules (i.e., the NPT's sole condition
is that the enrichment can only be "for peaceful purposes"),
and although the NPT imposes upon other parties to the treaty the obligation
to "facilitatethe fullest possible exchange of equipment, materials
and scientific and technological information for the peaceful uses of
nuclear energy,"13 under British, French and German urging Iran,
in November 2004, agreed "on a voluntary basis to continue and extend
its suspension to include all enrichment related and reprocessing activities,"
while these states agreed to continue negotiations in good faith for the
sake of an agreement that "will provide objective guarantees that
Iran's nuclear programme is exclusively for peaceful purposes,"
and "firm guarantees on nuclear, technological and economic cooperation
and firm commitments on security issues."14
-
- But subsequent stages of negotiations
foundered mainly because the three EU states could not provide Iran with
guarantees on security-related issues without also securing U.S. guarantees
for the same-and not only were U.S. guarantees never forthcoming, but Washington
and Israel escalated their threats instead. Moreover, it is the longstanding
U.S. position that "no enrichment in Iran is permissible,"
in the words of U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton. "The
reason for that," he added, "is that even a small so-called
research enrichment program could give Iran the possibility of mastering
the technical deficiencies it's currently encountering in its program.
Once Iran has the scientific and technological capability to do even laboratory
size enrichment, that knowledge could be replicated in industrial-size
enrichment activities elsewhere, that's why we've felt very strongly that
no enrichment inside Iran should be permitted, and that remains our position."15
In short, the United States unilaterally refuses to allow Iran its rights
granted it by the NPT.
-
- Now some 18 months later, a U.S.-led
consortium of states has introduced a draft resolution within the UN Security
Council with the intent of imposing upon Iran a deadline for terminating
all indigenous "enrichment-related and reprocessing activities"
(pars. 1-2), as well as calling on all states to prevent the transfer
of the technology and the expertise "that could contribute to Iran's
enrichment-related and reprocessing activities and missile program"
(par. 4)-thereby following the U.S. lead and criminalizing Iran's and
only Iran's pursuit of its "inalienable" rights under Article
IV of the NPT, and treating Iran's otherwise legal, NPT-sanctioned enrichment
program as a Chapter VII threat to international peace and security. Equally
striking, this draft resolution also expresses the Security Council's
"intention to consider such further measures as may be necessary
to ensure compliance with this resolution" (par. 7).16 This is exactly
the kind of phraseology that, if adopted, the Washington regime would have
be eager to interpret as a use-of-force type resolution, regardless of
whether other members of the Security Council went along with it.
-
- We regard the terms of this draft resolution
as well as the general thrust of British, French, German, and European
Union diplomacy on the Iranian nuclear issue to be a perfect accommodation
to the needs of the aggressor state, which openly denies Iran its "inalienable"
rights under NPT rules. This also constitutes a death-blow-by-politicization
to the NPT and a gross abuse of the functions and powers of the Security
Council, all in deference and service to a program in violation of the
most basic principle of the UN Charter-that all members "shall settle
their international disputes by peaceful means" and refrain from
the "threat or use of force" (Article 2).
-
- Since the spring of 2003, U.S. power
has produced a steady and indignant focus on Iran's alleged foot-dragging
on inspections. As in the case of Iraq's failure through March 2003 to
prove that it did not possess any "weapons of mass destruction"
(WMD), the U.S.-driven allegations and inspections regime channeled through
the IAEA have focused on Iran's parallel failure to disprove a negative-namely,
that Iran prove that it is not secretly engaging in practices that are
prohibited under the NPT and subsequent Safeguards Agreement (May 15,
1974) and the Additional Protocols (signed December 18, 2003, though only
observed "on a voluntary basis"). Moreover, throughout the current
38-month cycle of allegations and inspections to which the IAEA has now
subjected Iran, the IAEA has repeatedly adopted a phraseology to the effect
that the IAEA is "unable to confirm the absence of undeclared nuclear
material and activities inside Iran"-an inherently politicized condition
that no state would be capable of meeting, no matter what it agreed to
do, and whose application depends ultimately on the strength of the political
forces that pressure the IAEA to continue the search.17 With enough political
pressure, no amount of "transparency" and "confidence-building"
measures on the part of the accused state can meet it, as was evident
in the Iraq case. And as long as the IAEA reports that it is unable to
confirm the absence of undeclared nuclear material and activities inside
Iran, Iran is helpless before the IAEA's negative condition.
-
- The "threat" and crisis have
been sustained in the media by the use of patriotic and fear-mongering
frames and suppressions of relevant fact that may even be more brazen
and misleading than those justifying the invasion of Iraq. The crisis-supporting
frames are: (1) that Iran is a dangerous theocratic state, with an irrational
and unstable political and clerical leadership that has supported terrorists
and threatened Israel and is therefore not to be trusted with a nuclear
program; (2) that it has been secretive about its nuclear program, has
not been fully cooperative with the inspections program of the IAEA, and
that the reason for this secrecy is Iran's intention to develop nuclear
weapons; (3) that its acquisition of a nuclear weapons capability would
be intolerable, would destabilize the Middle East if not the whole of
Western Civilization, and must be stopped.
-
- In sustaining these frames it is necessary
to suppress major facts, such as:
-
- (1) that there is no proof that Iran
plans to go beyond the civilian uses of nuclear materials to which it
is entitled under the NPT and the IAEA has never claimed that it has evidence
of such weapons efforts or plans;
-
- (2) that both the United States and
Israel possess large and usable nuclear arsenals,18 and both have attacked
other countries in violation of the UN Charter, which Iran has not yet
done;
-
- (3) that Iran is far less dangerous
than Israel and the United States because it is very much weaker than
the two that threaten it, and could only use nuclear weapons in self-defense-offensive
use would be suicidal, which is not the case should the United States and
Israel attack Iran;
-
- (4) that Iran was secretive about its
nuclear program because it recognized that the United States and Israel
would have opposed it bitterly, but Iran at least did sign up with the
NPT and has allowed numerous intrusive inspections, whereas Israel was
allowed to develop a nuclear weapons program secretly, with U.S., French
and Norwegian aid, refused to join the NPT, and remains outside the inspections
system;19
-
- (5) that both the United States and
Israel are virtual theocratic states, profoundly influenced by religious
parties whose leaders are arrogant, racist, and militaristic, and who
have posed persistent threats to international peace and security;
-
- (6) that both the United States and
Israel have supported terrorists on a larger scale than Iran (e.g., Posada,
Bosch and the Cuban terrorist network, the Nicaraguan contras, Savimbi
and UNITA, the South Lebanon Army, among many others); and
-
- (7) that it is the United States and
Israel that have destabilized the Middle East, by aggression and ethnic
cleansing in violation of international law and by forcing a huge imbalance
in which only Israel is allowed nuclear weapons among the countries of
the Middle East, a condition which allowed Israel to invade Lebanon and
enables it to ethnically cleanse the West Bank without threat of retaliation.
-
- A first alternative-frame that might
be used but is not to be found in the mainstream media is based on the
fact that, year-in and year-out, the United States has been a chronic
violator of the NPT's Article VI requirement that all parties "pursue
negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation
of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament,
and on a treaty on general and complete disarmament under strict and effective
international control." In the context of the U.S.-driven accusations
about Iran's violations of the NPT, it is worth emphasizing that in a
1996 decision by the International Court of Justice, the fourteen judges
on the Court ruled unanimously that "There exists an obligation to
pursue in good faith and bring to a conclusion negotiations leading to
nuclear disarmament in all its aspects under strict and effective international
control."20 The United States has brazenly ignored this ruling, refusing
to countenance any form of disarmament or international control over its
sovereign rights on questions of war and peace, openly working on improving
its nuclear weapons,21 and even threatening to use them against Iran.22
-
- Hence the United States not only has
unclean hands, but its own illegal policies and threats pose a clear and
present danger that the UN and international community should be addressing
right now. Furthermore, not only is Iran not an immediate threat, but
given the U.S. threat to Iran and the U.S. refusal to work toward the
elimination of nuclear weapons and to pledge non-use against nuclear weapons-free
countries like Iran, Iran has a moral right to try to acquire such weapons
for self-defense. Noting what the Americans had done to a nuclear-weaponless
Iraq in 2003, the Israeli historian Martin van Creveld has written, "Had
the Iranians not tried to build nuclear weapons, they would be crazy."23
-
- This point is reinforced by a second
alternative frame: namely, that the United States is using the Iran nuclear
threat as a gambit closely analogous to the WMD claim that it employed
as the lying rationale for the invasion-occupation of Iraq. As before,
the gambit is a cover for a desire to force a "regime change"
in Iran to make it into another amenable client state. This is sometimes
even openly acknowledged, and helps explain the frenzied threat-inflation
and artificial creation of a crisis that can be used as the pretext for
an attack and possibly produce turmoil and political change in Iran. It
also helps us understand the continual U.S. refusal to negotiate with
Iran and/or to offer a security guarantee in exchange for possible Iranian
concessions on its nuclear plans. The same process occurred in the run-up
to the Iraq invasion-the United States inflated the threat, created a crisis,
refused to negotiate with Iraq, and would not allow inspectors to complete
their search for WMD allegedly because of the dire threat, but more plausibly
because of a longstanding U.S. determination to engineer a regime change.
-
- As noted, the mainstream media have
followed the party line on the Iran "crisis" and failed almost
without exception to note the problems and deal with matters raised in
the alternative frames. Remarkably, despite their acknowledged massive
failures as news organizations and de facto propaganda service for the
Bush administration in the lead up to the Iraq invasion,24 with the administration
refocusing on the new dire threat from Iran it took the mainstream media
no time whatsoever to fall into party-line formation-from which they have
not deviated. Thus, they never go into the U.S. violations of its NPT
obligations, never discuss international law and its possible application
to U.S. pre-invasion aggression and threats of open attack, just as they
ignored the subject in reference to the Iraq invasion.25 They never challenge
the threat-inflation or consider any possible Iranian right of self-defense.
(We may recall that the Free Press was able to make an almost completely
disarmed Guatemala a frightening threat back in 1954, as well as the badly
weakened Iraq in 2002-3.) The media never suggest that the United States
may be abusing the inspections process-never harking back to its abuses
and outright lying as regard the Iraq inspections effort-and they never
suggest ulterior motives for the aggressor.
-
- In treating EU, UN and IAEA responses,
the media never suggest that the real problem is containing the United
States. In the comical version offered and hardly contested in the media,
it is often suggested that there is a threat of "appeasement"
of Iran, and that if the world is "to avoid another Munich,"
and the "Security Council fails to confront the Iranian threat,"
it is up to the United States to "form an international coalition
to disarm the regime."26 But there is never a hint that the problem
might be appeasement of the United States. Or that the applicable Munich
analogy might not apply to the Iranian nuclear program at all, as the
1938 Pact among the European powers that impelled Czechoslovakia to accept
the cession of the Sudetenland to the Nazis is analogous to the ongoing
UN and EU role in facilitating the designs the United States is pursuing
toward Iranian territory.27
- Pravda could not have done a better job
for any planned Soviet venture abroad than the Free Press is once again
doing for the Bush administration.
-
- Conclusion
-
- It is clear that when it comes to actions
that the superpower (or its leading client states) chooses to take, international
law is completely inoperative, and that this has become institutionalized
and accepted by the "international community" (which doesn't
include the global underlying population). In the case of Iran, it is
as if the lessons of the recent past, and even of the ongoing present
in Iraq, simply disappear, and similar imaginary "threats" and
misuse of supposedly neutral international bodies like the IAEA and its
"inspections" can be re-run in a miasma of hypocrisy. In fact,
as we have noted, the situation has deteriorated, with the UN and EU now
playing an active aggression-supportive role, following the U.S. lead
in denying Iran its "inalienable" rights under the NPT and making
its pursuit of those rights into a criminalized "threat to peace,"
setting the stage for a more direct U.S. attack.
-
- Our conclusion is twofold. First, given
the U.S. and Israeli possession of nuclear weapons, their threat to possibly
use them in attacking Iran, and the record of both countries in major
law violations such as the U.S. violation of the UN Charter prohibition
of aggression and the Israeli violations of the Fourth Geneva Convention
on obligations of an occupying power, and given the fact that the Washington
regime is already in the early phases of aggression against Iran, the
UN and Security Council should be urgently focusing on the U.S. aggression
instead of some minor inspection delinquencies on the part of Iran (and
it goes without saying, instead of giving positive aid to the aggressor's
program).
-
- Second, if there is a concern over
violations of the NPT, far more important than Iran's deficiencies are
the U.S. failure to undertake any measures to eliminate nuclear weapons
and its protection of Israel as the sole nuclear power in the Middle East,
and remaining outside IAEA jurisdiction. In fact, the United States is
improving its nuclear arsenal with the express intention of making nuclear
strikes more "practicable." As these threaten Iran as well as
many other countries, common sense dictates that this violation of the
NPT is vastly more important than any attributable to Iran-real or imaginary.
- In a decent and sane world, bringing
the U.S. violations of the NPT and its nuclear improvement actions before
the UN and Security Council ought to have a very high priority, second
only to stopping the U.S. aggression already underway against Iran and
which threatens an enlargement of the conflagration begun by its prior
and still raging "supreme international crime" in Iraq.
-
-
- Edward S. Herman is Professor Emeritus
of Finance at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, and has
written extensively on economics, political economy and the media. Among
his books are The Real Terror Network, Triumph of the Market, and Manufacturing
Consent (with Noam Chomsky).
-
- David Peterson is is an independent journalist
and researcher.
-
- Endnotes
-
- 1. "To initiate a war of aggressionis
not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime
differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself
the accumulated evil of the whole." See "The Common Plan or
Conspiracy and Aggressive War," in Judgment of the International
Military Tribunal for the Trial of German Major War Criminals, part of
the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials website maintained by the Avalon Project
at Yale Law School.
-
- 2. Seymour Hersh, "The Iran Plans,"
New Yorker, April 17, 2006.
-
- 3. See "Foreign Terrorist Organizations,"
Ch. 8 of Country Reports on Terrorism 2005, U.S. Department of State,
April, 2006, pp. 30/212 31/213. On the U.S. Government's decision in
July 2004 to grant "protected" status to the MEK members semi-permanently
encamped at Ashraf in eastern Iraq, see "Daily Press Briefing,"
Adam Ereli, Deputy Spokesman, U.S. Department of State, July 26, 2004.
As the spokesman for Tehran's Foreign Ministry noted in reaction, "The
United States is using its fight against terrorism as a tool, and we knew
from the beginning that this fight is void and they are not serious. Using
the Geneva Convention to protect this terrorist group is naive and unacceptable."
"U.S. war on terror is a sham, says Iran," Daily Times (Pakistan),
July 28, 2004.
-
- 4. See Matthew Rycroft, "The secret
Downing Street memo," July 23, 2002 (as posted to the Times Online,
May 1, 2005); also Michael Smith, "The war before the war,"
New Statesman, May 30, 2005; Michael Smith, "General admits to secret
air war," Sunday Times, June 26, 2005; David Peterson, "'Spikes
of Activity'," ZNet, July, 2005; and David Peterson, "British
Records on the Prewar Bombing of Iraq," ZNet, July, 2005.
-
- 5. Jonathan Steele and Dahr Jamail,
"This is our Guernica," The Guardian, April 27, 2005; Mike Marqusee,
"A name that lives in infamy," The Guardian, November 10, 2005.
-
- 6. See, e.g., Gretchen Borchelt et al.,
Break Them Down: Systematic Use of Psychological Torture by U.S. Forces,
Physicians for Human Rights, May, 2005; Leila Zerrougui et al., Situation
of detainees at Guantánamo Bay (E/CN.4/2006/120), UN Commission
on Human Rights, February 15, 2006; and By the Numbers: Findings of the
Detainee Abuse and Accountability Project, Center for Human Rights and
Global Justice, Human Rights First, and Human Rights Watch, February,
2006.
-
- 7. At a symposium in 1994 titled "Global
Structures: A Convocation: Human Rights, Global Governance and Strengthening
the UN," the current U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations John R.
Bolton stated: "The United States makes the U.N. work when it wants
it to work, and that is exactly the way it should be, because the only
question -- the only question -- for the United States is what's in our
national interest? And if you don't like that, I'm sorry. But that is
the fact." See Nomination of John R. Bolton, Hearing before the
Committee on Foreign Relations, U.S. Senate, April 11, 2005.
-
- 8. The blood spilled during the criminal
U.S. and U.K. military seizure of Iraq had yet to dry before the UN Security
Council placed its stamp upon the occupation with a litany of scramble-for-Iraq
resolutions, beginning with Resolution 1483 (May 22, 2003), lifting economic
sanctions that dated all the way back to Resolution 661 (August 6, 1990).
-
- 9. See "The Iran 'Crisis',"
Edward S. Herman and David Peterson, ColdType, November, 2005.
-
- 10. On demonization, see David Peterson,
"The Language of Force," ZNet, January 16, 2006.
-
- 11. For some recent opinion surveys
of American beliefs and attitudes, all of which, in the manufactured crisis
of the moment, find Iran and Muslims to be grave threats to Americans,
see Jeffrey M. Jones, "Americans Rate Iran Most Negatively of 22
Countries," Gallup, February 23, 2006; Joseph Carroll, "Americans
Say Iran Is Their Greatest Enemy," Gallup, February 23, 2006; Claudia
Deane and Darryl Fears, "Negative Perception Of Islam Increasing,"
Washington Post, March 9, 2006; and "States of Insecurity,"
Atlantic Monthly, April, 2006.
-
- 12. On the American Democratic Party
not only "not differ[ing] significantly from the administration,"
but " trying to outflank the administration by being even more hardline,"
see Anatol Lieven, "There is menace in America's policy of prevention,"
Financial Times, March 20, 2006 (as posted to the website of the New American
Foundation). The lunatic (though still counterfactual) scenario laid out
by Timothy Garton Ash in "The tragedy that followed Hillary Clinton's
bombing of Iran in 2009" (The Guardian, April 20, 2006), is imaginable
in the first place only because in the democratically crippled American
political system, what are marketed as alternatives remain captive of
the reigning de facto consensus.
-
- 13. Here quoting Article IV of the Treaty
on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (effective March 5, 1970).
-
- 14. See the copy of the agreement between
the E3/EU and Iran signed in Paris on November 15, 2004, as reproduced
in INFCIRC 637, IAEA, November 26, 2004, pp. 3-4.
-
- 15. Quoted in "No uranium enrichment
'permissible' for Iran-US envoy," Agence France Presse, March 6,
2006. Note that we can find no entry for Bolton's remarks on the website
of the United States Mission to the United Nations, e.g., under Press
Releases, January - March, 2006. Also see David Peterson, "Overthrowing
the NPT the American Way," ZNet, March 7, 2006..
-
- 16. For the actual text of the draft
resolution as it existed on May 3, see "TEXT-UN council gets draft
text on Iran nuclear program," Reuters-AlertNet, May 3. And for reporting
on the May 3 draft, see, e.g., Elaine Sciolino, "U.S., Britain and
France Draft U.N. Resolution on Iran's Nuclear Ambitions," New York
Times, May 3; "UN Security Council considers action on Iran's nuclear
programme," UN News Center, May 3; John Ward Anderson and Colum
Lynch, "U.S. Crafts Response on Iran," Washington Post, May
3; Maggie Farley, "Security Council Gets Iran Nuclear Resolution,"
Los Angeles Times, May 4; Warren Hoge, "Britain and France Press
U.N. to Oppose Iran Nuclear Efforts," New York Times, May 4; Column
Lynch, "Security Council Is Given Iran Resolution," Washington
Post, May 4; Edward Alden and Caroline Daniel, "US pushes for Iran
financial sanctions," Financial Times, May 8. Also see Marjorie Cohn's
"Bush Setting up Attack on Iran," Truthout, May 8.
-
- 17. To quote the latest installment
in the IAEA's series of reports to its Board of Governors (at least the
17th overall), "the Agency is unable to make progress in its efforts
to provide assurance about the absence of undeclared nuclear material
and activities in Iran." Implementation of the NPT Safeguards Agreement
in the Islamic Republic of Iran (GOV/2006/27), April 28, 2006, par. 33,
p. 7. IAEA-channeled allegations about the Iranian nuclear program have
been formulated in this manner since the very beginning.
-
- 18. For a current assessment of the
U.S. nuclear stockpile, see Robert S. Norris and Hans M. Kristensen, "U.S.
nuclear forces," Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, January/February,
2006; and for Israel's, see Robert S. Norris et al., "Israel nuclear
forces, 2002," Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, September/October,
2002.
-
- 19. For a history of Israel's development
its nuclear weapons, entirely outside the NPT and international controls,
see Avner Cohen and William Burr, "Israel crosses the threshold,"
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, May/June, 2006; and "Israel Crosses
the Nuclear Threshold," National Security Archive Update, April 28,
2006.
-
- 20. See Legality of the Threat or Use
of Nuclear Weapons, International Court of Justice, July 8, 1996, pars.
98 103, and Opinion F. Although an "advisory opinion," and
thus not legally binding on states, to date this counts as the most authoritative
legal decision to have been produced on issues stemming from the existence
of nuclear weapons and states' obligations under the NPT.
-
- 21. On U.S. plans to upgrade its already
peerless nuclear stockpile and the means of delivering it, see James Sterngold,
"Upgrades planned for U.S. nuclear stockpile," San Francisco
Chronicle, January 15; Walter Pincus, "U.S. Plans to Modernize Nuclear
Arsenal," Washington Post, March 4.
-
- 22. On the potential U.S. threat to
use nuclear weapons against Iran-a case in which even so much as a hint
or a whisper of threat is deafening, and leaked warnings about such threats
even louder-see Hersh, "The Iran Plans," New Yorker, April 17,
2006; Sarah Baxter, "Gunning for Iran," Sunday Times, April
9, 2006; and Peter Baker et al., "U.S. Is Studying Military Strike
Options on Iran," Washington Post, April 9, 2006. Also see the material
reported under the "Divine Strake" entry on the Weapons of Mass
Destruction webpage of GlobalSecurity.org.
-
- 23. Martin van Creveld, "Sharon
on the warpath: Is Israel planning to attack Iran?" International
Herald Tribune, August 21, 2004. However, it should be pointed out that
neither the United States, IAEA, nor the European powers have given any
evidence that Iran's claim that it is only seeking the peaceful use of
atomic energy is not valid.
-
- 24. The classic case having been "The
Times and Iraq," New York Times, May 26, 2004; and the accompanying
webpage The Times devotes to this topic, "The Times and Iraq: A Sample
of the Coverage," May, 2004. Though we add the caveat that the documents
contained herein, and the conclusions affirmed by The Times about the
role that it played during the build-up for the invasion, grossly understate
The Times's real culpability.
-
- 25. Howard Friel and Richard Falk, The
Record of the Paper: How the New York Times Misreports US Foreign Policy
(London: Verso, 2004). In 70 editorials on Iraq between September 11,
2001 and March 21, 2003, The Times editors never once mentioned international
law. See chapter 1.
-
- 26. Nile Gardiner and Joseph Loconte,
"The Gathering Storm Over Iran," Boston Globe, May 3. Conversely,
usage of the false Munich analogy and the charge of "appeasement"
abounds. See, e.g., "Iran's Nuclear Challenge," Editorial, Washington
Post, January 12; William Kristol, "And Now Iran; We can't rule
out the use of military force," Weekly Standard, January 23; and
Kim Willsher, "'Only a fraction of Teheran's brutality has come to
light'," Daily Telegraph, March 19. This last example was particularly
revealing. In it, Maryam Rajavi, described as the "leader of the
largest exiled Iranian opposition group," the National Council for
Resistance for Iran, reportedly "says Western governments must end
their 'dangerous appeasement' of Iran's regime and recognise the worth
of her group." Unmentioned is the fact that the U.S. Government
(officially, anyway) includes her group along with the Mujahedin-e- Khalq
on its list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations. See note 3, above.
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- 27. The Iran gambit could be a cover
for a partial invasion-occupation of the geographic region of Iran where
in the words of the U.S. Department of Energy the "vast majority
of Iran's crude oil reserves are located," that is, "in giant
onshore fields in the southwestern Khuzestan region near the Iraqi border."
Contrary to popular myth, this would not entail going "all the way
to Tehran," as a saying attributed to the Neoconservatives has it,
but only as far as the greatest concentration of Iran's proven oil reserves
extend, where southeastern Iraq borders Khuzestan. See "Iran,"
U.S. Energy Information Administration, January, 2006, p. 2. As this same
report adds, "in September 2005, several bombs were detonated near
oil wells in Khuzestan, raising concerns about unrest amongst ethnic Arabs
in the region" (p. 2).
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- http://www.counterpunch.com/herman05112006.html
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