WEST MULLING NEW SANCTIONS AGAINST IRAN COUNTDOWN TO WAR?
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6 Nov 06
Iran has warned the United States that it would find itself in a
"quagmire deeper than Iraq" if it attacked the Islamic Republic.
The warning last week, by the head of Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guard
Corps, a target of new US sanctions, announced a week earlier, added
to the angry rhetoric between the two old foes which has prompted
speculation of possible American military action.
US President George W. Bush has suggested that a nuclear-armed Iran
could lead to "World War III". Washington insists it wants a diplomatic
solution to the issue of Iran’s nuclear program, but a US official
said last week more "tough-minded diplomacy" was needed.
"If the enemies show inexperience and want to invade Islamic Iran,
they will receive a strong slap from Iran", Mohammad Ali Jaafari
said in comments carried by the Fars news agency. "The enemy knows
that if it attacks Iran, it will be trapped in a quagmire deeper
than Iraq and Afghanistan, and it will have to withdraw in defeat",
he told a parade in Iran.
The five permanent members of the Security Council were expected to
meet in London on November 2 to discuss a possible third round of
UN sanctions.
In Vienna, US Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs Nicholas
Burns said that Teheran would have a price to pay if it did not
cooperate with the UN nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic
Energy Agency, and halt uranium enrichment.
"It’s very important that we send this message that there is going
to be a price to what Iran does. And that price will be increased
isolation and heightened sanctions", Burns told journalists ahead of
a meeting with IAEA chief Mohammad El-Baradei.
"If Iran has not suspended its enrichment program in Natanz by a couple
weeks’ time, that’s going to be a highly relevant factor" as it will
show Teheran has not complied with UN Security Council resolutions,
Burns said.
The Security Council has already passed two resolutions calling
for sanctions if Iran does not fully suspend its enrichment and
reprocessing activities and the United States is pushing for a third.
"Iran has chosen the route of sanctions", Burns said.
Ahead of his meeting with El-Baradei, he added that the US took issue
with comments the director-general had made in the past "that would
seem to indicate that sanctions might not work."
El-Baradei sparked controversy in the US when he told CNN that he
had no evidence that Iran was building nuclear weapons and emphasized
the need for "creative diplomacy" rather than sanctions.
"I don’t see any other solution than diplomacy and inspections",
El-Baradei said.
Burns repeated calls for the Security Council to pass a sanctions
resolution on Teheran as soon as possible, and he urged the European
Union to impose further sanctions and for major trading partners to
cut ties with Iran.
The five permanent Security Council members — the US, China, Russia,
France and Britain — and Germany were meeting on Friday in London
to discuss strengthening UN sanctions against Teheran.
Washington accuses Teheran of seeking nuclear weapons and has never
ruled out the option of military action to end its defiance. Iran
insists it wants only to generate electricity for a growing population.
Rafsanjani: ‘A menacing climate of fear’ In Teheran meanwhile,
Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, an influential former president,
warned Iran to be alert in the face of "unprecedented" actions by
its arch-foe the United States.
"Since the [1979] revolution, the enemies have plotted a lot, but
the current situation is unprecedented. Therefore everybody must be
alert", the cleric said, according to the state-run IRNA news agency.
"The movements and the presence of US forces and their supporters in
the region is unprecedented, as is the creation of a menacing climate
of fear", he told army commanders in a speech.
Rafsanjani’s cautious tone contrasted with the rhetoric of his
political rival, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has brushed off
the idea of an American attack on Iran, saying US forces are too
bogged down in Iraq.
Ahmadinejad famously said in September that his mathematical skills
as an engineer and faith in God made him sure that US forces would
not launch an attack.
After suffering a defeat by Ahmadinejad in the 2005 presidential
election, Rafsanjani has staged a political comeback in the last year,
winning the chairmanship of the Assembly of Experts, an influential
clerical body.
The Assembly of Experts is the body charged with supervising and
choosing Iran’s all-powerful supreme leader. Rafsanjani also heads
the main political arbitration body the Expediency Council.
Gulf states suggest compromise Arab states in the Gulf have come up
with a compromise aimed at defusing the crisis between the West and
Iran over its disputed nuclear program, a specialized Middle East
publication said last week.
The six-member Gulf Cooperation Council has proposed to Iran that it
create a multinational consortium to provide enriched uranium to the
Islamic republic as a way of resolving the standoff, The Middle East
Economic Digest (MEED) reported on its website.
It said Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal told MEED in
London that the plan would mean Teheran could continue developing
nuclear energy while removing fears that the project was a cover for
an atomic weapons drive.
"We have proposed a solution, which is to create a consortium for
all users of enriched uranium in the Middle East", he said.
"[We will] do it in a collective manner through a consortium that
will distribute according to needs, give each plant its own necessary
amount, and ensure no use of this enriched uranium for atomic weapons",
MEED quoted Prince Saud as saying.
Under the reported GCC plan, its members — Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman,
Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) — would
establish a uranium enrichment plant in a neutral country outside
the Middle East.
The plant would produce nuclear fuel that would then be provided to
Middle East countries seeking to harness atomic energy.
Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, Libya and Yemen as well as the six GCC states
have all said that they want to pursue peaceful nuclear projects.
Prince Saud told MEED he believed the new plant "should be in a
neutral country — Switzerland, for instance".
"Any plant in the Middle East that needs enriched uranium would get
its quota. I don’t think other Arab states would refuse. In fact,
since the decision of the GCC to enter into this industry, the other
Arab countries have expressed a desire to be part of the proposal".
He added that Iran was considering the GCC offer.
"We hope the Iranians will accept this proposal. We continue to talk to
them and urge them not only to look at the issue from the perspective
of the needs of Iran for energy, but also in the interests of the
security of the region.
"The US is not involved, but I don’t think it [would be] hostile to
this, and it would resolve a main area of tension between the West
and Iran".
Meanwhile, Iranian officials said they were satisfied with the results
of their latest talks with the UN atomic agency.
The talks were part of a deal the International Atomic Energy Agency
clinched in August for Iran to answer outstanding questions over its
atomic program so the IAEA can conclude a four-year investigation
into its nature.
Scholar links Bush’s US and Hirohito’s Japan A leading American
scholar of wartime Japan has said that the Bush Administration’s "war
on terror" bears close parallels to Japan’s past militarism through a
defiance of international law. Herbert Bix, who won the Pulitzer Prize
in 2001 for his landmark biography of the wartime Emperor Hirohito,
said he believed US aerial bombings and alleged use of torture in
Afghanistan and Iraq constituted war crimes.
"The current American rampage in Iraq and elsewhere, not to mention
the Bush Administration’s threats of war against Iran, so clearly
replicates Imperial Japan during the period when its leaders willfully
disregarded international law and pursued the diplomacy of force",
Bix said during a visit to Tokyo last week.
Japan defied the Nine-Party Treaty guaranteeing China’s sovereignty,
signed in 1922 in Washington, when Japanese troops invaded Manchuria
in 1931.
Bix compared Japan’s action to current American efforts to scuttle
the Treaty of Rome establishing the International Criminal Court,
which President George W. Bush argues could unfairly target Americans.
He also said that senior US leaders — not just rank-and-file soldiers
— should have been held to account for the killings of 24 civilians
in the Iraqi town of Haditha.
"US war criminality is justice institutionalized, as Japan’s once was",
Bix charged.
"In today’s America, torture is not only standard battlefield practice
in the so-called war on terror. Torture is celebrated in American
popular culture as evidenced by the popularity of ’24’, a TV program
in which the hero confronts a ticking bomb scenario… designed to
justify torture".
But Bix, a professor at the State University of New York at Binghamton,
said he remained optimistic for change as most Americans were opposed
to "the Washington consensus".
Bix is best known for writing Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan,
in which he described the emperor as a shrewd architect of the war.
The book remains highly controversial in Japan, where most historians
have portrayed Hirohito, who was never prosecuted and stayed on
the throne until his death in 1989, as a figurehead detached from
war planning.
Oil crisis exercise bares US ‘impotence’ It’s August 2009, oil prices
have topped 150 dollars a barrel and a secret uranium plant has been
detected in Iran.
Teheran and Caracas are slashing oil exports by 700,000 barrels to
punish the West for sanctions, and the US military is ready to move
its entire Pacific fleet into the Middle East to counter threats.
It may be tomorrow’s headlines, but on November 1 a high-powered
panel of Washington insiders acting as the US president’s national
security council found they would face almost impossible choices
and be powerless in such a case, baring the United States’ growing
inability to lead in global crises.
"In this kind of hostile environment [Iran and Iraq] would have the
upper hand", argued Gene Sperling, former President Bill Clinton’s
national economic adviser, who played the treasury secretary in
the exercise.
It "would make us look impotent", he added.
"This scenario could start tomorrow," said retired General John
Abizaid, the former US Central Command chief.
In a separate development, Abizaid suggested that US troops might
remain in the Middle East for as long as the next 50 years.
Put on by the Securing America’s Future Energy (SAFE) and the
Bipartisan Policy Center, the unscripted one-day simulation sought
to emphasize the danger of the extremely narrow gap between world
oil production capacity and demand, and the heavy US dependence on
oil imports.
But it exposed the strained US military’s incapacity to project its
power over multiple regions, and the ability of even comparatively
small countries to provoke a world political and economic crisis.
To play a White House team reacting to the news in real time, SAFE
brought together nine former top presidential advisors and officials
with intimate knowledge of national security affairs.
The "council" included former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin playing
the president’s national security advisor, former Deputy Secretary of
State Richard Armitage as secretary of state, former Navy Secretary
John Lehman as secretary of defense, and Philip Zelikow, a former
National Security Council official as national intelligence director.
The scenario they woke up to on May 4, 2009 was the loss to world
markets of one million barrels a day in oil supplies when saboteurs
in Azerbaijan caused the shutdown of the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline.
The action heightened geopolitical tensions in the region and sent
oil prices from the mid-90 dollar range to 115 dollars a barrel.
With the stock markets plummeting, the council has to advise the
president what to say and do, and finds its hands tied by the strains
of the Iraq war and by domestic politics.
"Energy Secretary" Carol Browner — head of the US Environmental
Protection Agency in the 1990s — says the president can release
oil from the strategic reserve to lower gasoline prices, or call
for conservation with lower speed limits, a Sunday driving ban,
and other measures.
Looking at possible Russian or Iranian involvement in the Azerbaijan
blast, "joint chiefs chairman" Abizaid says the strategic reserve
has to be kept for military needs.
Others say the public and Congress would not accept forced
conservation.
With no information on who made the Azerbaijan attack — Armenians?
pro-Russian elements? Iran? — the defense and intelligence officials
say they have to be on alert but do not know what else to do.
"Our ability to project power into this area is very limited. We are
strung out all over the globe", said Lehman, noting that the military
hasn’t begun to rebuild after years in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Rubin points out that with global production capacity almost at its
maximum, there is little possibility of replacing the lost oil flow.
"It shows how weak our hand is", he says, as the group falters on
urging the president to do more than assuage US consumers.
Three months later, the situation has drastically worsened. A secret
uranium enrichment plant was discovered in Iran, confirming its nuclear
weapon ambitions; oil production in Nigeria has been curtailed by
rebel attacks.
As the council meets, Iran has just replied to threatened new Western
sanctions by cutting back its oil production and Venezuela follows
suit, sending prices past 150 dollars.
The president’s advisors say there are no short-term measures to
soften the economic or political blow. They also admit sanctions
on Iran have little effect, that high oil prices and short supply
actually encourage producer cutbacks.
Militarily, with Israel threatening to take action on Iran itself,
the Pentagon says the US has to project force in the region. But
doing so means moving the entire Pacific fleet to the Middle East,
ceding power in the Pacific — and Taiwan — to China.
After years following the 9/11 attacks of not demanding sacrifice of
its people, the new crisis has brought things to a head, Lehman said,
as he suggests restarting the draft.
"We are facing a mortal threat to our way of life here", he muses.