Thursday, April 13, 2006
Middle East Policy II
So Iran made a big deal about the fact it has enriched uranium.
Literally and figuratively, this was theater. They enriched uranium to 3.5 percent, not the 80 percent they would need for weapons-grade stuff. They also have only enriched small amounts of uranium in a lab. They will need to manufacture it in massive quantities to make a single weapon.
Iran is still years away from a weapon. I’ve heard 10 years thrown around as an estimate.
I suspect this theater was Iran’s government figuratively thumbing its nose at the West while simultaneously boasting to the people of Iran about its accomplishment. Iran is not significantly closer to having nuclear power or a nuclear bomb than it was last week, as a European diplomat who monitors Iran’s nuclear program said to the New York Times.
Iran is a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which means that it can legally produce nuclear reactor fuel, build reactors, and receive technological assistance for doing so in exchange for forgoing the development of nuclear weapons.
Few people on Earth actually believe Iran has no intentions of making a bomb. Many signatories to that treaty have violated it, including India, Pakistan, and North Korea. The United States itself has violated the treaty by providing Israel with nuclear weapons. I would be shocked if Iran, suddenly, became one of the most restrained nations on Earth and decided to abide by the treaty.
The language of the Bush administration today regarding Iran is eerily similar to its language regarding Iraq in 2002. “All options are on the table.” “We’re seeking a diplomatic solution.”
I think, by now, we all know just how patient the Bush administration is with diplomacy.
Nevertheless, newspapers and periodicals across the country have printed articles virtually unanimously dismissing military strikes as a good option. I’ve read these articles in periodicals like the American Conservative and the Atlantic, in newspapers like the New York Times.
But journalists don’t work at the Pentagon, and Bush doesn’t listen to journalists or world opinion. Seymour Hersh reported that his sources tell him that planning military strikes against Iran has moved past the preliminary and contingency stages into the “operational” stage. Hersh is the Pulitzer-prize winning journalist who first broke the Abu Ghraib scandal.
The military planners who thought they could hold Iraq with 140,000 troops now think they can handle the blowback from military strikes against Iran.
Time and time again US leaders have adopted a belligerent foreign policy that has made US interests more endangered around the world. We know from declassified KGB documents that the abortive Bay of Pigs fiasco enraged the KGB and led directly to them redoubling their efforts at subverting US interests in the western hemisphere, including giving aid to Sandinista rebels in Nicaragua and coordinating an assassination of a US diplomat in Canada with separatists in Quebec. When the US decided to try its hand in Asia China checked the advance of US forces in Korea and then Vietnam, at a great and bloody cost to our country.
A century of supporting autocratic regimes and helping suppress dissent in Central America, South America, and the Middle East has left the majority of the people in those regions with little but hatred for the United States. I doubt the Vietnamese or Indonesians have many fond memories of US involvement in their country. This is why many of these people cheered on September 11th.
The ill will of the world has manifested and will manifest itself in very concrete ways. September 11th was one of those ways.
Iran’s reaction to Israel bombing Iraq’s Osirak Reactor in 1981 was to ensure that its nuclear program was dispersed into dozens of sites around the country, many of them buried, so they would be extremely resistant to bombing. Three years after the US launched a pre-emptive war against Iraq, and Iran is now making their nuclear program very public and a very high priority for their government. North Korea continues to develop nuclear weapons.
It is not “wild speculation” to suggest that these nations have suddenly put a high priority on acquiring a nuclear weapon as a deterrence to a US invasion. It is the opinion of many if not most diplomats and foreign policy experts.
It is also not “wild speculation” to suggest that one big reason countries in this hemisphere have cracked down on free speech is because the CIA has repeatedly subverted media outlets in their countries to help subvert their government. Hugo Chavez has made it a crime for media to broadcast “treasonous” content, which may sound like media intimidation until you realize that many media outlets participated in his temporary overthrow in 2002. The CIA has pumped money into media outlets around the world. These actions were a precursor to the CIA tossing the democratically-elected Allende government in Chile in 1973.
President Bush has already asked congress for something like 86 million dollars to “encourage” dissent in Iran. That would buy you a few radio stations in a country that was foolish enough to sell them to you, but I don’t think the mullahs are that stupid. That money will worm its way into Iran in more subtle ways.
# posted by BitterHarvest @ 3:41 PM 
