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This campaign is a psychological war
aimed at forcing the Islamic Republic to accept the demands of the
United States and its allies. The latter want the Teheran regime to
submit to the policies that they propose for the Near and Middle East.
According to the evaluation made by the warmongers, Teheran still needs
three, four or five years before becoming a member of the nuclear club.
There is then still room for diplomacy.
The occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq
by US imperialism and its allies has increased mass protests across the
region. In the absence of revolutionary and democratic alternatives, it
is the Islamic Republic of Iran which profits from the mass discontent
in the region. It is exactly for that reason that the Teheran regime
can allow itself to prevaricate before the demands of the US and its
allies.
The Iranian regime has drawn the
lessons from the fate of the regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq. The
difference between the Iraq war and the threat of war against Iran is
that the Saddam Hussein regime did not possess weapons of mass
destruction, whereas Iran undoubtedly seeks to equip itself with
nuclear weapons. On the eve of the second Gulf war, Saddam not only
affirmed, even giving proof, that he did not possess weapons of mass
destruction, but produced myriad initiatives and concessions destined
to deter the threat of intervention. Iran and specifically its
president are doing the opposite.
Certainly, the Teheran regime denies
that it is trying to acquire nuclear weapons. But at the same time, the
Iranian leaders do everything to give the impressions that they are on
the way to acquiring them. They seize every opportunity to stress their
progress in the military area and in particular in the area of rockets
capable of hitting Israel. Far from hiding their nuclear ambition, they
proclaim it at every opportunity and often in a fairly ambiguous way so
that civil and military ambitions are difficult to distinguish.
The regime incessantly repeats that
Iran is risking nothing because the US is weakened and durably bogged
down in Iraq and Afghanistan. They cannot run the risk of opening a new
front when US public opinion is already demanding the withdrawal of the
GIs from those countries. Moreover they evoke the kinds of reprisals
that they would not hesitate to use in case of attack, including the
sending of thousands of kamikazes against the Americans in Iraq,
Afghanistan or around the world. The new regional situation after the
war between Israel and Hezbollah, which is sponsored by the Teheran
regime, renders a rapid and strong reaction from the great powers yet
more difficult.
Nuclear energy, heritage of the Shah
The Iranian nuclear programme goes back
to 1974. It certainly had a military dimension, but that was not a
problem since it was about countering the USSR. Iran was the ally of’
Israel, which Washington had allowed to acquire the bomb. To better
understand the circumstances we should recall the geopolitical
situation of the region at the time. In the early 1960s, the war waged
by China on its borders with India led the latter country onto the
nuclear road, with a discreet initial aid from the US, and then the
Soviet Union. India had nuclear weapons at the end of the 1970s and the
latter became operational in the mid 1980s. This situation, judged
intolerable by the Pakistani military, ended a little afterwards in an
inevitable Chinese riposte: Beijing supplied the technical means for a
Pakistani counter bomb which would lighten the burden of the Chinese
deterrent.
In the ballistic area in particular,
China went through the intermediary of its North Korean ally to avoid
any US sanctions. But the operation, much beyond the limited means of
Pakistan, was financed at 75% by Saudi Arabia, which saw the prospect
of a real “Islamic bomb”, with the Emirates and Malaysia covering the
rest. It was then Pakistan which, in the 1980, put the Saudis in
contact with the Chinese (with whom they did not then have any
diplomatic relations) so that the Wahabite kingdom could buy medium
range missiles, an act which for the fundamentalist kingdom represented
the first step in the direction of nucléarisation. In exchange for the
Sinai, Sadat had to renounce the Egyptian nuclear programme, which was
partly frozen and partly transferred by Mubarak, after Sadat’s
assassination, to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in the 1980s. Different rival
Arab projects emerged at the same time, in Algeria, Libya and even
little Syria. None of these projects has so far led anywhere
definitive, and the renouncement by Qaddafi will undoubtedly be
definitive.
It is in this charged context that Iran
wished to acquire nuclear weapons from the time of the Shah onwards.
The US was favourable, to dissuade a possible Soviet attack on the
northern frontier of the country, which was, with its Afghan extension,
the sole line of Western defence in contact with the USSR without
nuclear protection. It was France which took responsibility, with the
Eurodif factory, for supplying the Iranian leaders of the time with the
initial technical means. Iran then entered with France into the capital
of Eurodif, a European consortium for the enrichment of uranium, and
obtained the right to use 10% of production, for civil purposes, from
the Pierrelatte factory (which alone covered a third of world needs).
Parallel to this, Iran loaned 1 billion dollars to France, through the
Atomic Energy Commission (AEC). The repayment of this sum was to begin
from the entry into service of Eurodif, that is in 1981. After the
revolution of 1979, Iranian participation in Eurodif was frozen. In his
book “Atomic Affairs”, Dominique Lorentz shows the link between the
importance of the contentious Eurodif/Iran and the terrorist attacks of
1986-88 in France. Iran abandoned this project, but the Iranian leader
would resume it in the mid-1980s against the threat of invasion by
Saddam’s Iraq. The first Iraq war and above all the US strikes against
Baghdad in 1991 demonstrated the vulnerability of their country
After 1988, France capitulated and
settled the Eurodif dispute. After the 1988 armistice with Iraq,
Teheran turned toward the Soviet Union, in exchange for supporting the
Russians against the independence movements in Azerbaijan and central
Asia and withholding any support to the Chechen cause (which rested
increasingly on the Saudi-Pakistani Sunni axis).
“America is stuck”
Playing on this theme the current
Iranian leaders have tempted the Europeans, in search of an original
policy, and then the Americans themselves who, behind the bombast of
propagandist proclamations, have been offered precious aid by Teheran,
first in Afghanistan to consolidate the anti-Taliban regime of Karzaï
and, at present, more fundamentally still, in Iraq: without the
constant support of grand ayatollah Sistani, himself Iranian in origin,
the situation of the Americans in Baghdad would be much more difficult,
much more precarious. For the major fight in Iraq really opposes
combatants who are either foreign or have been trained abroad: on one
side troops allied to the US, and on the other armed elements linked to
the Guardians of the Iranian revolution (Pasdarans and Iraqis
previously exiled in Iran), like the Al Badr brigade. It is a low
intensity war between the US and Iran which is taking place on Iraqi
soil.
But if the Iranians have here chosen
pragmatic realism against Al Qaïda and Sunni Salafist fundamentalism,
it is of course in order to receive a payback. The constant moderation
of the Teheran regime in relation to Moscow has been rewarded by
technical nuclear cooperation from the Russians. Their tacit alliance
with India allows them to isolate their Pakistani rival. Their support,
as unilateral as it is unstated, for the US occupation of Iraq will
certainly bring the inexorable arrival of a Shiite regime in Baghdad,
but that is hardly sufficient. For in consolidating itself, the new
Iraqi regime will become more liberal than its Iranian neighbour and
ally. After that, the Washington-Washington exchange will become much
less advantageous, much more even-handed than is the case today.
That is why many Teheran, and not only
the extremists, believe that this is the best time to come our of the
non-proliferation treaty and declare openly that Iran is a nuclear
power.
The US, despite the bluff of the sabre
rattlers, has neither the military means, nor the political means (the
stability of Iraq would be at stake), nor even the financial means to
respond: a simple blockade of the Persian Gulf would lead to a doubling
of the oil price and a freefall for the dollar. Committed in Iraq,
Afghanistan, several African countries, Indonesia and the Philippines,
the US cannot today wage a ground war against Iran. As to the Islamist
regime in Iran, to avoid this land war, it ahs decided to militarily
pin down the US in Iraq. As witnessed by operations which involve the
encirclement, indeed the bombardment of Iraqi towns.
The main Iranian leaders and in
particular the current faction in power are convinced that “America is
stuck” because of the Iraqi fiasco; because of the threat of a massive
entry of the Shiite population into insurrection alongside the Sunni
population; the rapidity of the deterioration of the situation in
Afghanistan; the chaos in Palestine; the permanent terrorist threat
underlined by the recent bombings in Egypt and the reappearance of Bin
Laden; the fear of the use of the oil weapon; the increasingly high
cost of the military operation launched by Bush; and the evolution of
public opinion in the US itself.
One could add the stoking up of
anti-Americanism across the entire world, the refusal of China and
Russia, linked economically and militarily to Iran, to back an armed
intervention to which even Tony Blair is opposed; the successive
defeats in their respective countries of those western political
leaders who backed the intervention in Iraq (Spain, Italy, Portugal,
Norway, Japan and so on); the dizzying rise in oil prices which has
enriched all the US’s adversaries or competitors, and finally the
upheavals in virtually the whole of Latin America. For all these
reasons, then, the US cannot take the risk of another conflict.
EU in search of markets
Officially, the historic states of the
European Union (EU) would like to stop the mullahs from having an
Islamic nuclear bomb. But more concretely, they would like to take back
from the Russians the market in Iranian nuclear supplies. In the role
of challenger, they should be more friendly than the Russians:
Henceforth, the wish to recapture this very lucrative market from the
Russians links in with current and very significant European interests
in Iran.
Because the Europeans continue to sign
new contracts of great scope. And the Iranian market is not negligible:
in 2004 Iranian imports ran at USD26.6 billion; industrial machines and
plant (44.8%), metals and minerals (22.3 %), basic chemical products
(14.5 %) and agro-alimentary products (9.7%) represented the main
areas. Overall 51.8% of imports come from the European Union.
Germany occupies first place with 11.4%
and France second with 8.5% of the Iranian market. In particular they
supply industrial machinery and spare parts. In the motor vehicle
sector, France occupies first place with 1.3 billion dollars (2nd place
for China with 360 million dollars). In May 2006 Renault successfully
bid for a joint-venture (of a value of 2 billion dollars) with its L90
(Logan) project, with the aim of manufacturing an annual total of
300,000 cars in Iran with the hope of rising to a million each year
around 2010-2012. The global stock of French investment in Iran is
(according to French sources) 35 billion dollars outside Buy-Back
contracts signed in the oil and gas sector by Total.
That is why the EU will do all it can
to ensure that the Islamic Republic escapes sanctions from the UN
Security Council. Because sanctions would restrain economic relations
with Iran. Europe wants a negotiated solution: that is to say it wants
to obtain the market for supplying Iran with civil power stations and
nuclear fuel. Excluded from Iraq, the Europeans now consider Iran as an
alternative base: and hope to win a privileged access to its oil. But
that does not mean that the European leaders are ready to capitulate
completely to the Iranian regime. Witness the declarations of Angela
Merkel, on January 29, 2006 in Jerusalem, that an Iran possessing
nuclear weapons “is not just a threat to Israel, but also to the
democratic countries of the entire world”. For his part, Jacques Chirac
unleashed a political storm in Europe in threatening “the leaders of
states who would have recourse to terrorist means against us, as well
as those who would envisage using, in one manner or another, weapons of
mass destruction”, and stating that the France’s “response” “could be
conventional, could be of another kind”.
But Germany and France have also sought
to counterbalance US bellicosity by advocating “negotiations” and even
the British government has stated that there “was no military option”
in this crisis.
Strengths and weaknesses of Russian and Chinese arguments
Neither Russia, nor China, which is
seeking to secure its supplies of Iranian hydrocarbons, would hesitate
to use their Security Council veto to protect Teheran’s back.
A long held objective of Russian policy
- coinciding with that of Iran - has been to put an end to the
political, military and economic presence of the US in Iran and to
bring all its weight to bear on the region as a whole. Thus, the sale
to Iran of nuclear know-how and conventional weapons (more than 8
billion dollars of weapons between 1999 and 2005) is one of the most
effective and productive means of attaining this objective.
There are doubts as to the acceptance
by the Russians of economic sanctions against their Iranian partner:
bombing means destruction and reconstruction contracts and nothing on
arms sales, whereas sanctions mean the end of Russia’s economic
supremacy in arms sales and nuclear technology.
Russia has rejected the US demand to
cease its (civil) nuclear cooperation with the regime of Teheran and
especially the construction of a nuclear power station in Bushehr. The
Russian minister of foreign affairs has published a communiqué
according to which each country is free to cooperate with the country
of its choice, each country should have the right to decide on the
manner and conditions of its cooperation with another country.
Everything indicates that the Russians
have energetically aided the mullahs in their enterprise of industrial
enrichment of uranium for military use. The declaration concerning the
freedom of industrial cooperation between Iran and Russia represents a
counter attack, but Russia has no other choice than to cede: the
Russians will choose neutrality.
China receives 14% of the oil necessary
to its rapidly growing economy from Iran. At the end of 2004, China and
Iran signed an agreement worth 70 billion dollars in oil and natural
gas for a period of 30 years. The Chinese state oil company, Sinopec,
has obtained a share of 51% in the recently discovered Iranian oilfield
of Yadavan, whose reserves are estimated at three billion barrels.
Finally, US imperialism has built a
string of military bases in central Asia, practicing a strategic
encirclement of China and seeking to control oil resources against both
Russia and China. The US is pursuing a policy of containment of China,
by strengthening the military links with Japan and providing India (a
country which has not signed the Non Proliferation Treaty and which
possesses a significant nuclear arsenal) with very advanced nuclear
technologies to form a counterweight to China.
Things are evolving very slowly between
the US, the Russians and the Chinese: we can already conclude that
there is an agreement of principle between the great powers on the
“undesirable” character of the regime of the mullahs and this for many
reasons, like the need to strengthen the stability of the Middle East
and Central Asia, the necessity of securing oil supplies, the war on
terror and the struggle against nuclear terrorism and so on, but if the
Russians and Chinese can accept that the US takes on this “job”, they
would like to be sure that their interests in Iran do not suffer too
much as a consequence.
But everyone knows that things can go
further and that for the moment there is still much to play for. The
regime of the mullahs know that it can avoid “giving in” while
multiplying its provocations because it tells itself it can in any case
sign in extremis (with the EU or with Russia) to “prevent escalation”
or “save peace”. On the other hand, the Westerners know that they can
let the crisis deepen because at any time they have the means to bomb
Iran and to destroy its installations if they judge it necessary.
Israel
There remains one more serious threat
to Iran’s passage to the status of nuclear power: Israel. Certainly,
the dispersal of the atomic centres renders the Israeli riposte
hazardous.
And the Iranian bomb, which will only
be truly operational in three or four years, will definitively protect
the country against direct blackmail by its Saudi and Pakistani
neighbours, with whom relations are much more tense in everyday reality
than with Israel.
The offensive options are, on the other
hand, more limited: For an uncertain strike on Israel (the anti-missile
defences of the Jewish state are also progressing rapidly), the Tsahal
submarine permanently immersed in the Oman sea and equipped with cruise
missiles with multiple warheads could vitrify Teheran, the oil zone,
the religious capital of Qom and several dispersed nuclear centres,
with a precision of around 15 metres. No doubt the mullahs, less and
less fanatical and increasingly given to the simple joys of existence,
would ultimately choose life rather than death.
Also as has happened since the 1950s
with all the new successive holders of the atomic bomb, the apparent
tragedy which threatens at this time between Israel and Iran can also
end in a dramatic turn of events. The US does not wish to compromise
still further its position in Iraq. Iran would have a lot to lose if it
sacrifices, like pawns, its positions of strength among the Shiite
Arabs of Iraq and Lebanon. And Israel could not advance as quickly on
the Palestinian terrain if a broad regional crisis broke out.
Immediately, the Iranian bomb bothers
Pakistan and Saudi Arabia much more than Israel. And Jerusalem and
Teheran share a very friendly relationship with India (and secondarily
with Turkey). If an acceptable compromise can be found to the crisis,
perhaps a great upheaval in the Oriental world would take place under
our eyes.
Today, it is certain that the Islamic
regime wants to secretly procure the nuclear bomb like Israel. However
the goal of the Iranian regime is not to destroy Israel as the
warmongers claim. For some years Iran has renounced the myth of the
Islamic Revolution in the Muslim world to privilege the interests of
the class in power, the sole preoccupation of the regime.
 Houshang Sepehr
is an exiled Iranian revolutionary Marxist militant. He is an organizer
of Solidarité avec les Travailleurs en Iran (“Solidarity with the
Workers in Iran”), 266 avenue Daumesnil, 75012 Paris) and a member of
the Fourth International.
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