Washington seeks to pressure UN inspectors into quitting their search for weapons of mass destruction. Washington says a terrorist regime is bent upon WMD and poses an imminent danger to world peace. Washington makes no secret of its belief that the only option to end the threat is military action. This is how it began in Iraq and now the whole awful charade is starting to be played out again — over Iran.
Mohamed El-Baradei, head of the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), has been working hard for months to edge a suspicious Iranian government toward a resumption of full inspections of its nuclear facilities. The IAEA has an international mandate to undertake this work, not primarily because of nuclear proliferation but largely on safety grounds. As disasters or close disasters at Chernobyl, Three Mile Island and in Japan have demonstrated, the operation of civil nuclear power plant carries major risks. El-Baradei has, however, clearly been coming under intense behind-the-scenes pressure from the Americans to give up on the recalcitrant Iranians and hand the whole issue of its nuclear program back to the Security Council. There Washington would push for a punitive option, which would almost certainly be opposed by the Russians and Chinese. Even so, without a Security Council resolution to use force, the Americans would go ahead anyway, as they did in Iraq. The consequences of such unilateral action are likely to be even worse than the America’s ill-judged interference in Iraq. El-Baradei’s response to Washington’s pressure has been to go public, warning that outsiders anxious to contribute their two cents should stop meddling. The cooperation deal the IAEA has just cut with Tehran may not be ideal. It may seem to allow Iran to continue to bypass the international obligations to which it has signed up. But El-Baradei insists that the agreement does represent progress. He also says that if the Iranians are acting in bad faith, it will quickly become evident.
What the IAEA chief wants now is a period in which Washington ceases its belligerent rhetoric and its threat to call for much tougher sanctions to punish Tehran. The Bush White House, unfortunately, seems incapable of letting the matter go. Just as in the final period of the UN weapons inspections in Iraq, Washington may be turning up the heat in preparation for precipitate action.
What, the whole world outside the US must wonder, does Bush imagine any missile attack on Iranian nuclear facilities might achieve? If Bush cannot understand just what anger such an attack would produce, he should try and imagine US popular reaction if Russian cruise missiles took out the Israeli nuclear weapons establishment at Dimona and all other nuclear sites besides.
Bush and his neocons have lied to and tricked Americans into one disaster of epic proportions. Are those same Americans to be panicked and duped into a second greater folly by phony propaganda that is an echo of the very lies that led to the current horrors in Iraq?
