If US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice were to tell American TV presenters that the world should prepare for war over Iran’s nuclear program, she would be faced with an international barrage of accusations. The first one would be that she was a warmonger and that here was proof of Washington’s bellicose intentions toward Iran. In fact, Rice has said no such thing. On the contrary, her colleague, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, said on Sunday that the US remains committed to using diplomacy and economic means (i.e. sanctions) in order to stop Iran from becoming a nuclear military power.
But if the US is not saying it, France is. French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner has stunned the world with the stark assessment that while negotiations on Iran’s possible nuclear plans have to continue, the world has “to prepare for the worst, and the worst is war.” Moreover, in his view it is the Iranians, not the Americans, who are to blame for the nuclear row; they must be forced to drop their nuclear ambitions by military means if necessary. An Iran with nuclear weapons would pose “a real danger to the whole world,” he says. At the same time he wants the European Union to impose tougher sanctions with or without UN backing.
He has not explained, as Americans have not, why nuclear weapons in Iran’s hand alone would pose a threat to world peace. Why not in Israel’s hands? Why not in the hands of his own country, France? After all, when it had better weapons than others had, it had, by invading and colonizing nations, posed a danger to world peace. Do they fear that if weaker nations were armed with nuclear weapons, the likes of France would not be able to occupy them with impunity?
All these threats come when UN atomic energy chief Mohamed El-Baradei has said that force should not be used yet to resolve the Iranian nuclear crisis, dismissing talk of war as a lot of hype. He was speaking for the whole world when he said, remembering the hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians who lost their lives because of the “suspicion” that Iraq had nuclear weapons, “We need always to remember that use of force could only be resorted to when ... every other option has been exhausted. I don’t think we are at all there.”
But Kouchner thinks so. Is a war being planned, regardless of what Iran does?
Equally inevitably, Iran has come out with guns blazing. It presents him as President Bush’s lapdog. Kouchner was one of the few Frenchmen who refused to condemn the US-led invasion of Iraq at the time and his criticism of fellow socialists for their anti-Americanism had made headlines. But it is difficult to believe without more evidence that, as Iran says, the new French government “has become the executors of the will of the White House.” It is more likely that they both have the same idea about how to “pacify” the Middle East. For this reason, if Kouchner says war is a possibility, we have to take that warning seriously.
