Thursday, June 09, 2011

Iran and nuclear capability


Despite the deliberately deceptive efforts of the Barack Obama administration (a continuation of deliberately deceptive efforts of the Bush and Clinton administrations before), it seems to be increasingly well understood that the US's nuclear dispute with Iran is over the American idea that Iran, for Israel's benefit, must be prevented from having technology and capabilities that are legal under the NPT and that multiple countries have, for example Japan.

I just want to point out Tony Karon's contribution to this understanding:

And, it's a lot harder, outside of Washington, to present Iran as a "grave and gathering danger" when what it's doing is using the ambiguities of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty to put the nuclear weapon option within reach -- as Japan, for example, has done -- but not yet exercising that option. Indeed, even while Iran resists cooperating with a number of IAEA inquiries, its production of nuclear fuel, while in defiance of Security Council resolutions, is undertaken under the scrutinty of IAEA inspectors, who continue to certify that none of it has been diverted into any covert program.


Then I want to point to an editorial by European former Ambassadors to Iran (Richard Dalton - United Kingdom, Steen Hohwü-Christensen -Sweden, Paul von Maltzahn - Germany, Guillaume Metten - Belgium, François Nicoullaud - France and Roberto Toscano - Italy) saying about the same thing:

Today, a majority of experts, even in Israel, seems to view Iran as striving to become a "threshold country," technically able to produce a nuclear weapon but abstaining from doing so for the present. Again, nothing in international law or in the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty forbids such an ambition. Like Iran, several other countries are on their way to or have already reached such a threshold but have committed not to acquire nuclear weapons. Nobody seems to bother them.


This is not new information. This is a subject the Bush and Obama administrations like to dance around and lie about because it really is not a defensible position.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Sorry for being off topic here, but wouldn't the current hostility between the United States and Iran still exist even without Zionism?

The US/UK decision to overthrow Mossadegh and install the Shah as a puppet was motivated not by Israel, but by fear that Mossedegh was sympathetic to the Cold War enemy, as well as by a desire to safeguard the property of Western oil companies in Iran.

To give another example, the US first opposed Castro's regime in Cuba because it nationalized the assets of American corporations. It was only later that Castro officially declared his regime to be Socialist.

In addition, the Shah was hated in Iran not for his collaboration with Zionism, but rather for the general oppressive nature of his rule, along with his persecution of practising Muslims. And that persecution wasn't motivated by Israel either. The Shah of Iran, like Kemal Ataturk in Turkey, blamed Islam for keeping his country backward, and believed that if Iran were to modernize it would have to secularize.

So I see no reason why there would not have still been an anti-American revolution in Iran even if Israel didn't exist.

Arnold Evans said...

We can read the text and the legislative histories of the US unilateral sanctions against Iran. They were written by advocates for Israel and for them to end Iran has to end its (popularly supported, and legitimate by Iranian values) hostility towards Israel.

I don't think there is a serious question that the current and especially post-cold war US antagonism against Iran is fueled more by concern for Israel than by anything else.

Anonymous said...

I was thinking not so much about US antagonism against Iran, but rather Iranian antagonism against the United States.

Arnold Evans said...

There are no unilateral Iranian sanctions against the United States, no laws in Iran barring business transactions with the United States. Khomeini said from the beginning of the revolution that Iran is willing to talk with the United States as well as every country in the world other than Apartheid South Africa and Zionist Israel.

Iranian leaders routinely travel to the United States and interact with US press and people, limited only by restrictions on their travel imposed by the US.

In practical terms, or in effective terms, all of the antagonism between the US and Iran comes from the US side, and nearly all of it comes from the US commitment to Israel.