What is the Issue With Iran?
There has been considerable attention given to Iran recently especially as regards its ongoing plans for the development of nuclear power. The content of this attention in the media has been the allegation that Iran is attempting to develop a nuclear weapon and must be diverted from this course through a U.S. led program of sanctions and the threat of military attack.
It is worth considering what is behind all of the breast beating from U.S., European and Middle Eastern leaders. It cannot be said that Iran’s nuclear program represents much of a danger to its neighbours or anyone else in the world. Iran claims that it is developing facilities to enrich uranium for use as fuel for the production of nuclear energy. It has a right to develop a nuclear industry just as other countries have done since the advent of nuclear power reactors in the mid-twentieth century. Iran unlike the other nuclear nations in the Middle East and South Asia is a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (“NNPT”) and its nuclear program is regularly inspected by the International Atomic Energy Agency (“IAEA”). The NNPT and the IAEA inspections are intended to keep the possession on nuclear weapons within the hands of a select group of major powers and their allies. The treaty has provisions to prevent any fissionable materials, highly enriched uranium or plutonium, from being diverted from power generation into the production nuclear arms. Iran allows the IAEA to carry out regular inspections of its nuclear facilities. These inspections up till now have found that Iran’s nuclear program is in compliance with the non-proliferation treaty and has found no evidence that Iran is pursuing a nuclear weapons program. Iran has also said repeatedly that it is not interested in becoming a nuclear armed state and that it has no nuclear weapons program. It should be noted that India, Israel and Pakistan all possess nuclear weapons and unlike Iran none of these countries are signatories of the NNPT.
In the face of evidence of Iran’s compliance with its treaty obligations, Iran has been subjected to an endless chorus of accusations claiming that it is secretly developing a nuclear bomb and must be stopped from doing so. The accusations come principally from politicians in the U.S. and Israel with support from leading politicians from England, France and Germany. The aim of this campaign is to isolate Iran and paint it as an enemy of peace and security and a threat to the entire world. The attempt to make Iran into one of the world’s greatest enemies is strikingly similar to the political and public relations onslaught used to prepare conditions for the invasion of Iraq in 2003. The current campaign against Iran has the same objective as did the 2002-2003 hysteria against Iraq. The aim is to vilify and isolate the state of Iran and create the conditions for a military attack on Iran or other measures to bring about the overthrow of the regime in its regime and its replacement with one more agreeable to the U.S.
The campaign of vilification of Iran on the question of its nuclear intentions even on the surface is laughable. Even if Iran were developing nuclear weapons what would be the practical implications of that fact? Many countries possess nuclear weapons. Only one country, the U.S., has actually used them. The reason nuclear weapons have not been used in any of the many conflicts since the Second World War is that their use threatens the user as much as the intended victim. It is an article of faith among both historians and war planners that the greatest deterrent to the use of nuclear weapons are nuclear weapons themselves. It is a very dangerous business to pick fights with nuclear armed nations as they are in a position to retaliate in a very damaging fashion. The threat posed by a potentially nuclear armed Iran is not that it might use its nuclear weapons in an aggressive manner. The consequences for Iran to use nuclear weapons, for example against Israel, would be the annihilation of its cities in retaliation. Iran is not suicidal. Nor does it have a recent history of aggression. The wars it has fought in the modern period have been forced upon it. The 1980 to 1988 Iraq-Iran war was instigated by Iraq with the support of the U.S. The real concern of the U.S. and other similarly aggressive powers is that a nuclear armed Iran would be far less subject to great power bullying.
Iran clearly does not pose an aggressive threat against its neighbours through the use of nuclear weapons. The campaign against it therefore is an indication of something else. The most likely explanation is that Iran has become a significant presence in the region in opposition to U.S. and western interests. There are probably three elements to this Iranian influence that bother the U.S. and its allies. First there is the fact that Iran is a large producer of oil and natural gas and has been marketing these products to its neighbours in Asia, principally China. The U.S. does not want to see an alliance between Iran and China that will strengthen both those parties at the relative expense of the U.S. Second, Iran has close ties with the Shiite dominated government of Iraq. There are also significant Shiite minorities in many Arab states surrounding the Persian Gulf. Those regimes are unpopular and unrepresentative. There is therefore significant potential for sectarian instability in this oil producing region. The U.S. considers Shiite Iran to be a threat to its long term domination of the Middle East. Third, Iran is a major irritation to the U.S. as regards its client state of Israel. Iran is the principle provider of arms and political assistance to Hezbollah in Lebanon, to Hamas in Gaza and to the state of Syria. As such Iran interferes with Israeli hegemony in the region. Both the U.S. and Israel would like to remove Iranian influence in the Arab Middle East by any means necessary.
The current hysteria about Iran’s nuclear ambitions therefore should be seen through the prism of Middle Eastern power politics rather than as something that has arisen as a result of a possible threat Iran poses to the world through its possession of nuclear weapons. The nuclear weapons issue is simply a convenient issue on which to try and undermine the Iranian state through the use of military threats and economic and political sanctions.