[lit-ideas] Iranian nukes are not the real issue
- From: Omar Kusturica <omarkusto@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Fri, 12 May 2006 22:38:10 -0700 (PDT)
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/HE13Ak01.html
Iranian nukes not the real issue
By Gareth Porter
WASHINGTON - In pushing for a showdown over Iran's
nuclear program in the United Nations Security
Council, the administration of US President George W
Bush has presented the issue as a matter of global
security - an Iranian nuclear threat in defiance of
the international community.
But the history of the conflict and the private
strategic thinking of both sides reveal that the
dispute is really about the Bush administration's
drive for greater dominance in the Middle East and
Iran's demand for recognition as a regional power.
It is now known that the Iranian leadership, which was
convinced that Bush was planning to move against Iran
after toppling Saddam Hussein in Iraq, proposed in
April 2003 to negotiate with
the United States on the very issues that the US
administration had claimed were the basis for its
hostile posture toward Tehran: its nuclear program,
its support for Hezbollah and other anti-Israeli armed
groups, and its hostility to Israel's existence.
Tehran offered concrete, substantive concessions on
those issues. But on the advice of Vice President Dick
Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Bush
refused to respond to the proposal for negotiation.
Nuclear weapons were not, therefore, the primary US
concern. In the hierarchy of the US administration's
interests, the denial of legitimacy to the Islamic
Republic trumped a deal that could have provided
assurances against an Iranian nuclear weapon.
For insight into the real aims of the Bush
administration in pushing the issue of Iranian access
to nuclear technology to a crisis point, one can turn
to Tom Donnelly of the American Enterprise Institute,
a neo-conservative think-tank. Donnelly was the deputy
executive director of the Project for the New American
Century from 1999 to 2002, and was the main author of
"Rebuilding America's Defenses".
That paper was written for Cheney and Rumsfeld during
the transition following Bush's election and had the
participation of four prominent figures who later took
positions in the administration: Stephen Cambone,
Lewis Libby, Paul Wolfowitz and John Bolton.
Donnelly's analysis of the issue of Iran and nuclear
weapons, published last October in the book Getting
Ready for a Nuclear-Ready Iran, makes it clear that
the real objection to Iran's becoming a nuclear power
is that it would impede the larger US ambitions in the
Middle East - what Donnelly calls the Bush
administration's "project of transforming the Middle
East".
Contrary to the official line depicting Iran as a
radical state threatening to plunge the region into
war, Donnelly refers to Iran as "more the status quo
power" in the region in relation to the United States.
Iran, he explains, "stands directly athwart this
project of regional transformation". Up to now, he
observes, the Iranian regime has been "incapable of
stemming the seeping US presence in the Persian Gulf
and in the broader region". And the invasion of Iraq
"completed the near-encirclement of Iran by US
military forces".
Donnelly writes that a "nuclear Iran" is a problem not
so much because Tehran would employ those weapons or
pass them on to terrorist groups, but mainly because
of "the constraining effect it threatens to impose
upon US strategy for the greater Middle East".
The "greatest danger", according to Donnelly, is that
the "realists" would "pursue a 'balance of power'
approach with a nuclear Iran, undercutting the Bush
'liberation strategy'". Although Donnelly doesn't say
so explicitly, it would undercut that strategy
primarily by ruling out a US attack on Iran as part of
a "regime change" strategy.
Instead, in Donnelly's scenario, a nuclear capability
would incline those outside the neo-conservative
priesthood to negotiate a "detente" with Iran, which
would bring the plan for the extension of US
political-military dominance in the Middle East to a
halt.
What is really at stake in the confrontation with Iran
from the Bush administration's perspective, according
to this authority on neo-conservative strategy, is the
opportunity to reorder the power hierarchy in the
Middle East even further in favor of the United States
by overthrowing the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Iran's position
Meanwhile, Iran has not acknowledged its real interest
in pushing its position on nuclear-fuel enrichment to
the point of confrontation with the United States,
either. Instead, it has focused in public
pronouncements on the enormously popular position that
Iran will not give up its right to have civilian
nuclear power.
According to observers familiar with their thinking,
senior Iranian national-security officials have long
been saying privately that Iran should try to reach an
agreement with the United States that would normalize
relations and acknowledge officially Iran's legitimate
role in the security of the Persian Gulf.
Trita Parsi, a specialist on Iran's foreign policy at
the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International
Studies, who conducted extensive interviews with
senior Iranian national-security officials in 2004,
said Iran "is now primarily trying to become
rehabilitated in the political order of the region".
Najmeh Bozorgmehr, an Iranian journalist now at the
Brookings Institution as a visiting scholar, agrees.
Based on several years of covering Iran's
national-security policy, she said, "Iran wants to
bargain with the United States on Iran's regional
role," as well as on removal of sanctions and
assurances against US attack. Tehran has been looking
for any source of leverage with which to bargain with
the United States on those issues, she said, and
"enrichment has become a big bargaining chip".
Bozorgmehr said the Iranians have become convinced
that they have to do something to show the United
States "we can give you a hard time" to induce the
Bush administration to negotiate. And Parsi said the
prevailing view among Iranian officials after the 2003
US rejection of diplomacy was that they had to have
the capability to inflict some pain on the United
States to get its attention.
According to Parsi, that rejection confirmed Iranian
suspicions that the US problem is not with Iran's
policies but with its power. That Iranian conclusion
precisely parallels Donnelly's insider analysis of the
Bush administration's aims.
But what the Iranians really want, according to these
observers of Iranian national-security thinking, is
not nuclear weapons but the recognition of Iran's
status in the power hierarchy of the Persian Gulf
region. The Iranian demand for regional status can
only be achieved through a broad diplomatic agreement
with the United States.
The Bush administration's insistence on extending its
dominance in the Middle East even further can only be
achieved, however, by the threat of force and, if that
fails, war against Iran.
Gareth Porter is a historian and national-security
policy analyst. His latest book, Perils of Dominance:
Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam, was
published last June.
(Inter Press Service)
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