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   From: etaa123@etaoin.com   
      
   [11]what's left   
      
   The US’s Barbarous Policy on Iran   
      
      By Stephen Gowans   
      
      “Sanctions,” New York Times’ reporter Rick Gladstone writes, have   
      subjected “ordinary Iranians” to “increased deprivations” in order   
   to   
      “punish Iran for enriching uranium that the West suspects is a cover   
      for developing the ability to make nuclear weapons.” [1] In other   
      words, Iran is suspected of having a secret nuclear weapons program,   
      and so must be sanctioned to force it to abandon it.   
      
      Contrary to Gladstone, the West doesn’t really believe that Tehran has   
      a secret nuclear weapons program, yet even if we accept it does believe   
      this, the position is indefensible. Why should Iranians be punished for   
      developing a capability that the countries that have imposed sanctions   
      already have?   
      
      The reason why, it will be said, is because Iranians are bent on   
      developing nuclear weapons to destroy Israel. Didn’t Iranian president   
      Mahmoud Ahmadinejad threaten to “wipe Israel off the map”?   
      
      Regurgitated regularly by US hawks and Israeli politicians to mobilize   
      support for the bombing of Iran, the claim is demagogic rubbish.   
      Ahmadinejad predicted that Israel as a Zionist state would someday   
      disappear much as South Africa as an apartheid state did. He didn’t   
      threaten the physical destruction of Israel and expressed only the wish   
      that historic Palestine would become a multinational democratic state   
      of Arabs and of Jews who trace their descent from antecedents who   
      arrived in Palestine before the arrival of Zionist settlers, i.e., that   
      it would someday become a more humane alternative to what it is today.   
      [2]   
      
      No less damaging to the argument that Iranians aspire to take Israel   
      out in a hail of nuclear missiles is the reality that it would take   
      decades for Iran to match Israel’s already formidable nuclear arsenal,   
      if indeed it ever aspires to. For the foreseeable future, Israel is in   
      a far better position to wipe Iran off the map. And given Israel’s   
      penchant for flexing its US-built military muscle, is far more likely   
      to be the wiper than the wipee. Already it has almost wiped an entire   
      people from the map of historic Palestine.   
      
      But this is irrelevant, for the premise that the West suspects Iran of   
      developing a nuclear weapons capability is false. To be sure, the mass   
      media endlessly recycle the fiction that the West suspects Iran’s   
      uranium enrichment program is a cover for a nuclear weapons program,   
      but who in the West suspects this? Not high officials of the US state,   
      for they have repeatedly said that there’s no evidence that Iran has a   
      secret nuclear weapons program.   
      
      The consensus view of the United States’ 16 intelligence agencies is   
      that Iran abandoned its nuclear weapons program years ago. Director of   
      US intelligence James Clapper “said there was no evidence that (Iran)   
      had made a decision on making a concerted push to build a weapon. David   
      H. Petraeus, the C.I.A. director, concurred with that view…. Other   
      senior United States officials, including Defense Secretary Leon E.   
      Panetta and Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of   
      Staff, have made similar statements.” [3]   
      
      Rather than weakening this conclusion, stepped up US espionage has   
      buttressed it. Iran’s leaders “have opted for now against…designing a   
      nuclear warhead,” said one former intelligence official briefed on US   
      intelligence findings. “It isn’t the absence of evidence, it’s the   
      evidence of an absence. Certain things are not being done” [4] that   
      would indicate that Iran is working on nuclear weapons. Even Mossad,   
      Israeli’s intelligence agency “does not disagree with the US on the   
      weapons program,” according to a former senior US intelligence   
      official. [5]   
      
      So, contrary to the repeated claim that the West “suspects” Iran of   
      concealing a nuclear weapons program, no one in a position of authority   
      in the US state believes this to be true. Neither does Israeli   
      intelligence. So why is the United States and its allies subjecting   
      ordinary Iranians to increased deprivations through sanctions?   
      
      The answer, according to the grand docent of US foreign policy, Henry   
      Kissinger, is because US policy in the Middle East for the last half   
      century has been aimed at “preventing any power in the region from   
      emerging as a hegemon.” This is another way of saying that the aim of   
      US Middle East policy is to stop any Middle Eastern country from   
      challenging its domination by the United States. Iran, Kissinger points   
      out, has emerged as the principal challenger. [6]   
      
      Indeed, it did so as long ago as 1979, when the local extension of US   
      power in Iran, the Shah, was overthrown, and the country set out on a   
      path of independent economic and political development free from the   
      oppression of a Washington henchman. For the revolutionaries’ boldness   
      in asserting their sovereignty, Washington pressed Saddam Hussein’s   
      Iraq into a war with Iran. This served the same purpose as today’s   
      economic warfare, sabotage, threats of military intervention, and   
      assassinations of Iran’s nuclear scientists: to weaken the country and   
      stifle its development; to prevent it from thriving and thereby   
      becoming an example to other countries of development possibilities   
      outside US domination.   
      
      Uranium enrichment has emerged as point of conflict for two reasons.   
      
      First, a civilian nuclear power industry strengthens Iran economically   
      and domestic uranium enrichment provides the country with an   
      independent source of nuclear fuel. Were Iran to depend on the West for   
      enriched uranium to power its reactors, it would be forever at the   
      mercy of a hostile US state. Likewise, concern over energy security   
      being in the hands of an outside power has led Turkey, Saudi Arabia,   
      Vietnam and South Korea to insist over US objections that they be   
      allowed to produce nuclear fuel domestically, without sanction. With US   
      nuclear reactor sales hanging in the balance, it appears that their   
      wishes will be respected. [7] Iran will be uniquely denied.   
      
      Secondly, uranium enrichment provides Tehran with the capability of   
      developing nuclear weapons quickly, if it should ever feel compelled   
      to. Given Washington’s longstanding hostility to an independent Iran,   
      there are good reasons why the country may want to strengthen its means   
      
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