| WHY BUSH IS THREATENING IRAN |
| Socialist Campaign Group News - July 2006 |
| www.tonybenn.net |
| The threat to attack Iran by the US and Israel, because it has decided to go for a civil nuclear power programme, now poses the greatest danger to peace in the Middle East, coming after the aggression against Iraq and the illegal and dangerous occupation of Afghanistan. President Bush has many motives for his hostility, which date back to the overthrow of the Shah who had been imposed by the US, and which he has used to accuse the Iranians of being a part of the ‘Axis of Evil’. When the Shah was on the throne 30 years ago, the US was actually urging him to go for a civil nuclear power programme, as I discovered on my visit to Teheran as Secretary of State for Industry in 1976. Another charge is that President Ahmadinejad has called for Israel to be ‘wiped off the map’ — words that he never used, a lie based upon a deliberate mistranslation of what he did say which demanded ‘the elimination of the regime occupying Jerusalem’ — that has a totally different meaning. Now we have the charge that Iran is in breach of the Non Proliferation Treaty because it intends to adopt a policy of nuclear power and to enrich uranium for that purpose, which Bush claims amounts to a decision to breach the NPT to which it is a signatory. But the International Atomic Energy Authority, which has the responsibility of monitoring Iran, has made no such claim. The real reason is that Bush wants Iranian oil and bases there so that the US can dominate the whole of the near east which is of supreme strategic importance to Washington. The truth is that the US and Britain are themselves in breach of the NPT, which committed the nuclear weapons states to negotiate disarmament which they have never done. The use of depleted uranium in the Iraq war was an even greater breach of that treaty. Bush and Blair are both planning a huge expansion of their nuclear power programmes and are also committed to develop new and even more deadly nuclear weapons and the replacement of Trident. The US arms Israel, which has a massive nuclear weapons armoury and is not even a signatory of the NPT. But apart from these legal arguments the possibility of a US or Israeli attack is that, even if only conventional weapons were used, bombs dropped on Iranian nuclear installations could release radioactivity into the atmosphere or even trigger nuclear explosions comparable to those we saw at Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, which would set the Muslim and Arab world aflame. These are the reasons why our campaign to prevent this from happening is of such supreme importance. The war on Iraq was justified because we were then told the lie that that country had nuclear weapons. We must be alert to the possibility that the US might try to secure a resolution critical of Iran at the UN Security Council and then, if China and Russia declined to support military action, the US might ignore it and hope to suck Britain into another ‘coalition of the willing’, making war without UN authority. Perhaps the final irony is that while these threats continue there could well be those in Teheran who conclude that the only way to deflect a US attack would be to decide on a nuclear weapons programme so that the US would recognise the dangers to itself. If they did that, Bush would be encouraging the spread of nuclear weapons — the very opposite of what he is pretending to prevent. TONY BENN - JULY 2006 |
| www.tonybenn.net |