No to the Hitlerite Incitement against Muslims!
No to the Subversion of the Anti-War Movement!

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No to the Hitlerite Incitement against Muslims!
No to the Subversion of the Anti-War Movement!

Euro Factor to the Iran "Crisis"

Iran: The Next War

The government is attempting, in a very sinister fashion, to use the issue of the controversy over the protests against the anti-Muslim cartoons to re-ignite support for an offence of "glorifying terrorism". These proposals contained in a further "anti-terrorism" bill, which have been strongly opposed, had been thrown out in the House of Lords. At the same time as the incitement over the publication of the cartoons, a storm has been deliberately whipped up over the conviction of Abu Hamza, which itself shows every sign of being orchestrated to blacken the legitimate expression of anger against oppression, with a demand of "why didn’t the police act sooner?".

Expressions of incredulity that the government and media can act in such an irrational fashion, or debates about the limits of "freedom of speech", are missing the essential point. The right to conscience is being attacked, profound racism is being fostered, and a hysterical atmosphere created in which every kind of diversion can take root. And in this atmosphere, the news media and government are acting to undermine the opposition to the occupation of Iraq, the plans to commit aggression against Iran, and the stepping up of their genocidal campaign against billions of Muslims as the evil-doers in this world.

The parallels with the coming to power of Hitler and the "final solution" cannot be dismissed. As one commentator elaborates: "Julius Streicher [publisher of Der Stürmer, the Nazis' official anti-Semitic rag], was the only journalist to be convicted at Nuremburg for crimes against humanity and hanged. During the 1930s, amid widespread public disquiet about the ongoing economic and political problems occasioned by Nazi rule and its termination of social and political rights, Der Stürmer blamed all difficulties on ‘the Jews’. It popularised a line of cartoons that repeatedly portrayed hook-nosed stereotypical representations of mediaeval Jewish moneylenders, conspiring together in a counting house and cackling over the misfortunes befalling the German people."

These cartoons, and especially the controversy whipped up around them, prepare an atmosphere in which further such genocidal assaults throughout the Muslim world can be rationalised. As part of this attempted creation of hysteria, the Anglo-American elites are attempting to diffuse the anti-war movement. In particular, at this moment, they are trying to create public opinion against Iran in particular to prepare the ground for a military strike, and to criminalise Muslims as fanatics, extremists and depict Islam as an evil ideology unless it conforms to the Anglo-American values embodied in neo-liberalism and representative democracy. This creation of hysteria also includes attempts to isolate the Muslim community from the rest of the polity throughout Britain and Europe and the "West".

This is what the "war against terror" has come to, the chilling preparation for a new holocaust. But these plans must not be allowed to succeed. Our Party calls on the working class and people to constitute themselves as a bulwark against fascism and war. Never again!

By Finian Cunningham*, February 9, 2006

The referral of Iran to the UN Security Council by the International Atomic Energy Agency is not a step towards resolving the presumed nuclear problem between that country and the "international community". It is a step towards further confrontation, with the deliberate intention by the US-UK axis to provide political cover for its real aim: subjugation of Iran.

This is phase three of the Anglo-American "war on terror" which, deciphered from its Orwellian doublespeak and put into intelligible language, means the ongoing Anglo-American war of aggression on humanity.

The truly worrying thing is that such are the contradictions between the reckless fantasies of Anglo-American neo-imperialism and the limits of its own power that the warmongers may be tempted to actually trigger the very outcome they say they are trying to prevent: a nuclear conflagration.

First of all, let us dispel the latest smokescreen from the IAEA. Iran is being reported to the UN Security Council for alleged breaches of IAEA protocols. But these protocols, such as research into the enrichment of uranium, were only ever put in place by Iran on a voluntary basis. How can someone be in breach of something that they put forward in a non-binding, voluntary capacity? Besides, the ongoing IAEA arrangement was part of a quid pro quo in which the EU-3, Britain, France, Germany, would in return for Iran’s cooperation provide specific economic incentives and safeguards concerning Iran’s national security.

But as seasoned observer of non-proliferation issues Selig Harrison said: "The EU, held back by the US, has failed to honour this bargain."

The recommencement of uranium enrichment is Iran’s sovereign prerogative. And the plain truth is that Iran has and will be doing nothing outside of the only legally binding statute governing the issue, the Non-Proliferation Treaty, which grants all signatory nations an "inalienable right to develop nuclear technology for peaceful, energy purposes," as already pointed out in this newspaper recently by Ghani Jafar.

For two years Iran has been negotiating with the EU-3 over its nuclear programme. Iran’s considerable petroleum and gas reserves are nevertheless finite and like every other fuel supplier the country may indeed have reached "Peak" – the technical term the oil industry uses to mean final reserves – lasting perhaps another two decades. Iran has been prudently making the transition to an alternative energy source - nuclear. (In the same way as US President George Bush urged his country during his State of the Union speech last week!)

Iran has always said that its nuclear programme is about civilian use of energy. Despite allowing the IAEA unprecedented access to its nuclear facilities, and the IAEA not being able to find any evidence of clandestine nuclear weapons production, the same sinister allegations and suspicions of "nuclear ambitions" are relentlessly thrown at Iran by the US and EU.

Several real initiatives put forward by Iran in its efforts to resolve the latest diplomatic "impasse" and head off a referral to the UN Security Council were haughtily dismissed by the EU-3 as "nothing new". And calls for further dialogue by the Iranian foreign minister were rebuffed. It must be said that Britain has taken the lead in adopting this intransigent attitude by the EU troika. Days before the IAEA ruling, British Prime Minister Tony Blair told his parliament that "not only has Iran breached its international nuclear obligations but it is exporting terrorism around the world."

Clearly this is a soft cop, hard cop routine. There was never any intention of a reasonable, diplomatic "solution". The real intention was to set up an appearance of a diplomatic process, which could then be presented as tried, exhausted and failed. Now, it’s over to the hard cop.

Just like phase one and two of the Anglo-American war on humanity in which Afghanistan and Iraq were placed in the firing lines, there were similar attempts to create a diplomatic façade. But all the while, the troops were being readied, the tanks cranked up and the bombers loaded. It is to their Machiavellian credit that the Anglo-Americans appear to have now managed to get the French, Germans, Chinese and Russians on board. We are still some way off the trigger of aggression and these last four mentioned may have no intention of going all the way of endorsing Security Council sanctions. But as we have seen with Afghanistan and Iraq, Washington and London didn’t need UN sanctions to launch into aggression; they just need to create a false sense of crisis in world security. This same process is now happening once again.

The collision course with Iran is a central aim of the Project for the New American Century, the real manifesto for which Bush was elected. This geopolitical strategy for full-spectrum dominance has already taken considerable shape, with US-British military penetration into vast areas of the critical energy territories in Western and Central Asia. Iran being the second-largest source of petroleum and gas is obviously a prize even bigger than Iraq. Its strategic importance is underlined by Iran’s existing and potential geopolitical connections to Pakistan, India, China and Russia.

There’s also a revenge factor. Since the Americans and British were kicked out of the Islamic Republic of Iran in 1979 after more than two decades of a cosy arrangement with their brutal client, the Shah, there would be, for them, the immense satisfaction of "imperial recovery".

But here’s the real trigger for a military attack on Iran. It’s Iran’s intention to challenge the all-dominant US petrodollar oil trade by setting up a rival euro oil market.

Many political commentators have pointed out that the deficit-ridden US and British economies have only been able to continue their unsustainable ways because the US dollar enjoys the artificial privilege of being the world’s reserve currency. The world’s two existing oil markets, the NYMEX in New York and the International Petroleum Exchange in London, both owned by US capital, insist on all oil transactions being conducted in US dollars. For this reason, all countries must have substantial reserves of dollars to ensure vital supplies of fuel energy. This means that the US economy can go on accumulating stratospheric debts because they can just keep printing more dollars, knowing that the rest of the world will have to take them in order to keep their oil supplies coming.

American political analyst Mike Whitney points out that the US is now running a total debt of $8 trillion, which makes it by far the world’s biggest economic basket case.

Whitney said: "America’s currency monopoly is the perfect pyramid scheme. As long as nations are forced to buy oil in dollars, the US can continue its profligate spending with impunity. The only threat to this strategy is the prospect of competition from an independent oil exchange, forcing the faltering dollar to go nose to nose with more stable, debt-free currencies such as the euro.

"That would compel central banks to diversify their currency holdings, sending billions of dollars back to America and ensuring a devastating economic crash."

Iran has already given notice to the world that it intends opening this new euro oil market next month. With the devastating blow that this move will cause to the US-British economies, we can expect Washington and Britain to precipitate a pre-emptive confrontation with Iran over its "nuclear ambitions" and "threats", using poor little (nuclear-armed-to-the-teeth) Israel as a proxy.

The profoundly disturbing contradiction is this: the Anglo-American neo-imperialists need to subjugate Iran for economic survival, yet their conventional military resources are pinned down in overstretched geopolitical adventures. The Anglo-American war on humanity could thus reach new depths of illegality and depravity, through the unleashing of nuclear weapons.

* The writer is a newspaper journalist based in Dublin. Thanks to Mike Whitney

By John Pilger, New Statesman cover story, February 13, 2006

Has Tony Blair, our minuscule Caesar, finally crossed his Rubicon? Having subverted the laws of the civilised world and brought carnage to a defenceless people and bloodshed to his own, having lied and lied and used the death of a hundredth British soldier in Iraq to indulge his profane self-pity, is he about to collude in one more crime before he goes?

Perhaps he is seriously unstable now, as some have suggested. Power does bring a certain madness to its prodigious abusers, especially those of shallow disposition. In The March of Folly: from Troy to Vietnam, the great American historian Barbara Tuchman described Lyndon B Johnson, the president whose insane policies took him across his Rubicon in Vietnam. "He lacked [John] Kennedy's ambivalence, born of a certain historical sense and at least some capacity for reflective thinking," she wrote. "Forceful and domineering, a man infatuated with himself, Johnson was affected in his conduct of Vietnam policy by three elements in his character: an ego that was insatiable and never secure; a bottomless capacity to use and impose the powers of his office without inhibition; a profound aversion, once fixed upon a course of action, to any contradictions."

That, demonstrably, is Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and the rest of the cabal that has seized power in Washington. But there is a logic to their idiocy – the goal of dominance. It also describes Blair, for whom the only logic is vainglorious. And now he is threatening to take Britain into the nightmare on offer in Iran. His Washington mentors are unlikely to ask for British troops, not yet. At first, they will prefer to bomb from a safe height, as Bill Clinton did in his destruction of Yugoslavia. They are aware that, like the Serbs, the Iranians are a serious people with a history of defending themselves and who are not stricken by the effects of a long siege, as the Iraqis were in 2003. When the Iranian defence minister promises "a crushing response", you sense he means it.

Listen to Blair in the House of Commons: "It's important we send a signal of strength" against a regime that has "forsaken diplomacy" and is "exporting terrorism" and "flouting its international obligations". Coming from one who has exported terrorism to Iran's neighbour, scandalously reneged on Britain's most sacred international obligations and forsaken diplomacy for brute force, these are Alice-through-the-looking-glass words.

However, they begin to make sense when you read Blair's Commons speeches on Iraq of 25 February and 18 March 2003. In both crucial debates – the latter leading to the disastrous vote on the invasion – he used the same or similar expressions to lie that he remained committed to a peaceful resolution. "Even now, today, we are offering Saddam the prospect of voluntary disarmament . . ." he said. From the revelations in Philippe Sands's book Lawless World, the scale of his deception is clear. On 31 January 2003, Bush and Blair confirmed their earlier secret decision to attack Iraq.

Like the invasion of Iraq, an attack on Iran has a secret agenda that has nothing to do with the Tehran regime's imaginary weapons of mass destruction. That Washington has managed to coerce enough members of the International Atomic Energy Agency into participating in a diplomatic charade is no more than reminiscent of the way it intimidated and bribed the "international community" into attacking Iraq in 1991.

Iran offers no "nuclear threat". There is not the slightest evidence that it has the centrifuges necessary to enrich uranium to weapons-grade material. The head of the IAEA, Mohamed ElBaradei, has repeatedly said his inspectors have found nothing to support American and Israeli claims. Iran has done nothing illegal; it has demonstrated no territorial ambitions nor has it engaged in the occupation of a foreign country – unlike the United States, Britain and Israel. It has complied with its obligations under the Non-Proliferation Treaty to allow inspectors to "go anywhere and see anything" – unlike the US and Israel. The latter has refused to recognise the NPT, and has between 200 and 500 thermonuclear weapons targeted at Iran and other Middle Eastern states.

Those who flout the rules of the NPT are America's and Britain's anointed friends. Both India and Pakistan have developed their nuclear weapons secretly and in defiance of the treaty. The Pakistani military dictatorship has openly exported its nuclear technology. In Iran's case, the excuse that the Bush regime has seized upon is the suspension of purely voluntary "confidence-building" measures that Iran agreed with Britain, France and Germany in order to placate the US and show that it was "above suspicion". Seals were placed on nuclear equipment following a concession given, some say foolishly, by Iranian negotiators and which had nothing to do with Iran's obligations under the NPT.

Iran has since claimed back its "inalienable right" under the terms of the NPT to enrich uranium for peaceful purposes. There is no doubt this decision reflects the ferment of political life in Tehran and the tension between radical and conciliatory forces, of which the bellicose new president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is but one voice. As European governments seemed to grasp for a while, this demands true diplomacy, especially given the history.

For more than half a century, Britain and the US have menaced Iran. In 1953, the CIA and MI6 overthrew the democratic government of Muhammed Mossadeq, an inspired nationalist who believed that Iranian oil belonged to Iran. They installed the venal shah and, through a monstrous creation called Savak, built one of the most vicious police states of the modern era. The Islamic revolution in 1979 was inevitable and very nasty, yet it was not monolithic and, through popular pressure and movement from within the elite, Iran has begun to open to the outside world – in spite of having sustained an invasion by Saddam Hussein, who was encouraged and backed by the US and Britain.

At the same time, Iran has lived with the real threat of an Israeli attack, possibly with nuclear weapons, about which the "international community" has remained silent. Recently, one of Israel's leading military historians, Martin van Creveld, wrote: "Obviously, we don't want Iran to have nuclear weapons and I don't know if they're developing them, but if they're not developing them, they're crazy."

It is hardly surprising that the Tehran regime has drawn the "lesson" of how North Korea, which has nuclear weapons, has successfully seen off the American predator without firing a shot. During the cold war, British "nuclear deterrent" strategists argued the same justification for arming the nation with nuclear weapons; the Russians were coming, they said. As we are aware from declassified files, this was fiction, unlike the prospect of an American attack on Iran, which is very real and probably imminent.

Blair knows this. He also knows the real reasons for an attack and the part Britain is likely to play. Next month, Iran is scheduled to shift its petrodollars into a euro-based bourse. The effect on the value of the dollar will be significant, if not, in the long term, disastrous. At present the dollar is, on paper, a worthless currency bearing the burden of a national debt exceeding $8trn and a trade deficit of more than $600bn. The cost of the Iraq adventure alone, according to the Nobel Prizewinning economist Joseph Stiglitz, could be $2trn. America's military empire, with its wars and 700-plus bases and limitless intrigues, is funded by creditors in Asia, principally China.

That oil is traded in dollars is critical in maintaining the dollar as the world's reserve currency. What the Bush regime fears is not Iran's nuclear ambitions but the effect of the world's fourth-biggest oil producer and trader breaking the dollar monopoly. Will the world's central banks then begin to shift their reserve holdings and, in effect, dump the dollar? Saddam Hussein was threatening to do the same when he was attacked.

While the Pentagon has no plans to occupy all of Iran, it has in its sights a strip of land that runs along the border with Iraq. This is Khuzestan, home to 90 per cent of Iran's oil. "The first step taken by an invading force," reported Beirut's Daily Star, "would be to occupy Iran's oil-rich Khuzestan Province, securing the sensitive Straits of Hormuz and cutting off the Iranian military's oil supply." On 28 January the Iranian government said that it had evidence of British undercover attacks in Khuzestan, including bombings, over the past year. Will the newly emboldened Labour MPs pursue this? Will they ask what the British army based in nearby Basra – notably the SAS – will do if or when Bush begins bombing Iran? With control of the oil of Khuzestan and Iraq and, by proxy, Saudi Arabia, the US will have what Richard Nixon called "the greatest prize of all".

But what of Iran's promise of "a crushing response"? Last year, the Pentagon delivered 500 "bunker-busting" bombs to Israel. Will the Israelis use them against a desperate Iran? Bush's 2002 Nuclear Posture Review cites "pre-emptive" attack with so-called low-yield nuclear weapons as an option. Will the militarists in Washington use them, if only to demonstrate to the rest of us that, regardless of their problems with Iraq, they are able to "fight and win multiple, simultaneous major-theatre wars", as they have boasted? That a British prime minister should collude with even a modicum of this insanity is cause for urgent action on this side of the Atlantic.

With thanks to Mike Whitney.