Attacking Iran: Tragedy or Farce?

According to The Telegraph, Washington is losing patience with British Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, accusing him of failing to ‘match his more robust private conversations on Iran with hard-hitting public statements’. Is this simply political self-preservation from a man who has yet to face his electorate, or does Brown know what many of us strongly suspect: that claims about the threat posed by Iran have been ‘sexed-up’?

“History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.” – Karl Marx

There are clear parallels between the way public opinion toward Iran is being shaped today and the escalation in rhetoric against Iraq in the months before the 2003 invasion.

You’ll recall that, throughout 2002 we were assured that Iraq posed an imminent threat to the United States and its allies; that Iraq had an active nuclear weapons programme; that Iraq possessed chemical and biological weapons; and that Iraq provided funding, training and weapons to terrorist organisations.

Well, we face broadly the same threats from Iran today – or so we are led to believe.

Of course, the claims made against Iraq are now known to have been grossly exaggerated. In March 2004, the House of Representatives Special Investigation Division published a report based upon ‘a database of statements about Iraq made by President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Secretary Rumsfeld, Secretary Powell, and National Security Advisor Rice.’ The report, entitled Iraq on the Record: The Bush Administration’s Public Statements on Iraq, found that the five officials had made 237 misleading statements about the threat posed by Iraq in the 12 months or so prior to the commencement of hostilities.

These statements were made in 125 separate appearances, consisting of 40 speeches, 26 press conferences and briefings, 53 interviews, 4 written statements, and 2 congressional testimonies. Most of the statements in the database were misleading because they expressed certainty where none existed or failed to acknowledge the doubts of intelligence officials. Ten of the statements were simply false.

None of this would have been news to Gordon Brown who, as a recipient of the infamous 2002 Downing Street Memo, would already have known that ‘the intelligence and facts were being fixed around’ Bush’s policy of removing Saddam.

In that context, maybe Brown is right to be a little more cautious in his handling of the current crisis with Iran than his predecessor, Tony Blair, was with Iraq. The same can be said of the US intelligence community, which seems to be resisting calls to reverse-engineer the ‘facts’ about Iran back in to the politicians’ allegations. As Gareth Porter, writing for Inter Press Service, reported on November 8th:

A National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran has been held up for more than a year in an effort to force the intelligence community to remove dissenting judgments on the Iranian nuclear programme, and thus make the document more supportive of U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney’s militarily aggressive policy toward Iran, according to accounts of the process provided by participants to two former Central Intelligence Agency officers.

That dissenting judgements persist is really no great surprise given that just two years ago, the Washington Post reported that the best intelligence suggested Iran was ‘about a decade away from manufacturing the key ingredient for a nuclear weapon’, which was roughly double the ‘previous estimate of five years’.

“I have not received any information that there is a concrete active nuclear weapons program going on right now.” – Mohamed ElBaradei, director of the International Atomic Energy Agency

The US intelligence community is not alone in failing to produce the alarmist judgements that Cheney allegedly demands. Speaking on October 29th, Mohamed ElBaradei, director of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), said that, although he couldn’t ‘give Iran a pass right now’, there was no evidence that Iran was building nuclear weapons. Further, in a move that will undoubtedly have angered Washington, he accused US leaders of ‘spinning and hyping the Iranian issue’, and warned that military force could spark a global conflagration.

There is no shortage of alarm coming from Israel, however, as it continues to trade off of the mistranslation of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s famous “wipe off the map” comment.

Even before Ahmadinejad’s had uttered those fateful words, Israel had introduced the concept of the ‘point of no return’ as a possible justification for the use of pre-emptive force against Iran’s suspected nuclear facilities. Since then, speculation has mounted that, if there is to be a strike against Iran, it could well come from Israel and not America.

Back in January 2007, The Times carried an article suggesting that ‘Israel has drawn up secret plans to destroy Iran’s uranium enrichment facilities’ using ‘low-yield nuclear “bunker-busters”’ in an attack reminiscent of that which crippled Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor in 1981.

Osirak was a 40 megawatt light-water nuclear reactor, which was sold to Iraq by France. Construction began in 1979 at the Al Tuwaitha Nuclear Center near Baghdad.

Although Iraq insisted that its interest in nuclear energy was a peaceful one, Israeli intelligence determined that Iraq intended to use the facility to produce nuclear weapons. Whilst some estimates suggested Iraq was between five and ten years away from building a nuclear weapon, others indicated it might have happened within one or two years. Convinced that the opposition party might not act pre-emptively should they gain power, Prime Minister Menachem Begin decided his only option was to attack.

Operation Opera commenced in the afternoon of June 7th 1981, when a squadron of eight F16s left Etzion Air Force Base in southern Israel, accompanied by six F15s. At a little after 17:30, Iraq’s reactor was ruined.

Critics of the attack rejected Israel’s claims that this act of ‘pre-emptive self-defence’ was justifiable both under international law and under Article 51 of the charter of the United Nations. Indeed, the United Nations Security Council expressed its ‘deep alarm over the unprecedented Israeli act of aggression… which created a grave threat to international peace and security’, in a resolution dated Novermber 13th 1981.

Interestingly, this resolution was suspended in 2005 following Israel’s continued refusal to comply. And now Israel appears ready to commit another act of ‘pre-emptive self-defence’. This time, however, any such ‘act of aggression’ wouldn’t be ‘unprecedented’.

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