A clamor is mounting internationally for the United States to
step back from even intimating a threat to take military action to
destroy Iran’s developing nuclear weapon capability. “All options
remain on the table” is attacked as American aggressiveness.
Accompanying this noise is not a belief that political and
economic sanctions will work, but rather that any future Iranian
nuclear arsenal could be “deterred” in a manner similar to what was
accomplished regarding the USSR during the Cold War.
The Soviet Union, however, was run by a calculatingly logical
secular dictatorship as opposed to Iran’s mystical theocracy. That
the latter’s view of the world is skewed by radical religious
perceptions of martyrdom and imperial vested right seems to have
escaped this new breed of appeasers.
The fact is that the so-called moderate forces in Iran are just
as committed to pushing Iran forward as a nuclear-armed nation as
the radical leadership of President Ahmadinejad. In 1988 Ali-Akbar
Hashemi Rafsanjani, the man who is considered a more pragmatic, and
thus moderate, alternative in Iranian politics was reported to have
made the following statement addressing the Islamic Revolutionary
Guards Corps:
“We should fully equip ourselves both in the offensive and
defensive use of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. From now
on, you should make use of the opportunity and perform this task.”
(Quoted in Middle East Defense News, July 22, 1991.)
One could set aside what some might characterize simply as a
typical strident tone for the benefit of a military audience, but
some material realities would have to be ignored in order to do so.
By 2002 the Iranian missile, the Shahab-4 (a version of the Russian
SS-4 and North Korea’s Taepodong-1) already was test-fired.
Initially the missile was reported to be having trouble with its
guidance system, but it is now operational. Under development are
the Shahab- 5 and 6 (Taepodong-2) with capabilities ranging 4,000
km and beyond, which theoretically could hit targets as far away as
Great Britain.
These are not missiles designed for conventional warheads. The
Taepodong-1, on which the Shahab-4 is based, reportedly can carry a
1.2 ton warhead with a range of 2000+ km. Iran has been planning
for long before the arrival on the scene of Ahmadinejad to become a
power capable of projecting its nuclear strength anywhere in the
Middle East. A full intercontinental ballistic missile potential is
the next step. Those are technological facts, not hyperbole.
But that’s not the way some wish to view the obvious. Former
U.K. ambassador to Moscow and chairman of the Conservative PM John
Major’s joint intelligence committee, Sir Rodric Braithwaite, only
last week chose to characterize warnings about Iran as
“[t]errifying intelligence [that] is once again being trotted out
to paint the threat in apocalyptic colors.” One wonders what colors
Sir Rodric would prefer for nuclear dangers emanating from a regime
that sent tens of thousands of lightly armed old men and young teen
age boys (of the Basiji) to their deaths across mine
fields in futile assaults against entrenched regular Iraqi military
units during the Iran/Iraq War.
Old-fashioned European appeasement would like to be accepted as
reasoned non-ideological judgment when it is in fact nothing more
than the ostrich strategy so well practiced by earlier generations.
This is a trap into which an unfortunate number of Americans of
both parties are falling.
It is convenient to dismiss warnings about Iran as the ranting
of far right wing “neoconservative” political elements. It is
another thing to ignore the consistent and well-studied
intelligence assessments coming out of the normally reticent State
Department as well as the now especially careful Pentagon led by
Secretary of Defense Robert Gates.
It would be nice to think of the theocratic autocracy that is
Iran as simply misunderstood, God-fearing nationalism. The
ambitions of Tehran, however, both religious and political, are
quite clear to all who pay attention to their incessant theme that
the U.S. wishes to take over Iran. This dissembling — known in
Shia philosophy as the principle of taqiyah— is a
convenient method of covering Iran’s own intentions of regional
hegemony.
Iran ultimately wishes to be recognized as a major power. The
Iranians justify this as their historical right as both the center
of contemporary Shia Islam as well as the heirs to Persia’s ancient
political position. Nuclear weapons are deemed essential to
reclaiming the greatness of their world role. In their eyes this is
merely a long overdue moment in history that has been prevented
from coming to fruition by the West, in general, and now the
Americans, in particular.
