Iranian nukes not the real issue
asiatimes: In pushing for a showdown over Iran's nuclear program in the United Nations Security Council, the administration of US President George W Bush has presented the issue as a matter of global security - an Iranian nuclear threat in defiance of the international community.
But the history of the conflict and the private strategic thinking of both sides reveal that the dispute is really about the Bush administration's drive for greater dominance in the Middle East and Iran's demand for recognition as a regional power.
It is now known that the Iranian leadership, which was convinced that Bush was planning to move against Iran after toppling Saddam Hussein in Iraq, proposed in April 2003 to negotiate with
the United States on the very issues that the US administration had claimed were the basis for its hostile posture toward Tehran: its nuclear program, its support for Hezbollah and other anti-Israeli armed groups, and its hostility to Israel's existence.
Tehran offered concrete, substantive concessions on those issues. But on the advice of Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Bush refused to respond to the proposal for negotiation. Nuclear weapons were not, therefore, the primary US concern. In the hierarchy of the US administration's interests, the denial of legitimacy to the Islamic Republic trumped a deal that could have provided assurances against an Iranian nuclear weapon.
For insight into the real aims of the Bush administration in pushing the issue of Iranian access to nuclear technology to a crisis point, one can turn to Tom Donnelly of the American Enterprise Institute, a neo-conservative think-tank. Donnelly was the deputy executive director of the Project for the New American Century from 1999 to 2002, and was the main author of "Rebuilding America's Defenses".
That paper was written for Cheney and Rumsfeld during the transition following Bush's election and had the participation of four prominent figures who later took positions in the administration: Stephen Cambone, Lewis Libby, Paul Wolfowitz and John Bolton.
Donnelly's analysis of the issue of Iran and nuclear weapons, published last October in the book Getting Ready for a Nuclear-Ready Iran, makes it clear that the real objection to Iran's becoming a nuclear power is that it would impede the larger US ambitions in the Middle East - what Donnelly calls the Bush administration's "project of transforming the Middle East".
Contrary to the official line depicting Iran as a radical state threatening to plunge the region into war, Donnelly refers to Iran as "more the status quo power" in the region in relation to the United States. Iran, he explains, "stands directly athwart this project of regional transformation". Up to now, he observes, the Iranian regime has been "incapable of stemming the seeping US presence in the Persian Gulf and in the broader region". And the invasion of Iraq "completed the near-encirclement of Iran by US military forces".
Donnelly writes that a "nuclear Iran" is a problem not so much because Tehran would employ those weapons or pass them on to terrorist groups, but mainly because of "the constraining effect it threatens to impose upon US strategy for the greater Middle East".
The "greatest danger", according to Donnelly, is that the "realists" would "pursue a 'balance of power' approach with a nuclear Iran, undercutting the Bush 'liberation strategy'". Although Donnelly doesn't say so explicitly, it would undercut that strategy primarily by ruling out a US attack on Iran as part of a "regime change" strategy.
Instead, in Donnelly's scenario, a nuclear capability would incline those outside the neo-conservative priesthood to negotiate a "detente" with Iran, which would bring the plan for the extension of US political-military dominance in the Middle East to a halt.
What is really at stake in the confrontation with Iran from the Bush administration's perspective, according to this authority on neo-conservative strategy, is the opportunity to reorder the power hierarchy in the Middle East even further in favor of the United States by overthrowing the Islamic Republic of Iran. Read more
But the history of the conflict and the private strategic thinking of both sides reveal that the dispute is really about the Bush administration's drive for greater dominance in the Middle East and Iran's demand for recognition as a regional power.
It is now known that the Iranian leadership, which was convinced that Bush was planning to move against Iran after toppling Saddam Hussein in Iraq, proposed in April 2003 to negotiate with
the United States on the very issues that the US administration had claimed were the basis for its hostile posture toward Tehran: its nuclear program, its support for Hezbollah and other anti-Israeli armed groups, and its hostility to Israel's existence.
Tehran offered concrete, substantive concessions on those issues. But on the advice of Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Bush refused to respond to the proposal for negotiation. Nuclear weapons were not, therefore, the primary US concern. In the hierarchy of the US administration's interests, the denial of legitimacy to the Islamic Republic trumped a deal that could have provided assurances against an Iranian nuclear weapon.
For insight into the real aims of the Bush administration in pushing the issue of Iranian access to nuclear technology to a crisis point, one can turn to Tom Donnelly of the American Enterprise Institute, a neo-conservative think-tank. Donnelly was the deputy executive director of the Project for the New American Century from 1999 to 2002, and was the main author of "Rebuilding America's Defenses".
That paper was written for Cheney and Rumsfeld during the transition following Bush's election and had the participation of four prominent figures who later took positions in the administration: Stephen Cambone, Lewis Libby, Paul Wolfowitz and John Bolton.
Donnelly's analysis of the issue of Iran and nuclear weapons, published last October in the book Getting Ready for a Nuclear-Ready Iran, makes it clear that the real objection to Iran's becoming a nuclear power is that it would impede the larger US ambitions in the Middle East - what Donnelly calls the Bush administration's "project of transforming the Middle East".
Contrary to the official line depicting Iran as a radical state threatening to plunge the region into war, Donnelly refers to Iran as "more the status quo power" in the region in relation to the United States. Iran, he explains, "stands directly athwart this project of regional transformation". Up to now, he observes, the Iranian regime has been "incapable of stemming the seeping US presence in the Persian Gulf and in the broader region". And the invasion of Iraq "completed the near-encirclement of Iran by US military forces".
Donnelly writes that a "nuclear Iran" is a problem not so much because Tehran would employ those weapons or pass them on to terrorist groups, but mainly because of "the constraining effect it threatens to impose upon US strategy for the greater Middle East".
The "greatest danger", according to Donnelly, is that the "realists" would "pursue a 'balance of power' approach with a nuclear Iran, undercutting the Bush 'liberation strategy'". Although Donnelly doesn't say so explicitly, it would undercut that strategy primarily by ruling out a US attack on Iran as part of a "regime change" strategy.
Instead, in Donnelly's scenario, a nuclear capability would incline those outside the neo-conservative priesthood to negotiate a "detente" with Iran, which would bring the plan for the extension of US political-military dominance in the Middle East to a halt.
What is really at stake in the confrontation with Iran from the Bush administration's perspective, according to this authority on neo-conservative strategy, is the opportunity to reorder the power hierarchy in the Middle East even further in favor of the United States by overthrowing the Islamic Republic of Iran. Read more
posted by exoplanet at 7:10 PM
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