Obama threatens Iran

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Obama threatens Iran
6 August 2010

At a White House briefing Wednesday, President Obama personally joined the
growing chorus of war threats against Iran coming from Washington and its allies.

Recent threats include remarks from US Defense Secretary Gates, who argued
against “another war in the Middle East” in 2008, but stated last month that the
US does “not accept the idea of Iran having nuclear weapons.” Israeli Defense
Minister Ehud Barak said it was “still time for sanctions,” but that “at a
certain point, we should realize that sanctions cannot work.”

It was against this backdrop that the White House called in selected journalists
for a press briefing on Iran. They reportedly discovered only after arriving
that the “briefer” at this apparently routine event was none other than the
president himself.

Obama’s purpose was to deliver a blunt warning to the Iranian government: it
could either surrender to US demands that it abandon its nuclear program, or
face US attack.

Obama said that Iranian officials “should know what they can say ‘yes’ to.” If
“national pride” drove Iran to develop nuclear weapons, Obama continued, “they
will bear the costs of that.” He said “all options” were open, in order to
“prevent a nuclear arms race in the region and to prevent a nuclear-armed Iran.”

Fearing that certain journalists had misunderstood Obama’s empty phrases about
diplomacy as indicating plans for new negotiations with Iran, senior White House
officials later spoke to one of the reporters there, well-known pro-war
journalist, Robert Kagan, to set the record straight.

In a Washington Post column, Kagan criticized journalists who asked US officials
about diplomacy with Iran: “This put the officials in an awkward position: they
didn’t want to say flat out that the administration was not pursuing a new
diplomatic initiative, because this might suggest that the administration was
not interested in diplomacy at all.”

Kagan commented, “As one bemused senior official later remarked to me, if the
point of the briefing had been diplomacy, then the administration would have
brought its top negotiators to the meeting, instead of all the people in charge
of putting the squeeze on Iran.”

In fact, the Obama administration’s policy has never been to negotiate with
Iran, but to present Tehran with a list of humiliating, nonnegotiable demands.
These were presented in the context of a two-track policy: a campaign of
sanctions and war threats could either lead to Tehran’s capitulation, or lay the
basis for US military action.

Last June, the Obama administration unsuccessfully tried to arrange a pro-US
regime in Tehran, by overturning Ahmadinejad’s election. The US tacitly backed
the so-called “Green Revolution,” led by defeated candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi
and billionaire tycoon Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, and supported by sections of
the middle class in Iran. However, Washington was thwarted when these forces,
drawn from the wealthier layers of Iranian society, failed to gain broader support.

The administration still believes that some form of internal “regime change” may
be possible. Kagan noted that White House officials hoped that the political
forces behind the Green Revolution could connect with recent strikes of
merchants in the bazaars, and the combination “would pose a real threat to the
regime.”

However, the Obama administration now seems increasingly set on war as the only
way of securing its policy interests in the region. It considers that a US
victory in the standoff with Iran is now critical to maintaining Washington’s
prestige and hegemonic role in world affairs.

A report by Obama administration advisors at the Bipartisan Policy Center (BPC)
notes that “American credibility…would be seriously diminished if, after
repeatedly issuing warnings to the contrary, it permitted Tehran to cross the
nuclear threshold,” that is, to acquire nuclear weapons. It finds that the US
must be prepared for “extraordinary action” to preserve its credibility as the
world’s greatest military power, and calls for “visible, credible preparations
for a military option.”

The US campaign against Iran’s nuclear program is a political fraud. Washington
has mounted no such campaign against nuclear-armed India, because it views the
Indian army as a US strategic asset in the region. In the case of Iran—seen by
Washington as a strategic adversary—the country’s nuclear industry, which Iran
insists is for only for energy, becomes a pretext for a US campaign to isolate
and beat it into submission.

It is virtually impossible for the Iranian regime to demonstrate that the US
should not treat it as a threat, short of total political self-emasculation.
Iran has ties to political and military forces in US-occupied Iraq and
Afghanistan, as well as in Lebanon and the Gaza Strip; it is a major supplier of
oil and gas to world markets, including to key US competitors such as China; and
it has developed a significant nuclear program.

To get a lasting deal with Washington, Iran would have to publicly renounce
supporting parties or resistance movements in regions oppressed by the US or
Israel, grant US firms access or control of its oil fields, and submit to
invasive controls of its nuclear program. This would amount to a public
declaration by the Iranian government that it is a lackey of American imperialism.

As suspicions grow that Tehran may not make such an offer, views are hardening
in Washington in favor of war. There are even calls for a press campaign to
soften up public opinion for war. The BPC report called for “public discussion
of military options,” while the French newspaper Le Monde recently asked whether
the public might be “psychologically prepared for the scenario of war with Iran.”

US threats, issued in an unannounced meeting covered by a handful of reporters,
underscore the Obama administration’s contempt for public opinion. Elected as a
result of mass opposition to the Bush administration’s policy of aggressive war,
Obama now threatens to start a war that would dwarf the Iraq and Afghan
conflicts and threaten to engulf the entire region.

Alex Lantier

http://wsws.org/articles/2010/aug2010/pers-a06.shtml

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