Iranian scientist assassinated as US steps up war threats

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Iranian scientist assassinated as US steps up war threats
By Bill Van Auken
13 January 2010

Massoud Ali Mohammadi, one of Iran’s leading nuclear scientists, was
assassinated in Tehran Tuesday, just two days after the top US
military commander in the region announced that the Pentagon has drawn
up plans to bomb Iranian nuclear sites.

The killing and the ratcheting up of military threats are indicative
of the deepening international tensions over the Iranian nuclear
program. While the US, Israel and other Western powers have charged
Tehran with seeking to obtain a nuclear weapon, Iran has insisted
repeatedly that its nuclear programs are for peaceful purposes only.

Ali Mohammadi, 50, was killed when a powerful remote-controlled bomb
exploded near his vehicle as he prepared to drive to work at Tehran
University. The blast shattered windows 300 feet away in Ali
Mohammadi’s northern Tehran neighborhood of Qeytariyeh. It was
reported that the bomb was strapped to a motorcycle.

Ali Mohammadi taught neutron nuclear physics at the university, and,
according to at least one report from Iran, he was among Iranian
citizens subject to international sanctions for involvement in the
nuclear program.

Colleagues of the murdered professor described him as apolitical,
although his name appeared with those of more than 200 other academics
in a statement supporting opposition candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi’s
challenge to the results of the disputed June12 presidential election,
which gave President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad a second term.

Iran’s senior prosecutor charged the US and Israel with responsibility
for the attack. “Given the fact that Massoud Ali Mohammadi was a
nuclear scientist, the CIA and Mossad services and agents most likely
have had a hand in it,” the prosecutor, Abbas Jafari Dolatabadi, told
the state-run media.

Foreign ministry spokesman Ramin Mehmanparast said that initial
investigations pointed to “the Zionist regime, America and their
mercenaries in Iran in this terrorist incident.” He added, “Such
terrorist acts and the physical elimination of the country’s nuclear
scientists will certainly not stop the scientific and technological
process, but will speed it up.”

Iran’s press TV commented, “It seems that kidnap and assassination of
Iranian scientists is on the agenda of the United States.”

Washington brushed off the accusation. “Charges of US involvement are
absurd,” said State Department spokesman Mark Toner.

Given the growing bellicosity of Washington’s threats over the Iranian
nuclear program, together with the fact that the US and Israel are the
leading practitioners of the criminal policy of targeted
assassinations, Tehran’s charges cannot be dismissed so easily.

The state prosecutor, Dolatabadi, said that the killing of
Ali-Mohammadi follows the disappearance last June of Iranian nuclear
researcher Shahram Amiri during a pilgrimage to the holy city of
Medina in Saudi Arabia. The Iranian government has charged that he was
abducted by Saudi intelligence and handed over to the US.

The Financial Times of London also pointed to the case of Ardeshir
Asgari, a professor at Shiraz University, who worked at Iran’s nuclear
uranium conversion facility in Isfahan. His death in 2007, at the age
of 44, was attributed to “gas suffocation,” but there are strong
suspicions that he was murdered.

The US-based intelligence web site Stratfor noted: “Three years ago, a
noted Iranian nuclear scientist, Ardeshir Hassanpour, was killed. At
the time, Stratfor had learned that the Israeli intelligence service
Mossad was behind the assassination. Indeed, even this time around,
Iranian officials have pointed fingers at the Jewish state. It is,
however, too early to tell if that is the case.

“Assassinations of individual scientists and even defection and
kidnapping of others is not unprecedented. Furthermore, there have
been bombings in recent months that have targeted senior military
commanders of the country’s elite military force, the Islamic
Revolutionary Guard Corps.”

In another article, Stratfor wrote that the assassination of
Ali-Mohammadi will complicate negotiations between the West and Iran
over the country’s nuclear program. “That could provide an opportunity
for Israel,” the web site continued. “If Iran becomes more inflexible
in the nuclear negotiations, Israel will have a stronger argument to
make to the United States that the diplomatic course with Iran has
expired. And should the United States be driven by the Israelis to
admit the futility of the diplomatic course, the menu of choices in
dealing with Iran could narrow considerably.”

The assassination in Tehran came just two days after the senior—and
highly political—US Army general, David Petraeus, announced in a
television interview that Iran’s nuclear facilities “certainly can be
bombed.” Petraeus heads the US Central Command, which oversees both
the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. His statement signaled a significant
escalation of US military threats against Iran.

In an interview with the CNN cable news network broadcast Sunday,
Petraeus declared that “it would be almost literally irresponsible” if
CENTCOM (Central Command) failed to draw up “plans for a whole variety
of different contingencies” relating to a potential military attack on
Iran.

The general said that despite reports that Iran had dispersed its
nuclear facilities and sought to protect them in underground tunnels,
they can still be attacked. “Well, they certainly can be bombed,” he
said in the interview. “The level of effect would vary with who it is
that carries it out, what ordnance they have and what capability they
can bring to bear.”

While Petraeus refused to comment on Israeli plans for military
action, the statement was clearly an oblique reference to whether an
attack on Iran would be carried out by Tel Aviv, which has repeatedly
threatened such a strike, or the United States. The US military is
accelerating production of its new “bunker buster” weapon, known as
the Massive Ordnance Penetrator. This 30,000-pound bomb is reportedly
capable of burrowing 200 feet into the ground before detonating.

In a statement that suggested the grand scope within which Petraeus
sees his military responsibilities, the CENTCOM commander allowed that
“there’s a period of time, certainly, before all this might come to a
head, if you will.” In other words, he is prepared to allow the
politicians and diplomats to go through the motions with Tehran before
he takes charge.

Tehran issued a muted reaction to Petraeus’ provocative remarks. A
foreign ministry spokesman referred to them as “thoughtless and
irresponsible.” The Tehran Times quoted the spokesman as saying that
“the US is retrogressing and repeating the mistakes of the previous
administration.”

In another indication of the military pressure that Washington is
bringing to bear on Iran, President Obama has ordered a carrier strike
group, led by the aircraft carrier USS Eisenhower, into the Persian
Gulf for a six-month deployment. The flotilla, including 6,000 sailors
and Marines, four squadrons of fighter bombers and several missile
cruisers and destroyers, set sail for the region on January 2.

The military escalation is running parallel to the Obama
administration’s attempt to punish Iran with a new set of economic
sanctions. The so-called P5+1—the US, France, Britain, Russia, China
and Germany—is set to meet in New York City Saturday to discuss
punitive measures against Iran, over and above three earlier rounds of
sanctions imposed by the United Nations Security Council over Iran’s
refusal to suspend its uranium enrichment program.

The six powers had imposed an end-of-the-year deadline on Tehran to
accede to a proposal made by the International Atomic Energy Agency,
the UN nuclear watchdog, that would have compelled Iran to ship most
of its low-enriched uranium (LEU) to Russia and France to be refined
into reactor fuel.

Tehran ignored the deadline and put forward its own counter-proposal
to exchange batches of the LEU for nuclear reactor fuel from Turkey,
with which Iran has been developing close economic ties. The US and
the other Western powers have ignored this proposal.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said this week that Washington
wants the implementation of “smarter sanctions” that would target
“decision-makers.” Media reports have indicated that the US is pushing
for a wide range of new sanctions against the Islamic Revolutionary
Guard Corps, which is involved in Iran’s nuclear program, but also
controls broad swathes of the Iranian economy, ranging from the Tehran
airport to national telecommunications, with substantial investments
in thousands of enterprises.

It is highly unlikely, however, that any substantial new round of
sanctions will gain the approval of the UN Security Council, which is
chaired by Beijing this month. Both Russia and China are among the
five countries with veto power and neither has any interest in halting
economic relations with Iran.

China is rapidly expanding trade with Iran and investment in its
energy sector. Iran is now the third-largest supplier of crude oil to
China and also exports large amounts of natural gas. For its part,
Russia is responsible for 85 percent of Iran’s weapons imports. Both
countries have interests in the region that are in conflict with those
of Washington and do not see the Iranian nuclear program as any real
threat.

Nor for that matter is the threat of an Iranian bomb the driving force
behind US policy. US imperialism is seeking to establish its hegemony
over the energy-rich regions of Central Asia and the Middle East,
where it is now waging two wars—in Iraq and Afghanistan, with Iran
lying between the two. It is seeking to reassert US dominance in Iran
at the expense of its geo-strategic rivals and is threatening to
ignite a conflict that could trigger a far wider war with incalculable
consequences.

In the absence of Security Council approval, Washington will likely
impose its own unilateral sanctions, with the support of Britain and
other allies. Legislation now pending in the US Congress would give
the Obama administration the power to enforce an embargo on Iran’s
importation of refined petroleum. With Iran dependent on imports for
40 percent of its refined petroleum, such a measure would have a
crippling effect and would be tantamount to the launching of a war.

Obama was elected in 2008 promising a new policy of “engagement” with
Iran. As he nears the end of his first year in office, however,
Washington’s rhetoric and policies are turning more and more
threatening, while the diplomatic actions over Iranian sanctions begin
to resemble the maneuvers staged by the Bush administration over Iraqi
“weapons of mass destruction” in the run-up to the Iraq war.

http://wsws.org/articles/2010/jan2010/iran-j13.shtml

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