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Will Confrontation with Iran Lead to War?
By Patrick Seale
Fidel Castro, 83 -- Cuba ’s long-serving former president and commander- in- chief until his retirement in 2008 -- has in recent days been issuing stark warnings that the United
States and its Israeli ally intend to subdue Iran by force. The confrontation, he predicts, will lead to “the most dreadful of all wars.”
Is Castro right, or is he blinded by his hostility to the United States and his
detestation of Israel -- a country he has compared to Nazi Germany?
“The Yankees believe that Iran will soon surrender,” he wrote this week in one of his periodic “Reflections,” but Iran is pursuing nothing other than
“absolutely fair national interests.” Missiles will fly, he says, as soon as American and Israeli naval vessels attempt to inspect Iranian merchant vessels. His conclusion: “Today, everything hangs by a thread.”
He
repeated his dire predictions of imminent conflict in a rare personal appearance on Cuban state television last Monday.
Certainly, the face-off with Iran looks increasingly dangerous. Tehran has responded with
predictable defiance to the fourth set of UN sanctions, adopted by the Security Council on 9 June, which tightened financial and military restrictions on Tehran . On 12 July, Iran ’s atomic chief, Ali Akbar Salihi, announced
that Iran had produced 20 kilos of uranium, enriched up to about 20 percent. While this is still far below the 95 percent and more enrichment required for the fissile core of an atomic weapon, it is a step in that direction.
The heart of the dispute is that Tehran continues to declare that its nuclear activities are entirely peaceful -- as are allowed under the Nuclear non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) of which it is a signatory -- whereas the
United States and its allies are seeking to shut down Iran’s nuclear programme altogether. They suspect that Iran is attempting, if not actually to build a nuclear weapon, then at least to reach the threshold stage, which would
allow it to do so in a hurry, if in danger of attack.
Short of defeat in war, it is hard to imagine this Iranian regime, or indeed any other, abandoning the quest to master the uranium fuel cycle, widely seen as a
national goal of the greatest significance. Clearly, the more Iran is threatened with attack -- by Israel , first and foremost, but also by the United States -- the more it will feel the need to acquire a deterrent capability.
Israel has made no secret of its determination to quash any challenge to its Middle East nuclear monopoly.
The outcome of the meeting in Washington earlier this month of U.S. President Barack Obama with Israel ’s
right-wing Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu strongly suggested that the United States would look the other way of Israel decided to strike. There was no hint on this occasion that the U.S. had cautioned Israel against
attacking -- although this had been the message which senior members of the Administration had carried to Israel last year.
On the contrary, a joint statement issued after the meeting declared that “The President told
the Prime Minister he recognizes that Israel must always have the ability to defend itself, by itself, against any threat or possible combination of threats, and that only Israel can determine its security needs.”
Obama
himself said: “We strongly believe that, given its size, its history, the region that it’s in and the threats that are levelled against it [he first said “levelled against us,” before correcting himself to “against it”] that
Israel has unique security requirements... And that’s why we remain unwavering in our commitment to Israel ’s security. And the United States will never ask Israel to take any steps that would undermine their security
interests.”
Such uncritical and unconditional support will inevitably be interpreted by some in Tehran and elsewhere as an American green light for Israel to attack. If Tehran makes further progress with uranium
enrichment, Israel may feel compelled to do so, secure in the knowledge of American support. The American press reported, however, that Netanyahu had promised to inform Washington before any such attack.
With only four
months to go before the midterm elections in November, Obama seems anxious to win over Israeli supporters who have been offended by his call for an Israeli settlement freeze and his insistence on a two-state solution to the
Palestinian-Israeli conflict. All the indications are that the President is anxious, in particular, to reassure pro-Israeli Democratic donors, as well as lobbyists and pro-Israeli members of the Congress, that he will not put
any pressure on Israel . Political expediency has evidently triumphed over principle.
Needless to say, Obama made no reference to the acute security concerns of Israel ’s neighbours -- Lebanon , Syria or the Palestinians
-- who have all been repeatedly threatened and attacked by Israel .
Possibly the most promising initiative for defusing the crisis with Iran has come from Catherine Ashton, the new European Union high representative for
foreign affairs and security. Ashton has long had an interest in nuclear non-proliferation. In the 1970s, she was a prominent member in Britain of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), serving as the radical movement’s
national treasurer and vice-chairman. In recent weeks, she has argued for a dual approach to Tehran -- sanctions but also a readiness for dialogue.
On 14 June, she wrote to the chief Iranian nuclear negotiator, Said
Jalili, inviting him to meet her for a discussion on nuclear weapons. Jalili replied on 6 July that Iran would be ready to resume negotiations on 1 September with the 5+1 group (the United States , Russia , China , France, the
UK and Germany ). But he repeated Iran ’s familiar views: Was the aim of the talks to bring about entente and cooperation, or was it to pursue hostility and confrontation with Iran over its rights in nuclear matters?
Logic demanded, he said, that for dialogue to be successful threats and pressures had to cease. He asked Ashton to clarify the position of the great powers concerning Israel ’s nuclear arsenal.
This was the position
outlined by Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad on 28 June when he announced a two-month break in talks, as a reaction to the latest Security Council sanctions. He also called for future talks to include other powers -- a
reference to Turkey and Brazil whose compromise agreement over a fuel swap, reached with Iran on 17 May, was spurned by the United States and other permanent members of the Security Council.
It remains to be seen whether
negotiations with Iran can in fact be resumed on 1 September or whether an Israeli surprise attack this summer will introduce an altogether new dimension of violence and destruction in the Middle East .
Patrick Seale
is a leading British writer on the Middle East . His latest book is The Struggle for Arab Independence: Riad el-Solh and the Makers of the Modern Middle East (Cambridge University Press).
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