The hysteria over Iran

“The Iranian nuclear programme is back in the news,” says Paul Barratt for ABC. The latest report by UN inspectors has hardened suspicions that Iran is looking to build weapons. And “as predictably as death and taxes, the news has been accompanied by Israel indicating it’s considering a pre-emptive military strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities, and demands from the US for tighter sanctions”.

But we’ve been hearing this for years. “The fact that Iran has been ‘on the brink’ of a nuclear capability for almost two decades speaks to the credibility of that argument.” The oft-cited view that Iran is run by ‘mad mullahs’ is incorrect. “The Iranian leadership has been quite rational and cautious in the conduct of its foreign and military policies, and can be expected to continue to be so.” Moreover, US sanctions are a “seriously dumb idea” because, in short, they won’t work.

“Here we go again with nuclear hysteria,” agrees Eric Margolis in Huffington Post. US Republicans “are baying for war against Iran, seemingly heedless of the political, financial or economic risks involved. Israel, they chorus, is in mortal danger.” But it’s the other way round. Iran is surrounded by potentially hostile neighbours who are “all lusting for her vast oil and gas deposits”. In fact, “what’s so crazy about all this is that while Iran remains under intense UN nuclear inspection, Israel has a very large arsenal of nuclear and bio-warfare weapons”.

Furthermore, not only have the big nuclear powers failed to abandon their own nuclear forces, they’re still updating them. “If France or Britain can have nukes for self-defence, then why not Iran?” But not everyone is so sanguine. “It would be best if Iran could somehow be dissuaded from building nuclear weapons,” says Fred Kaplan in the National Post. “It would be seriously bad news” if the country does develop such a bomb. That makes “the Iran problem very difficult, maybe the knottiest that the West faces today. Nobody knows what to do about it; every proposed response carries risks and uncertainties.”

A pre-emptive strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities would delay the programme only slightly. It would also boost popular support for the regime, and is likely to “unleash a spree of terrorist attacks and economic retaliation”. So “there’s only one option, and it’s worked pretty well against much mightier regimes – calm, vigorous, sustained containment”.

There may yet be another way, says Alireza Jafarzadeh in the Baltimore Sun. Iran has an opposition party – the MEK – that has been the source of much of the intelligence about the country’s nuclear sites, despite “being brutally suppressed … for organising and/or taking part in anti-government demonstrations”.

With Iran’s economy “currently in a shambles” and the ruling elite fighting among themselves, the MEK is growing
in strength. It’s “committed to replacing the regime with a democratic, secular and non-nuclear republic”. So there’s no need for foreign governments to allocate money or launch military action against Tehran. “This is the era of people power, arguably more deeply rooted in Iran than what we have seen in the Arab Spring. It is time for the West, the US in particular, to focus on the third way: change from within by relying on the people of Iran and their organised opposition movement”.

Category: Economics