2012: Year of the Attack on Iran

‘Why would anyone come to Iran voluntarily?’, is the first thing he asks after we meet over a brawny handshake. We’re on the breathtaking Imam Khomeini Square in Isfahan, the city whose beauty is so legendary that it is described in Persian as Esfahān nesf-e jahān ast: Isfahan is half of the world. ‘This country is so boring and unpleasant that everybody wants to leave. Life is one long string of prohibitions, restrictions and retaliations. Only the wealthy or those who have a father in high places, can do as they please.’

The harsh criticism against the authorities and the authoritarian clerical system dissipates when we visit the Rosary of Martyrs, a vast burial ground for men, women and children who fell during the war with Iraq (1980-1988) or who died later on of the wounds the incurred. Every head stone features a portrait and a miniature Iranian flag, the dead are organised by battlefield and military campaign, and in the middle of the grounds there is a simple monument for the Unknown Soldier.

‘This is where the brave rest’, he says with striking softness. I ask whether he too would volunteer if today another war ensued from the international polarization surrounding Iran’s nuclear program. ‘Yes’, is his instantaneous and unwavering answer. And there is more to it than the heat of the moment. He worries on a daily basis about such an impending war and he has clearly given the issue some consideration. ‘I wouldn’t raise a finger to support the regime’, he adds, ‘but if one’s country is under attack, one cannot remain an idle bystander.’

war drums

The United States Secretary of Defence, Leon Panetta, fears that Israel will launch an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities in April, May or June. Or so it would seem from a piece written by David Ignatius, an influential correspondent of the Washington Post, in the issue of February 2. Panetta neither denies nor confirms the information. Even the day before, the Israeli Minister of Defence, Ehud Barak, had warned that there was little time left to prevent Iran from reaching the point where the country possesses the necessary knowledge, infrastructure and equipment to make an atomic bomb. Once that critical point has been reached, there is not much use in an attack anymore, Barak claimed, to which he added ominously that ‘dealing with a nuclear Iran will be much more complicated and dangerous, and will cost more lives.’

In November 2011 Ehud Barak stated that a war with Iran without nuclear weapons ‘is not a picnic, but that in such a case Iran’s reaction to an Israeli attack would be bearable. It would not lead to hundreds of thousands or tens of thousands or a thousand deaths. The state of Israel would not be destroyed.’ His troops do not share this relatively optimistic analysis.

On January 24 the EU ministers of Foreign Affairs imposed the strictest sanctions ever on Iran. On February 1 the United States Senate Banking Committee raised the bar even higher by demanding that Iran be excluded from international payments through the Brussels based Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT). The speed with which all these stories are reported and these measures are approved, illustrates the extremely tense situation in the Middle East and the widespread fear that in 2012 the end game surrounding Iran will lead to a war which no one really wants, or so all parties claim.

In a speech delivered on a military base in Ramstein early February, Leon Panetta confirmed that military action is a possibility. ‘We have to keep trying to convince Iran not to develop nuclear weapons, to rejoin the international family of nations, and to comply with the rules that bind us all. Yet if Iran refuses, we are willing to react and for this all options are on the table.’

According to Iran, however, the problem is not that all nations should follow the same rules. Iran did sign the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which makes it illegal for Iran to develop nuclear weapons and requires it to allow inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency as agreed upon. Yet according to the NPT rules, the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council are permitted to possess nuclear weapons, while Israel, Pakistan and India – who refused to sign the NPT and are therefore not bound by legal constraints – have in the meanwhile also procured atomic weapons, just like North Korea, which left the NPT in 2003. This means that Iran’s sworn enemies, both on an international and regional level, namely the US and Israel, possess the very weapons that both claim Iran can never be allowed to acquire.

There is only a slim chance that the US will launch an attack on Iran this year. It is Barack Obama’s intention to go to the people in the November elections as the president who ended the unwise war in Iraq and who will successfully round off the “necessary” war in Afghanistan. At the same time, one cannot imagine the US distancing itself from Israel if that country should turn its threats into action and start bombing Iranian nuclear facilities.

Obama’s Republican rival candidates are already calling out loud for tough action against Iran. In this way, Obama cannot afford to appear lax when it comes to guaranteeing Israeli security. In Israel it are mostly politicians who threaten to take action, with Minister of Defence Barak and Prime Minister Netanyahu taking the lead, whereas the army and security forces issue warnings about the disastrous consequences of such a course of action.

the bomb is haram

The controversy over Iran’s atomic program began ten years ago, on August 14 2002, during a press conference held in Washington by the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI). The NCRI is the political wing of the Mujahedeen-e-Khalq (MEK), a militarised resistance group who in the eighties committed murderous attacks against the leaders of the Islamic Republic and who later on conspired with Saddam Hussein during and after the long war between Iraq and Iran.

This MEK is on the US black list of terrorist organisations. At that 2002 press conference, spokesperson Alireza Jafarzadeh disclosed that Iran maintained secret nuclear facilities in Natanz and Arak. During the years to come, the NCRI would divulge similar classified information, which filled the West with distrust against the Iranian government and which rapidly increased international pressure on the country to disclose its full atomic program and allow inspections.

In his book Target Iran Scott Ritter, one the UN’s foremost inspectors in Iraq between 1991 and 1998, states that the NCRI obtained its information from the Israeli secret service. The intimate ties between the Mossad, Shin Beth (Israel’s domestic security forces) and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) make it easier for hardliners in Teheran to dismiss the agency’s requests for inspection as unlawful interference in matters of national security, especially when it comes to sensitive subjects like military facilities.

The revelations done by the NCRI set off a chain of events. First the Iranian government denied the reports, only to admit to them later on, be it stressing that the import of nuclear raw materials, know-how and tools was aimed exclusively towards a civilian nuclear energy program. According to article IV of the Non-Proliferation Treaty every party has the “inalienable right” to the best knowledge and technology available to develop a peaceful nuclear program. For the last decade, the Iranian government has continually hammered away at that point.

The reason why Iran wants atomic energy is not necessarily – as Tel Aviv claims – the production of nuclear weapons and the annihilation of Israel. At the end of January, Amir Eshel, Major-General in the Israeli Defence Forces, described the most likely reason for a possible military nuclear program as follows: ‘Would anyone have dared to take on Gaddafi or Saddam Hussein if they had atomic weapons at their disposal? No way!.’ In other words, a nuclear weapon would be an excellent pre-emptive defence for a regime that feels threatened both from the inside and the outside.

Nevertheless, in September 2004 the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, issued a striking fatwa proclaiming that the production, storage and usage of atomic weapons are forbidden according to Islam. Khamenei believes that the West is above all trying to prevent Iran from becoming an independent power in the region. ‘They do not wish for an Islamic and independent country in the Middle East to make scientific progress and for it to possess advanced technology’, the Supreme Leader stated on March 14 2005.

reversed onus of proof

The US and Israel very quickly tried to have Iran convicted within the IAEA for not honouring its commitments, and moved to have the matter brought before the United Nations Security Council, which could impose a number of sanctions that would slowly cripple the country. Former Director General of the IAEA, Mohamed ElBaradei, prevented such a step, but on February 4 2006 his Board of Governors voted in favour of a referral to the Security Council anyway. Five years later, Western distrust – just like Iranian frustration – has only grown.

In a very critical report by present Director General Yukiya Amano to the Board of Governors dated 8 November 2011, we read the following: ‘as Iran is not providing the

necessary cooperation… the Agency is unable to provide credible assurance about the absence of undeclared nuclear material and activities in Iran, and therefore to conclude that all nuclear material in Iran is meant for peaceful activities.’ The report also contains an extremely critical supplement describing the ‘Possible military dimensions of the Iranian Atomic Program’, based largely on the information found on the so-called ‘laptop of death’ – a discovery of roughly 1,000 pages of information that was delivered by the United States to the Atomic Agency in 2005.

After Amano’s report was published, American atomic engineer and former IAEA inspector Robert Kelly emphasized to Christian Science Monitor that this information was not new, hardly credible and quite limited. He himself had seen and reviewed the information at the time.

In any case, Amano’s choice of words confirms what Scott Ritter had found in 2005: the onus of proof had been reversed in the sense that the inspectors no longer had to prove that there was an ongoing military program, but that Iran had to prove that such a military program was non-existent. Such negative proof is always much harder to give and in this case close to impossible.

low doors

In an article for the New York Times, William Luers and Thomas Pickering, two former US diplomats, write on February 2 that a diplomatic agreement between the United States and Iran is not impossible, provided that policies aim for it and create the necessary conditions for such an agreement. ‘If you deal in camels, make the doors high’, the authors state citing an Afghan proverb. In reality this would mean that the West would renounce its ambitions to change Teheran’s regime and would recognize Iran’s right to nuclear energy – including an enrichment cycle, as long as it remains within the limits of civilian application. Iran on the other hand would have to recognize Israel’s right to security and would have to take its responsibilities in supplying the West with energy.

Still, the United States, Israel and increasingly Europe have been moving in quite the opposite direction. Since it has been so hard to prove that Iran has in fact been working on a military atomic program, other elements have increasingly been added to the discussion about sanctions against Iran. In the Factsheet: The European Union and Iran, dated January 24, the European Council refers to four areas of tension: the Iranian attitude towards peace in the Middle East, the human rights situation in Iran, support to terrorist organisations, and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.

This means that even if the Iranian government would meet all of the demands for an atomic program as determined by the IAEA and the United Nations Security Council, the doors to the international community are still not certain to open up again.

The list of EU sanctions against Iran contains as of January 24 no more than 24 sections. To boot, the most recent decisions in Brussels and Washington specify which sanctions apply at which point in time, but they do not say anywhere when and on which conditions these sanctions shall be lifted. In other words, the doors to a diplomatic solution are therefore so low that the Ayatollah can hardly pass through them. Let alone a camel.

exchange instead of isolation

‘We are a lonely people’, she says. ‘Our own government doesn’t look after us and the rest of the world doesn’t care about us.’ We are sitting in a coffee house with a surprisingly open atmosphere. Her one-liner sounds good, but it’s not completely correct. The government does look after its people, but only to check whether citizens observe the Islamic commandments and prohibitions. And the rest of the world does care about Iran, but the sanctions and the international isolation does not affect the government and its economic elite, while it makes life considerably harder for regular citizens. That bothers her.

‘Even before the new European sanctions come into effect, prices of milk, bread and oil rise. And who do you think pays for that? And why is Europe doing this to us?’ There is not an ounce of understanding at the small table for the Western politics of embargoes and sanctions. Another young woman, who works at a private company that produces tapestries and exports to over thirty countries, expresses it crisply: ‘Instead of more isolation we need more international cultural centres and more exchange of people and ideas. Europe should not retreat from Iran and should not bar Iranians from Europe; the opposite would be much more effective.’

They feel left alone. Left in the hands of a government that has more power than ever over daily life and its people’s future. Which offers little cause for optimism for most people. ‘We don’t think about the future’, according to the woman who sells tapestries, ‘we worry about it.’ After the brief silence that follows so much truth, someone softly adds: ‘And then we run away from it.’

<inset>

Elections for a powerless parliament

On Friday March 2 the Iranians went to the polls to elect 290 representatives of the people. Originally 5,395 candidates applied for a seat in the next Majlis, as the national legislative body of Iran is called. However, in Iran every candidate is first screened by the Election Commission and afterwards by the Guardian Council, one of the highest institutions of power in the Islamic Republic. The eventual number of approved candidates is only known a week before the elections, but on February 5 the Guardian Council announced that more than 3,000 candidates had already received the go-ahead.

In Iran, parliament and even the government and president are always bound hand and foot to the Supreme Leader’s power. Indeed, the political system is based on the theology of velayat-e-faqih, as developed by ayatollah Khomeini. The central doctrine of this is that the Supreme Leader is the ultimate judge when it comes to interpreting and implementing divine law in Iran. Reformists like former presidents Khatami and Rafsanjani or 2009 presidential candidates Karroubi and Moussavi do not really question the velayat-e-faqih, whereas the people are disgruntled and increasingly cry out for fundamental change in the political system. This is also explained by the fact that in 2009 Ayatollah Khamenei openly supported Mahmoud Ahmadinejad during the controversy and protest marches following the presidential elections. ‘The elections for parliament of March 2 are only a finger exercise’, says a woman at end of January, who only agreed to speak to me after the promise of anonymity. ‘There is no real struggle between the majority and opposition party, as the true opposition is under house arrest and remain incommunicado. Even critical voices within the conservative majority are disqualified by the Guardian Council. Although I must say I’m curious to see the balance of power between the Supreme Leader’s camp and the current president’s faction. This will be a major factor for next year’s really important elections, when we will have to choose a successor for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.’

Even diplomatic circles and political analysts focus on the growing differences of opinion among the supporters of the Islamic Republic, especially now that there are almost no reformist candidates, which means that only very few critical citizens will go to the polls. In particular they eagerly await the distribution of seats between the Islamic Front of Government of Ahmadinejad and his right hand Esfadiyar Rahim Masha’I, and the Front of Resolution, which opposes Ahmadinejad, but fully supports the position of ayatollah Khamenei. In between both there is the Front of Principles, a group of conservatives who mainly strive for a status quo.

In any case the upcoming elections will not change anything about Iran’s attitude to nuclear energy, which is outside of the parliament’s jurisdiction. Matters of national security are the sole responsibility of the Supreme Leader, who is the only one who can declare war, and who not only wields power in the armed forces, but also has the parallel army of the Revolutionary Guards (IRGC) at his command. More and more the Western sanctions try to target this IRGC, but monitors doubt whether this is an efficient strategy. (gg)