by Mehri Honarbin-Holliday (Campaign Iran)

In recent weeks, Israel’s relentless discourse of immanent military attacks on a variety of sites in Iran, including the channels for refined oil returning to Iran and nuclear installations, have dominated the world press. In the US this week, the Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama has told the pro Israeli lobbyists in the Bush administration that the military option against Iran remains on the table. This is despite his promises of  offering a discourse of diplomacy through “meaningful concessions” during his campaign to become the first black president in the US. The map below shows how Iran is surrounded by US military bases, except from the north because of Russia’s presence, and how the countries which are not a direct military base are either occupied by the US forces, or are tied to the US dollar as clients for vast quantities of military equipment, or receive US dollars to sustain regimes which favour US Imperialism.

The Iranian nation meanwhile suffers on multi levels.

The promise of military attacks deeply exacerbates the existing uncertainties and demoralises the nation. This  is just one of the elements poignantly outlined and reflected on this week by the Iranian academia in an open letter to the world asking for Long-lasting Peace. They put it to the world that Iran suffers profoundly from the negative impacts of this ‘virtual war’, directly damaging internal political developments, bringing massive inflation, promoting  economic stagnation, and bearing ever tighter political, technical and scientific restrictions.  They suggest that the US and the world would do better to place attention on Pakistan’s possession of nuclear weapons and the likelihood of extremist groups gaining access to these deadly weapons, which would extend beyond its immediate neighbours.

The promise of military attacks further aggravates the lasting wounds of the imposed eight year war with Iraq. Iranian citizens in Ahvaz and its environs in the South East continue to suffer from the chemical fall out buried in the sands which in the summer sandstorms and summer heat contaminate the air. The US supplied Saddam Hussein with experimental chemical weapons during the war against Iran, and this fall out is currently taking the life of the elderly and the physically vulnerable.

The widely implemented unilateral US sanctions continue to have severe consequences. Economic hardships is damaging the nation, the economically vulnerable women who have to feed and shelter children, men and women who have to work very long hours in two or three jobs to provide the most basic needs of their families, students who need to pay for transport to get to their places of education, and those in the industry who are driven to bankruptcy because they cannot sustain the foreign currency exchange rates to acquire supplies from overseas. Regular daily power cuts bring disruptions damaging to the country’s infrastructures, the hospitals, the industry, educational institutions as well as limiting the flow of life in the urban space and domestically in homes, whether in the heat of the summer or the cold of the winter.

Why should Iran and the Iranian nation be punished so savagely by the  Imperialist West? Is it not because Iran refuses to be subordinated in the manner the US expects of Iran’s neighbouring countries illustrated in the map above. Is it not because Iran desires to remain sovereign of its destiny rather than succumbing to the US’s expansionist designs for Iran and the region? Does this not refresh our memories of the late 1940s and 1950s when for the love of oil and specific geopolitics the US directly influenced a coup d’état and ousted the democratically elected prime minister Dr Mossadegh in favour of the Shah.  In Iran today, there is no division between the Iranian government and the Iranian nation in wishing to remain sovereigns of their own affairs, and there is no division in when it comes to thinking and planning for the future generations’ need for new sources of energy. Like any self-respecting modern country Iran needs electricity to sustain supplies to the country’s infrastructures, the industry, and scientific laboratories. Iran needs to explore other means and possibilities, other sources of energy through nuclear development. There has been no evidence so far that Iran is developing nuclear energy for weaponry to attack the world; Iran has not attacked any country in the past 200 years.

Military attacks on Iran will have unprecedented and profoundly grave consequences for world peace. Military attacks on Iran will not be received quietly by the Muslim world whose boundaries reach the depths of the Far East as well as the Western world. Military attacks on Iran will mobilize profound hatred from Iran’s Muslim neighbours even if they are under the rule of the US. Any military attack on Iran will be a human catastrophe, and an ecological disaster, and a self-inflicting affliction for the West. As the Peace Laureate  Shirin Ebadi has said in an interview with the Guardian:

“Undoubtedly a military attack on Iran would worsen human rights in the country. Look at Iraq – now the fundamentalists have a pretext for their extremism- no one talks about freedom of speech or human rights. People just want a safe shelter. Do you think that since the US troops arrived in Iraq that the Iraqi people have become prosperous?”

The Bush administration in its last shameful months, the misguided neoconservatives, and the Israeli government will do better to follow the European lead in seeking diplomatic solutions through a comprehensive diplomatic initiative which keeps channels of discussion open. Javier Solana, The European Union foreign policy envoy, has visited Iran representing amongst others Britain, France, Germany, Russia, and China, to encourage Iran to suspend the enrichment of uranium offering a new package of incentives. These, some sources reveal, might also offer discussions about help and advice for safe nuclear development for civilian energy use.

See David Batty, Friday June 13, The Guardian for Shirin Ebadi interview

The Bush Administration steps up its secret moves against Iran.

 by Seymour M. Hersh / Source: The New Yorker

Late last year, Congress agreed to a request from President Bush to fund a major escalation of covert operations against Iran, according to current and former military, intelligence, and congressional sources. These operations, for which the President sought up to four hundred million dollars, were described in a Presidential Finding signed by Bush, and are designed to destabilize the country’s religious leadership. The covert activities involve support of the minority Ahwazi Arab and Baluchi groups and other dissident organizations. They also include gathering intelligence about Iran’s suspected nuclear-weapons program.

Read article >

by Naz Massoumi / Source: Socialist Worker

The drums of war against Iran were beating stronger and faster this week.

The neocons around George Bush want to escalate the war in the Middle East in an attempt to extricate the US from the Iraq quagmire – and see an attack on Iran as the best way to do this.

The justification for such an attack has shifted of late – from stopping Iran’s nuclear programme to retaliation for Iran’s alleged support of resistance movements in Iraq and Lebanon.

And the targets have also broadened, with US warmongers talking about a general attack on Iran’s infrastructure as opposed to “surgical strikes” directed at nuclear facilities.

Iran’s president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad visited the US this week and was met by a feverish wave of jingoistic hysteria. “The Evil Has Landed” read the New York Daily News front page. The New York Post described him as a “madman”.

This follows a week of steadily building hostility towards Iran coming from the US administration and its allies.

On Friday of last week the US state department hosted a meeting with British, French, German, Russian and Chinese officials to try and agree increased sanctions against Iran.

The US also wants other countries to agree to blacklist Iran’s Revolutionary Guards. Last month Bush designated the Revolutionary Guards a “terrorist organisation” – a move widely seen as preparing the legal justification for a military attack on Iran.

Meanwhile France’s new foreign minister Bernard Kouchner – one of the few French politicians to back the US-led attack on Iraq in 2003 – warned that the French should “prepare ourselves for the worst”, adding that “the worst is war” against Iran.

The warmongering comes as the occupation of Iraq becomes ever more unpopular in the US.
As veteran anti-war radical Noam Chomsky puts it, “They’re desperate. Everything they touch is in ruins. Under these circumstances, they’re unpredictable. They might go for broke, and hope they can salvage something from the wreckage.”

An attack on Iran would be catastrophic for the people of Iran and the wider Middle East region. It threatens to plunge the world into flames. But this is a price Bush’s neocons are willing to pay in their pursuit of imperial power.

None of this makes war inevitable – but it does mean the global anti-war movement must redouble its efforts to end the US-led occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, and bring all the troops home.

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The consequences of entering a war with Iran will be catastrophic regionally and globally. Their political and environmental impact, and the human suffering and loss of lives and displacement, are not a matter of prophesy. Rather, they are are fully predictable and, moreover, avoidable. Any such attack on Iran would add exponentially to the horrifying developments and experiences of the aftermath of the invasion of Iraq.

In a comprehensive and detailed analysis, Dr Dan Plesch and Martin Butcher make clear the gravity of the state of affairs with regard to any form of military attack on Iran. As the authors put it:

“This study uses open source analysis to outline what the military option might involve if it were picked up off the table and put into action. The study demonstrates that an attack can be massive and launched with surprise rather than merely a contingency plan needing months if not years of preparation.”

This document is essential reading and can be found on the following site.
http://www.rawstory.com/images/other/IranStudy082807a.pdf

Iranian author Mehri Honarbin-Holliday reminds us of the nefarious history of the crushing of Iranian democracy by the US and UK, and describes the peaceful efforts of a new generation of Iranian youth to build it in the beleaguered circumstances of a sanctions-imprisoned Iran

Ask Iranians why they profoundly despise, distrust and condemn any form of intervention, presence and action by the British and the Americans, and they will document vividly the links in the century-old chain of events through which the governments of these two countries have sought illegitimate political dominance in Iran since the discovery of oil in 1908.The cycle of mistrust, based on direct military and political undermining of Iran’s sovereignty, is firmly etched on the psyche of the Iranian nation, and looms large in the common experiences of millions of present-day Iranians.

Iran’s oil was swiftly recognised as the energy source of a new political and industrial era for Britain at the turn of the 20th century.Winston Churchill is quoted as having said that British battleships floated with Iranian oil to victory in the first world war. In 1944, three years after the British army invaded Iran and exiled the shah to Africa, he insisted that the British government ought to secure a ‘golden share’, or a right of veto, in the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC), to make sure that the Iranians understood that the AIOC was an extension of the British government operating in Iran.

The nationalisation of the oil in 1951 by Iran’s democratically elected prime minister, Mohammad Mosaddeq, was met with more than just hostility by both British and Americans. While the British boycotted Iranian oil temporarily, the CIA engineered an overnight coup d’etat on 19 August 1953, ousting Prime Minister Mosaddeq in favour of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. It was not only Iran’s oil that they wanted – they also wanted Iran in order to secure an assured strategic military base and presence in the region for their new imperial ambitions. This strategic importance is made clear in the current distribution of US bases in the region, at a time when the US is not permitted to colonise Iran.

The 1979 Islamic revolution shattered US domination.The occupation of its embassy in Tehran by a group of militant students who took 53 political staff hostage left the Americans profoundly irritated and led to a campaign of demonisation of Iran and all things Iranian.Within a short period Saddam Hussein was appointed the US’s undisputed agent and bully-in-chief in the region. He was armed and encouraged to impose a devastating eight-year war on Iran from 1980 to 1988.

Every Iranian will tell you how the US and British governments silently and shamelessly watched this catastrophic aggression unravel, pointing the finger at Saddam’s 5,000 British and US-made tanks, 4,000 armoured vehicles, 7,000 artillery and 500-plus aircraft, which sent more than one million Iranians to their graves and displaced, economically damaged, and chemically contaminated millions more.The memories of this war are fresh in the hearts, minds and daily lives of Iranians.

Economic and psychological captives

The US imposed broad economic sanctions against trade with Iran in 1979, further freezing over $8 billion of Iranian assets. Since the early 1980s,Washington has sought to isolate Tehran, and has in recent years accused the Iranian government of developing nuclear weapons and sponsoring terrorism. Iran, however, asserts that it has voluntarily revealed its uranium enrichment programme at Natanz since February 2003 and has invited the UN’s nuclear monitoring body, and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) specifically, to carry out inspections. Further assertions have been made by Iran repeatedly that it has not breached its obligations under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), and that its intentions are peaceful, producing low level enriched uranium for the nuclear fuel industry.

Since then the Bush government has made military threats and imposed bilateral and unilateral sanctions against Iran, all justified with a demonising and damning rhetoric. While US-based oil companies and their sub-contractors have been blocked from doing business with Iran, wider sanctions under UN resolution 1747 were passed on 24 March, targeting the transactions of Iran’s state-owned bank, its arms exports and the activities of its Revolutionary Guards.

Like any modern country, Iran needs new resources to sustain development and reconstruction in the post Iraq-Iran war era.Maintaining economic stability and confidence is crucial. The sanctions add up to economic and psychological warfare against the Iranian nation. Sanctions will create more inflation in the foreign currency market, ultimately damaging the infrastructure of the trade. They undermine business confidence, damaging the economy and harming the poorest and most vulnerable in society. Sanctions addressed at the Iranian government will destroy the lives and livelihoods of the Iranian people, school children, students and families.The Iranian government is being bullied by the west for acquiring the nuclear knowledge that has been made readily available to several of Iran’s neighbours.

The Iranian people are being punished by widening sanctions, and by an unprecedented presence of the US and British war machines in the Persian Gulf pointing their guns at the Iranian nation and, in the process, at any socio-political movement from within Iran towards a more comprehensive form of democracy and civil society.

The future is female

Ask Iranians about the prospects of democracy and civil society in Iran, and they will tell you about the daily struggle they endure to build it.They will also tell you that the seeds of a democratic civil society must be planted by Iranians themselves, free from the prescriptive forms imported by US and British soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan.

A new, critical and reflective generation of Iranians has emerged since 1979. It must be nurtured and be given space to grow. Despite the tough socio-economic conditions, the ongoing singular and local interpretations of Islam, and the routine shifts of power and manoeuvring between the Supreme Leader and his appointed Council, the hardliners, the reformists and even oppositionist factions within the regime, this new generation is very much alive and kicking.

It is as visible as it is expressive in its social behaviour. It possesses a particular voice, a particular and profound desire for social justice, and a particular sense of struggle for political reform. It is engaged in a quest for a more progressive civil society, projecting diverse views and behaviours, in which individuals might be full and active participants regardless of their gender, form of religious beliefs and cultural heritage.

According to the 2004-2005 national statistics published by the education ministry, there are over 15 million Iranians in primary and secondary schools. There are three million students in universities, many entering the urban space from remote towns and villages for the first time and creating intra-national cultural exchange and cosmopolitanism.

Significantly, 65 per cent of this student body are female.Apart from seeking to educate themselves, these young women subtly and persistently signify ideological difference through altering dress codes, and examine traditional and familial expectations by pursuing all kinds of interaction with their male counterparts in the cities and towns. Like the older generation of women in urban Iran, they seek to become economic partners and hold and develop careers in the civil service, higher education, medicine and health care, law, journalism, and politics, with all the limitations that the latter offers.

If desire, curiosity and a sense of struggle are among the markers of a youth movement, then young women in Iran specifically embody that movement. This is particularly significant in discussions about the development of a civil society. Can the west really afford to continue sanctions against Iran and take up military action against a people who are alert and have ideas and require stability and peace to take those ideas forward from within? Is it really prepared to squeeze and isolate Iran further, and in doing so destroy its people’s aspirations and development, simply because it needs the oil?

www.mehri-honarbin-holliday.com
Mehri Honarbin-Holliday is a leading member of Campaign Iran.
This article first appeared in Red Pepper