7 March 2012
Reasons to Attack Iran
By Gwynne Dyer
The last time US President Barack Obama met Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, it was obvious that the two men distrusted and despised each other. This time (5 March), their mutual dislike was better hidden, but the gulf between them was still as big, especially on the issue of Iran’s alleged desire for nuclear weapons.
There is something comic about two nuclear-armed countries (5,000-plus nuclear weapons for the US, around 200 for Israel) declaring that it is vital to prevent a third country from getting a few of the things too. Particularly when that third country, Iran, has signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and still abides by it, while Israel has always refused to sign it. But never mind that.
What divides Obama and Netanyahu is a question of timing. Obama’s “red line” is the point at which Iran “possesses” a nuclear weapon, which would not arrive for a couple of years even if Iran actually intends to make one. (American and Israeli intelligence services concur that it is not working on one now.)
Netanyahu’s “red line” comes much sooner: whenever Iran has enough enriched uranium to build a bomb, whether it does so or not. It is, of course, quite legal for Iran to enrich uranium (which it says is solely for use in civilian nuclear reactors), while an unprovoked attack on Iran would be a criminal act under international law. But that didn’t stop former president George W Bush from invading Iraq, and it wouldn’t stop Obama now.
What worries Obama are three other things. First, the American public simply isn’t up for a third “war of choice” in ten years in the Middle East. As retired general Anthony Zinni, former commander of US military forces in the Middle East, warned three years ago: “If you liked Iraq and Afghanistan, you’ll love Iran.”
Secondly, this is presidential election year in the United States. If Israel attacks Iran, the oil price will soar and kill the economic recovery Obama is depending on for re-election. However, if the US fails to back Israel, American Jews will turn against him and kill his re-election chances anyway.
Thirdly, the attack would not destroy Iran’s uranium enrichment plants. Israel has been threatening to attack them for years, so the Iranians have buried them deep underground. Israeli and American hawks claim that an attack could delay Iran’s capability to enrich large quantities of uranium for three years, but Meir Dagan, former head of Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency, thinks three months is optimistic.
Even if it were three years, Iran would be back to where it is now by 2015 – and an Iran that had been attacked by Israel and the United States would be determined to get nuclear weapons as fast as possible. As Gen Martin Dempsey, the Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, said recently, Israeli attacks on Iran “would be destabilising and would not achieve their long-term objectives”.
If Prime Minister Netanyahu and his fellow hawks truly believed that Iranian nuclear weapons would mean the extinction of the Jewish state, then their wish to attack Iran would be defensible, but they don’t. That’s just for public consumption. What’s actually at stake here is not the survival of Israel, just the preservation of the huge strategic advantage Israel enjoys as the sole nuclear weapons state in the Middle East.
Ehud Barak, Israel’s defence minister, let the cat out of the bag in a recent interview with Israeli journalist Ronen Bergman for the New York Times Magazine. “From our point of view, a nuclear state offers an entirely different kind of protection to its proxies. Imagine if we enter another military confrontation with Hezbollah, (and a) nuclear Iran announces that an attack on Hezbollah is tantamount to an attack on Iran. We would not necessarily give up on it, but it would definitely restrict our range of operations.”
Big deal. Israel lost its last military confrontation with Hezbollah in 2006 even WITH a monopoly of nuclear weapons, but it suffered no lasting harm as a result. If Israel is not facing an existential threat, but just the potential loss of some strategic leverage, then launching an illegal war of aggression against Iran makes no sense at all.
But there is also a deeper motive. Netanyahu and his allies really think that an attack on Iran would bring the Islamic regime down. As Barak told Bergman: “An Iranian bomb would ensure the survival of the current regime, which otherwise would not make it to its 40th anniversary in light of the admiration that the young generation in Iran has displayed for the West. With a bomb, it would be very hard to budge the administration.”
So what Barak and his fellow hawk Netanyahu are actually demanding is American support for an attack whose real aim is to bring down the Iranian regime. The thinking is delusional: the notion that the Iranian regime will collapse unless it gets the bomb is held by both Israeli and American hawks, but there is no concrete reason to believe it.
As Meir Dagan said in a lecture at Tel Aviv University recently, “The fact that someone has been elected doesn’t mean that he is smart.”
8 December 2011
Women and the Monotheisms
By Gwynne Dyer
One should not mock the sexual obsessions of Islamic fundamentalists; it’s like shooting fish in a barrel. When a senior academic in Saudi Arabia, Prof. Kamal Subhi, declares in a report for the Shura Council, the kingdom’s legislative assembly, that allowing women to drive would spell the end of virginity in the kingdom, it doesn’t really require further comment. But let’s offer a few comments anyway.
In the report, Prof. Subhi describes sitting in a coffee shop in an unnamed Arab state where “all the women were looking at me. One made a gesture that made it clear that she was available. This is what happens when women are allowed to drive.”
I regret to report that this doesn’t happen to me in coffee shops. In fact, it doesn’t even happen to me in bars, although I am generally reckoned to be the most handsome man of my generation. (The late Jurassic generation.) It doesn’t seem to happen to any of my male friends either, although most of us live in the decadent, post-Christian West, where women drive all the time.
Maybe it’s just that none of us are as amazingly good-looking and sexy as Prof. Subhi, or maybe Arab women are incredibly lascivious and immoral. But it seems more likely that he was just imagining it all, in which case another possible explanation presents itself.
Perhaps he has a mentality so sex-obsessed and so fearful of women that these feverish imaginings seem perfectly normal to him. And they ARE quite normal among Islamic fundamentalists, like the Nour Party in Egypt that demands strict prohibitions against mixed bathing, “fornication”, and the appointment of women to leadership roles – and got a quarter of the votes in last week’s election in Egypt.
But the point is not that Muslims are weird; they are all too normal. All the “Abrahamic” religions, as Muslims call them, have traditionally been sex-obsessed and terrified of women, and the fundamentalists among them still are. Take the increasingly influential and importunate Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) Jews of Israel.
US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, last week told an audience that included Israel’s deputy prime minister, Dan Meridor, and opposition leader Tzipi Livni that she was shocked by the growing discrimination against Israeli women. She even compared the separate seating for women on some Jerusalem buses to the humiliation of Rosa Parks, the black American woman who made history in 1955 by refusing to give up her bus seat for white passengers.
Clinton also compared the behaviour of some Israeli soldiers who recently walked out on a performance by female singers to the attitude towards women in Iran. But God – at least, the God worshipped by the Haredim – is enraged whenever men listen to women singing, so of course they had to leave. As for Christian fundamentalist attitudes toward women, here’s the Rev. Pat Robertson, one of the most influential US television evangelists:
“The Feminist agenda is not about equal rights for women. It is about a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism, and become lesbians.” Not to mention drive cars and hang around in coffee shops making come-hither eyes at ageing academics.
Where does all this weirdness come from? Other societies and other religions have been just as patriarchal and disrespectful of women: it wasn’t much fun being a woman in traditional Hindu, Buddhist or Confucian societies either. But nowhere else was there the same male sexual panic, the profound, ingrained fear of free women that infests all the Middle Eastern monotheisms. Where does that come from?
I started to write this next paragraph three times, and then admitted to myself that I really do not know the answer. It’s clear from the fragments of history that have come down to us from five thousand years ago that there was an intense struggle in the ancient Fertile Crescent between the old female fertility cults and the new male-centred religions, which celebrated war, hierarchy and blind obedience.
The male religions triumphed everywhere: by three and a half thousand years ago, male hierarchies ruled everything, both in the heavens and on the Earth. But why was the struggle so much more intense in the Middle East, and the outcome so much more hostile to women, than in most other places? Dunno.
It doesn’t matter, really. You can’t unpick the history; you have to start from where you are, even if you’d much rather start from somewhere else. And the fact is that people can overcome their history: most Jews, Christians and Muslims today do not have extreme anti-female attitudes. The reason we have a special name for those who still do is evidence enough that they are a minority in the present populations, if you actually needed it.
Fundamentalists are a big minority in countries like the United States, Israel, Egypt and Iran, but a much smaller minority in countries like France, Turkey, and Russia. In some places their numbers are actually growing at the moment, but the long-term trend is sharply down. By today’s standards, ALL Jews, Christians and Muslims were fundamentalists five hundred years ago.
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To shorten to 725 words, omit paragraphs 11 and 12. (“I started…Dunno”)
9 November 2011
Iran: Here We Go Again?
By Gwynne Dyer
“We will not build two (nuclear) bombs in the face of (America’s) 20,000,” said Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in response to an International Atomic Energy Agency report this week that accuses Iran of doing just that. He called Yukiya Amano, the head of the IAEA, a US puppet, saying: “This person does not publish a report about America and its allies’ nuclear arsenals.”
Well, that’s true, actually. Amano will never publish a report about America’s nuclear weapons (only 5,133 of them now, actually). He hasn’t said anything about Israel’s, Britain’s and France’s weapons of mass destruction either. And his report is largely based on information fed to him by Western intelligence agencies.
But apart from that, Amano is as impartial and free from US influence as you would expect a career Japanese diplomat to be. Only cynical people will see any resemblance to Colin Powell’s performance at the United Nations in 2003, when the US defense secretary held up a test tube and assured us all that Iraq really was working on germ warfare.
Iraq was allegedly working on nuclear weapons, too: former President George Bush’s famous “smoking gun,” which also subsequently went missing. And on the basis of this “intelligence” about Iraq’s “weapons of mass destruction,” the United States and its more gullible allies invaded the country. Hundreds of thousands died, no weapons were found, and nothing was learned. Here we go again.
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. The same intelligence agencies are producing the same sort of reports about Iran that we heard eight years ago about Iraq’s nuclear ambitions, and interpreting the information in the same highly prejudiced way.
Many people in the West realise that they are being hustled into yet another attack on a Middle Eastern country, but they don’t really worry about it too much. After all, it will only be air strikes, and we all know that an air-only war is practically casualty-free for the side with air superiority. Look at Libya, for example.
But how many citizens of the United States or Britain know that Iran has ten times as many people as Libya? Maybe one in ten, maybe one in twenty. How many know that Iran is a partially democratic, technologically proficient state with no history of attacking its neighbours, not a tinpot dictatorship run by a vicious loon? About the same number. How many realise that the war would not end with a few days of air strikes? Practically none.
The interesting exception to all this is Israel, where people do know those things, and where there is a vigorous debate about whether attacking Iran is a good idea. A lot think it is not, and that also goes for both of Israel’s intelligence agencies, Mossad and Shin Bet. Meir Dagan, the recently retired head of Mossad, said last January that an attack on Iran was “the stupidest idea” he had ever heard.
So Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Defence Minister Ehud Barak, who do both want to attack Iran (or rather, have the United States do it for them), have gone public. If the Western powers don’t act at once, they warn, then Iran will get nuclear weapons and Armageddon will be just around the corner.
There are two things wrong with this proposition. One is the evidence. If you believe it all, it shows that Iran wants the knowledge and equipment that would let it build a nuclear weapon very quickly if necessary: an Israeli nuclear threat, a military coup in nuclear-armed Pakistan that brings young Shia-hating officers to power, whatever.
The evidence does NOT show that Iran is actually building a nuclear weapon now, or has any present intention of doing so. And having the knowledge and equipment that would let you do so fast in an emergency is entirely legal under IAEA rules.
The other problem with the accusations against Iran is the logic behind them. Building a nuclear weapon now would be extremely costly for Iran in terms of economic sanctions, global diplomatic isolation and the like if it became known. But it would be completely pointless from a deterrence point of view if it remained secret.
Deterrence is the only logical reason that Iran would ever want nuclear weapons, since it would be suicidal for it to attack anybody with them. As Mahmoud Ahmadnejadi pointed out (above), it would have at the most a few nuclear warheads. The United States has thousands of them, Israel has hundreds of them, and even Pakistan has dozens.
If Iran’s leaders were completely logical in their thinking, they wouldn’t waste a minute thinking about nuclear deterrence. They’d just rely on the fact that their military can completely shut the Gulf to oil traffic and bring the global economy to its knees if anybody attacks them. However, they are still a lot more rational than their Western counterparts – or at least than their Western counterparts can afford to seem in public.
You heard about that recent exchange between French President Nicolas Sarkozy and US President Barack Obama that went out on an open microphone? Sarko said “I can’t stand (Netanyahu) any more. He’s a liar.” And Obama replied: “YOU’RE sick of him? I have to deal with him every day.” What about? One gets you ten that it’s about bombing Iran.
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To shorten to 725 words, omit paragraphs 3, 6 and 13. (“But apart…warfare”; “Many…example”; and “Deterrence…dozens”)
17 August 2011
Was George Bush a Sleeper?
by Gwynne Dyer
In spy talk, a “sleeper” is somebody who lives his life in the target country, keeping his nose clean and climbing up the ranks of the local hierarchy, until he reaches a position in which he can be of great service to his true employers abroad. It’s time to inquire if that description fits former US president George W. Bush.
The question arises because Bush’s actions as president did much more for Iran’s interests in the Middle East than for those of the United States. Consider, for example, a little-noticed recent development in the five-month-old confrontation between pro-democracy protesters and the Baathist regime that rules Syria with an iron hand.
The Baath Party seized power in Syria in 1963. Since 1970 it has been led by members of the Assad clan – the current president is Bashar al-Assad – and the Alawite (Shia Muslim) sect they belong to dominates the government and the intelligence services.
Alawites are only 10 percent of Syria’s population, and are seen as heretics by many in the Sunni Muslim majority. The Baathist Party is as corrupt and incompetent as it is oppressive, and Syria under its rule has fallen into poverty and decay. It was bound to be challenged by the “Arab spring,” and non-violent mass protests against the Baathist monopoly of power began all across the country in mid-March.
The regime’s response has been brutal. Justifying its actions with the brazen lie that the protesters are “armed terrorist gangs,” Assad’s government has sent the Syrian army into one city after another to crush the demonstrations. At least 1,700 Syrian civilians have been killed, and an estimated 30,000 have been arrested. The violence has been so horrifying that even the Baathist regime’s former friends have denounced it.
Last weekend, for example, Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu bluntly ordered the Syrian authorities to stop the crackdown, warning that if the military attacks on Syrian cities do not end, “there will be nothing more to discuss about the steps that will be taken.” In diplomatic-speak, that is a very serious threat, and Turkey is Syria’s most powerful neighbour.
Most of the Arab world has also denounced President Assad’s regime, including the Arab League, the Saudi Arabian, Jordanian and Egyptian governments, and Yasser Abed Rabbo, the secretary general of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), who said recently that the Baathist regime’s actions are “a crime against humanity.”
Even Russia and China voted for the United Nations resolution two weeks ago that condemned the Syrian government for “widespread violations of human rights and the use of force against civilians.” However, the regime’s only real ally, Iran, remains loyal.
You can’t assume that George Bush was in Iran’s pay just because his invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq destroyed that country’s two most serious enemies in the region, the Taliban regime in Kabul and Saddam Hussein in Baghdad. It could just have been deep ignorance and ideologically driven blindness. But how else can you explain this?
Iraq, almost uniquely among Arab states, supports and defends the Baathist regime’s actions in Syria. Last week, Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki warned the protesters not to “sabotage” the Syrian state. And this Iraqi government was created and nurtured by the Bush administration.
Before the US invasion in 2003, Iraq was ruled by a rival branch of the Baath Party, led by Saddam Hussein. He was a cruel and murderous dictator, though not significantly more so than the Assad regime in Syria. And Saddam Hussein was Iran’s worst enemy.
The Iraqi dictator was not working on nuclear weapons, as the Bush administration asserted, nor did he have any links to al-Qaeda, as it also claimed. George Bush had access to the output of the best (or at least the most numerous) intelligence agencies in the world, and they all privately knew that the claims were false.
Iraq had a nuclear weapons programme before the first Gulf war in 1990-91, but it was comprehensively dismantled by United Nations teams in the mid-nineties, and Iraq was subsequently under a strict arms embargo right down to 2003. Moreover, far from being an ally of al-Qaeda, Saddam Hussein, the leader of a strictly secular regime, was a target for its assassins.
Yet the invasion went ahead anyway, Saddam Hussein was killed, and the United States devoted immense efforts to creating a new government. Almost five thousand American soldiers died in support of that enterprise (together with hundreds of thousands of Iraqis). Around half a trillion dollars were spent on it. All that to build a government, led by Nuri al-Maliki, that is a close ally of Iran, and Syria’s only supporter in the Arab world.
There is a case to answer here, and a Congressional investigation into George W. Bush’s secret links to the Iranian mullahs whose cause he has served so well is long overdue. They could start by figuring out where Bush was really born. Tehran? Tabriz? Maybe the “Birthers” could help the investigators to establish the truth.
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To shorten to 725 words, omit paragraphs 7 and 13. (“Most…humanity”; and “Iraq…assassins”)