Bush raises tension over Iran
WORKERS, OCT 2006 ISSUE
Bush is ratcheting up the US drive to war against Iran. Responding to a question on Iran, he said on 12 September, "It's very important for the American people to see the president try to solve problems diplomatically before resorting to military force." The word "before" implies that the one follows the other.
As Charles Krauthammer noted in the Washington Post, "The signal is unmistakable. An aerial attack on Iran's nuclear facilities lies just beyond the horizon of diplomacy." Bush also said, "The world's free nations will not allow Iran to develop a nuclear weapon." Not the "United Nations won't allow", but the "free nations" of the world won't allow.
As part of the war preparations, Republican members of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence released a report, "Recognising Iran as a Strategic Threat", on August 23. It was not voted on or discussed by the full bipartisan committee, but the office of John Negroponte, the director of national intelligence, reviewed it before release.
The report was written by Fredrick Fleitz, a CIA operative on secondment to the US ambassador to the UN, John Bolton. Fleitz and Bolton were involved in constructing the arguments for the March 2003 invasion of Iraq. Fleitz is also writing a report about North Korea for the intelligence committee.
The International Atomic Energy Agency, a UN body, has protested to the US government over the Iran report, calling it "erroneous" and "misleading". The IAEA said that the report contained serious distortions of the agency's findings on Iran's nuclear activity. It said the report was wrong to say that Iran had enriched uranium to weapons-grade level, when the IAEA had found that it had produced only small amounts of uranium, which were far below the level necessary for weapons.
The IAEA also took "strong exception to the incorrect and misleading assertion" that the IAEA removed senior safeguards inspector Chris Charlier for "allegedly raising concerns about Iranian deception" over its programme. The IAEA went on to brand as "outrageous and dishonest" a suggestion in the report that Charlier was removed for not adhering "to an unstated IAEA policy barring IAEA officials from telling the whole truth" about Iran.
The Democrat vice-chairwoman of the committee told colleagues that the report "took a number of analytical shortcuts that present the Iran threat as more dire – and the intelligence community's assessments as more certain – than they are." Sounds familiar.
Iran says its nuclear programme is solely for power generation, but the US and British governments have accused Tehran of using it to hide a nuclear weapons programme. The US state has told the IAEA that Iran is "aggressively" trying to build nuclear weapons and that the time has come to punish Tehran with UN sanctions. However, both Russia and China have resisted the US–British effort to impose sanctions; they recognise that imposing sanctions will not bring about a peaceful solution.