A Dangerous Delusion E-Book

Peter Oborne

• Herausgeber: Elliott & Thompson
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 105

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

In 2013 it is possible that Israel, backed by the United States, will launch an attack on Iran. This would be a catastrophic event, risking war, bloodshed and global economic collapse. In this passionate, but rationally argued essay, the authors attempt to avert a potential global catastrophe by showing that the grounds for war do not exist, that there is no evidence of an ongoing Iranian nuclear weapons programme, and that Iran would happily come to a table and strike a deal. They argue that the military threats aimed by the West against Iran contravene international law, and that Iran is not a pariah state but a legitimate power across the Middle East. For years Peter Oborne and David Morrison have, in their respective fields, examined the actions of our political classes and found them wanting. Now they have joined forces to make a powerful case against military action. Ten years on from the war in Iraq, will the politicians listen?

Leseprobe

A Dangerous Delusion

A Dangerous Delusion

WHY THE WEST IS WRONG ABOUT NUCLEAR IRAN

Peter Oborne & David Morrison

First published 2013 by Elliott and Thompson Limited

27 John Street, London WC1N 2BX

www.eandtbooks.com

ISBN: 978-1-908739-89-6

Text © Peter Oborne and David Morrison 2013

The Authors have asserted their rights under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Authors of this Work.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We have incurred many debts while writing this book. We have drawn heavily on Shashank Joshi’s superbly researched volume The Permanent Crisis: Iran’s Nuclear Trajectory, published in 2012. We are also indebted to Flynt and Hillary Mann Leverett’s hugely important and indeed masterly book Going to Tehran: Why the United States Must Come to Terms With the Islamic Republic of Iran, published just as we went to press. We have inserted a number of their insights and stolen the JF Kennedy quotation about noxious myths from their pages. David Patrikarakos’ very timely Nuclear Iran: The Birth of an Atomic State, also from 2012, has proved invaluable.

We would also like to thank a number of experts who have read these pages in advance and helped us form our judgments. Conflicts Forum in Beirut have been generous with their time, and we would like to thank Aisling Byrne and Alastair Crooke for reading the MS and making comments. We would also like to thank David Blair of The Daily Telegraph, Peter Jenkins, Ben Wallace MP and Shashank Joshi of RUSI, who have performed the same service. Our readers have vigorously disagreed with some of our judgments, but they have helped make this a much better book and saved us from error. All remaining errors are our own. We also thank Nicola Dawson for cheerful and efficient administrative assistance.

Authors’ note

One point of terminology: we wish we could have found a better collective term to describe Iran’s opponents than ‘the west’. The current so-called ‘P5 plus 1’ negotiating team actually contains China, Russia, Germany, France, Britain, the EU’s High Representative and the United States. But the alternative term ‘international community’ would be completely misleading, since the 120-nation Non-Aligned Movement takes a different view of the Iranian nuclear question from that of the US and its allies. It is also fair to state that nuclear policy towards Iran has been driven most of all by the United States and a handful of client states, of whom Britain and France are probably the most important.

‘For the great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie – deliberate, contrived, and dishonest – but the myth – persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic. Too often we hold fast to the clichés of our forebears. We subject all facts to a prefabricated set of interpretations. We enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.’

President John F Kennedy, Yale University Commencement Address, 11 June 1962

CHAPTER ONE

THE OFFER THE WEST TURNED DOWN

It was the early spring of 2005 and a team of British, French and German diplomats were arriving at the magnificent French foreign ministry at the Quai d’Orsay on the left bank of the Seine.

But the splendour of the Second Empire building did not match their mood. The negotiating team, which included high-flying John Sawers (now head of the British Secret Intelligence Service), had been fruitlessly searching for a solution to the Iranian nuclear stand-off for more than a year.

There seemed no solution. The European negotiators, under massive pressure from the United States, were adamant that Iran must give up its uranium-enrichment programme.

For the Iranians these demands seemed an intolerable humiliation for a sovereign state, and a classic manifestation of the western imperialism that had humiliated their ancient country for centuries.

The meeting had been under way for approximately 20 minutes, with no progress, when suddenly the face of the leader of the Iranian negotiating team, Javad Zarif, was wreathed in smiles.

‘We have a proposal to show you,’ he said. ‘It is an entirely unofficial idea. It has not been discussed or approved by our masters in Tehran. But perhaps it might be something we can talk about.’

After these preliminary words, the Iranians delivered a PowerPoint presentation which amazed the European negotiating team. It was the basis of a deal and one, moreover, that offered genuine benefits for both sides, though both sides would have to make compromises as well.

Briefly, in the gilded nineteenth-century Parisian salon, a resolution of the nuclear stand-off between Iran and the west felt entirely possible.

The Iranians explained that they were not prepared to abandon their plans to develop centrifuge enrichment technology on Iranian soil. But in return for carrying on with their enrichment programme they proposed unprecedented measures to provide guarantees that they would never divert peaceful nuclear technology for military use.

They offered a solemn pledge that Iran would remain bound by the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) – which obliges member states to subject their nuclear facilities to external inspection – for as long as it existed.

They said that Iran’s religious leaders would repudiate nuclear weapons.

They put on the negotiating table a series of voluntary restrictions on the size and output of the enrichment programme.

And they offered inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Authority (IAEA) improved oversight of all nuclear activities in Iran.

The European diplomats allowed not a trace of emotion to show on their faces. But one official recalls thinking that ‘what we had just heard was a most interesting offer. We realised that what we had just heard was a valid and coherent proposal that was in full conformity with relevant international treaty provisions.’

This diplomat adds today that ‘trust was not an issue, because over the preceding 18 months we had got to know our Iranian counterparts and had acquired confidence in the Iranians’ ability to honour their commitments’.

When the Iranians had finished their presentation, the Europeans asked for a break so that they could discuss the proposal among themselves. Once on their own they agreed that there was no way that the Iranian offer would be acceptable to their political masters in Europe. One witness puts the problem like this: ‘There was not the faintest chance that President George W. Bush’s Republican advisers and Israeli allies would allow him to look benignly on such a deal. On the contrary, if the Europeans were to defy American wishes, they would be letting themselves in for a transatlantic row to end all rows.’

So when they came back to the negotiating table one hour later they were studiously non-committal. They spoke highly of the Iranian offer, but asked for time so that their governments could consider it.

And when John Sawers took the Iranian offer back to London it was very quickly forgotten. According to Foreign Office sources, Tony Blair intervened to make sure that it went no further. Later Sawers explained to Seyed Hossein Mousavian, spokesman of the Iranian nuclear negotiation team, why the offer could not be taken up. ‘Washington would never tolerate the operation of even one centrifuge in Iran,’ he said.1

So the peace proposal from the Iranian negotiators was killed stone dead even though the European negotiating team realised that it was both very well judged and in full conformity with international law. ‘This was an extraordinary sleight of hand by the EU,’ says one European diplomat close to the negotiations today.

The purpose of this short book is to dispel some of the myths and falsehoods which have distorted the view of Iran in America and Europe. We will show how Iran has often been ready to deal reasonably with the rest of the world over its nuclear ambitions. Iran was one of the original signatories to the NPT on 1 July 1968, and has for the most part obediently respected its provisions, and continues to do so today. As required by the NPT, it has not acquired nuclear weapons and its nuclear facilities are subject to IAEA inspection.

By contrast, the United States (and its client states in Europe, including Britain) has stood in the way of a settlement by refusing to accept Iran’s right to uranium enrichment under the NPT. Moreover, the west has repeatedly made unjust demands, and at crucial moments showed bad faith at the negotiating table.

Western politicians have nevertheless issued a barrage of partial and misleading statements about the Iranian position. These statements have very rarely been exposed in the western media, which as a whole shows little interest in finding out the truth about Iran. More commonly, western newspapers and television channels have disseminated fabrications which have fuelled hatred and suspicion, and sowed misunderstanding. We will supply examples of this malevolent public discourse, and seek to put the record straight.

As a result of these misrepresentations, most people in the west can be forgiven for believing that Iran is an aggressive and malevolent power hell-bent on the acquisition of nuclear weapons. We concede that it is indeed possible that the Iranians are secretly pursuing a nuclear bomb. However, we can show that there is at present no convincing evidence for this belief. Any western politician or propagandist who claims otherwise (and there are plenty of them) is either ignorant of the facts, or lying.

Nor is that all. The United States knows with reasonable certainty that Iran has no nuclear weapons programme, let alone a nuclear bomb. This also seems to be the position of the IAEA, which is responsible for monitoring the activities of the signatories of the NPT.

So what is going on? Why all the anger, the endless barrage of rhetoric and the ruthless drive to isolate Iran, which has led to the sanctions that are reportedly driving millions of Iranians to the brink of poverty and despair? We will suggest that a different agenda is at work, which has little or nothing to do with Iran’s non-existent nuclear weapons. We will argue that the United States and its European clients are driven by a different compulsion: the humiliation and eventual destruction of Iran’s Islamic regime.

The central purpose of this book, therefore, is to make the argument that confrontation with Iran is unnecessary. As the settlement proposed by the Iranians at the Quai d’Orsay suggests, Iran is prepared to deal with the west. It is the west that has repeatedly refused to accept the peace entreaties of the Iranians, that is refusing to deal with Iran on reasonable terms.

So we will make the urgent case that America and the west should return to the negotiating table to strike a deal with Iran. The alternative is yet more of the aggression and brinkmanship repeatedly shown by western negotiators: and ultimately the risk of an unnecessary and pointless war.

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1 Seyed Hossein Mousavian, The Iranian Nuclear Crisis: A Memoir, p173

CHAPTER TWO

THE UNITED STATES AND IRAN: A TRAGIC HISTORY

The best way to understand the nuclear stand-off between Iran and the west is to look back at the historical record, and in particular the long series of hostilities and tragic misunderstandings that have marred relations between America and Iran. This is a tale which starts in the aftermath of World War II, when the United States took over from Britain the role of superpower in the Middle East.

Until this moment, the United States had been much more popular in Iran than either Britain or France. Many educated Iranians believed that the United States was on the side of freedom, and therefore saw the American War of Independence as a prototype for their own struggles against imperialism.