The threat of American aggression against Iran has alarmed people everywhere. Right now the US is engaging in sabre-rattling, threatening Iran with military action, while, for the time being, pressing ahead with its efforts to impose economic and diplomatic sanctions. But as recent events (Iraq) and history have shown, such sanctions are often the prelude and even the path to a more violent settling of the issue. There is a real possibility of another war in the Middle East.
In April, the New Yorker magazine, the Washington Post and the UK Sunday Times each independently reported on US preparations to attack Iran, based on interviews with unnamed high-level American military and intelligence officials. The New Yorker article by Seymour Hersh said that the US government is considering not only conventional military strikes but also the use of tactical nuclear weapons. The Sunday Times wrote that the British armed forces have taken part in a mock invasion of Iran led by the US. The London Sunday Telegraph revealed a secret meeting between British cabinet officials and generals to discuss a possible attack on Iran and its consequences.
These reports were published at a time when the UN Security Council had given Iran 30 days to stop the enrichment of uranium. Iran had resumed this process a few months earlier following the collapse of its negotiations with Britain, France and Germany. This led to the matter being removed from the hands of the International Atomic Energy Agency and sent to the Security Council, which has the authority to take punitive measures. In retaliation, the Iranian government cancelled permission for UN snap inspections of its nuclear sites. Then the Islamic Republic announced it had succeeded in enriching uranium to 3.5 percent, and later to 4.8 percent. Throughout April the drumbeats of war grew loader almost daily.
US ambassador to the UN John Bolton, in a speech to the annual convention of the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee, said: “The Iran regime must be made aware that if it continues down the path of international isolation, there will be tangible and painful consequences.” He warned that the United States was prepared to “use all the tools at our disposal to stop the threat”. Most shockingly, US President George Bush and other American officials repeatedly emphasized that the military option remains “on the table”.
Yet at the same time, in the face of world concerns, US officials denied that they are preparing for a war and instead insisted they are still seeking a diplomatic solution. What do those contradictory signs mean? There is no doubt that the US is playing a hide and seek game, openly building a political climate in favour of war while also trying to hide just how concrete the danger is. In fact, as White House officials have openly admitted on occasion, the illusion of seeking a diplomatic solution is a necessary requirement to prepare American and European public opinion for war.
The Iran government, meanwhile, has tried to hide the strong rhetoric of the US authorities from the Iranian people, or downplayed it as mere psychological warfare.
What is the US seeking in this game?
The US asserts that its main objective is to ensure compliance with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). It claims that the Iranian regime is pursuing the ability to build nuclear bombs. Iran says that the aim of its nuclear programme is to produce atomic energy and not nuclear weapons. The US and its allies have not been able to prove their accusations, despite sending UN inspectors to Iranian nuclear sites, setting up permanent camera surveillance all over these sites and making Iran accept snap visits whenever these inspectors want. In addition, they put their entire intelligence apparatus to work in an effort to find the smallest evidence to back up their claims, but there has been none at all. The International Atomic Energy Agency’s report said there was no proof that Iran is or is not working towards nuclear weapons. But that has not stopped the US and its big power allies from finding the accused guilty. Now they are discussing the sentence, the kind of punishment to impose on the Islamic Republic, threatening to repeat the tragedy and crime they committed against Iraq with the pretext of “weapons of mass destruction”.
Western experts have estimated that even if Iran is seeking nuclear weapons, it doesn’t have the necessary materials, tools and technology, and it would take Iran at least five to ten years to reach that point. With the prevailing mood in Western official circles, this estimate is likely to be too low.
One question that should lay bare much of what’s really going on is this: how can the US claim to care so much about preventing the spread of nuclear weapons when it is the only country in history that has ever used atomic bombs – with hundreds of thousands of dead and the after-effects still reaping victims from following generations? Why, over the six decades since the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, has the US always rejected calls to at least express regret for this crime against humanity? Why has it manufactured many thousands of nuclear warheads and repeatedly refused to reduce its nuclear arsenal? Why does the US blatantly threaten other countries with nuclear weapons?
As for the UK, the British government is currently determined to upgrade its Trident submarine nuclear missiles, in breach of the NPT. Last January, French President Jacques Chirac also shamelessly threatened to use nuclear weapons if needed to further his country’s interests. What’s more, the US and its allies helped bring about the world’s most flagrant violation of the NPT: the nuclear arming of Israel, a country whose very existence is based on the occupation of other people’s land and threatening and invading other countries. Israel has refused to sign the NPT and ignores UN Security Council resolutions, but this still goes without even diplomatic condemnation, let alone international punishment by the UN. The only thing that concerns the US and its allies is how to arm the Zionists even more.
If the US were so concerned about the NPT, why only two months ago did it agree to provide new nuclear technology to India, another country that has rejected the NPT and developed and tested nuclear weapons – a country that has often intervened in neighbouring countries such as Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Kashmir, not to mention its wars with Pakistan and China? The most outrageous part is that states who themselves are in breach of the NPT or have refused to signed the NPT are members of the main body of the International Atomic Energy Agency with the power to judge whether other countries comply with the NPT.
Obviously, the problem with the Islamic Republic, in the eyes of the US and the other countries who referred Iran to the Security Council and are trying to punish it, has nothing to do with enforcing the NPT. Certainly there must be other interests that they are pursuing.
When Condoleezza Rice, the US Secretary of State, was visiting the north of England, she was asked to admit that the occupation of Iraq was a mistake. She replied that the US made many tactical mistakes but that the invasion was strategically correct, because building a new order in the Middle East was not possible with Saddam. The same logic applies to the Islamic Republic of Iran. Last March, she explained: “We may face no greater challenge from a single country than from Iran, whose policies are directed at developing a Middle East that would be 180 degrees different than the Middle East that we would like to see develop.” There might be an exaggeration of the degrees of difference, but certainly that is the US’s real concern. This was verified recently when a reporter asked her if the US would promise not to invade Iran if the Islamic Republic gave up its nuclear programme. Absolutely not, she said. “Iran is a troublemaker in the international system… security assurances are not on the table.” (Associated Press, 22 May). 
Henry Precht, a Mid East expert who headed the US State Department desk on Iran in 1978-80, pointed out in the Foreign Service Journal  (October 2005) that many regimes seek nuclear weapons, deny rights to their people and especially women, and commit other crimes of the kind carried out by the Islamic Republic of Iran – and are rewarded by the US as loyal friends. The one and only real reason for the current campaign against Iran, he said, is “animosity” toward the regime. In an interview on the BBC Persian Service (3 April) he argued, “Let’s say the Iranians admit that they made a mistake and they no longer want to pursue nuclear energy … and they abandon this programme. I will assure you that the [American] agenda would be that Iran is the main sponsor of terrorism, Iran sabotages Arab-Israeli peace, Iran violates human rights… As long as the Iranian Islamic regime has not disappeared from the Middle East, they will not be happy.”
These are the strong arguments from supporters of American imperialist interests that the US’s main concern is not the NPT but the existence of the Islamic regime, at least in its present form.
US policy statements have discussed a Greater Middle East that would extend from Morocco to Afghanistan. The US needs to reconfigure this region to achieve global domination. The Middle East has the world’s biggest oil reserves and is home to the biggest oil producers, too. It is also a main source of natural gas. The majority of the globe’s fuel passes through the Persian Gulf and Arabian Sea to the world market. Oil today has so much strategic importance that control over this commodity is key for controlling the world, including the European countries, Japan, China, India and others whose economies depend on the uninterrupted flow of oil. So for the US, the importance of grabbing up the Middle East is not the immediate profit it might gain. It needs the oil as a lever to use against its main rivals, even if obtaining it might mean losing money in the short or medium term. As V. I. Lenin pointed out in Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, “an essential feature of imperialism is the rivalry between several Great Powers in the striving for hegemony, i.e., for the conquest of territory, not so much directly for themselves as to weaken the adversary and undermine his hegemony.”
Further, the importance of the Middle East is not limited to oil. The region is geographically situated at the intersection of three continents and in fact is the gateway to them, including militarily. As one of the most important Middle Eastern countries, Iran has attracted the attention of imperialists and colonial powers for centuries. In addition, because of its long common border with the ex-Soviet Union, it has played a very special role for the West and US.
The 1979 Iranian revolution was a costly blow to US imperialism. The overthrow of the US and British-installed regime of the Shah meant the loss of a main pillar of American power in the region, even though the Islamic leadership of the revolution softened this blow to some extent. Working mainly through Europe, the Western imperialist bloc headed by the US successfully contained the Islamic regime and prevented it from falling into the Soviet imperialist bloc orbit. They kept Iran as mainly a Western client, and, most importantly, helped the Islamic regime suppress the revolutionaries and kill and execute tens of thousands of them.
However, with today’s new world situation following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the emergence of the US as the only superpower, the US can no longer rest content with the old order in the Middle East forged under different conditions. This is what has changed the Islamic Republic of Iran in American eyes. A regime that was acceptable in the previous situation has become completely unacceptable, not because of any change in the regime itself, but because the restructuring of the Middle East that the US believes is now possible and necessary requires regime change in Iran.
What the US seeks is far more than just the regime’s fall. The most important question is what will replace it. Certainly a real revolution would be at least as unacceptable as the Islamic Republic. The US seeks to install a regime that would give it the freedom American imperialism deems necessary to obtain their objectives in the region, including stationing their armed forces in the country. This is what the US considers a “fair and balanced” settlement of the Iran situation in line with America’s new status following the change in the balance of forces after the collapse of the Soviet bloc. 
As Lenin wrote, “Finance capital and the trusts do not diminish but increase the differences in the rate of growth of the various parts of the world economy.” In this case, while the economies of the US’s rivals in Europe and Japan are rapidly overtaking that of the US, suddenly the US no longer has any current military rivals. Now the world finds itself in a situation where one imperialist country has the military power to impose its will on the others and preserve its economic interests by force of arms. The configuration of imperialist spheres of influence in the world based on the balance of power between the two rival imperialist blocs headed by the US and the formerly socialist USSR has lost its reason to exist. Lenin continued, “Once the relation of forces is changed, what other solution of the contradictions can be found under capitalism than that of force?” The US’s efforts to turn Iran into an American neo-colony are at the heart of a struggle to re-divide the world according to this new balance of forces.
Next instalment: The tactics of US imperialism in this conflict - AWTW