Mainstream paranoia

24Nov08

Even though the latest IAEA report once again clears Iran of any diversion of nuclear material, and concludes that its ongoing enrichment program has produced only low level enrichment uranium of less than 5% (LEU), the reaction of the American press has been hysterical.  Led by a Judith Miller-style hit piece in the New York Times last week by Sanger and Broad, the newspapers have been tip-tapping calculators to conclude that if Iran locked down its program and enriched all of its LEU to HEU levels, it would now have enough to make a single atomic bomb.  Just what Iran would do with a single heavy Hiroshima-type uranium bomb (no missiles in Iran’s current inventory are capable of hefting such a 4000kg device) is left to the imagination.

 

This bit of paranoia is indicative of the mainstream consensus on the subject of Iran’s nuclear programme.  As with driving Cuba into the arms of the Soviet Union in the early 1960s, the American attitude can only encourage conservatives in Tehran to think about optimization of a “breakout” nuclear program to deter the real threat of an ill-considered attack by the US and/or Israel.  Once again, former Iranian negotiator-consultant Kaveh Afrasiabi pinpoints the core risks:

 

What both Washington and Tel Aviv fail to realize is that their own action, of constantly threatening Iran with nuclear attacks, is tantamount to playing with fire. Such threats heighten Iran’s sense of national security vulnerability and chip away at the latency of Iran’s nuclear potential. In other words, the perceived remedy of issuing threats in the hope of thwarting Iran’s march toward nuclear bombs has the exact opposite effect of poisoning the climate where Iran feels safe enough not to go beyond its reliance on conventional arms and acquire the actual bombs.

To return to the New York Times, a number of its columnists, such as Thomas Friedman and David Brooks, have also been fully involved in cultivating the perception of an “Iran threat”. In Friedman’s recent column titled “Show me the money” he takes this for granted and takes European, and the Russian and Chinese governments to task to prove their support for Obama by imposing tougher sanctions on Iran.

This aside, in light of the news of the impending selection of the ardently pro-Israel senator from New York, Hillary Clinton, as Obama’s secretary of state, we are unlikely to witness any moderation of anti-Iran bias in Washington, influenced as it is by the incessant wheels of the “Fourth Estate”.

Needless to say, hardly enough of this is encouraging and, indeed, is rather depressing and despairing of the hope that true change is coming to the practice and orientation of US foreign policy. The sheer speed of “over-Clintonization” of the Obama administration, reflected in the selection of so many officials linked to the Clinton “circle”, none of whom can be regarded as agents of change, alone indicates that the hope for an Obama-led change in US foreign policy may be a hope against hope.

 

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