The Guardian 12 December, 2007
Culture and Life
by Rob Gowland
Lies, in the face of
all evidence to the contrary
So 2007 ends with US President Bush lying once again to justify a war (this time against Iran) and ignoring his own intelligence agencies. So why should we expect anything different? After all, Bush was put in office through the efforts of Big Oil, the energy lobby and a cabal of highly reactionary corporations that want the US to take over the world’s energy supplies (in their interests, of course).
On Monday December 3, 16 US spy agencies issued their combined National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), a regular but infrequent occurrence. The key revelation in the latest NIE was that Iran had "halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003".
It also expressed the opinion that even if Iran wanted to produce a nuclear weapon, and restarted its weapon program in order to do so, the earliest it could hope to produce a nuclear bomb would be 2015.
Now this you would have thought rather effectively cut the ground from under the White House. Bush has been claiming for years that Iran had an "active" nuclear weapons program and portrayed Iran as being on the brink of detonating its own bomb.
But the new intelligence report not only belies this, it actually confirms that Bush has known at least since August that Iran had no nuclear weapons program any more. Not that that stopped him from going right on using "Iran’s nuclear threat" as justification for actively preparing for war with that country.
However, the NIE certainly scuttled US schemes to use the UN Security Council to impose sanctions on Iran, as a forerunner to a US-led air war.
Vitaly Churkin, Russia’s UN Ambassador, told the media that the NIE vindicated Moscow’s opposition to any sanctions. "We have said all along that there is no proof they are pursuing nuclear weapons", he said.
China’s Ambassador to the UN, Guangya Wang, asked whether sanctions were now less likely, responded: "I think the Security Council members will have to consider that, because I think we all start from the presumption that now things have changed."
Bush, however, preferred to interpret it differently. He held a press conference the next day, Tuesday, at which he argued that, since Iran had an embryonic nuclear weapons program four years ago, they could revive it at any time. "What’s to say that they couldn’t start another covert nuclear weapons program?" he asked.
"If Iran shows up with a nuclear weapon at some point in time, the world is going to say, ‘What happened to them in 2007? How come they couldn’t see the impending danger? What caused them not to understand that a country that once had a weapons program could reconstitute the weapons program?’"
Ignoring the conclusions of the NIE, Bush used his press conference to basically lay out the case for "preventive war" against Iran. That there is nothing to "prevent" didn’t phase him at all.
After all, the real purpose of the war would not be to stop Iran’s nuclear weapons program any more than the invasion of Iraq was to find and destroy Saddam Hussein’s equally fictitious "weapons of mass destruction".
The energy and munitions cliques, and the Religious Right, who stand behind Bush, want Iran knocked out as a power in the region, and its oil appropriated by US interests.
Asked specifically at the press conference whether the new intelligence findings meant that Washington would refrain from utilizing a "military option" against Iran, Bush insisted that "all options are on the table".
In August, when Bush was told that in fact Iran had no nuclear weapons program, the White House was engaged, as the World Socialist Website puts it, "in a major propaganda campaign against Iran, with Bush delivering speeches containing unsubstantiated charges that Iran was responsible for attacks on US occupation forces in Iraq and was threatening the world with a ‘nuclear holocaust’."
It was at that time also that the US stepped up the pressure on Iran by arresting its diplomatic officials in Iraq. It was at that time too that "the White House first announced its threat to brand the country’s largest uniformed security force, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), as a ‘terrorist organisation’.
"In short, Bush and Cheney were delivering speeches invoking a ‘nuclear holocaust’ and, in the case of Bush’s October 16 press conference, threatening ‘World War III’, all the while knowing that the nuclear weapons program that they were warning against did not even exist."
The NIE essentially acknowledges the accuracy of the assessment by the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the UN watchdog group that has conducted extensive inspections of Iranian nuclear facilities. The agency’s Director General Mohamed El Baradei welcomed the report, saying that it would help to defuse the mounting international crisis.
Unfortunately, Bush and Co are rabid warmongers who, clearly, will stop at nothing if the stakes are high enough. They must be opposed by global mass action, at all levels using all forms of peaceful struggle.