Informed Comment

Daniel Graeber covers the debate about Iraq on university campuses and finds that attention has largely turned elsewhere.

And, indeed, even Gen. Ray Odierno, who had earlier opposed a quick drawdown in Iraq, is now suggesting that he may accelerate the US troop exodus.

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A suicide bomber rammed his vehicle into a NATO convoy in eastern Afghanistan on Wednesday morning. There are reportedly casualties but early reports did not specify them.

Roadside bombs set by anti-government guerrillas in Afghanistan killed 36 civilians in a 24-hour period ending Tuesday, with a single bombing of a bus near Qandahar accounting for 30 of the dead (and 39 of the wounded). Another bomb in Qandahar killed 5 civilians. Yet another bomb killed a woman in Spingar, Nangarhar.

In addition, 22 Taliban are alleged to have been killed in fighting with Afghan Army and NATO forces in Farah Province. Tuesday’s death toll is thus likely around 60 if all deaths from political violence were tabulated.

Some key statistics:

Ali Akbar Salehi, the head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization, reaffirmed Monday that a date would soon be set for the International Atomic Energy Agency to inspect the planned nuclear enrichment facility near Qom about which the Iranian government informed the IAEA on Monday a week ago.

If Iran really does permit full, ongoing IAEA inspections of the facility, then it cannot be used for weapons production. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton admitted Sunday that Iran cannot use the Natanz plant for bomb-making because it is being regularly inspected by the UN.

Scott Ritter, an experienced inspector himself, dispels the myths about the new Qom facility and urges against new economic sanctions on Iran as counter-productive. Great transparency and more inspections should be the demand of the West, he says.

I made the same point on MSNBC on Monday with Nora O’Donnell:

And no here’s something you won’t read in major American newspapers or see on American television.

The USG Open Source Center translated remarks to Iranian television of General Hoseyn Salami, commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Air Force concerning Iran’s Monday missile tests (Islamic Republic of Iran News Network Television (IRINN), Monday, September 28, 2009):

Gen. Salami said, “as long as our enemies act within a political domain, our behavior will be completely political. However, if they want to leave the domain of political action and enter the domain of military threat, then our action will be exactly and completely military.” . . .

Many Western media reports implied that the missile tests were launched along with threats to wipe out Israel. But note that the commanding officer overseeing them explicitly restated Iran’s “no first strike” pledge. To my knowledge, no current high official in the Iranian executive has threatened war against Israel, which in any case would be foolhardy given Israel’s nuclear arsenal (see below). Iranian officials do say they hope the “Zionist regime” will collapse as the Soviet Union did.

The report also said:

‘Salami said the strategic objective in staging the war game was “to demonstrate the Iranian nation’s resolution in defending revolutionary and national values and ideals as well as to make a new attempt to upgrade the level and quality of the Islamic Republic’s deterrence against any probable threat given the current political and international atmosphere.” ‘

Salami linked the tests strongly to Iran’s defensive needs and pointed out they came before the anniversary of Iraq’s 1980 attack on Iran, which kicked off a highly destructive 8-year war that killed on the order of 250,000 Iranians. (The United States supported Iraq in that war.) The trauma of being invaded by a rapacious enemy at a moment of national weakness after the 1979 revolution has deeply informed Iranian political leaders’ views of the world ever since.

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Haggai Ram writes in a guest editorial for IC:

Before, during and after the recent UN General Assembly meeting, the Israeli government, much like Sisyphus, who was condemned to repeat forever a meaningless task, once again stepped up its campaign against Iran’s nuclear program. The immediate objective is patently clear: to push the United Nations Security Council to expand sanctions against Iran and perhaps also to lay down the justification for a future Israeli preemptive strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities.

The tactic used is not new either. It consists of a well known, well orchestrated endeavor to conjure up a radioactively reified picture of Iran as a Nazi Germany-like power obsessively bent on making good on its alleged pledge to have the Jewish state “wiped off the map.” Thus, on a recent trip to Russia Israeli President Shimon Peres described the prospects of an Iranian nuclear bomb in ominous terms as “a flying concentration camp”; and Netanyahu, while on a trip to Germany, warned Iran that Israel will not allow “those who wish to perpetrate mass deaths, those who call for the destruction of the Jewish people or the Jewish state, to go unchallenged.”

In assessing the Jewish state’s unrelenting recourse to drawing analogies between Iran and Nazi Germany, one should not dismiss the genuine feelings of vulnerability among Israelis stemming from the trauma of the Jewish Holocaust during World War II. This explains, in part, why despite Israel’s overwhelming military superiority and its own nuclear arsenal, Israeli Jews today are deeply concerned about the likelihood of an impending “second” Holocaust. However misplaced and exaggerated, the reality of such feelings, their importance, must be recognized.

Persistently voicing venomous anti-Israel rhetoric and allegedly pursuing nuclear weapons capabilities, the Iranian government, no doubt, has not been helpful in reducing these misplaced anxieties. To these we should add the reverberations of the electoral earthquake that has shaken the Islamic republic to its core since last June. Indeed, the fraudulent presidential elections and their aftermath have demonstrated to the Israelis the brutal force which that government is prepared to unleash — even against its own people — in order to ensure its survival.

Yet one should also not ignore the dubious dividends that the Israeli government now expects to reap from producing such tenuous analogies. It is no secret that the Obama administration has been exploring ways to bringing about the resumption of the long-stalled Middle East talks. To that end, it has mounted pressure on Israel to agree to a partial freeze on the construction of settlements on occupied Palestinian land. By playing up the purported genocidal threat issuing from Iran, the Netanyahu government thus hopes to avoid making any concessions that are likely to bring about a meaningful breakthrough in the Israeli-Palestinian impasse. “The message is: Iran is an existential threat to Israel; settlements are not,” as an Israeli official recently told The Guardian.

In my recent book, Iranophobia (2009), I have demonstrated how the Jewish state has time and again (ab)used the specter of the “Iranian threat” in order to cover up, and divert attention away from, both domestic oversights and the continuing apartheid regime in the Palestinian territories. Avigdor Lieberman, Israel’s incumbent Foreign Minister, is a case in point. When asked in the wake of the devastation that the Israeli military had sown in Gaza last year, “What you think is the first most strategic threat to Israel,” Lieberman responded: “Iran, Iran, Iran… As long as there’s no solution to the Iranian problem we will deal with neither the settlements nor the settlers… Only after we will have taken care of … Iran it will become possible to talk about… the problem in Judea, Samaria, and the Golan Heights.”

These fanciful expressions concerning the existential threat posed to Israel by Iran are misleading for two reasons: First, because when compared to the extraordinary misery and depredation which the Iranian government has exacted on its own people, the actual threat which it poses to the Jewish state pales into insignificance; and second, because such expressions have thus far enabled the Jewish state to exacerbate, rather than help to alleviate, the Palestinian problem. It is this yet-to-be resolved problem — and not Iran — that presents the Jewish state with the most serious challenge to its survival.

Haggai Ram teaches the history of the Middle East at Ben Gurion University of the Negev, Israel. His most recent book is Iranophobia: The Logic of an Israeli Obsession (Stanford University Press, 2009).

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There is no good evidence that Iran has a nuclear weapons program. It has offered to allow regular International Atomic Energy Agency inspections of the newly announced facility near Qom, which would effectively prevent it from being used for weapons production.

There is a secret nuclear facility in the Middle East, however, producing plutonium and not just enriched uranium, which has the capacity to make 10 nuclear warheads a year.

Here is a 3-D reconstruction of the most dangerous weapons plant in the Middle East, at Dimona in Israel.

It is Israel’s ongoing nuclear weapon production that drives the nuclear arms race in the Middle East. Saddam wanted a bomb because Israel had one. The Iranians were then worried both about an Iraqi and an Israeli bomb. Egypt, Saudi Arabia and others are annoyed at their geostrategic helplessness in the face of Israeli nukes.

Israel’s nuclear arsenal is the region’s Original Sin.

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