Should US attack Iran?

According to Guardian (London, April 1) report the Pentagon is preparing to set off a record breaking bang detonating 635 tonnes of high explosives and sending a mushroom cloud into the sky over the Nevada desert. The blast on June 2 is designed to test the impact of bunker bursting nuclear bomb aimed at underground targets. Hans M Christensen, a highly valued physicist in the Federation of American Scientists in an article published in the Baltimore Sun said that according to Pentagons contingency plan. Washington is edging towards a policy of nuclear preemption. According to an article by Philip Giardi, a former CIA official, published in the August 2005 issue of American Conservative, vice president Dick Cheney has issued a request for using tactical nuclear weapons against Iran. Republican Senator John McCain told US television recently that 'Iranian threat to the world is the biggest since the cold war'.

President Bush addressing an audience at George Washington university recently charged Iran of persistent efforts to manufacture nuclear weapons and that coalition forces in Iraq had seized Iranian supply of explosives to insurgents. 'America will confront the threat', he said. President Bush talked of 'mushroom clouds over New York' to raise fear among Americans about the danger of a potential Iranian nuclear attack and to manipulate support for military action on Iran. The Administration is repeating over and over again the warning that Iran is trying to build nukes and there 'is no choice but to address the Iranian problem and defeat it'. Defence Secretary Rumsfeld accused Iran of dispatching the Al Qaeda division of its Revolutionary Guard too stir trouble inside Iraq . The Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte recently told US Congress that Teheran has been responsible for the 'increasing lethality' of anti coalition attacks by providing Shia militias with the capability to build improvised explosive devices. Secretary of State Rice has declared Iran as 'the central banker' for terrorism in the Middle East as well as the single most dangerous threat to the US. In its latest version of national strategy, the Bush Administration has reiterated its belief in 'preventive war' threatening a future Iran/ US confrontation and labeling Iran as 'cold war enemy number one' . 'We may face no greater challenge from a single country than from Iran', it said.

True, it is wrong that Iran has threatened to wipe out Israel from the map and denied holocaust of jews in Germany during the second world war. But Iran is more sinned against than sinning. Iran offers no threat to the region let alone the US. Iran has repeatedly pledged that its nuclear programme is for peaceful purposes for producing energy. Iran has not broken any obligation under the NPT to which it is a signatory. Iran has allowed unrestricted inspection of its nuclear facilities by IAEA Inspectors who found no evidence of its nuclear weapons programme IAEA chief Mohammad AL Baradej issued a report in November 2004 that Iran was in 'substantive compliance' not only with NPT obligation but 'those of additional protocol'. There is not the slightest evidence it has the required quantity of centrifuges to enrich uranium to weapons grade material. Iran has enriched uranium to a small 3.5 percent with 180 centifuges, much short of required 80 percent enrichment which would require 16000 centrifuges.

Iran is at least 8-10 years away from making a nuclear weapon, according to scientists and CIA experts. Granted that Iran becomes capable to produce nuclear weapons, but then it will be no more a threat than Israel, Pakistan and India are as nuclear powers.

Iran has no record of disruption of regional or international peace. Iran has not invaded another country in 250 years but has been subjected to western interventions beginning in Anglo-Russian inspired revolution of 1906-11 to Anglo-American coup in 1953 against democratically elected government of Mohammad Mossadeque for installing US controlled monarchy of the Shah to Anglo- US support to Iraq in its war with Iran launched in 1980 after the1979 Islamic revolution in Iran. Ironically the western aid to Iraq included scientific and industrial support for Iraq's nuclear, biological and chemical weapons programme. Despite the 1988 US cruise missile attack on Iranian civil airliner killing more than 100 passengers on board, Iran cooperated with US to unseat the Taleban in Afghanistan. Iran has also arrested and repatriated hundreds of Al Qaeda suspects in the past two years in a display of willingness to bring terrorist under control.

Then, why is this vitriolic attack against Iran by the US? May be, it is to shore up the plummeting popularity rating of Bush by winning a short, swift and sharp victory in Iran. May be, US is acting on Israel's bidding. May be, it is to avenge the humiliation of American embassy staff held hostage in Teheran shortly after the Islamic revolution under the leadership of Ayatollah Khomeini. May be, the answer lies more than anything else in the perceived 'ideology of hatred that needs to be dealt with' in the Middle East against the values and culture of the west.

A nuclear attack on Iran, in which millions of innocent men, women and children will perish and become disabled, maimed and disfigured, will be insane. Speaking of consequences of nuclear attack on Iran, Dr Hirsh, professor of physics at UC San Diego said, 'Each bomb would deliver an incalculable number of corpses, radiation fall out, both immediate and residual, unparallel in magnitude to the tragedy in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Besides radiation fallout in Iran and beyond its borders, the political and economic consequences of nuclear attack on Iran will be enormous and far reaching with the disruption of oil supply lines, increasing radicalisation in the region and the Muslim world and potential danger of involvement of any combination of nuclear actors including China, Russia, Pakistan and Israel unleashing the Armageddon of nuclear cataclysm wreaking death, devastation and annihilation of the human race.'

The clock is ticking to the defining moment for a final decision on Iran by the Security Council which gave an ultimatum to Iran last month to suspend enrichment of uranium by 28 April. Iran, meanwhile, in defiance has successfully enriched uranium. It remains to be seen what the Security Council does when it resumes early next month to consider the Iran dossier submitted by the IAEA. America, Britain and regrettably France, apparently in a departure from its stance in the Iraq debate, may in all probability opt for tough action including economic sanctions and military force. But China and Russia who have entrenched political and economic interests in Iran will most certainly veto any such resolution. Under such circumstances, will the West go along its trodden path of unilateral preemptive attack on Iran for a regime change?

American people do not want another war and cannot allow their elected officials to play foul with the fate of their lives and those of other nations at their sweet will under the pretext of providing security to Americans from so called rogue states. Iran crisis, much of which is of Bush Administration's making, is deepening and may soon spiral out of control unless American people as well as the international community unitedly rein in the long arm of President Bush to disabuse him of the delusion of grandeur of conquest which provides neither honour nor security.

Abdul Hannan is a former Press Counsellor, Bangladesh UN Mission in New York