Iran 202

'Condoleezza Rice and Iran’s nuclear weapons
By Christopher King*3 June 2008

Christopher King argues that the USA and Britain will use the same techniques they used to justify aggression against Iraq – falsehood, deception and disinformation – in order to attack Iran and seize its oil.

When the International Atomic Energy Agency’s (IAEA) latest report on Iran’s nuclear programme was released to the United Nations last week, US Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice was quick to say: "I think right now the Iranians have a lot of explaining to do about the IAEA report, which essentially sees them as not cooperating on some very important dark questions...,” and more like this. I tried to check the IAEA website but the report hasn’t been released to the public by the IAEA board. This gives a wonderful time window within which the Bush administration can spin IAEA reports however they wish. Condoleezza and other administration officials will always be able to grab headlines with this sort of alarmist rubbish which the media gleefully report verbatim. When the report is eventually released and one can examine the facts, the propaganda has had its effect. Those of us who are interested in fact rather than invention can’t get the same audience and, to the media, the story is dead anyway. That’s how Messrs Bush and Blair took us to war against Afghanistan and Iraq. The same technique is being used now to justify attacking Iran.President Bush blamed the Iranians for killing Americans in Iraq by supplying “sophisticated shaped charge weapons” which turned out to be a lie – none of Iranian origin were ever found. Similarly, when the display to newsmen of General Petraeus’s arms cache last May had to be cancelled because experts could not tie the weapons to Iran, with it went the lie that Iran was supplying conventional arms to Iraqi fighters. Then Iranian “strategic advisers” were supposed to have been coordinating the Mahdi resistance in Basra a few months ago. No-one ever even claimed to have seen an Iranian strategist. All lies and invention but it’s these that people remember. So Iran’s nuclear programme is the only scare and blame story left. Let’s have a look at it. We don’t have the latest IAEA report but we do have the previous one of February 2008 which stated the outstanding issues. Check it out.These are historic issues. They are not about current matters. They relate to when and from whom Iran obtained information about manufacturing nuclear weapons, as well as whether the evidence supplied by the United States and others is genuine or not. It’s about the involvement of Dr A.Q. Khan, the leading figure in developing Pakistan’s nuclear programme, and his dissemination of weapons technology and information to Libya, North Korea, Iraq and Iran in the 1980s and 1990s. The IAEA’s outstanding queries are not about the physical manufacture of weapons, nor current weapons programmes. The current position is being monitored by the IAEA, which reported several years ago that Iran had no current weapons programme. Despite this, the Bush administration insisted for years that Iran had a current weapons programme. This was echoed by our UK politicians who thought that they knew better than the IAEA if they thought at all. Conceivably, the US security services realized that disagreeing with IAEA inspectors on the ground would eventually make them look as incompetent at they did over Iraqi weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and they contradicted their own president. So another lie collapsed.The central issue to these queries is whether Iran ever had a nuclear weapons programme in the past. The Iranians say they have never had one and in March 2008 made a statement to the United Nations secretary-general of this position and their right to enrich uranium under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). Whether or not the Iranians began a weapons programme in the 1980/90s, they don’t have one now. You might wonder then what relevance these outstanding queries have to the current security of the Middle East, Europe and the United States. The answer is that they have no relevance or importance whatever to it.'

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