Who’s up for bombing Iran, then?

23Jul07

The Economist has just published a disgraceful editorial, purportedly rejecting an attack on Iran but in fact doing everything it can to legitimise one.

Jérôme Guillet has already dealt with the article fairly comprehensively, and to his credit the foreign editor of The Economist, Peter David, showed up to defend the editorial, here. My response to Peter is viewable here, and I’ve copied and pasted it below, with a few changes to correct typos, add links and include a couple of things I hadn’t thought of before.

All the quotes are from the editorial, linked above, except for the first one, which is taken from the comment by Peter David to which the following is a reply.

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“There is indeed a rational case for pre-emption but we don’t buy it.”

Hi Peter. I think that’s one of the major flaws in your leader. You seem to take it as a given that the U.S. has a right to intervene in Iran if it deems doing so to be in its interests, in effect that the U.S. has a right to rule the world.

It doesn’t. Even if there were a “rational case” that attacking Iran would bring positive results for the U.S. and Israel (and there isn’t), we would still have no right whatsoever to attack them. I think that’s a critical point, and one that is missing from your editorial.

You start the leader thus:

“Iran’s leaders think a nuclear weapon could rejuvenate their tired revolution.”

Do they? Really? I was under the impression that the Iranian leadership had repeatedly denied any desire for a nuclear weapon (indeed, further down this same editorial you yourself acknowledge that Iran ’says its nuclear aims are peaceful’), and that the IAEA has been unable to discover any evidence to the contrary. The standard IAEA conclusion – see the latest report (.pdf) from May 2007, for example – is that the IAEA is confident that none of Iran’s declared nuclear material is being diverted to a secret nuclear weapons programme, but that it is unable to verify for certain that there exists no undeclared nuclear material. That is hardly a basis for the certainty displayed in your editorial.

You write:

“THE Iranian regime is basically a messianic apocalyptic cult. So says Israel’s once and perhaps future prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu. If he is right the world is teetering on the edge of a terrifying crisis.”

Why on earth would you consider it appropriate to quote Netanyahu, the far-right Israeli politician who makes Ariel Sharon look almost cuddly by comparison? Netanyahu has also compared Ahmadinejad to Hitler, and Iran to Nazi Germany. Who cares what a loony like him has to say on the matter? In any event, it is surely ridiculously biased to quote Netanyahu and Sen. John McCain (see below) without providing any counter-quote from someone grounded a bit further in reality (Scott Ritter, say?).

“While the world has been distracted by Iraq, Afghanistan and much else, Iran has been moving relentlessly closer to the point where it could build an atomic bomb.”

Has it? Again, as far as I’m aware (and please provide the evidence if you disagree), we have no proof that Iran is developing a nuclear weapon. Isn’t it therefore the height of irresponsibility for a journal as influential as yours to assume and state as fact that it is, given the current political climate?

“Figuring out how to put the fuel into a usable weapon will also take time–perhaps a year or more. But for would-be bomb-builders, making the fuel is by far the hardest part.”

Again, you’re assuming as fact that Iran is trying for a bomb. That is not a legitimate assumption.

“It has signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and says its nuclear aims are peaceful. But having spent decades deceiving nuclear inspectors, it is disbelieved even by its friends.”

Yes, Iran hasn’t been exactly honest about its nuclear programme in the past (to put it mildly). However, since it all finally came out a few years ago Iran has been on the whole extremely cooperative, voluntarily suspending enrichment and submitting to extensive IAEA checks and investigations, and even, for a time, acting according to optional additional protocols that gave the IAEA extra access. The result has been that, while there remain some inconsistencies and unanswered questions, and whilst Iran continues to be non-cooperative on some aspects of its programme, the IAEA has found no evidence of a nuclear weapons programme whatsoever.

“The centrifuges spin defiantly on.”

The UN Security Council resolutions had no basis in law. Iran is entitled by the NPT to enrich uranium, so if anything, you should say that the UN Security Council is acting “defiantly”, not Iran.

“So what next? This story could have at least three unhappy endings. In one, Iran ends up with nuclear weapons, bringing new instability and a hair-trigger face-off with nuclear Israel into one of the world’s least-safe neighbourhoods. In another, America or Israel take pre-emptive military action and manage to stop it, even though such an attack would almost certainly have very dangerous consequences of its own. In the third ending, Iran is attacked, and enraged, and retaliates—and still ends up with a bomb anyway.”

Well, there is a fourth option, but of course it is considered too far beyond the pale to even bother mentioning. Iran has proposed this option itself numerous times: the Middle East could be made a nuclear weapons free zone. Or, even further into the realm of fantasy, how about all the nuclear weapons states comply with the law, stop pretending that they have some God-given right to nukes that is not shared by Iran and everyone else and start seriously working towards global disarmament? Or are we only allowed to think about the narrow question of how to maintain the unjust situation where some countries are permitted nuclear weapons whilst other are not?

“After the false intelligence that led America into Iraq”

Well, I’d dispute your wording here. It’s not just that the intelligence was “false”, but rather that it was deliberately fixed around the policy. It was made to be false; it didn’t just happen to be that way.

“But they are–and they are not mad.”

Really? I would think that “mad” is quite an appropriate description of any state seriously thinking about perpetrating another criminal act of mass murder, even as the victims of its last atrocity continue to die in horrific numbers day after day, don’t you?

“This time, after all, there is no question of false intelligence: the world’s fears are based on capabilities that Iran itself boasts about openly.”

Yes, but surely you accept that it is totally illegitimate (criminal, in fact) to attack someone just because they have the capability to produce nuclear weapons? What matters is whether they actually are producing nuclear weapons.

And even then, unless there was solid evidence showing that Iran was planning to use those nuclear weapons, an attack would not be legitimate (just as it would not have been acceptable to, for example, bomb Israel if we had found out what they were up to in Dimona in time).

“Yet such an attack would nonetheless be a huge gamble.”

No, it would be a huge crime. Why do you never point this out? Is it unimportant? Doesn’t it matter? Is the only relevant question whether or not the crime is technically feasible, or strategically wise?

“The succinct answer of Senator John McCain is that although attacking Iran would be bad, an Iran with nuclear weapons would be worse.”

Who cares what John McCain thinks? He supported the criminal aggression against Iraq, and so it’s not particularly surprising that he is in favour of a criminal aggression against Iran. John McCain has zero credibility, so why turn to him?

“He is not alone: most of America’s presidential candidates would consider military force.”

Yes (ditto Gordon Brown, who yesterday refused to rule out an attack on Iran, in violation of the UN Charter), and they are only able to keep up that criminal stance because papers and journals like yours do not call them on it. Call them on it, please.

“Iran is a self-proclaimed theocracy. Yet it has conducted foreign relations since the revolution of 1979 in a way that seems perfectly rational even if it is not pleasant. Its president, the Holocaust-questioning Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is widely reported to have threatened to “wipe Israel off the map”. But in fact he may never have uttered those precise words, and there is both ambiguity and calculation behind the bluster.”

Well done for pointing that out (although you seem to contradict this in your comment above). What you fail to mention in this leader is that whatever Ahmadinejad said, he is the President, elected on the basis of promises of domestic reforms, and thus has no authority over foreign policy whatsoever. That power lies with Khamenei, who has explicitly distanced himself from Ahmadinejad’s remarks, declaring that “the Islamic Republic has never threatened and will never threaten any country.”

“This newspaper continues to believe that even for Israel containment of a nuclear Iran would be less awful than a risky pre-emptive attack”

A “pre-emptive attack” is not what’s being discussed here. “Pre-emptive attacks” have a strict legal definition – an attack is preemptive if it is in response to an immediate and overwhelming threat, leaving no choice of means and no time for deliberation. In other words, for an attack to qualify as ‘preemptive’ it must be in response to strong evidence of an imminent attack. Anything else is “preventive” or “aggressive” – international law makes no distinction between the two.

Also, I note that your article is written totally from the perspective of Israel and the U.S. There is no attempt to step inside Iran’s shoes and look at it from the Iranian perspective. Iran is surrounded by hostile nuclear powers (Israel, and the U.S. in Afghanistan and Iraq) and is sitting atop energy resources that the U.S. has made perfectly clear it desires. It was named as part of the “axis of evil” by a country with an explicit policy, and a long history, of ‘preventive force’ (which, again, is legally indistinguishable from aggression) in pursuit of its perceived interests. Iraq, Iran’s neighbour on the “axis” as well as the map, has already been invaded and destroyed – the lesson to Iran could hardly be clearer: get nukes, quick! As one of Israel’s leading military historians Martin van Crevald put it, “Obviously, we don’t want Iran to have nuclear weapons and I don’t know if they’re developing them, but if they’re not developing them, they’re crazy.”

Instead, for The Economist, all that matters is the security needs of Israel and the U.S. Iran’s security needs are, evidently, irrelevant.

“Even if Iran never used its bomb, mere possession of it might encourage it to adopt a more aggressive foreign policy than the one it is already pursuing in Iraq, Lebanon and the Palestinian territories.”

Yes – ‘gunboat diplomacy’. We can’t have that, can we? Only the United States is permitted to use military might as a tool in its foreign policy.

“And once Iran went nuclear other countries in the region–such as Saudi Arabia, Egypt and perhaps Turkey–would probably feel compelled to follow suit, thereby entangling the Middle East in a cat’s cradle of nuclear tripwires.”

Unless you think that the Arab states and Iran will be content to sit in the shade of a nuclear Israel forever, then this is going to happen sooner or later anyway. A world in which some have nuclear weapons and some don’t is unsustainable (not to mention unjust, if maintained by force), particularly if those that do have them adopt as aggressive a foreign policy that of the United States and Israel. The solution is not to invade Iran, but to work seriously towards global disarmament.

“Iran is obstinate, paranoid and ambitious.”

Paranoid? Hardly. Iran would have to be totally crazy if it didn’t fear for its security. Ambitious? Probably, although it is hardly unique in that characteristic. Obstinate? Well, given that its really only pursuing its legitimate rights, why not be obstinate about it?

Surely it is those in Israel and the United States, the global and regional military superpowers, both with sizeable nuclear arsenals of their own, who claim to be threatened by Iran who are paranoid? Surely it is the U.S. that is being “obstinate” and “ambitious” in its desire to control Middle Eastern energy resources?

See – you say this editorial argues against an attack, but in fact it works tirelessly to legitimise one.

“Sanctions that cut off equipment for its decrepit oilfields or struck hard at the financial interests of the regime and its protectors in the Revolutionary Guards would have an immediate impact on its own assessment of the cost of its nuclear programme.”

OK – if you can present to me a morally and legally consistent argument that would permit sanctions on Iran but not on the U.S., please do so. I certainly can’t think of one.

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Any reply I receive will be posted in full, although it doesn’t look like one will be forthcoming.

If you read the editorial and feel moved to set the editor straight, you can write them here: letters@economist.com .

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