On Feb. 4, the International Atomic Energy Agency voted to refer a resolution threatening Iran to the United Nations Security Council. Twenty-seven of the 35 member countries voted for the resolution, three voted against, while Algeria, Libya, South Africa, Belarus and Indonesia abstained. The resolution calls on Iran to freeze uranium enrichment and related activities.
In its relentless drive to coerce members of the board to vote “yes,” the United States had to make minor concessions. They included the deferment of Security Council action against Iran until March, when IAEA head Mohamed El Baradei will deliver his comprehensive report on Iran’s nuclear file.
 Demonstrators near Tehran support Iran’s right to nuclear energy. Nov. 18, 2005. Photo: AFP/Getty Images |
A conflict, which delayed the vote by a day, gives a sense of the power relations at play. Egypt had proposed the inclusion of a statement that would call for a Middle East free of nuclear weapons.
The U.S. government found this proposal unacceptable. The final version removed the reference to nuclear weapons and only called for a Middle East free of weapons of mass destruction, a compromise that the United States and Israel found less objectionable.
The IAEA proceeded to refer Iran to the Security Council on the basis of its “absence of confidence that Iran’s nuclear program is exclusively for peaceful purposes.” But it was forced to remove language that indirectly referenced Israel’s currently existing nuclear weapons.
The resolution does not explain why only the Middle East—and not the entire world—should be free of weapons of mass destruction. The purpose of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty is supposedly the guiding principle of the IAEA.
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran’s president, reacted by saying, “The board of governors, under the influence of certain countries and without any international legal or judicial justification, adopted a resolution which does not take into account Iran’s extensive cooperation and which violates the national rights of Iran.”
Other Iranian officials announced that Iran would discontinue adhering to the Additional Protocol. This voluntary protocol signed by Iran in December 2003 allowed IAEA inspectors to conduct surprise inspections at various sites.
Behind the propaganda
An intense imperialist propaganda campaign against Iran has depicted Iran’s pursuit of a nuclear program as proof that the Iranian government is pursuing plans to destroy the world. Iran is sitting on a “sea of oil” and has no conceivable need for nuclear energy, the argument goes.
 A scientist works at the Isfahan Uranium Conversion Facility. Photo: Raheb Homavandi/Reuters |
But the construction of nuclear reactors in Iran goes back to 1974, when Iran was ruled by the Shah, a U.S. puppet. At the time, the United States and Britain welcomed the idea of a nuclear Iran and proceeded to sign contracts for construction.
Due to population growth, rapid industrialization and a several-fold increase in the number of automobiles in the country, Iran’s domestic oil consumption has gone up exponentially. Of the 4 million barrels of oil per day that Iran currently produces, approximately 1.5 million are consumed domestically. If the current consumption pattern continues, it is estimated that within 15 years, Iran’s oil production will only be sufficient for domestic consumption. (Agence France Presse, March 14, 2000)
With the upward trend of worldwide energy consumption and the exhaustion of the supply of this non-renewable energy source in the foreseeable future, Iran’s pursuit of non-fossil fuel sources of energy is a perfectly understandable policy. Additionally, the development of nuclear energy opens the door to other technological advances—technologies that Iran’s rapidly developing national economy is eager to master.
The real reason the Pentagon is targeting Iran is not its nuclear program. It is the fact that the Islamic Republic is pursuing an independent political path that is not acceptable to U.S. imperialism and the fact that Iran’s economy is inhospitable to international capital penetration.
In March of this year, the Iranian Oil Bourse is scheduled to launch. It aims to compete with the New York Mercantile Exchange and London’s IntercontinentalExchange in oil trade. As early as 2003, Iran began taking payments for its oil in euros, although the pricing has still been done in dollars. But the Iranian Oil Bourse will price and exchange oil in euros. With the U.S. dependence on selling treasury bonds to fund its ballooning budget and trade deficits, a move away from the dollar in oil trade could set a precedent that would substantially threaten the dollar’s reserve currency status and the U.S. capitalist economy.
The conservative Heritage Foundation has issued its 2006 “Index of Economic Freedom,” which supposedly measures “the level of government interference in the economy.” According to the logic of modern-day monopoly capitalism, the more freedom the capitalists have in investment—in exploiting labor and extracting super-profits from oppressed countries—the “freer” the country. The list is really a ranking of different countries’ relations to world imperialism—allies and clients on top, enemies and targets on the bottom.
Iran is ranked 156th on this index, one higher than the dead-last Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. Incidentally, the countries that voted against the IAEA resolution to refer Iran to the Security Council—Cuba, Syria and Venezuela—all rank near the bottom of the index, as do most of those that abstained.
A challenge to progressives
The case of Iran poses a challenge to progressive forces in the United States and to the anti-war movement in particular. The challenge is not in the complexity of the issue—the basic facts are too obvious.
Armed to the teeth, the imperialist powers are trying to deprive Iran of its right to develop nuclear energy. Iran’s alleged plan to develop nuclear weapons in a minimum of five to 10 years is portrayed as a grave danger to humanity, while many countries in the region are currently in possession of nuclear weapons. Within a few hundred miles of Iran’s borders, Israel, India and Russia have nuclear bombs, and nuclear-armed Pakistan is Iran’s neighbor. Nuclear-armed U.S. submarines are always present in the international waters off the coast of Iran and can strike on short notice.
Sanctions and military attacks against Iran are now distinct possibilities. It does not take a great deal of analytical prowess to determine that it is U.S. imperialism that is threatening Iran, not the other way around.
Despite these glaring threats, some prominent forces within the U.S. anti-war movement close their eyes to the coming conflict. They prefer to focus only on the U.S. war in Iraq, reflecting their hope that Democratic Party politicians will lead a retreat from the Pentagon’s military quagmire.
Many of these forces, like key leaders of United for Peace and Justice, are the same ones who capitulated to U.S. propaganda leading up to the invasion of Iraq. In the lead-up to the 1991 invasion of Iraq, they called for “Sanctions, not war.” In the run-up to the 2003 invasion, they called for “international inspectors” to police Iraq’s defense and economic infrastructure.
Both of those arguments weakened the anti-war movement by raising chauvinist illusions about well-intentioned imperialist powers against crazy leaders of oppressed countries. Appeals to the “international community” ignore that this “community” is composed of predator imperialist countries and their lackeys.
There will be those who point to real and exaggerated crimes of the Islamic Republic, past and current. And indeed, the Iranian government has been no friend to progressive and revolutionary Iranians fighting on behalf of the working class there.
But the vast network of CIA-funded propaganda outfits that broadcast the real and imagined repressive acts of the Iranian government has nothing in common with the true interests of Iranian working people. They routinely fabricate and exaggerate stories with the sole goal of creating a public climate supportive of military action against Iran.
How various political forces within the U.S. anti-war movement respond to developments in Iran is more often tied to their attitude toward their own ruling class rather than their ideological expertise or training in international law. The anti-imperialist path of struggle, the only path that leads to socialism, never finds excuses to side with our “own” bourgeoisie against its enemies. Rather, it stands with the targets of the empire.
The only progressive path of struggle is to defend Iran’s right of self-determination and condemn threats of sanctions and military action against it. This includes the reaffirmation of Iran’s right to defend itself against imperialist threats by any means at its disposal.
Articles may be reprinted with credit to Socialism and Liberation magazine.
