The expansion of the war from Palestine to Iran, which began on 13 June, signals an Israeli obsession persisting for four decades. As the Trump administration was negotiating in bad faith with Iran over its nuclear programme, the Israeli regime took advantage of an interval to bomb Tehran, assassinating leading scientists, a senior general and other officials, some of them engaged in the talks.

Nuclear Options
TARIQ ALI

After a few unconvincing denials, Trump admitted that the US had been informed of the attack ahead of time. Now the West is backing Israel’s latest onslaught, despite what Tulsi Gabbard, the Trump-appointed Director of National Intelligence, said as recently as 25 March: ‘The Intelligence Community continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme Leader Khamenei has not authorized the nuclear weapons programme he suspended in 2003.’  

The IAEA inspectors know full well that there are no nuclear weapons. They have simply been acting as willing spies for the US and Israel, providing pen-portraits of the senior scientists who have now been killed. Iran has belatedly realised that it was pointless letting them into the country and a parliamentary bill has been drafted to throw them out. The country’s leadership had nothing to gain from sacrificing this part of their sovereignty, yet they clung to the lame half-hope, half-belief that if they did as the Americans wanted, they might get the sanctions lifted and a US-guaranteed peace.  

Their own historical experience should have taught them otherwise. Iran’s elected government was overthrown with covert Anglo-American aid in 1953 and its secular opposition destroyed. After a quarter of a century of Western-backed dictatorship, the Pahlavi dynasty was finally overthrown. But a year after the 1979 Revolution, the West – as well as Saudi Arabia and Kuwait – funded Iraq to start a war against Iran and topple the new regime. It lasted eight years and left half a million people dead, mostly on the Iranian side. Hundreds of Iraqi missiles hit Iranian cities and economic targets, especially the oil industry. In the war’s final stages, the US destroyed nearly half the Iranian navy in the Gulf and, for good measure, shot down a civilian passenger plane. Britain loyally helped in the cover-up.  

Since then, the Islamic Republic’s foreign policy has always put the regime’s survival at its centre. During the Iran–Iraq war, the clerics had no hesitation in buying arms from their avowed enemies, Israel included. Their solidarity with oppositional forces has been fragmentary and opportunist, devoid of any consistent anti-imperialist strategy, except in their lonely but crucial capacity as a defender of Palestinian rights, in a region where every single Arab government has capitulated to the hegemon. On 15 June, soon after the Israeli attack, there was a remarkable procession of over fifty donkeys in Gaza, the animals garlanded and covered with silk and satin robes; as they were led down the street, children stroked them with genuine affection. Why? ‘Because’, explained the organiser, ‘they have been more help to us than all the Arab states put together’.  

Following the US-led invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the Iranians no doubt hoped that collaborating with Washington – clearing the path for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein and Mullah Omar – would win them some respite. In many respects, the ‘War on Terror’ was not a bad time for the Islamic Republic. Its standing in the region soared together with oil prices, its enemies in Baghdad and Kabul were brutally removed, and the Shia groups it had been backing since 1979 were brought to power in neighbouring Iraq. It’s difficult to imagine that neither the Bush politburo (Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice) nor its unofficial US-based Arab advisers (Kanaan Makiya, Fouad Ajmi) could have foreseen this outcome, but that appears to have been the case. The first non-Western foreigner to visit the Green Zone as an honoured guest was President Ahmedinejad. 

Both Sunni and Shia nationalists came together to oppose the occupying forces, firing rockets and mortar at the US embassy. It was Iranian state intervention that split this opposition, ensuring that a united Iraqi resistance movement descended into a futile and destructive civil war. Muqtada al-Sadr, a key Shia leader in Iraq, had been shocked by the atrocities in Fallujah and led a series of popular uprisings against the US coalition. At the height of the conflict, he was invited to visit Iran and ended up staying – or being kept there? – for the next four years. The subsequent entry of ISIS onto the battlefield strengthened this tactical US–Iran alliance, with the Pentagon providing air support to aid the assaults being carried out by the 60,000 strong Shia militants on the ground.

Most of these forces were under the indirect command of Qassem Soleimani, who was in regular communication with General David Petraeus. Soleimani was a gifted strategist, yet susceptible to flattery, especially from the Great Satan. He was the main thinker behind the expansionist tactics deployed by Tehran after 9/11, but his tendency to boast to his US counterparts alienated some of them, especially when he explained accurately how the Iranians had foreseen and exploited most US mistakes in the region. Spencer Ackerman’s description rings true: 

He was pragmatic enough to cooperate with Washington when it suited Iranian interests, as destroying the Caliphate did, and was prepared to clash with Washington when it suited Iranian interests, as with Soleimani’s backstopping of Syria’s Bashar el Assad or earlier with IED modifications that killed hundreds of US troops and maimed more. Soleimani’s impunity infuriated the Security State and the Right. His success stung.  

Yet even as Iran’s regional power increased, social tensions at home were rising. The revolution had excited hopes at first, but the ensuing war with Iraq was debilitating. Partly for this reason, Iran took a tougher stance on the nuclear question, asserting its sovereign right to enrich uranium. Domestically, this was seen as a means of reuniting the population. Externally, it has a perfectly logical defensive purpose: the country was in a vulnerable position, encircled by atomic states (India, Pakistan, China, Russia, Israel) as well as a string of American bases with potential or actual nuclear stockpiles in Qatar, Iraq, Turkey, Uzbekistan and Afghanistan. Nuclear-armed US aircraft carriers and submarines patrolled the waters off its southern coast.  

Totally forgotten in the West is the fact that the nuclear programme was an initiative first taken by the Shah in the 1970s with US support. One of the companies involved was a fiefdom of Dick Cheney, Bush’s sleazy Vice President. Khomeini halted the project when he came to power, considering it un-Islamic. But he later relented and operations restarted. As the programme ramped up in the mid-2000s, Iran and its supreme leader found that their attempts to placate Washington had come to nothing. They were still in the West’s crosshairs. The Bush White House gave the impression that either a direct US strike against Iran, or an attack via its tried-and-tested regional relay, Israel, might soon be on the cards. The Israelis, for their part, were virulently opposed to anyone challenging their nuclear monopoly in the Middle East. Iran’s leader was described by the Israeli government and its loyal media networks as a ‘psychopath’ and a ‘new Hitler’. It was a hurriedly manufactured crisis, of the sort in which the West has become a specialist. The hypocrisy was breathtaking. The US had nuclear weapons, as did the UK, France and Israel; yet Iran’s search for the technology required for the lowest grade of nuclear self-defence provoked moral panic.  

In the scramble by European powers to enhance their standing with Washington following the invasion of Iraq, France, Germany and Britain were keen to prove their mettle by forcing Tehran to accept stringent limits on its nuclear activity. The Khatami regime immediately capitulated, imagining it was really being invited in from the cold. In December 2003, they signed the ‘Additional Protocol’ demanded by the EU3, agreeing to a ‘voluntary suspension’ of the right to enrichment guaranteed under the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Again, it made no difference. Within months, the IAEA condemned them for having failed to ratify it and Israel was boasting of its intention to ‘destroy Natanz’. In the summer of 2004, a large bipartisan majority in the US Congress passed a resolution for ‘all appropriate measures’ to prevent an Iranian weapons programme and there was speculation about an ‘October surprise’ in the run-up to that year’s election.  

At the time, I argued inthe Guardian that ‘to face up to the enemies ranged against Iran requires an intelligent and far-sighted strategy – not the current rag-bag of opportunism and manoeuvre, determined by the immediate interests of the clerics’. A number of liberal and socialist Iranian intellectuals wrote back from Tehran to express strong agreement, especially with my conclusion:  

Clearing the way for the overthrow of the Iraqi Ba’ath and Afghan Taliban regimes and backing the US occupations has bought no respite. The US undersecretary of state has spoken of ‘ratcheting up the pressure’. Israeli defence minister Shaul Mofaz has said that ‘Israel will not be able to accept an Iranian nuclear capability, and it must have the capability to defend itself with all that this implies, and we are preparing.’ Hillary Clinton accused the Bush administration of ‘downplaying the Iranian threat’ and called for pressure on Russia and China to impose sanctions on Tehran. Chirac has spoken of using French nuclear weapons against such a ‘rogue state’. Perhaps it is simply high-octane rocket-rattling, the aim being to frighten Tehran into submission. Bullying is unlikely to succeed. Will the West then embark on a new war?  

US foreign policy was aptly summarised by Bush’s laconic avowal in 2003, ‘if you’re not with us, you’re against us’. Britain, Canada, Israel, Saudi Arabia and Australia needed no convincing. To this day, Iraq has not returned to the social and economic stability that it had before ‘regime-change’. A million plus casualties and five million orphans was the price it was forced to pay after its government was mendaciously accused of harbouring WMDs. Western companies now siphon off the bulk of Iraqi oil.  

Many who waged the Iraq war have since regretted it, but that has not stopped imperial strategists from carrying on in similar fashion elsewhere. In Gaza, the horror continues. Bombs, deaths, starvation and a callousness that evokes how the Wehrmacht treated the Slav Untermensch. The Israeli newspaper Haaretz has published an editorial, tougher than anything that has appeared in liberal dailies in the Euro-Atlantic zone, which attacks European leaders’ pathetic decision to sanction only the two outright fascists in Netanyahu’s government and instead demands total sanctions against Israel itself. This is what real friends of Israel should be demanding, rather than encouraging its kamikaze politics and genocidal campaigns.  

After Israel’s near-complete success in levelling the Strip and exterminating tens of thousands of its people, the Netanyahu government clearly felt it was time to expand the war to other targets. First there was the IDF’s campaign against Hezbollah, which killed much of its leadership and left the organisation greatly weakened, bringing Lebanon to heel. (It is no surprise that young Lebanese have since climbed onto their roof terraces to cheer on the Iranian drones.) Then came Syria, where Israel launched multiple attacks without even pretending it was self-defence. In collaboration with NATO-member Turkey and remnants of the Ba’athist apparatus, Israel helped to install a puppet government under a well-trained US stooge, the former al-Qaida operative Jolani.  

The stage was now set for the assault on Iran. As always, Western double-standards are at work when Israel is involved. Israel has not joined the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, has not signed the Biological Weapons Convention and the Ottawa Convention, has not ratified the Chemical Weapons Convention and has disregarded international law and UN resolutions for decades, with ICJ arrest warrants now issued against Netanyahu and Gallant for war crimes and crimes against humanity, plus an ongoing genocide investigation . . . This is what a rogue state looks like.  

The two countries are currently communicating via drones, F35s and missiles. Both Tehran and Tel Aviv have suffered hits. The declared Israeli aim of destroying the nuclear reactors has not been accomplished and Netanyahu’s boast that he will bring about regime change has produced the opposite effect. Hijabless women have been demonstrating in the streets, chanting ‘Get an atom bomb’. One of them told a reporter: ‘In parliament, they’re discussing closing down the Hormuz Straits. No need to discuss. Just close them down.’ Trump is insisting that the war can only end once Tehran surrenders completely. Many Iranians now believe that the recent nuclear negotiations were always a feint. In 2020, Trump used similar tactics to carry out the assassination of Soleimani, persuading the Iraqi Prime Minister to act as a mediator in US–Iran talks so as to lure the General to Baghdad. So far, the Iranians have withstood the assault. The country that urgently needs regime change is Israel. 

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Tariq Ali-Writer, journalist and film-maker Tariq Ali was born in Lahore in 1943. He owned his own independent television production company, Bandung, which produced programmes for Channel 4 in the UK during the 1980s. He is a regular broadcaster on BBC Radio and contributes articles and journalism to magazines and newspapers including The Guardian and the London Review of Books. He is editorial director of London publishers Verso and is on the board of the New Left Review, for whom he is also an editor. He writes fiction and non-fiction and his non-fiction includes 1968: Marching in the Streets (1998), a social history of the 1960s; Conversations with Edward Said (2005); Rough Music: Blair, Bombs, Baghdad, London, Terror (2005); and Speaking of Empire and Resistance (2005), which takes the form of a series of conversations with the author.

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