by Matthew Chavez
Daily Lobo columnist
In the late 1990s, Iran specialist Shahram Chubin predicted that the "all-purpose bogey" the Iranian government found in U.S. foreign policy was a device whose effectiveness at constraining domestic dissent was rapidly waning.
"Hostility toward the U.S. continued to serve as a benchmark for the regime's revolutionary credentials," Chubin wrote, but the strategy "rings less and less true to a youthful population that sees the past as distant history and holds the regime accountable for current failures." The ensuing period of Iranian reform briefly broke through Tehran's coveted bogeyman, but even Chubin could not have foreseen the decisive role a new, virulent strain of American interventionism would play in restoring the Iranian government's reactionaries. The Bush administration's recent announcement of plans to designate Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps - the center of state power in Iran - as a foreign terrorist organization brings the emerging U.S.-Iran cold war perilously closer to open conflict. It will be the first time in history the U.S. government applies the propaganda label "terrorist" to the regular military forces of another state.
President Bush, on Aug. 9, promised "there will be a price to pay" for Iran's alleged support for Iraqi militias. And on Aug. 15, the U.S. State Department alarmed European leaders by announcing it is "confronting Iranian behavior" on a variety of "battlefields" - rhetoric suggesting the first stage of aggression has been ordered.
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"What (the Bush administration) is trying to do is further isolate Iran," Carah Ong, the Iran policy analyst at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, said in an interview. "But really what we're doing is further isolating ourselves. What we'll end up seeing is a backlash against proponents of reform and moderation inside of Iran." The move would likely result in the Revolutionary Guard attacking Iranian advocates of engagement with the West, Ong said.
At the turn of the 21st century, Iranian foreign policy exhibited unprecedented signs of detente: Thousands of Iranians observed a vigil for the victims of the 9/11 terrorist attacks; Iran provided crucial intelligence and logistical support for the U.S. campaign to depose the Taliban; and shortly after the fateful U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, Tehran made sweeping diplomatic overtures former officials called "historic."
"The offers were authentic, and they were rejected out-of-hand by the United States," Ong said. "To repay Iran, President Bush labeled Iran part of the Axis of Evil."
July 2007 marked the final act of the Bush administration's theater of democracy promotion, as the White House announced $20 billion in arms sales to the very regimes whose domestic repression and violence helped spawn the extremism about which Washington feigns concern.
"The arms deal is a poorly-veiled attempt to mask a disaster of American policy in the region, (and it) has boosted Iran and weakened popular support for Arab regimes," Ong said. "What it could end up doing is tip the balance in Tehran in favor of those who are pressing for Iran to pursue a nuclear weapons program. It could also spur a conventional arms race in the region."
In a separate package, the administration will reward Egypt's deepening political regression and domestic violence with $13 billion in military aid. Israel will receive $30 billion in no-strings-attached military funding timed to coincide with the one-year anniversary of Israel's bloody invasion of Lebanon - in which Tel Aviv's forces killed 1,000 civilians, displaced one-fourth of the country, and committed, in the words of Amnesty International, "destruction on a catastrophic scale" that "give(s) rise to individual criminal responsibility."
"I think it is a serious step toward launching strikes against Iran," Iranian journalist Omid Memarian told me of the move to blacklist the Revolutionary Guard Corps. "(The Revolutionary Guard Corps) is not only a military organization, but also involved in (Iran's) economy vastly. No evidence has been shown that they are involved in any terrorist activities."
Memarian attributes the move to the Bush administration's frustration with the U.N. Security Council's reluctance to impose harsher economic sanctions against Tehran, "so they are shifting gears to 'war on terror' policy, which doesn't need the international community's permission. If the U.S. and Iran start talking about mutual interest then they will play another game."
The stated purpose of Bush's generous military aid, along with the growing U.S. military presence in the Persian Gulf, is to confront the U.S.-arranged ascent of Iranian power in the Middle East. But many analysts have noted the strategic peculiarity of confronting Iran's burgeoning nonmilitary power with conventional weapons, which suggests the armaments may augment a planned U.S. military attack against Iran's nuclear and military infrastructure. Such a blunder, even if temporarily successful, would ultimately encourage states' desire for nuclear weapons.
"Convincing states that they do not need weapons of mass destruction," Hans Blix, the respected chairman of the Weapons of Mass Destruction Commission, recently observed in the Boston Review, "would be significantly easier if all U.N. members practiced genuine respect for the existing restraints on the threat and use of force."
Regrettably, the six-year menace of U.S. threats against Iran is stifling the only reliable deterrent against an Iranian bomb: the Iranians themselves.
