By Anthony Gregory
It is all well and good that the U.S. and Russia, possessors of the world’s largest nuclear stockpiles, are planning to reduce their arsenals. This has always been the goal of thoughtful humanitarians and prudent policy makers. Nixon and Reagan had similar goals—Reagan looked forward to a day of zero nuclear weapons, as does Obama.
But there’s a loophole. All nuclear-armed states, under the Obama doctrine, promise not to use nukes against non-nuclear armed states that are in compliance with their non-proliferation treaty guidelines. Although Iran is a signatory to the Non-Proliferation Treaty, and although the U.S. intelligence community declares that Iran has not tried to obtain a nuclear weapon since 2003 at the latest, the Obama administration’s position is that Iran has been flouting the NPT, claiming that Iran was “caught” building a nuclear reactor in Qom—even though Iran was open about this, and it probably falls within Iran’s rights under international agreement to develop nuclear energy for peaceful uses. By all credible acounts, Iran is years away from the uranium purity needed to make a weapon, much less one that could threaten the United States. Iran is right now deterred by both Israel and the U.S., both nuclear-weapons states that dwarf the military capacity of Iran. But most Americans have bought into the propaganda that Iran already has nuclear WMD.
As with all his other doublespeak, Iran’s gestures for peace and nuclear disarmament are actually a threat of war, even nuclear war, against Iran. Let us hope the U.S. does not engage Iran militarily, for it could easily become a disaster that makes Iraq and Afghanistan look like the cakewalks the neocons promised.