From Arab News (Saudi Arabia)
http://www.arabnews.com/?page=7§ion=0&article=58584&d=6&m=2&y=2005US Will Be Isolated If It Acts Militarily Against Iran
James C. Moore, The Independent
LONDON, 6 February 2005 — President Bush’s rhetorical flourishes against tyranny, both in his State of the Union speech and his inaugural address, have left Britain, the rest of the EU and much of America wondering if Iran will be the next target of US military might. The consternation is great, and not without cause. Under the Bush administration, a pathology has emerged for asserting foreign policy, and each step foreshadows the next: The president expounds vague principles to stir American hearts and, subsequently, lower administration officials mumble the frightening details. That’s the way the US ended up occupying Iraq, and it is how any move will be made against Iran.
President Bush’s thinking on Iran is readily discernible. A few hours before Bush’s inauguration, Vice President Dick Cheney said on a radio talk show that “Iran is at the top of the list” of trouble spots because of “a fairly robust nuclear program”. A similar public pronouncement about Iraq by Cheney proved to be unfounded, but had, nonetheless, the political effect of generating public support for invasion. The day after his State of the Union speech, President Bush repeated his conviction that Iran was “the world’s primary state sponsor of terrorism”. The White House ought to have diminished credibility on such allegations after Iraq, but the American public continues, disturbingly, to listen and trust.
Is the information about Iran any better than it was about Iraq? There is no incontrovertible evidence — for public consumption — that Iran has nuclear capabilities. There are reports, however, and they come from eerily similar sources to those that led the US into Iraq. The National Council of Resistance of Iran, a group of exiles who want to overthrow the ruling clerics, said in Paris last week that Iran had conducted experiments with a nuclear weapon triggering mechanism. The Iraqi National Congress, CIA-funded Iraqi exiles who wanted the US to depose Saddam Hussein, used the same tactic when articulating Saddam’s alleged nuclear indiscretions.
The safest assumption is that Bush believes Iran is acquiring nuclear capability. No one need be an expert at diplomacy to reach an unsettling conclusion on how Bush intends to deal with Iran. At the end of a lengthy interview with the conservative Washington Times, President Bush asked the assembled reporters if they had read Nathan Sharansky’s book The Case for Democracy. A former Soviet refusenik and an Israeli Cabinet member, the right-wing Sharansky has been criticized for promoting the destruction of non-democratic regimes and avoiding appeasement.
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