Even threatening to use nuclear weapons is a violation of international law.
Arash
April 19, 2006
Iran: The Day After
By Phyllis Bennis
The airwaves and the headlines are full of talk of a U.S. military strike against
Iran. That is as it should be - the danger of such a reckless move is real, and
rising, and we should be talking about it. The Bush administration claims that
negotiations are their first choice. But they have gone to war based on lies before,
and there is no reason to believe that they are telling the truth this time.
They have put the military - and even, horrifyingly, the nuclear - option at the
center of the table. Don’t worry, they say, even if a preventive military strike is
needed, we're only talking about “surgical” attacks on Iran's nuclear facilities - no
one, they say, is talking about invasion. It can’t happen, some say. The military
brass knows their troops are bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan, they appear to be
strongly opposed to a strike on Iran.
And we know that any military strike on Iran - ANY strike - would be a violation of
international law prohibiting preventive war.
And George Bush now admits that "preventive war" - not his earlier claim of
pre-emptive war - is indeed his strategic doctrine.
We know that according to the International Court of Justice (ICJ), even threatening
to use nuclear weapons is a violation of international law [1] - and the Bush
administration is threatening to use nuclear "bunker-buster" bombs to attack Iran.
We don't hear much about it, but we know the National Academy of Sciences has found
that "the use of such a weapon would create massive clouds of radioactive fallout
that could spread far from the site of the attack, including to other nations. Even
if used in remote, lightly populated areas, the number of casualties could range up
to more than a hundred thousand…" [2]
We know all that. But what if the Bush administration orders it anyway? What if they
DO carry out just such a strike, nuclear or otherwise? Then what? What happens the
day after?
Practically no one is talking about that. And that makes this whole threat even more
dangerous. It's as if the Bush administration believes that the day after they bomb
Iran, everything will be over, except maybe for the happy campers in the streets of
Tehran cheering and clamoring for the U.S. to bomb some more to help them change
their regime. Maybe they really do believe that. We have to assume there are plenty
of Iranian versions of "Ahmad Chalabi" around Washington, exiles eager to return to
power on the backs of U.S. tanks, urging the White House on.
But there's no reason we should believe them. Given the history of lies and deceit
that underpinned the Bush administration's invasion and occupation of Iraq, we have
no excuse for buying their lies once again. Fool me once…fool me twice, after all.
Let's look at reality, instead of lies, distortions and weasel-words. If the U.S.
attacks Iran - with nuclear or "conventional" bombs - it is virtually certain that
Iranian retaliation will be swift and lethal.
Iran's surrounding neighborhood is, as the military jargon puts it, "target-rich".
Iran's military strategists will have a wide choice.
A direct attack on U.S. troops in Iraq or elsewhere in the region (Saudi Arabia,
Kuwait, Qatar, UAE Bahrain, and Oman are all possibilities) is only the first option.
Iran's military is certainly no match for the Pentagon, but serious retaliation
doesn't require that; Tehran has plenty of conventional capacity to target those
troop concentrations.
How about Israel? Tel Aviv has been making bellicose threats towards Iran even before
the Bush administration took up the crusade, and Israel's 1981 destruction of Iraq's
French-built nuclear power plant at Osirak still looms large in Middle Eastern
memories. Iran's missiles can certainly reach Israeli cities. And given President
Bush's statements that Iran represents a threat to Israel, and that the U.S. will do
whatever is needed to "protect our ally", it is certainly possible that Iran's
retaliation will target Israel, regardless of whether it is ultimately U.S. or
Israeli bombers that drop their lethal payload.
Another possibility would be an attack through proxies, particularly in Iraq. Iraqi
Shia and others, outraged by the expansion of Washington's war to Iran, could well
push already unstable parts of the country over the edge. Southern Iraq could
collapse into chaos and violence.
(Conversely, the widely-discussed claim that Iran might retaliate against the U.S. by
"turning loose" Hezbollah to commit rampant terror attacks around the world appears
to be grounded less in facts than in febrile Washington imaginations. Such a scenario
assumes that Hezbollah, a decades-old anti-occupation movement in Lebanon created to
resist Israel's 1982 invasion, is nothing more than a cat's-paw of the Iranian regime
that Tehran can deploy at will. It denies the reality of Hezbollah's independent,
popular legitimacy, including its powerful representation in the Lebanese parliament,
and the fact that despite long-standing Iranian support, Hezbollah's strategic
imperatives are driven by Lebanese, not Iranian, realities).
And what about the oil weapon? Iran certainly has the capacity to shut the strategic,
but potentially vulnerable, Strait of Hormuz, through which a huge proportion of
Middle Eastern oil flows to the rest of the world. What if the Iranian navy scuttled
an oil tanker in the Strait, blocking oil traffic? What if it was a U.S. tanker?
Do we really think the Bush administration - which so far has steadfastly refused
even to hint at the possibility that Iran might respond with anything other than
cheers and flowers to a U.S. bombing campaign - would respond to Tehran's military
retaliation politely, saying "oh of course we anticipated an Iranian strike-back,
it's just tit-for-tat and now it's over"? Or do we think they will be true to form
and move towards powerful retribution against Iran, possibly including the invasion
by U.S. ground troops that we're being told today is not even being considered?
Some military analysts indicate Iran's troops these days are training primarily in
defensive guerrilla-war strategies, seemingly aimed at overcoming a future invasion.
That shouldn't surprise us. Iran, like the rest of the world, has watched the Bush
administration's disparate treatment of the various "Axis of Evil" countries. It has
escaped no one's notice – certainly not Iran's – that the U.S. invaded Iraq, a
country that had no viable nuclear program, while quietly ignoring North Korea,
understood to have at least the technical capacity to produce, and perhaps already
having, an existing nuclear weapon.
We can assume that other countries around the world have learned the same dangerous
and tragic lesson – that Non-Proliferation Treaty or not, if you get on the wrong
side of Washington only a nuclear capacity might protect you from a possible U.S.
invasion.
At the end of the day Iran has been pretty clear about what it wants. It doesn't seem
to want an actual nuclear weapon (both the late Ayatollah Khomeini and his successor
have issued religious prohibitions, or fatwas, against such weapons) although there's
little doubt that President Ahmadinejad appears to believe that posturing
aggressively about "going nuclear" will help his flagging domestic ratings. (Sound
familiar?) What Iran really wants, and has asked for, is serious negotiations with
the U.S., based on equality, not humiliation. And at the end, a security guarantee
that neither Europe nor the UN, but only the U.S. itself – the world's "sole
super-power" and the only nuclear weapons state threatening to actually use its
nuclear arsenal – can provide.
For all sides, talk is crucial. Nuclear weapons - in anyone's hands - are a nightmare
that should be abolished once and for all, as the now-fading Non-Proliferation Treaty
(NPT) anticipated so many years ago. Certainly Iran should abjure any search for
nuclear weapons - but that's not going to happen alone.
What we need - what we ALL need - is a weapons of mass destruction-free zone
throughout the Middle East. So not only no nukes for Iran, but let's be sure Israel
signs the NPT and places its unacknowledged but highly provocative Dimona arsenal of
200-400 high-density nuclear bombs under international supervision, and then allows
the inspectors to destroy them.
Let's be sure no country in the Middle East is running a chemical- or
biological-weapons program - the poor countries' nuclear weapons substitute of choice
and an unfortunate inevitability as long as Israel has a nuclear monopoly in the
region.
And it’s way past time for the U.S. to make good on its own NPT obligations to move
towards full and complete nuclear disarmament. As long as Washington laughs off that
obligation, and officially rejects it, it is hard to imagine why any other countries
should take seriously a U.S. demand that take nuclear weapons off their agenda.
Ironically enough the U.S. is already on record supporting just such a WMD-free zone
in the Middle East. Article 14 of UN Security Resolution 687, that ended the Second
Persian Gulf War (1991) and imposed crippling sanctions on Iraq, states that
disarming Iraq should be viewed as part of "establishing in the Middle East a zone
free of all weapons of mass destruction and the missiles to deliver them".
The language was written by the U.S. It's time we held Washington accountable to that
pledge. Let's talk to Iran.
* Phyllis Bennis (http://www.ips-dc.org/bios.htm) is a Fellow of the Institute for
Policy Studies and works with the United for Peace and Justice Coalition. Her most
recent book is "Challenging Empire: How People, Governments and the UN Defy U.S.
Power" (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/156656607X).
http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0419-23.htm
Notes:
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[1] "The Legality of the Threat or Use of Nuclear Weapons Case" was an advisory
opinion handed down by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on 8 July 1996. The
decision, given in response to requests from the United Nations General Assembly,
provides one of the few authoritative judicial decisions concerning the legality
under international law of the use or the threatened use of nuclear weapons. The
International Court of Justice ruled that the 'threat' or use of nuclear weapons
"would generally be contrary to the rules of international law applicable in armed
conflict".
http://www.icj-cij.org/icjwww/idecisions/isummaries/iunanaummary960708.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legality_of_the_Threat_or_Use_of_Nuclear_Weapons_Case
[2] Effects of Nuclear Earth-Penetrator and Other Weapons
http://fermat.nap.edu/catalog/11282.html