UK Foreign Secretary Miliband has got the whole Iran nuclear issue the wrong way round

 

Wednesday, November 26, 2008
By Kaleem Omar
Tony Blair may be history, but there are still plenty of British politicians left in the Labour Party government who are only too willing to serve as poodles to US President George W. Bush and his neo-con cabal, even in the waning days of Dubya�s presidency. One such politician is British Foreign Secretary David Miliband, whom Iran on Monday accused of having Zionist ties after he said that the prospect of a nuclear-armed Iran is �the most immediate threat to Middle East stability.�
This, of course, is a case of Miliband toeing the line that Bush and members of his administration have been peddling for years, despite the fact that Iran has repeatedly insisted that its uranium enrichment programme is not aimed at making nuclear bombs but at manufacturing fuel for the nuclear power reactor it is building with Russian help to generate electricity for Iran�s national grid.
The Bush administration continues to claim that Iran is �the most immediate threat� to Middle East stability, just as it used to claim back in 2002 and in the first three months of 2003 that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMD) that � in Bush�s words � �posed an immediate threat to the national security of the United States�� In fact, of course, as the whole world knew long ago, Iraq did not possess any WMD and posed no threat whatsoever to the mighty United States.
The whole Iraqi WMD thing was a lie cooked up by the Bush administration as an excuse to invade and occupy Iraq. When no WMD were found there by a 1,400-member team of US weapons inspectors and intelligence agents sent into Iraq by Bush after the invasion, wags promptly dubbed the so-called Iraqi WMD �weapons of mass disappearance.�
Then-US Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld repeatedly lied to the media about Iraq possessing WMD, going so far during one media briefing at the Pentagon to assert that not only did the US �know� that Iraq had WMD but also �knew� where they were.
Of course, the US �knew� no such thing. The whole thing was an outright lie, which eventually resulted in the Bush administration ending up with a massive amount of egg on its face.
The only �discovery� made by the US weapons inspectors during their 18-month-long search of so-called �suspect� Iraqi sites was that of a trailer, which the Bush administration initially claimed with fiendish glee was �a mobile laboratory for making chemical weapons.� Only two days later, however, it came out that the mobile laboratory was in fact a facility for manufacturing gas for weather balloons. Within hours of this news hitting the news wires, a highly embarrassed US CIA hurriedly removed all references to the so-called �mobile laboratory for making chemical weapons� from its web site.
Now, we have British Foreign Secretary David Miliband claiming that the �prospect� of Iran having nuclear weapons poses �the most immediate threat� to Middle Eastern stability� and appealing to Tehran�s neighbours to put pressure on Iranian President Mohmoud Ahmadinejad.
In saying what he did, Miliband conveniently choose to ignore the fact that the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Commission (the UN�s nuclear watchdog body) has said on more than one occasion that its inspectors have found no evidence that Iran is making a nuclear weapon. Miliband also choose to ignore the fact that in September last year, US intelligence agencies submitted a National Intelligence Estimate to President Bush stating that Iran was �at least ten years away from making a nuclear weapon.�
Even if we were to assume that Iran�s uranium-enrichment programme is aimed at making nuclear weapons (although there is no evidence to this effect), the US National Intelligence Estimate�s �ten years� time frame hardly constitutes �the most immediate threat� to Middle East stability � as falsely claimed by Miliband.
In fact, of course, the only country in the Middle East that possesses nuclear weapons is the Zionist state of Israel. According to the latest estimates, Israel has about 400 nuclear weapons in its arsenal and a variety of aircraft and missiles capable of delivering the weapons to all the Arab states and Iran. Israel also has the fourth most powerful conventional army in the world (after the United States, Russia and China).
On top of all this, Israel has long had an American nuclear umbrella, which successive US administrations have said they would use in support of Israel in the event of its existence being threatened. This commitment will be carried forward by the administration of US President-Elect Barack Obama after he takes office on January 20 next year. In August 2008, Obama publicly stated that he had a deep and abiding commitment to Israel�s security. He had nothing to say, however, about who will protect the beleaguered Palestinian people from the on-going acts of state terrorism unleashed on them by Israel.
In his anti-Iran diatribe on Monday, British Foreign Secretary Miliband, too, had nothing to say about the threat to Middle East stability posed by Israel�s nuclear arsenal. In October this year, Miliband warned of a possible nuclear arms race in the Middle East �if Iran was allowed to press ahead unchecked with a uranium enrichment programme.� Again, however, he had nothing to say about Israel�s nuclear weapons programme, which began back in the late 1950s.
The Jewish lobby in Washington is so influential that no American politician dares to say anything critical against Israel. Back in the 1980s, during the Reagan presidency, when then-US Defence Secretary Harold Brown was mildly critical of Israel at a press conference (saying that Israel should not deal so harshly with the Palestinian people), the Jewish lobby created such a fuss that Reagan had to sack Brown within 48 hours.
The only American president who ever criticised Israel�s nuclear programme was John F. Kennedy. In early 1963, he wrote a letter to the Israeli prime minister saying that Israel should stop pressing ahead with its nuclear weapons programme. Six months later, Kennedy was dead � assassinated in circumstances that have remained a mystery to this day. It is now widely believed by many in the United States that the Warren Commission report into Kennedy�s assassination was a cover-up job, designed to throw a veil of obfuscation over the identity of the real perpetrators and pin the blame on a lone American gunman, Lee Harvey Oswald. A lot of Americans, however, are convinced that the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad was behind the assassination � which had all the hallmarks of a highly professional hit.
AFP and Reuters � both Western news agencies � reported on Monday that: �World powers, fearing that Iran might make atom bombs under the guise of a civilian nuclear programme, have offered Tehran incentives and talks in return for a halt to uranium enrichment.� But why have these same Western World powers had nothing to say for decades about Israel�s known nuclear weapons programme � the details of which were revealed at exhaustive length some years ago by the well-known American investigative journalist Seymour Hersh in his authoritative book �The Samson Option.�
Hersh is no ordinary hack; he is the same journalist who broke the story about the My Lai massacre of 350 women and children carried out by US soldiers in Vietnam in the 1960s. He is also the one who broke the story about the torture of Iraqi detainees by American soldiers at the infamous Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad in 2004. I mention these facts in order to make the point that Hersh is an investigative journalist of the highest credibility.
AFP and Reuters reported on Monday that: �Iran has ignored five UN resolutions demanding a suspension of uranium enrichment, which can supply nuclear fuel as well as the fissile core of an atom bomb in high purification.�
But neither of the two Western news agencies made any mention of the fact that Israel has ignored dozens of UN General Assembly resolutions demanding that it immediate vacate the Arab territories captured by it during the Arab-Israel war of 1967 � which, it should be remembered, was started by Israel and not by the Arab states.
In blatant disregard of these UN General Assembly resolutions, Israel continues to occupy Syria�s Golan Heights, the Palestinian West Bank and the Gaza Strip to this day. It also remained in utterly illegal occupation of southern Lebanon for twenty long years, following its unprovoked invasion of Lebanon in 1982 when Ariel Sharon (aka �The Butcher of Sabra and Chatillia�) was the Israeli defence minister. He later became Israel�s prime minister. When he was prime minister, he ordered Israeli army bulldozers to demolish the Palestinian refugee camp at Jenin. Scores of Palestinian refugees were reported to have been buried alive under the rubble.

UK Foreign Secretary Miliband has got the whole Iran nuclear issue the wrong way round