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Report distorts Iran's nuclear fatwa
By Gareth Porter

WASHINGTON - The Barack Obama administration's new interest in the 2004 religious verdict, or fatwa, by Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei banning the possession of nuclear weapons, long dismissed by national security officials, has prompted the New York Times to review the significance of the fatwa for the first time in several years.

Senior Obama administration officials have decided to cite the fatwa as an Iranian claim to be tested in negotiations, posing a new challenge to the news media to report accurately on the background to the issue. But the April 13 New York Times article by James Risen rehashed old arguments by Iran's adversaries and even added some new ones.

Former Obama White House Iran policy coordinator Dennis B Ross, known for his close ties with Israel and hardline views on Iran, was quoted as suggesting that Khamenei may not be committed to nuclear weapons after all. But Ross implies that the reason is United States sanctions and perhaps the threat of war rather than that the 2004 fatwa was a genuine expression of policy.

The Times report repeated a familiar allegation, attributed to unnamed "analysts", that the fatwa is merely a conscious deception justified by the traditional Shi'ite legal principle called taqiyyah. But a quick fact check would have shown that taqiyyah is specifically limited to hiding one's Shi'ite faith to avoid being killed or otherwise seriously harmed if it were acknowledged.

Risen also cited unnamed "analysts" who argued that Khamenei's recent statements that Iran had not and would not develop nuclear weapons were contradicted by remarks he had made last year "that it was a mistake for Colonel Muammar el-Gaddafi of Libya to give up his nuclear weapons program".

But the quote from Khamenei complained that "this gentleman wrapped up all his nuclear facilities, packed them on a ship and delivered them to the West and said, 'Take them'!" Khamenei then added, "Look where we are, and in what position they are now."

Khamenei's references to "all his nuclear facilities" - not to his nuclear weapons program, as claimed by Risen - and to the contrast between the ultimate fate of the Gaddafi regime and the Islamic Republic's survival appear to have been suggesting that merely having a nuclear program without nuclear weapons can be a deterrent to attack.

That same point has been made by other Iranian officials who cite the Japanese model as one for Iran to emulate.

In another effort to discredit the fatwa, Risen wrote that Khamenei's predecessor, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, reversed his initial opposition to the shah's nuclear program as inconsistent with Islam in 1984, and "secretly decided to restart the nuclear weapons program".

Risen cited no source for that statement, but it is apparently based on an article by David Albright in the Tehran Bureau's "Iran Primer". Albright wrote, "A 2009 internal IAEA [International Atomic Energy Agency] working document reports that in April 1984, then president Ali Khamenei announced to top Iranian officials that Khomeini had decided to reactivate the nuclear program as the only way to secure the Islamic revolution from the schemes of its enemies, epecially the United States and Israel."

Even if that report, coming from an unidentified IAEA member country, was accurate, Risen misreported it, again substituting "nuclear weapons program" for "nuclear program".

But the claim cited in the IAEA working document is also demonstrably false, because it is well documented that the Islamic Republic had decided to continue Iran's nuclear program in 1981 and even made a formal request in 1983 for the IAEA to help it convert yellowcake into reactor fuel.

Missing from the Times article was any reference to Iran's refusal to retaliate with chemical weapons for Iraq's repeated chemical weapons attacks on Iranian cities, based on US intelligence on Iranian troop concentrations, killing 7,000 immediately and severely injuring at least 100,000.

Although US military officers disseminated reports during the war alleging Iranian use of chemical weapons against Iraq, the most authoritative study of the issue, Joost Hilterman's 2007 book A Poisonous Affair, shows those reports represented US disinformation. Hilterman concludes that no reliable evidence ever surfaced that Iran used such weapons during the war.

In a dispatch from Qom on October 31, 2003, Robert Collier of the San Francisco Chronicle, quoted Grand Ayatollah Yusef Saanei, one of the highest ranking clerics in Iran, as saying in an interview that Iran never retaliated against Iraqi chemical attacks with its own chemical weapons because of the strong opposition of Iranian clerical authorities to the development of weapons of mass destruction (WMD).

"You cannot deliberately kill innocent people," Saanei said.

The only reference in the Times report to Khamenei's role in the 2003 nuclear policy turning point was the statement that Khamenei "ordered a suspension of Iran's nuclear weapons program."

In fact, however, Khamenei did far more than "suspend" nuclear weapons work. He invoked the illicit nature of such weapons in Islam in order to enforce a policy decision to ban nuclear weapons work.

There is evidence that there was a long-simmering debate within the Islamic Republic behind the scenes over whether Iran should leave the door open to a nuclear weapons program or not. Both Khamenei and president Hashemi Rafsanjani had publicly opposed the idea of possessing nuclear weapons in the mid-1990s, but pressure for reconsideration of the issue had risen, especially after the aggressive posture of the George W Bush administration toward Iran.

In 2003, the debate came to a head, because Iran was reaching the stage where it would either have to cooperate fully with the IAEA or be accused of violating its commitments under the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), provoking serious international consequences.

The Atomic Energy Organization, which had gotten much more freedom from bureaucratic control in 1999-2000, was dragging its feet on cooperation with the IAEA, and some scientists, engineers and military men did not want to give up the option to develop a nuclear weapons program.

Under those circumstances, in a March 21, 2003 speech in Mashad, Khamenei began speaking out again on Islam's opposition to weapons of mass destruction. "We are not interested in an atomic bomb. We are opposed to chemical weapons," he said, adding, "These things are against our principles."

In July, he repeated his renunciation of all weapons of mass destruction.

When the IAEA passed a resolution demanding that Iran suspend enrichment and adopt an intrusive monitoring system in September, the Atomic Energy Organization and its bureaucratic and political allies were arguing that there was no danger of being taken to the United Nations Security Council because Russia and China would protect Iran's interests.

And hardliners were arguing publicly that Iran should withdraw from the NPT rather than make any effort to convince the West that Iran did not intend to make nuclear weapons.

Sometime in September and October, Khamenei ordered the designation of the secretary of supreme national security council Hassan Rohani, who reported directly to him, as the single individual responsible for coordinating all aspects of nuclear policy.

A key task for Rohani was to enforce Khamenei's ban on nuclear weapons. Later, Rohani recalled telling then president Mohammed Khatemi that he wasn't sure all agencies "were willing to cooperate 100 percent" and predicted "both disharmony and sabotage".

It was Rohani himself who announced on October 25, 2003, that Khamenei believed that nuclear weapons were illegal under Islam.
A few days later, one of Khamenei's advisers, Hussein Shariatmadari, president of Kayhan newspapers, told Collier, "Those in Iran who clandestinely believed they could develop nuclear weapons have now been forced to admit that it is forbidden under Islam."

Ever since then, Iranian officials have often referred to Khamenei's fatwa against nuclear weapons.

Skeptics have questioned whether such a fatwa exists, arguing that no published text of the fatwa can be found. But even Mehdi Khalaji of the pro-Israel Washington Institute for Near East Policy acknowledged in an essay published last September that Khamenei's oral statements are considered fatwas and are binding on believers.



Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist specializing in US national security policy. The paperback edition of his latest book, Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam, was published in 2006.

(Inter Press Service)

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Israel: The Israel Defense Force (IDF) has issued emergency call up orders to six reserve battalions in light of new dangers on the Egyptian and Syrian borders, Israeli press reported. The Knesset has given the IDF permission to summon a further 16 reserve battalions if necessary, Israeli media reported on Wednesday.

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The public justification for the reserve recall compared to the domestic economic costs of mobilizing reserve battalions in the absence of a threat of war do not add up well. The Bedouin problem is a law and order problem. The Syrian problem is population control of refugee and occasional spillover from Syrian suppression operations. Neither seems to require activation of reserve battalions, unless media coverage has understated the gravity of the border problems.

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The activation does convey a message that Israeli leaders are in no mood to be patient with even minor provocations on any border. If that is the case, then Readers should expect asymmetric Israeli responses to real or perceived provocations, comparable to Israeli responses to provocations by Hamas in Gaza.

Finally, if the Israeli leaders have decided to ramp up of capabilities and readiness in a way so as not to cause alarm as a contingency preparation for a war with Iran, this activation and its media cover story precisely match longstanding Israeli deception practices. The lameness of the public reasons for the reserve activations relative to the economic costs should raise red flags of vigilance that an Israeli deception operation is in effect.

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Congress pushes for war with Iran
By Stephen Zunes

In another resolution apparently designed to prepare for war against Iran, the US House of Representatives, in an overwhelmingly bipartisan 401-11 vote, has passed a resolution (HR 568) urging the president to oppose any policy toward Iran "that would rely on containment as an option in response to the Iranian nuclear threat."

With its earlier decision to pass a bill that effectively sought to ban any negotiations between the United States and Iran, a huge bipartisan majority of Congress has essentially told the president that nothing short of war or the threat of war is an acceptable policy. Indeed, the rush to pass this bill appears to have been designed to undermine the ongoing international negotiations on Iran's nuclear program. According to Iranian-American analyst Jamal Abdi, a prominent critic of both the Iranian regime and US policy, the motivation for the resolution may be to "poison those talks by signaling to Iran that the president is weak, domestically isolated, and unable to deliver at the negotiating table because a hawkish congress will overrule him."

President Barack Obama's "red line" on Iran - the point at which his administration would consider taking military action against the country - has been the reactionary regime's actual procurement of nuclear weapons. The language of this resolution, however, significantly lowers the bar by declaring it unacceptable for Iran simply to have "nuclear weapons capability" - not necessarily any actual weapons or an active nuclear weapons program. Some members of congress have argued that since Iranians have the expertise and technological capacity to develop nuclear weapons, they already have "nuclear weapons capability." The hawkish Senator Joe Lieberman (I-CT) has argued that "everybody will determine for themselves what [capability] means".

In case there was any doubt about the intent of congress in using this language, when Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) offered a clarifying amendment to a similar clause in a recent senate resolution - declaring that "nothing in the Act shall be construed as a declaration of war or an authorization of the use of force against Iran" - both its Republican and Democratic sponsors summarily rejected the amendment.

Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff for Secretary of State Colin Powell, noted how "this resolution reads like the same sheet of music that got us into the Iraq war, and could be the precursor for a war with Iran. It's effectively a thinly-disguised effort to bless war."

As the liberal Zionist group Americans for Peace Now observed, the legislation suggests that "unless sanctions imminently result in Iran voluntarily shutting down its entire nuclear program (and somehow deleting the nuclear know-how from the brains of its scientists), military force will be the only option available to the Obama administration and will be inevitable in the near term."

Though it is not legally binding, the resolution does limit the president's options politically. As pundit and former Capitol Hill staffer MJ Rosenberg has noted, the bill was "designed to tie the president's hands on Iran policy". And, as with the case of Iraq, the language of such non-binding resolutions can easily be incorporated into binding legislation, citing the precedent of what had been passed previously.

The end of containment
There is enormous significance to the resolution's insistence that containment, which has been the basis of US defense policy for decades, should no longer be US policy in dealing with potential threats. Although deterrence may have been an acceptable policy in response to the thousands of powerful Soviet nuclear weapons mounted on intercontinental ballistic missile systems aimed at the United States, the view today is that deterrence is somehow inadequate for dealing with a developing country capable of developing small and crude nuclear devices but lacking long-range delivery systems.

Indeed, this broad bipartisan consensus against deterrence marks the triumph of the neo-conservative first-strike policy, once considered on the extreme fringes when first articulated in the 1980s.

This dangerous embrace of neo-conservative military policy is now so widely accepted by both parties in Congress that the vote on the resolution was taken under a procedure known as "suspension of the rules," which is designed for non-controversial bills passed quickly with little debate. Indeed, given the serious implications of this legislation, it is striking that there was not a single congressional hearing prior to the vote.

The resolution also demonstrates that the vast majority of Democrats, like Republicans, have embraced the concept of "full-spectrum dominance," the Bush-era doctrine that not only should the United States prevent the emergence of another rival global superpower such as China, but it should also resist the emergence of even a regional power, such as Iran, that could potentially deter unilateral US military actions or other projections of American domination.

Limiting the president
It is unprecedented for congress to so vigorously seek to limit a president's non-military options in foreign policy. For example, in 1962, even the most right-wing Republicans in Congress did not push for legislation insisting that President Kennedy rule out options other than attacking Cuba or the Soviet Union during the Cuban missile crisis. What might be motivating Congress is the fact that, in electing Barack Obama in 2008, the American people brought into the White House an outspoken opponent of the US invasion of Iraq who not only withdrew US combat forces from that country but promised to "change the mindset" - the idea that the United States could unilaterally make war against oil-rich Middle Eastern countries that did not accept US domination - that made the Iraq war possible. Both Democratic and Republican hawks, therefore, appear determined to force this moderate president to accept their neo-conservative agenda.

Deterrence, when dealing with a nuclear-armed party, is indeed a risky strategy. The international community does have an interest in preventing Iran from developing nuclear weapons, as well as in forcing India, Pakistan, and Israel to disarm their already-existing arsenals. All reasonable diplomatic means should be pursued to create and maintain a nuclear-free zone in that volatile region.

However, the idea that deterrence against Iran would not work because the country's clerical leadership, which controls the armed forces, would decide to launch an unprovoked nuclear attack against Israel or the United States - and therefore invite massive nuclear retaliation that would cause the physical destruction of their entire country - is utterly ridiculous. The far more realistic risk to worry about is the enormous devastation that would result from a US war on Iran.

The real "threat" from Iran is if that country achieves nuclear capability, it would then have a deterrent to a US attack that was unavailable to its immediate neighbors to the east (Afghanistan) and west (Iraq), both of which were invaded by US-led forces. Both Democrats and Republicans appear to be united in their belief that no country should stand in the way of the unilateral projection of military force by the United States or its allies.

Indeed, this resolution is not about the national security of the United States, nor is it about the security of Israel. It is about continuing US hegemony over the world's most oil-rich region.


Stephen Zunes is a contributor to Foreign Policy In Focus and a professor of politics at the University of San Francisco.

(Posted with permission from Foreign Policy in Focus)

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asif iqbal said:

in addition in a unpresidented move the USAF has moved 6 x F22 Raptors to UAE, they are stationed at Al-Dhafra air base, and no UAE personal is allowed to do any maintenance or ground work on the aircraft, only strictly US staff are allowed to work on them and that even includes refuelings

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By LEE FERRAN
April 27, 2012

America's most sophisticated stealth jet fighters have been quietly deployed to an allied base less than 200 miles from Iran's mainland, according to an industry report, but the Air Force adamantly denied the jets' presence is a threat to the Middle East nation.

Multiple stealth F-22 Raptors, which have never been combat-tested, are in hangars at the United Arab Emirates' Al Dafra Air Base, just a short hop over the Persian Gulf from Iran's southern border, the trade publication Aviation Week reported.

Air Force spokesperson Lt. Col. John Dorrian would not confirm the exact location of the F-22s, but told ABC News they had been deployed to a base in Southwest Asia -- a region that includes the UAE. Dorrian also stressed that the F-22s were simply taking part in a scheduled deployment and are "not a threat to Iran."

"This is a very normal deployment to strengthen military relationships, promote sovereign and regional security, improve combined tactical air operations and enhance interoperability of forces," Dorrian said.

The F-22 has only been in the UAE once before for training missions in 2009 with "coalition partners."

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asif iqbal said:

in addition in a unpresidented move the USAF has moved 6 x F22 Raptors to UAE, they are stationed at Al-Dhafra air base, and no UAE personal is allowed to do any maintenance or ground work on the aircraft, only strictly US staff are allowed to work on them and that even includes refuelings

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4 August 2012 Last updated at 08:24 GMT
Saudi Arabia: Soldier shot dead in Eastern Province

A soldier has been shot dead and another injured during a clash with protesters in eastern Saudi Arabia, according to state media.

An interior ministry spokesman said that a security patrol was fired at by rioters on a motorbike in Qatif.

A protester was also killed in a firefight following the incident, according to news agency AFP.

The oil-rich Eastern Province is home to a Shia majority that has long complained of marginalisation.

Speaking to state media, Interior Ministry spokesman Mansour al-Turki said the shooting took place at 11pm on Friday evening.

"A security patrol was exposed to heavy fire from four armed rioters on a motorbike when pausing at a street intersection in Qatif", he is reported to have said.

He named the dead soldier as Hussein Bawah Ali Zabani and the wounded soldier, who was taken to hospital, as Saad Miteb Mohammed al-Shammari.

AFP quotes Mansour al-Turki as saying a "rioter" had been killed in a firefight following the incident.

Last week, state media said security forces detained a number of protesters in Qatif after tyres were set on fire during an overnight demonstration.

Protests erupted in the region in March 2011 when a popular uprising in neighbouring Bahrain, which has a Shia majority and a Sunni royal family, was crushed with the assistance of Saudi and other Gulf troops.

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