BY DOUG LORIMER
On April 30, the US State Department branded Iran "the most active state sponsor of terrorism during 2002". A week later, the department accused Iran of seeking to develop nuclear weapons in violation of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).
According to the State Department's report, Patterns of Global Terrorism (2002), Iran is a "state sponsor of terrorism" because it has given funds, arms and training to the guerrilla forces of Hezbollah (Party of God), a legal party with parliamentary representation in Lebanon. Hezbollah's only "terrorist" actions were military attacks upon Israel, during the Israeli army's illegal occupation of southern Lebanon from 1978 to 2000.
The report also accuses Tehran of having provided funding, training and weapons to Palestinian groups resisting the illegal Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and with having a "mixed" record with regard to the Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda terrorist network.
According to the report: "While it has detained and turned over to foreign governments a number of al Qaeda members, other al Qaeda members have found a virtual safe haven there and may even be receiving protection from elements of the Iranian government."
Washington's accusation that Iran supports al Qaeda is based upon the same sort of "evidence" as similar accusations flung at Iraq prior to the US invasion.
On May 8, State Department spokesperson Richard Boucher told reporters: "Iran now openly admits that it is pursuing a complete nuclear fuel cycle. We completely reject Iran's claim that it is doing this for peaceful purposes... Our concern is about the potential acquisition of nuclear weapons by a state that's a known supporter of terrorism."
Boucher implied that the construction of a uranium-enrichment plant near the central Iranian city of Natanz proved Iran was violating the nuclear NPT, which Iran signed in 1970, because it might enable Iran to produce weapons-grade uranium.
Washington is pressing Mohammad ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), to deliver a report to the agency's board meeting on June 16 finding Iran in violation of the NPT. US officials hope to use such a finding to secure UN Security Council action — beginning with economic sanctions — against Iran.
Under the NPT, however, Iran is legally entitled to build facilities for a full nuclear fuel cycle, including uranium enrichment plants and plants for reprocessing spent nuclear fuel that could be used to produce weapons-grade uranium or plutonium.
Japan, which is also a signatory to the NPT, has accumulated enough plutonium from reprocessing spent nuclear fuel to build 1000 nuclear bombs, yet Washington has made no complaint to the IAEA that Tokyo has violated the NPT.
The accusations against Iran are part of a diplomatic campaign by Washington to portray Tehran as a "threat" to US "national security" and thus be the next target for US-engineered "regime change".
Iran is home to about 10% of the world's known petroleum and natural gas reserves, and is the world's third-largest oil exporter, after Saudi Arabia and Russia. US oil corporations already control the distribution of Saudi Arabia's oil.
With Iraq now under US military occupation, Washington is well-placed to install a puppet regime in Baghdad that will privatise the Iraqi oil industry and enable US oil corporations to gain control of Iraq's oil reserves — which are the world's second largest after Saudi Arabia's.
With a general strike and mass insurrection in February 1979, the working people of Iran threw out the brutal monarchist regime of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi — installed in a CIA coup in 1953. The absence of a revolutionary working-class leadership that was capable of organising a struggle for power allowed Muslim clerics to replace the shah's regime with a capitalist "Islamic republic".
Nevertheless, since the 1979 anti-imperialist revolution Iranian governments have barred US oil corporations' access to the country's oil resources.
The reinstallation of a pro-US puppet regime in Iran would place all of the Persian Gulf region's oil resources — 65% of the world's oil reserves — under the US rulers' control, a crucial step in their drive to secure US domination over the world economy.
According to a report in the May 9 London Financial Times, "exiled Iranian monarchists are developing an alliance in Washington with influential neo-conservatives as well as Pentagon officials". The FT reported that Reza Pahlavi, the US-based son of the ousted shah of Iran, enjoys support "inside the office of Douglas Feith, undersecretary of defence for policy" as a potential head of a US-backed regime in Tehran.
From Green Left Weekly, May 21, 2003.
Visit the Green Left Weekly home page.