PRESIDENT Barack Obama’s decision to mark the Iranian New Year by issuing a video message offering Iranians a new and “honest” engagement with Washington has been broadly welcomed by Tehran, where the government says it will study the proposals closely. One certain outcome is a fillip for President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s administration, which will argue that Obama’s emollient words justify its determination to play hardball in the face of the bullying and bluster from the Bush White House. This may reinforce Ahmadinejad’s chances of re-election this June.
But the US message still carries a barely-concealed stick, in that Obama has not ruled out military action if Iran does not comply with UN demands for transparency over its nuclear program. Nor did Obama take the opportunity to resile from the crass Bush characterization of Iran as being part of the “Axis of Evil”. He also demonstrated the blinkered superpower approach to nuclear deterrence, whereby it is entirely all right for the US and Israel to have a nuclear arsenal but wrong for non-nuclear powers to aspire to the same. Thus his words that the measure of a country’s greatness is “not the capacity to destroy” but rather its ability to build and create, will ring hollow, certainly among hard-line Iranians. Obama cannot ignore the key regional reality that it was the past US-sponsored creation of Israel’s undeclared nuclear arsenal that has been used to justify the right of Iran to pursue its own atomic weapons strategy — if it chose to do so.
This said, Ahmadinejad has not helped ease Washington’s concerns by his intemperate statements about Israel, which played directly into the hands of the US Zionist lobby. Yesterday Tehran said that Obama needed to go further than words and demonstrate newfound US goodwill by actions. It has four key demands: The acceptance of its right to enrich uranium, the lifting of UN and US sanctions and an end to America’s “colonialist attitudes”. But this cannot be a one-way street. For its part, Iran needs to recognize the deplorable behavior of revolutionary students who seized the US Embassy hostages, which did so much to convince a shocked outside world that the new Iranian regime was not to be trusted. Whatever the revolutionary anger against Washington’s influence over the Shah, this was a totally unacceptable act that propelled Iran into three decades of isolation from which it has suffered.
The Iranians will doubtless be taking heart from the belief that the Obama administration needs them to play important roles in Iraq, where Tehran has quelled the activities of Shiite radicals, in Afghanistan, where it is suspected that Iranian-made roadside bombs have been used by the Taleban against NATO forces and in Lebanon and Gaza where the Iranians have supported Hezbollah and Hamas.
But the Iranians are going to have to give more than such cooperation. They need, as the US president said, to re-enter the community of nations. The process will be fraught but Obama’s New Year message to the Iranians is a good beginning.
Military brutality at its worst
THE Independent (UK) yesterday commented on Israeli soldiers’ revelations about what happened in Gaza, saying in part:
One of the values enshrined in the code of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) is that its soldiers will behave with scrupulous morality, even in the heat of combat. So the testimony published in a college newsletter from some Israeli soldiers who served in the recent military engagement in Gaza will come as a severe shock to a public taught to trust in its army’s “purity of arms”.
What these soldiers describe from their experience of the three-week long Operation Cast Lead is not scrupulous morality, but an almost complete absence of it. They cite wanton destruction of Palestinian property and a chilling indifference to civilian casualties. They also relate how such abuses were made possible by the permissive rules of engagement established by their superiors.
This is not the first time allegations of possible war crimes by Israeli soldiers during the Gaza operation have been made. Until now the IDF has shrugged off such claims, accusing those human rights groups which related tales of illegal killing and destruction of either being duped by Hamas or pursuing their own anti-Israeli agenda.
But that avenue is not open to the army on this occasion. It is true that all armies suffer occasional breakdowns in discipline. We in Britain should remember that Baha Mousa, an Iraqi hotel receptionist, was beaten to death in the custody of British troops in Basra in 2003 and none of our soldiers was convicted of this killing. American military personnel were guilty of appalling abuses of prisoners in Baghdad’s Abu Ghraib prison.
The army’s failure to investigate previous allegations of misconduct by its troops in a serious fashion leaves no confidence that it is about to change its ways now. An outside investigator should also look into the IDF’s distribution to soldiers of a pamphlet containing vile religious extremism prior to the Gaza invasion.
