Making a Mountain Out of Dead Moles

It looks like the sabers are rattling, again, over Iran’s nuclear program. Now the great white powers have their knickers in a knot over a supposedly “secret” nuclear facility Iran is constructing near the city of Qom without informing the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

Obama stood before the September meeting of the G-20 and solemnly declared that “Iran’s decision to build yet another nuclear facility without notifying the IAEA represents a direct challenge to the basic compact at the center of the non-proliferation regime…Iran is breaking rules that all nations must follow…and threatening the stability and security of the region and the world.”

As always, when Iran comes up, the hype outstrips the reality by several light years. It’s taken some pretty powerful hair splitting to come up with this one.

The plant will not be operational for eighteen months. The terms and conditions of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) require signatories to report new facilities 180 days before the introduction of nuclear material.

Nor is the plant a complete surprise since western intelligence agencies have been aware that the plant was under construction since 2006.

So why the fuss?

Well, for one thing, Israel still thinks Iran is an “existential threat,” even though the only thing Iran could threaten is Israel’s nuclear monopoly in the Middle East.

Then there’s the oil and the administration’s naive belief that it can militarily control oil in the Middle East militarily. It’s a fool’s dream. It is said that in discussing military affairs, amateurs talk strategy while professionals talk logistics. One only has to look at a globe to see the length of the supply line we’d have to maintain and protect to keep a massive force supplied. It would be cheaper and burn a lost less fuel simply to fly a trade delegation over there to cut the best deal we could. This is what the Chinese are dong, and they’re having better luck than we are.

The absurdity, here, is that Iran appears to have no interest in producing nuclear weapons. To date, their nuclear industry in only able to achieve five-percent enrichment of its nuclear material, which is acceptable under the NPT. Weapon-grade nuclear material must be enriched to 95 percent. This would require more and refigured centrifuges, and Iran couldn’t do that without the IAEA finding out.

There are two other factors at play here. First, Iran is the last dying gasp of an Euromerican imperial wet dream that has been the guiding light of western policy for five-hundred years. Natives simply are not allowed to thumb their noses at their betters. If they do, they must be disciplined as children are. The problem is that the children can now kick ass, so it’s not as easy as it use to be.

Throw into the mix the sting of imperial pique still felt by the United States over Iran’s overthrow of their puppet, the Shah, coupled with the seizure of the American embassy, and it becomes clear why Obama is talking about no options being off the table.

Imperial nations dig their own graves. They become so blinded by power and hubris that they come eventually believe themselves invincible. This hubris peaks just before they go bankrupt. In the United States, factories are shutters, homes are foreclosed, people are homeless, children go to bed hungry, but our administration continues to pursue two unnecessary wars because it’s the robust thing to do.

It’s a deluded pantomime that would be amusing if it didn’t leave so much suffering in its wake.