Iran: Forgotten lessons of history

The beating of war drums has begun but for the sake of the many lives that will be affected, I hope the leaders of Israel, USA and the other countries learn from history. Invading a country’s sovereign land will push the people towards a more aggressive nationalism which will only benefit the fundamentalists.

Israel’s need to “protect” itself seems laughable because we all seem to be focusing on Iran and its supposed Nuclear weapons, but nobody questions Israel and its nuclear arsenal, they have not signed the NPT, and they maintain “nuclear ambiguity” about their WMD, neither refusing nor accepting. Not being part of the NPT makes them evade International Atomic Energy Association’s (IAEA) inspections, and while in Iran they conduct them every now and then, they have no legal authority to do so in Israel. A little hypocritical, don’t you think? The argument that they need to protect themselves from the surrounding hostile nations, well, how are they in that situation in the first place? Who asked them to intervene in Lebanon which gave rise to the Hezbollah, or their human rights violations which gave rise to Hamas in Gaza or their intervention in Syria and Iraq’s supposed nuclear program and occupation of the Palestinian lands. As George Monbiot in one of his columns clearly puts it, “Nuclear weapons in Israel's hands are surely just as dangerous as nuclear weapons in Iran's… Iran is not starting a nuclear arms race, but joining one.”

Like most of the people, even I’m not that thrilled about these countries having nuclear weapons, since most of them are in the grips of terrorism, lawlessness and dictatorial governments. But that does not give Israel the right to be a bully and get its way.

Recently, an Israeli diplomat was attacked in Delhi, I remember the hue and cry that the Israeli government made blaming Iran for the attack and that was before any evidence was even established. Israel was already charging Iran as the culprit – innocent until proven guilty? It may have been Iran just as well that it may not have been, but this eagerness that the Israeli government is portraying does more harm than good. Ahmadinejad at home can tell his people, ‘look, they are after us,’ and in this way the fraudulently elected President gains legitimacy, in a previous post on the persecution of Baha’is I gave a few news headlines, what those told us was that Baha’is and Israel have become a convenient bogeyman where there is anything wrong in the country, they are the ones blamed and acts like this by the Israeli just strengthens that position. Oh and I also wonder what happened when those Iranian scientists were assassinated, didn’t hear of it? Don’t blame yourself; the story was given a quick burial.

Whenever there needs to be change in a country, rest assured the people themselves are going to do it, not the Americans not the Israelis, they wanted to ‘help’ Iraq, yeah, we all saw how that turned out. Nobody is going to change the way Iran is today other than Iranians themselves, we can help sure, but bombs and war will only push the country into extremism. History has tons of lessons; the world needs to learn from them.

As Israel repeatedly claims that it has the right to arm itself, since it’s surrounded by hostile nations, then doesn’t Iran have the same right! Let’s look at the facts’, they have Turkey, America’s ally to the north-west, Bahrain to the south which is where the US Fifth Fleet is based, Qatar, hosts the US Central Command headquarters, Turkmenistan to the north-east, which is refuelling centre for American planes since 2002 and Saudi Arabia whose king has often enough called for America to “attack Iran.” The Iranian state is threatened so don’t they have the right to protect themselves, it’s a state whose scientists have been assassinated in their own land, ‘stuxnet’ a computer worm that was used against them has set back their nuclear facilities by “two years”, the economic blockade that has crippled their economy and reduced their market to a barter system. One of the reasons there was no war between Soviet Russia and USA during the cold war was because both the countries had nuclear weapons and for their own good were prudent enough to follow a policy of ‘détente’ where they both knew that it was in their interests to avoid a nuclear war, so they diplomatically worked towards a solution. As Mehdi Hassan in his column in the Guardian puts it, “the fundamental geopolitical lesson that you and your countrymen learned over the last decade: the US and its allies opted for war with non-nuclear Iraq, but diplomacy with nuclear-armed North Korea.”

The biggest question is if the Iranians actually have nuclear weapons or not, a recent report on Reuters makes this question abundantly clear, “The United States, European allies and even Israel generally agree on three things about Iran's nuclear program: Tehran does not have a bomb, has not decided to build one, and is probably years away from having a deliverable nuclear warhead.”  Israel, why all the huffing and puffing!

The US intervention of Iran has already put the country in the hands of the mullahs. It irks me to see the ‘big brother’ attitude that the American government seems to give itself. I don’t like the idea of Iran having nuclear weapons as much as I don’t like the idea of Israel or USA having them, but if they want to engage with Iran for a solution, they need to first question their own hypocrisy in this matter.

This cartoon sums it up quite nicely: