The Economist and Media Bias

I’ve read The Economist every week for years now, and every so often an article comes along which reminds me never to underestimate the newspaper’s ability to infuriate me with its incredible reserve of pro-Western war mongering. The July 22^nd-28^th issue featured a front cover with ‘Can Iran Be Stopped?’ plastered across it, the name of the main leader in the paper this week. It also contained a 3 page briefing on Iran’s nuclear programme.

The Economist has a proven track record at advocating every intervention and Western war our elites cook up, including the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars, and intervention in Libya and Syria. The language it regularly uses about the need to ‘punish’ nations which ‘misbehave’ economically or politically often has more than a slight undertone of good-old British imperialism. This week’s leading story was another case study in the art of omission and distortion that the newspaper has mastered.

The main leader started with an effort to claim that the West should disregard the recent victory of Hassan Rohani in the Iranian presidential elections; Rohani was considered the moderate in the contest. We shouldn’t laud the new President’s calls for serious negotiation with the West according to the paper, as apparently ‘Iran’s regional assertiveness and its nuclear capacity mean that it is a more dangerous place than it ever was before’. By ‘regional’ they mean the Middle East, and a glance at Arab public opinion, the majority of citizens in the Middle East, shows that they actually consider the United States to be the biggest threat in the region, not Iran. According to a study by the Wilson Center and the United States Institute of Peace carried out in 2011, ‘Iran remained far behind… the United States: 59 percent identified the United States, and 18 percent identified Iran as one of the two greatest threats’ in the region. Other studies show similar, or even more pronounced results. Of course, The Economist has little regard for the ignorant opinions of the natives. That they consider the US to possess far more ‘regional assertiveness’ than Iran is irrelevant. That Israel is the only country with ‘nuclear capacity’- actually nuclear weapons- is also presumably irrelevant. Note also the construction of Iran as a ‘dangerous place’, not merely a dangerous state or government. The portrayal of enemies and far-away lands as mysterious and dangerous has a long tradition in Western journalism and writing.

The paper notes with implicit approval that Western-imposed sanctions have inflicted ‘severe economic pain… on Iran’s people’, ‘with 40% of Iranians thought to be living below the poverty line’; there is no comment on the fact that our actions are seriously harming the lives of millions of innocent Iranians.

It then provides a sober analysis of Obama’s recent decision to arm the rebels in Syria: ‘many believe the greater reason was [Obama’s] reluctance to see Mr Assad hold on to power as a client of Iran’s’. This cynical ‘real politic’ is actually applauded by the paper, which claims that a major reason to not only arm the rebels but to establish a no-fly zone over Syria is to ‘stem the rise of Persian power’. Apparently it is ‘not in the West’s interest that a state that sponsors terrorism and rejects Israel’s right to exist should become the regional hegemon’. That one of the West’s major allies in the region (Saudi Arabia) is probably a far greater sponsor of terrorism than Iran is of little importance to the paper. So presumably is the fact that Israel and the US have carried out terrorist assassinations of civilian scientists in Iran and sponsored exiled Iranian terrorist groups like MEK, something I wrote about briefly here. The historical context is utterly stripped from the article, and Iran is portrayed as the aggressive would-be hegemon in the region, a fantasy which ignores the elementary facts available to anyone who cares to look: namely that the US and Britain have sought to control the Middle East for their own interests, often with extreme aggression and terrorism, for decades. The piece ends with the battle cry: ‘When Persian power is on the rise, it is not the time to back away from the Middle East’; suggesting that there is some voluntary retreat from the Middle East by the Western powers, a fabrication unsurprisingly not elaborated on by the paper.

The briefing on Iran’s nuclear programme is somewhat more subtle, revealing in what it excludes rather than what it asserts. It follows the tradition of nearly every Western politician and journalist of the last decade and a half in hysterically asserting that the time is near when Iran will be able to acquire nuclear weapons- maybe true, but the humble reminder that people have been making that charge- falsely- for years, is again unsurprisingly missing from the paper’s piece. It presents Iran as making an ‘impossible demand’ in negotiations, ignoring the US role in scuppering potential deals and negotiations, something I wrote about here. It claims that ‘British and American intelligence sources think [Iran] is about a year away from having enough fissile material to make a bomb’, ignoring that it is the intelligence agency’s assessments (and the IAEA’s) that Iran hasn’t made the decision to attempt to get a bomb. Jacques Hymans wrote in Foreign Affairs the other month that ‘at the end of January, Israeli intelligence officials quietly indicated that they have downgraded their assessments of Iran's ability to build a nuclear bomb… Now, Israel believes that Iran will not have its first nuclear device before 2015 or 2016.’ That will probably be pushed back even further in the future.

It quotes a researcher at the highly establishment RAND Corporation, Greg Jones, and a more respectable source, David Albright, a former UN weapons inspector, to back up its arguments. It also references the oft-mentioned 2011 IAEA report that I discussed here. Left out of the picture are those such as former Director of the IAEA’s Iraq Action Team, Robert Kelly, who argues that the report proves nothing, and former head of the IAEA, Hans Blix, who has claimed that the hysteria about Iran is over-hyped. Even Jack Straw has come out recently to say that there isn’t sufficient evidence to prove Iran is moving towards a nuclear weapon- far from it.

Ultimately, thankfully, the paper doesn’t advocate a military attack on Iran, though for strictly practical reasons, as is the usual in the media. The (il)legality, or the (im)morality of a strike, isn’t even discussed. They do have the sense to recognise the danger that an attack upon Iran could end with a ‘full-scale invasion’ of the country, something even The Economist doesn’t want.

This is an example of the endless systemic bias inherent in the media, often represented most clearly in liberal papers like The Economist. A source of information they may be, but one needs to know how to read the media: a task I am still learning. 

Iranian-Western Relations Part 3

Iran Part 3- what to do

I clearly miscalculated when I said that there would be a 2-part series on Iran; it is now a 4-part series.

Given that Iran may well be attempting to move towards nuclear capability or weaponisation, it is sensible to review the options available to Western governments and the international community regarding Iran’s nuclear programme. Apologies for length and the occasional slightly technical passages, but this is a complicated and important issue which needs a thorough examination. This post will review letting Iran have a bomb, attacking their nuclear facilities, and waging low level warfare (the current policy). The next post will look at diplomatic options.

Let them get a bomb

There are some in academic circles who believe that nuclear proliferation is a force for stability in the world- notably Kenneth Waltz, the giant amongst international relations scholars, who wrote an article in Foreign Affairs recently entitled ‘Why Iran Should Get the Bomb’ (http://tinyurl.com/7mwgp9v). They argue that the destructive power of nuclear weapons is so vast that no regime would ever be the first to use them, as they require ‘Mutually Assured Destruction’ (MAD). Simplifying somewhat, their argument rests more or less upon historically precedent; we have had 70 years of the nuclear age and, so far, no two nuclear powers have ever gone directly to war with each other. They claim that this shows that nuclear weapons prevent leaders from going to war with other nuclear powers, lest they start a nuclear war and are both obliterated.

There are many reasons to be sceptical of this argument in any situation; it ignores the millions killed in proxy wars during the Cold War between the US and the USSR, and ignores how, in the words of the then-US Secretary of Defence Robert McNamara, ‘it was luck that prevented nuclear war’ (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3lrH7RtiobQ) between the US and USSR in the 1962 Cuban Missile crisis. Try to apply the argument to the modern day Middle East and things get shakier.

It’s not that Iran or any other state would be reckless enough to launch a nuclear missile at an enemy, unprovoked (as Richard Betts wrote in Foreign Affairs recently, ‘there is no evidence… that the Iranian leadership has any interest in national suicide, the likely consequence of an Iranian first nuclear strike’- http://tinyurl.com/bo74n4u); rather, wars often start from miscalculation and accident. As political scientist Scott Sagan has pointed out, accidents are a statistically inevitable part of any system (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xupuaqu_ruk).

Whilst Iran has ‘never launched a regular war against its enemies’ (Betts), the power and arrogance that can flow from having the world’s most powerful deterrent could embolden it to engage in more destabilising behaviour in the region. Waltz himself even admits that new nuclear states will ‘feel freer to make minor incursions, deploy terrorism, and engage in generally annoying behavior’ (http://tinyurl.com/bggroaj) , and given Iran’s apparent support for the Syrian regime, Hezbollah and Hamas, this is hardly something to welcome. The respected Geoffrey Robertson QC has documented the Iranian regime’s regional and domestic human rights abuses in Mullahs Without Mercy: Human Rights and Nuclear Weapons, and points out that a nuclear Iran would be disastrous for the region. Miscalculation between Iran and the US and Israel could cause a nuclear war.

Military Strike

Interestingly, some polls of Arab opinion have shown a majority in favour of Iran having a nuclear bomb in order to deter Israel and the US, who are considered to be the greatest threats to peace in the region by far (The Wilson Center and USIP- http://tinyurl.com/al48lzl). However it seems no one seriously interested in peace and stability could be in favour of a further extension of weapons capable of destroying humanity, regardless of the fact that Iran is generally considered to be what international relations scholars call a ‘rational actor’ in the world system (that is, a regime that won’t willingly undertake activity which it knows will lead to its self-destruction).

The other extreme is a military strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities, in order to forcibly halt Iran’s nuclear progress. Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu and (until recently) Defence Minister Ehud Barak are said to favour such an action, and there are certain sectors of the US government who are also in line with such thinking. Articles such as ‘Time to Attack Iran’ have appeared in major journals like Foreign Affairs. An article recommending a regime-toppling attack was even considered mainstream enough to be published (http://tinyurl.com/ckofvhx).  Such an attack would have to take out Iran’s considerable air defences, and heavily bomb dozens of facilities all over the country, perhaps even using M.O.B’s (http://tinyurl.com/324j56) or M.O.P’s (http://tinyurl.com/c6f7q6x) on underground facilities like Natanz and Fordow. Consequences are hard to predict, but civilian casualties from the bombing campaign would run at least into the hundreds; the best case scenario is that the nuclear programme is set back several years and Iran fails to retaliate to the attack on its sovereignty.

A realistic assessment of possible outcomes leaves us with dire scenarios. As Robert Jervis in Foreign Affairs points out, ‘Washington knows that the likely results include at least a small war in the region, deepening hostility to the United States around the world, increased domestic support for the Iranian regime, legitimation of the Iranian nuclear weapons program, and the need to strike again if Iran reconstitutes [the programme]’ (http://tinyurl.com/c6dcqms). Iran has repeatedly threatened to close the Strait of Hormuz (Reuters- http://tinyurl.com/cr5h83f), through which around 20% of the world’s oil supplies travel. A closure would rack the global markets and possibly send the world back into recession. Furthermore Iran is likely to respond, as any nation with substantial military capability would when attacked; Colin Kahl writes that such a retaliation would probably take the form of ‘proxy attacks against U.S. civilian personnel in Lebanon or Iraq, the transfer of lethal rocket and portable air defense systems to Taliban fighters in Afghanistan, or missile strikes against U.S. facilities in the Gulf [which] could cause significant U.S. casualties, creating irresistible political pressure in Washington to respond’ (http://tinyurl.com/6p2f5pu). If Israel were involved in the strike, the Iranian-backed Lebanon-based Hezbollah and Gaza-based Hamas could fire masses of rockets into Israel, leading to a swift response from the government there, and potentially a new conflict in the Gaza Strip and Lebanon. The Gulf States (Saudi Arabia, Qatar etc.) are extremely hostile to Iran, and any retaliatory attack upon them from Iran (many of them host US bases which could be a launching point for an air attack) could draw them into a huge region-wide conflict, unseen in decades. It is little surprise then, that former head of Mossad (Israel’s intelligence services) Meir Dagan has called an attack on Iran the ‘stupidest idea [he’s] ever heard’ (http://tinyurl.com/94w4xnt).

Low level warfare

We are now 10 years on from the Iraq War and it would take incredible amnesia to repeat the disaster which has unfolded there; whilst the above passage was committed to the practical consequences of an attack on Iran, there is also a very strong moral and legal case to be made against a strike (this perspective on the debate is nearly invariably left out of mainstream journals and media); the afore mentioned Geoffrey Robertson QC is against an attack ‘because it’s wrong’ (http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01p3hnl). Recently a legal memo was leaked from the British government declining US requests to use British bases as a launching pad for an attack upon Iran; the memo stated that such an attack would be in violation of international law, since Iran does not yet pose a ‘clear and present threat’ (Guardian- http://tinyurl.com/8gzhatj).  

A step down from a full blown strike would be low level warfare: sabotage attempts, sanctions, cyber warfare, funding opposition within Iran etc. This resembles the United States’ and Israel’s current policy. Vast sanctions have been placed upon Iran, causing the value of its currency to plummet by up to 80% in value (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-19786662), and allegedly causing a pharmaceutical crisis for the population, as the sanction are so broad that civilian goods get caught up in them (Guardian- http://tinyurl.com/cwo5q3d).  Scientists working on Iran’s nuclear programme have been assassinated (BBC- http://tinyurl.com/7xn4plk), and the famous ‘Stuxnet’ cyber virus was thought to have originated from the US (described by some legal experts as an ‘illegal act of force’- http://tinyurl.com/crxyocb).

The murky underground war against Iran goes further; an Iranian opposition group called the People’s Mujahedeen of Iran (MEK) has the public support of a number of US citizens high up in the US establishment, including James Woolsey, the former CIA director, and the former US ambassador to the UN John Bolton, who has campaigned to have the group removed from the US list of terrorist organisations (http://tinyurl.com/btyecg4). The group has been previously involved in Marxist terrorist activity (testament to the fact that many sectors of the US government will work with anyone if it furthers their strategic and economic interests- Al Jazeera http://tinyurl.com/c7fsqp6). Senior US officials allegedly told NBC news that the MEK has been involved in assassinations of Iranian scientists, carried out with the support of Israel (http://tinyurl.com/clhojjl).  

Israel has a seemingly strange relationship with another terrorist organisation: the Sunni Jundallah. Foreign Policy reported last year on how Mossad agents posed as CIA operatives and attempted to recruit members of Jundallah to help fight the covert war against Iran (http://tinyurl.com/6rz9jab). The idea of Israel working with Pakistani-based Sunni terrorists against a Shia government would be amusing if it weren’t so troubling. There is a long history of our government and our allies working with extremist groups and Islamists to further their own interests, most famously in the 80's when they funded Bin Laden and the groups which would later become the Taliban and Al Qaeda in their fight against the USSR in Afghanistan. The consequences of that policy are well known to all.

There is of course a similar argument to be made against such a policy in Iran- not only will these actions likely backfire, as it allows the government in Iran to muster up domestic support by using the threat of hostile powers as an excuse to expand its power and control- but these activities are most probably mostly illegal and certainly immoral. We can imagine what the US response would be if Iran were assassinating its scientists and launching huge cyber-attacks on its nuclear infrastructure (indeed we know what the Israeli response would be- when the Iranian-backed Hamas or Hezbollah launch any kind of attack against Israel, Israeli officials claim that they have a ‘right to defend their country’ and respond with huge force). The murder of civilian scientists for political aims and in order to scare away graduates from pursuing such a career is the very definition of state (or state-backed) terrorism. 

Iranian-Western Relations Part 2

This is part 2 of a 4 part series on Iranian-Western relations. In part 1 we documented some of the background to the modern day crisis, and in part 2 we look at the events up until the modern day, with particular focus on Iran’s nuclear programme, and whether Iran is attempting to move towards nuclear weapons.

After the overthrow of Mohammed Mossadegh and the installation of the Shah in his place, Iran was ruled as a dictatorship and a western client state for the next 26 years. As noted before, suppressing legitimate demands for democracy tends to empower extremist elements, and the situation in Iran was no different. In 1979 Shiite radicals rose up and overthrew the Shah, taking over the nuclear programme that had been started under the Shah and infamously invading the US embassy, leading to the hostage crisis dramatised in the 2012 film ‘Argo’. The tragedy of the Iranian revolution is that Iran had come close to a semblance of national independence and democracy in 1953, but radical measures were taken by the West to cripple this possibility. Independence was eventually achieved in 1979; at the price of living under one of the harshest theocratic regimes in the Middle East.

The ayatollahs have ruled Iran from 1979 to the modern day: the current Supreme Leader of Iran is Grand Ayatollah Khamenei, and the President is Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The current focus on Iran concerns its alleged nuclear weapons programme, and anyone who follows the news will no doubt have come across the debate over whether or not the US, Israel (and possibly Britain) should launch a military strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities in order to prevent them getting a bomb. The immediate question to be asked is: is Iran moving towards nuclear weapons?

This question is oft ignored in the mainstream discussion; it is taken for granted that Iran is moving towards nuclear weapons, or nuclear weapons capability (the capacity to quickly build nuclear weapons if need be), and that its peaceful nuclear programme is a façade for this darker motive. However given what we know about the lead-up to the Iraq war, the distortions, half-truths and lies (to name one of many, the claim that Saddam had bought uranium from Niger turned out to be false- http://tinyurl.com/cx3qqoc) , it would take great amnesia to uncritically accept Mr Romney and Mr Obama’s assertions that Iran is moving towards weapons.

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the UN’s body for monitoring nuclear sites and ensuring enriched uranium and plutonium isn't transferred to military uses, publishes regular reports on Iran’s nuclear programme. In 2011 and 2012 the Western media have jumped on the agency’s reports, claiming they document ‘damning evidence’ against Iran (see for example this Telegraph article- http://tinyurl.com/5wey66v). However a look under the headlines leads us to be a little more sceptical. Robert Kelley, Director of the IAEA’s Iraq Action Team in the run up to the Iraq War and with 30 years of experience in nuclear studies, wrote an article published by the respected Stockholm International Peace Research Institute at the beginning of last year (http://tinyurl.com/bvgrb9u) writing that whilst it is accepted that Iran was attempting to acquire nuclear weapons up until 2003, by the 2007 'US [intelligence] agencies concluded ‘with high confidence’ that Iran had halted its nuclear weapons programme in late 2003 under international pressure’. He described the ‘new’ evidence in the 2011 report as ‘sketchy’, and claimed that ‘all but three of the items that were offered as proof of a possible nuclear weapons programme are either undated or refer to events before 2004’. Furthermore the evidence the report relies upon for claims that Iran is trying to create a ‘device to produce a burst of neutrons that could initiate a fission chain reaction’ comes from a 2-page document passed to the IAEA in 2009, which was dismissed by the then-head Mohamed ElBaradei as a forgery.

The new IAEA stance towards Iran coincides with the arrival of a head of the agency, Yukiya Amano. Amano was supported by the US in the election process and has been accused by several former IAEA officials of a pro-Western bias in his judgments (http://tinyurl.com/ce3o297). Wikileaks have released cables from US diplomats who claim that Amano is ‘solidly in the US court on every key strategic decision, from high-level personnel appointments to the handling of Iran's alleged nuclear weapons program’ (document available here- http://tinyurl.com/7qk4gwn). Hans Blix, who was head of the IAEA in the run up to the Iraq War and warned at the time that Iraq probably didn’t have nuclear weapons, has claimed recently that ‘there is no evidence right now that suggests that Iran is producing nuclear weapons’ (http://tinyurl.com/dyeodsa). This all gives us reason to be sceptical of the IAEA’s new stance on Iran. Indeed, the IAEA continues to monitor most Iranian nuclear facilities, Iran seems to be keeping its stockpile of 20% enriched uranium below the level needed for a bomb (http://tinyurl.com/cvp2p35), and the US’ National Intelligence Director said recently that if Iran were to attempt to move towards a bomb then the US and/or IAEA would pick up on it (http://tinyurl.com/d5ayhfa). Israel’s intelligence services recently put back the date that they think Iran could achieve a bomb by to 2015/16 (http://tinyurl.com/csphp4o); interestingly, Israel has been claiming Iran are a few years away from a bomb nearly every year since 1992 (http://tinyurl.com/ajslo8t).

All of this is not to say that Iran certainly is not attempting to move towards nuclear weapons capability; they may well be. Indeed, assuming the Iranian regime is what international relations scholars call a ‘rational actor’ in the world system, it would in many ways be rational for Iran to attain a bomb. A hostile power, the US, has 42+ military bases surrounding Iran (http://tinyurl.com/7ko22c3), has recently invaded two neighbouring countries (Iraq and Afghanistan), and Iran have their facilities attacked with cyber bugs and scientists killed in the streets (http://tinyurl.com/bd6z67g). As noted in the major establishment journal Foreign Affairs, Qaddafi was overthrown by the US a while after he agreed to abandon his nuclear programme, and North Korea is now more or less safe from invasion after achieving nuclear weapons status (http://tinyurl.com/ck6oa2t). But there doesn’t appear to be sufficient evidence to prove Iran are moving towards weapons yet, contrary to the dominant narrative in mainstream discourse.

The next post (which will be up in around 10 days) will examine the options for engaging Iran, and assuming it is moving towards a nuclear weapon, how to avoid that eventuality.