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 invasion of Afghanistan, the Soviet Union itself, and the regime of Saddam 
 Hussein all ended in time, as he maintained the Israeli occupation of one 
 of Islam's holiest cities would too. 
  
 It's true that the Iranian president has made provocative statements 
 questioning the occurrence of the Holocaust. But his political powers are 
 limited, he does not control foreign policy, and he faces substantial 
 criticism from other members of the Iranian power elite. Mohammad Khatami, 
 Ahmadinejad's predecessor as president from 1997 to 2005 and still an 
 influential player in the Iranian power structure, has pointedly distanced 
 himself from Ahmadinejad's comment, telling an Arab audience that the 
 Holocaust was "an historical fact." But then, he's an internationally 
 respected proponent of the "dialogue of civilizations" who while in power 
 sought better relations with the U.S., only to be rebuffed. Anyway 
 Americans don't hear much about differences among Iranian leaders; we're 
 encouraged to see them all as threatening and vile. When in February 2003 
 Secretary Colin Powell's lieutenant Richard Armitage matter-of-factly 
 called Iran a "democracy," Cheney's neocons were all over him. 
  
 Americans aren't supposed to know that Iran has hotly contested elections, 
 even though all candidates for office must be approved by the Guardian 
 Council of six jurists elected by the Majlis (Parliament) and six clerics 
 chosen by the Supreme Leader, who is himself elected by a parliamentary 
 body of 86 people. (Basically, the democratic process is constrained by 
 repressive religious oversight. But that happens elsewhere too. Note that 
 Israeli "democracy" is predicated on the idea that any Jew from anywhere 
 arriving in Israel gets citizenship and voting rights. Israeli Arabs have 
 these rights too, but they do not exist among the four million strong 
 Palestinian exile community denied their right of return.) 
  
 But back to the big issue, the putative nuclear weapons program that might 
 someday destroy Israel. The U.S. press refers routinely to "Iran's nuclear 
 weapons program" as though it obviously had one, while most Americans don't 
 know that Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, actually issued a 
 fatwa against the production, stockpiling or use of nuclear weapons in 
 2005. Most know that Iran is enriching uranium, but probably don't know 
 that all countries have the right to enrich uranium, and that countries 
 without nuclear weapons programs (like Japan, Germany, the Netheralnds, 
 Brazil) have enriched it without American protest. Signatories of the 
 Non-Proliferation Treaty are in fact guaranteed the right to do so, so long 
 as they renounce nuclear weapons development and submit to IAEA 
 inspection---as Iran has done. (Indeed, Iran has submitted to 
 unprecedentedly intrusive UN inspections.) Meanwhile, countries that 
 haven't signed the treaty (like India, Pakistan, and Israel, 
 non-signatories that have nuclear weapons) aren't legally bound to its 
 terms at all! Americans might ask: Why do these three countries enjoy such 
 close relations with the U.S. despite their defiance of the 
 nonproliferation regimen the U.S. demands Iran respect? (North Korea was a 
 signatory but withdrew from the Treaty in 2003 in the face of unremitting 
 U.S. hostility and tested nuclear weapons in 2006.) 
  
 Most Americans probably don't know that Mohamed ElBaradei, Nobel Peace 
 Prize laureate and head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, a man 
 who understands the science, keeps saying there is no evidence that Iran's 
 enrichment program is related to a military program. True, he declared, 
 after a meeting with Condi Rice in March 2006 (in which she agreed to lift 
 U.S. efforts to fire him as IAEA head), that the IAEA was "not at this 
 point in time in a position to conclude that there are no undeclared 
 nuclear materials or activities in Iran." The Bush administration has used 
 that convoluted double-negative statement, and the September 2005 IAEA 
 statement on Iran, to justify its preparations for war. 
  
 According to that statement Iran's "many failures and breaches of its 
 obligations to comply with its NPT Safeguards Agreement [voluntarily signed 
 by Iran in 2003]constitute non-compliance" with the Non-Proliferation 
 Treaty, while the "history of concealment of Iran's nuclear activities" and 
 "resulting absence of confidence that Iran's nuclear programme is 
 exclusively for peaceful purposes have given rise to questions that are 
 within the competence of the Security Council." Most Americans don't 
 realize that this statement was actually opposed by 13 of the 35 voting 
 countries (including Russia, China, Pakistan, Brazil, Mexico, Nigeria, 
 Venezuela and South Africa) but backed by NATO country representatives 
 voting as a bloc. (This was used to produce UNSC Resolution 1737, which 
 having affirmed the right of Non-Proliferation Treaty signatories "to 
 develop research, production and use of nuclear energy for peaceful 
 purposes without discrimination," contradictorily "decides" that "Iran 
 shall without further delay suspendall [uranium] enrichment-related and 
 reprocessing activities.") 
  
 Misled by politicians (including AIPAC heroine Hilary Clinton) and poorly 
 served by the mainstream news media, many Americans just might swallow the 
 accusation that Iran is planning genocide, in league with Hizbollah and 
 Hamas. Some might believe that a nuclear Iran would somehow threaten the 
 Homeland, perhaps by sharing nuclear arms with terrorist groups. More might 
 believe that Iran is at least developing nuclear weapons, following Dick 
 Cheney's reasoning that Iran with all its oil can only be pursuing a 
 nuclear program with weapons in mind. (They might not know that in the 
 1970s, U.S. administrations and corporations such as General Electric were 
 encouraging Iran to develop a peaceful nuclear program! But that was when 
 Iran was under the Shah, a U.S. client toppled in the most mass-based 
 genuine revolutionary upheaval in the modern history of Islamic countries 
 in 1979.) 
  
 But there is in fact no reason to suppose that Iran plans to attack any 
 country. It has not, for the record, in modern times although it was itself 
 attacked by Iraq (supported by the U.S.) from 1980 to 1988. The closest it 
 came to invading a neighboring country came in 1998, when following the 
 killing of seven Iranian diplomats in Afghanistan, Tehran mobilized against 
 the Taliban regime. (In 2001 it cooperated with Washington to topple that 
 regime and replace it with one rooted in the Northern Alliance forces.) 
  
 In August 2006 Ahmadinejad stated that Iran was not a threat to any 
 country, "not even to the Zionist regime." French President Jacques Chirac 
 recently acknowledged, in an unguarded honest moment, that even if Iran had 
 a few nuclear weapons it would still be "not very dangerous." It is 
 ludicrous to depict the Iranian regime as a menace to the United States, 
 which has half the world's total military budget, troops based in 120 
 countries, and bases surrounding (and threatening) Iran in Afghanistan and 
 Iraq. As former Secretary of State Colin Powell's chief of staff Lawrence 
 Wilkerson has revealed, the State Department received an Iranian offer in 
 mid-2003 to end support for Palestinian militant groups, cooperate with the 
 U.S. in stabilizing Iraq and settling the Israeli-Arab dispute, and make 
 its nuclear program more transparent. In return Iran asked for an end for 
  
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 --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05 
  * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)