Israel’s Greatest Fear - Iran!

sent to : South China Morning Post
c/o: Luisa Tam, Op-Ed Pages editor
Date: 3 August 2009

Israel’s Greatest Fear - Iran!
By Tony Henderson

Iran has stated repeatedly that nuclear weapons is not an option as it is an Islamic Republic; Israel’s political leaders repeatedly insist that Iran plans to built such hideously inhuman weapons. They are using every opportunity to scapegoat Iran and to psychologically soften opposition to a proposed military strike against Iran, already in advanced stages of preparation.

Israel has a lot to lose in any negotiated settlement, and, the Zionists see that for them everything is at stake, because the evolving political situation and the new information sources such as Aljazeera are making it increasingly difficult to get-away-with-murder. The blanket of naivete is lifting.

While Iran has a culture thousands of years old, Israel is an upstart illegitimate non-state yet to achieve legalised status and as an occupying power in its western powers gifted lands it has militarised from the very beginning of its existence. Thus the victories against neighbouring states in 1948 and 1967.

Israel’s early terrorism (using this term properly) resulted in the first use of suicide bombings and those incidents marked a line of demarcation between the Palestine Jews who had been living together with Arabs and Christians for millennia and the arrival of the European Jewish nationalists with their Zionist intentions.

Israel today is a stronghold of arrogance and is built on violence of all kinds, and fear. While the Zionists - for there is no other fitting name for the violent protagonists of that potential nation - have weakened and split the Palestinians into a wide if not total acceptance of a two-state solution, the Hamas stand is to have a single country, called Palestine, and all peoples that have a legitimate claim should live there with equal rights.

This means Moslems, Christians, Jews living as they prefer, where they prefer and how they prefer with the holy city of Jerusalem freely open and accessible to their various faithful, given that their respective sacred places of worship are in that city.

This brings us back to the fear the military of today’s Israel have of Iran, and, their so-far open-ended support offered by the USA, to the extent of allowing Israel nuclear weapons.

Oil and gas is the reason the US is interested in the Middle East. The entire industrial west is dependant on access to and the price of, oil and gas. Iraq is sitting on immense volumes of oil and Afghanistan is a strategically situated stronghold of independent minded people unaffiliated with the USA or the West thus posing a threat if alliances are made by Afghanistan with competing nations such as Russia or India or China.

While there is no oil in Afghanistan, that country’s territory forms a direct route to take the oil and gas from deposits in Central Asia to the Indian Ocean for transhipment. That would sidestep dependance on oil from the so far unresolvable problems of the ME.

American oil companies have acquired rights to a large percent of the output of the new fields in Central Asia, and the US and western governments see the area around the Caspian and in Central Asia as an alternative to dependence on oil from the Persian Gulf region.

US troops followed the signing of these contracts. US Special Forces began joint operations with Kazakhstan in 1997 and with Uzbekistan a year later, training for intervention especially in the mountainous southern region that includes Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and northern Afghanistan.

How to get the oil and gas from that landlocked region to the world market, that’s the question: not wanting to rely on either the Russian pipeline system or - the easiest available land route - to unconditionally befriend Iran and have access to the Persian Gulf.

Oil companies have explored alternative pipeline routes - westward through Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey to the Mediterranean; eastward through Kazakhstan and China to the Pacific; and, southwards from Turkmenistan across western Afghanistan and Pakistan to the Indian Ocean.

Iraq is more complex but still oil is at the base of the military action. The universally condemned Hussein was in charge of an oil rich nation and that left an open door target for sufficiently sanctioned military operations that would leave the US-plus British and the West in general - or the developed industrialised nations altogether - in position allowing strategic leverage over events in the Middle East.

Control over Iraq is a trump card which also plays-in armed-to-the-teeth Israel, granting political space to that occupying power - put in place by the same forces with an eye on the Suez Canal - to expand and consolidate its territory at the expense of the divided forces of Palestine.

Iran poses a problem to those nations seeking local power positions in that the country is striking a highly independent stance that radically opposes US and western hegemony in the ME. Iran has legitimacy and lawfulness in its efforts to claim a strong role in the affairs of the ME as it’s physical situation impels it to look to these as local affairs.

Iran has a cultural depth stemming even further into history than those mighty pillars of its Islamic foundation. This brings it’s peoples through its government to demand the same rights any nations would expect. It cannot be walked over with impunity, unlike its famed carpets.

Whereas, the US, the British, the French, are acting far from home and anyone would wonder just why they have such pretensions far from the fold, veiled by democratic and humanitarian posturing.

It is oil, its accessibility and its transport, and securing an uninterrupted supply that provides the reason for the militaries of the more powerful nations to set up camp in the homes and on the doorsteps of Afghanistan and Iraq.

However, that oil is bypassing equally deserving though disadvantaged not-yet-economically developed nations, and that is a situation that needs addressing.