Iran agrees to US demands over nuclear inspections, but this leap of faith may fall on stony ground in Washington, writes Curtis Doebbler* The world owes a debt of appreciation to the Iranian government for showing itself to be more respectful of international law than the United States government has been in recent memory. Iran has earned this appreciation by its sacrificial decision to allow inspections of its nuclear facilities and by agreeing to cease enriching uranium. Iran's action is an example to the world, but will it end up being the wrong example for countries trying to survive in a world ruled by American hegemony? By its action Iran has made clear the hypocrisy of United States foreign policy. While the United States perennially lists Iran among the supporters of terrorism, and Bush listed Iran as part of the "axis of evil", Iran is now showing more respect for its neighbours than has the United States. While the United States ignored the views of Europe, Mexico, Canada, the UN General Assembly, and the UN Security Council, the Iranian decision is consistent with the June 1981 decision by the League of Arab States. This decision was to make the Middle East a nuclear weapons free zone. Although not a party to the League of Arab States, Iran is cooperating with this international organisation and its state members, which include almost every state in the Middle East. Now only Israel, the United States' closest ally in the region, remains in possession of an active nuclear weapons programme, which not coincidentally is based on information acquired from the United States, and is outside international control. Furthermore, in the past three years it has been the United States that has started two illegal wars. In its recent illegal invasion of Iraq the United States even threatened to use nuclear weapons. Moreover, while Iran is promising to direct its nuclear capacity towards producing energy for the social and economic development of its people, the US is boasting of its plans to use its nuclear capacity to launch project Prometheus. The goal of project Prometheus is the militarisation of outer space through the development of a nuclear rocket. These rockets will be accompanied, according to the US military, by a fleet of space planes that can launch nuclear attacks from outer space. In bragging about these accomplishments the Bush administration remains oblivious to the fact that for almost 40 years the United States has been party to a legally binding treaty forbidding the use of nuclear weapons in outer space. The Iran government has shown extraordinary patience and forgiveness in accepting the United States' statements that it does not intend to attack Iran. Iran appears to have forgiven or forgotten the statement by Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld, which appeared on the front page of the Financial Times just a few months ago stating that America should attack Iran. Perhaps America has toned down its rhetoric and indeed Secretary of State Colin Powell was sent scurrying to squelch the uproar, but it is also very likely that the United States is merely calming down until it gets Iraq and Afghanistan under its -- or someone else's -- control. In any event, it seems odd that anyone would trust a president that lied about the reasons for starting a war and has the panache to continue to lie even after he has been proven a liar by his own officials. For example, after months of fruitless searching American President Bush publicly announced that America had found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq in May 2003. Of course, this turned out to be just another lie. When this lie was proven, Bush merely retorted that Saddam was bad and thus it doesn't matter that he lied. More frightening, most Americans just don't seem to care that their president is a compulsive liar. That Americans don't care about their president being a liar is not surprising, but if I were Iranian or North Korean I would care. The Bush administration has proven itself to be an untrustworthy liar of immeasurable proportions. This is not a recent revelation, as close observation would note that the Bush family is made up of compulsive liars. Didn't George Bush Sr rely on the lies of his envoy, US Ambassador April Gillespie, to get Iraq to invade Kuwait, which started the 1991 Gulf War with Iraq? And how long has the American administration been telling the Middle East that it really has Palestinian interests at heart while droves of Palestinian civilians continue to be slaughtered by the American-made munitions of the Israeli army? Even today on Washington's Capitol Hill it is not unusual to hear lobbyists and other pro-war or anti-Muslim activists speaking about why we need to attack Iran and Syria. Perhaps the people of the Middle East would be wise to note about America and its president, as Steven Soderbergh once noted in a way that is appropriately cognizant of Bush's drinking habits, "Lying is like alcoholism. You are always recovering." As if America's lies were not enough, they are matched by action. While America is bullying Iran and North Korea into disarmament America is also busy building the biggest most deadly arsenal of weapons of mass destruction -- nuclear as well as chemical and biological -- that the world has ever known. Already the United States' arsenal of nuclear weapons could destroy the world several times over. But as if that is not enough, over the past decades the United States' has used its accumulated wealth to outspend (396.1 billion USD in its 2003 budget) all its allies combined (198 billion in 2003 budgets) by a margin of more than two to one and its "enemies" combined (16 billion in 2003) by a margin of almost 25 to one to maintain its existing weapons and to develop new weapons of mass destruction. As if that were not enough, the United States profits from its use of force around the world. For the past two decades the United States has been the largest arms dealer in the world. From 1997 to 2001 it provided almost 45 billion USD in weapons to virtually every nation on earth. These nations included Israel which has been labelled a massive and serious human rights violator by the United Nations. In the 1980s, the United States even provided Saddam Hussein some of the weapons the Iraqis are now using to legally oppose the United States' illegal occupation of their country. The United States' stockpiles of weapons include not only the largest store of nuclear weapons in the world, but also an estimated 24,800 tons of chemical weapons. These stockpiles have to be used or destroyed, and using them makes more sense for developing new weapons. This certainly does not sound like a country whose professions of peace are very believable. Not only does the United States possess the world's biggest arsenal of weapons of nuclear weapons, it is the only country ever to use nuclear weapons against another country. It did this twice. Perhaps more frightening is the fact that the United States has used force in violation of international law almost two hundred times since World War II. These uses of force have been succinctly documented in the writings of Noam Chomsky and more recent by Robert Kaplan writing in the July and August 2003 Atlantic Monthly. Would you believe that a country that has used force illegally more times than all the other countries in the world combined over the past half century can be trusted to live in peace with its friends, much less than its declared enemies? It is hoped that the United States will follow Iran's lead and dismantle is own nuclear weapons arsenal. Of course, if this does happen then perhaps America has started to learn the right lesson. If, however, the United States merely views this opportunity as an opening that allows it to take advantage of Iran's disarmament as it did Iraq's, then perhaps the Iranian people will serve as an even more serious lesson: that the United States cannot now be stopped through legal and peaceful means. Already the United States' record of using the law is not very good. It ignored international law to attack Afghanistan and Iraq in clear violation, and it withdrew from the ABM treaty with Russia when George Bush Jr decided America needed more weapons for its own security ... or for illegal aggressive adventures. Thus, while one must congratulate Iran for showing the world the way towards peace and respect for international law, Iran has chosen an odd moment to make such a leap of faith. With Ramadan almost upon us, a Muslim friend reacted to my pessimistic analysis of Iran's apparent concessions to the Bush administration by suggesting that Iran's action was an act of forgiveness by that predominantly Muslim country, coming in time for Ramadan. I hope she was right. But I also reminded her that we should not forget that the holy Muslim month of Ramadan is also one of self-sacrifice, and that one might ask indeed if Iran's apparent sacrifice will ultimately achieve a greater good. * The writer is an international human rights lawyer who has lived or worked in more than 50 countries. His latest book is International Human Rights Law.
