Washington is using Israel in order to mount a proxy war against Iran, writes Ismail Salami in Tehran The Israeli narrative of launching an attack on Iran's nuclear plants has been so overpoweringly hyped up and taken for granted by the Israeli media that there is almost the certainty that such an attack will happen and that Iran will sit idly by, befuddled, thunderstruck and petrified. However, the Western and Israeli media have aggrandised the military prowess of Israel to the skies and underestimated that of Iran. The US-led broadsides against Iran have been geared towards inflating the Iranian nuclear threat and manufacturing the illusion of nuclear weapons being held by Iran, while at the same time relegating the country's military might to a pitiful minimum, such that Iran will have no choice but to buckle under the military might of the Zionist regime. The fact is that Israel has a long history of showing its teeth to and spewing out threats against Iran, but it has never mustered up the courage to launch an attack on the country as it knows what would be the consequences of such foolhardiness. Despite the claims of some Western analysts, such as Richard Silverstein, who have even elaborated an Israeli war plan against Iran, a glance at the history of the threats against and lies about Iran sheds light on these claims and reveals who really steers such threats against the Islamic Republic. With the advent of the Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1979, the US government realised that it had lost a long-time ally in the Middle East, namely the US-installed puppet shah, and that its regional sway would now dwindle significantly. On the strength of this new realisation, Washington envisioned other ways to maintain its regional influence, on the one hand, and keep an eagle eye on the new developments and their effects on the region, on the other. Iran was now emerging as a new power that was predicted to exercise great political influence in the region and inject new blood into the veins of the Middle East. In order to stymie the materialisation of such ideas, the then US president, Jimmy Carter, afforded Israel the use of satellite spy photos in 1979, thereby implicitly giving the Zionist regime the green light to use them for future pre-emptive strikes in the Middle East. Emboldened by this gesture of amicability, Israel, which has refused to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) despite its colossal nuclear arsenal, felt free to explode its first nuclear bomb in the Indian Ocean. US officials have never accepted that this was a nuclear explosion since. Since then, Israel has directed its baneful attentions towards the Islamic Republic with the encouragement of Washington, and it has availed itself of any chance to deal a blow to Iran and its allies. In order to further corner Iran, Washington decided to engage the Iranian nation in a lethal war, for which it thought the Iranians were not ready in view of the still-young Iranian Revolution. To this end, the US encouraged and funded the despotic Iraqi ruler Saddam Hussein to mount an invasion of Iran in an attempt to catch it unawares. In 2002, The New York Times published a horrific report indicating that a covert US programme during the Reagan administration had "provided Iraq with critical battle-planning assistance at a time when American intelligence agencies knew that Iraqi commanders would employ chemical weapons in waging the decisive battles of the Iran-Iraq war." Paradoxically, the covert programme was conducted at the same time that Reagan's top aides, including secretary of state George P Shultz, defense secretary Frank C Carlucci and Colin L Powell, then national security adviser, were voicing their condemnation of Iraq for using chemical weapons, especially after Iraq attacked the Kurds in Halabja in March 1988. Is there no limit to the US hypocrisy? Iraq is a Muslim country, and Iran had reservations about bombing Iraqi cities, lest this lead to human losses, even though the Saddam regime bombed and re-bombed Iranian cities and inflicted huge amounts of damage. In sum, Washington encouraged and financed the Iraqi dictator and fought its war of cowardice against Iran through the Iraqi regime. The war came to an end in 1988 with inconceivable human losses on both sides. Iran then embarked on the costly reconstruction of its infrastructure, severely damaged by Iraqi missiles and bombs thanks to the financial support of the US government. However, there was no end to Washington's malicious policy of devastation. Now that Washington had been frustrated in its gambit against Iran, it sought another adversary to replace Saddam. Israel was thought to be the perfect substitute and a formidable candidate for this mission, as it contained a Jewish population repeatedly condemned by Iranian leaders as an occupying regime. The Zionist regime also harboured overt aversion for Islamic Iran. Under the pretext that Iran is seeking a nuclear weapons programme and might jeopardise or even exterminate the Zionist regime, Washington has handed Israel the excuse to initiate a series of threats against the Islamic Republic. All this chicanery has been done with the sole purpose of destroying the Iranian nation. According to a report by Reuters, the US, its European allies and even Israel in reality agree on three things about Iran's nuclear programme: Tehran does not have a bomb; it has not decided to build one; and it is probably years away from having a deliverable nuclear warhead. A highly classified 2011 US intelligence assessment also largely affirms that Iran is not seeking a nuclear weapons programme, a view originally put forward in 2007. Known as the national intelligence estimates, the assessment concludes that "Tehran halted efforts to develop and build a nuclear warhead in 2003." Yet, despite the testimony of its own intelligence agencies, Washington keeps up its mulishly adamant stance on Iran, disseminates false information on Iran's nuclear energy programme, and has been goading Israel into attacking Iran. Israel, however, has been paralysed by fear about starting such a war of no return and instead has been continuing with its rhetoric about the dangers of a supposed Iranian bomb. In the final analysis, the US is intent on fighting a proxy war against Iran through Israel as it did in the past through Iraq. Washington is doing this in order to gratify its own morbid desire to attack Iran. The writer is an Iranian Middle East expert.
