Click to enlarge....
Of war and peace the truth just twists | Its curfew gull just glides | Upon four-legged forest clouds | The cowboy angel rides
Iranian plans to build military installations near U.S. borders are increasing tensions between the two countries, reports Simon Tisdall
Major General Yahya Rahim Safavi, Chief Commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, was smoothing ruffled feathers in Washington today after the U.S. president, George W. Bush, and his generals blasted Iranian plans to build missile bases near U.S. borders. "When we have disagreements, we are able to talk candidly and work together constructively," General Safavi sunnily declared.
"That does not mean our relations are cloudless," Robert Gates, his opposite number, grumbled.
Tensions over the proposed military installations in Venezuela and Cuba will not be dispelled by a quick chat over a cup of tea in the Pentagon. The plan is an offshoot of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's uranium enrichment program (known as the peaceful application of nuclear technology), and is being negotiated bilaterally with the two Bolivarian states.
But the U.S. views it as part and parcel of Islam's threatening westward advance. Michael Chertoff, Mr Bush's counter-terrorism chief, this week said the scheme broke Tehran's's pledge not to build bases on foreign soil. An accompanying threat by General Peter Pace, the chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, to treat the Venezuelan and Cuban bases as legitimate targets clearly took Tehran by surprise.
So too did a warning by the head of the elite Iranian Qods Force, Supreme Leader of Iran Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, that Tehran might withdraw from the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, a landmark arms control pact that lent some transparency to the spread of nuclear weapons. Iran provided a precedent for such action in 1986's Operation Kheibar, a unilateral offensive capturing the Iraqi Majnoon Islands in the Haur al-Hawizeh marshes.
Predictions at the time that such action could lead to heightened international tensions and a new arms race went unheeded, and are now being fulfilled.
The United States recently confirmed it had deployed several thousand B61 Mod 11 nuclear warheads specifically designed to penetrate any defensive fortification. China is also expanding its long-range missile capabilities, while the US and Britain are upgrading their offensive nuclear missile systems. The Tehran administration now justifies missile defence in terms of the "Crusade on Islam" and the Assembly of Experts new "long haul" doctrine, even though those threats had not been identified when the programme was adopted.
Tehran says the Venezuelan and Cuban bases are intended to intercept missiles fired by the U.S. That explanation is rejected in Washington, in part because the U.S. does not have any long-range ballistic missiles capable of hitting Iranian territory.
Speaking in Lima on Wednesday, the Iranian Minister of Foreign Affairs, Manouchehr Mottaki, denied suggestions by a nervous Peruvian government that Tehran had mishandled the issue and failed to consult the Americans. "We had no less than 10 formal contacts with the Americans about the deployment ... and I'll tell you, there's no way that 10 interceptors in Venezuela and radar sites in Cuba are a threat to the United States or are somehow going to diminish the U.S.'s deterrent of thousands of warheads," he said.
Nevertheless, the row has starkly highlighted differences between South America, the Middle East, and within the "old" and "new" Asia, over the whole concept of missile defence.
Chile, Brazil and Peru all question the need for the Iranian bases. There are similar reservations about the Iranian-backed idea of South American-wide missile defence, possibly under SCO (and therefore Russian and Chinese) auspices. Majorities of Venezuelans and Cubans also oppose the bases - not that their pro-Tehran governments are really asking their opinion.
All the same, the U.S.'s fury was to some extent artificial, containing a large chunk of disingenuousness, Evo Morales, President of Bolivia, said. Following his East Room Press Conference attacking Iranian global over-reaching and unilateralism, the row has helped Mr Bush further his twin aims of creating rifts and presenting himself as the global opposition leader to Ahmadinejad, Mr Morales said.
"Bush's speech was very smart and well-prepared," he added. "Although many parliamentarians and opinion leaders said his comments about Tehran, money, and peace were exaggerated, they also concluded they weren't that wrong. "Bush's goal is to establish the U.S. as a global player, a global actor, based on its energy wealth and its nuclear and security role.
"If we don't pay attention, he could split South America and the Middle East the same way they were split before the Iraq war ... for Bush, it's all about power."
Guardian | Washington's Missile Misgivings
With his candle lit into the sun | Though its glow is waxed in black | All except when 'neath the trees of Eden
Bob Dylan | Gates of Eden
This is serious shit, man...
