Is a military showdown with Iran in the offing?

President Bush said of late that he will never allow Iran to develop nuclear weapons. This said, and Iran's flat rejection the European Union's package of incentives which was offered to it in return for a halt in uranium enrichment makes the issue all the more ominous. Instead, Iran vowed it will never stop uranium enrichment and what appeared to be a challenge to the West launched a new phase in a heavy water project despite a looming UN sanctions.

But on the other hand, in what seemed to be stonewalling on its part, Iran signalled its readiness to engage in no-holds-barred negotiations with the West to defuse the mounting crisis.

Foreign Minister spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi said that "despite Iran's strong line on enrichment, it remained keen for new talks. It is about time the European side returned to the negotiating table without prejudgments and bad humour so that we talk and reach a result."

Tehran described its atomic programme as irreversible. On the other side of the globe, President Bush vowed never to "permit the world's most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world's most dangerous weapons". President Bush with his neocon advisers has proven to be willing to implement their threats even in the face of considerable international and domestic opposition, as the case of Iraq had clearly shown.

Elite troops

In a January 2005 report in the New Yorker, US journalist Seymourt Hersh claimed that American elite troops are already deployed in Iran to mark potential military targets. The US administration remained ambivalent. It did not confirm or deny Hersh's findings but merely sought to minimise its impact. Instead of denying the report in its entirety the US government only said that "the article was filled with inaccurate statements".

Bush himself has repeatedly said that he would not rule out the "option of war" albeit he often said that resort to war will only be considered when diplomacy runs its course. After Iran signalled its dissent to accept the European carrot, is the region on the verge of a military strike or even a full-blown war?

The UN nuclear agency declared Iran had failed to halt nuclear work by the August 31 deadline. "Iran had not addressed the long outstanding verification issues or provided the necessary transparency to remove uncertainties associated with some of its activities." The UN report did not go down well in Washington. The UN Security Council must begin drawing up sanctions against Iran, US Ambassador John Bolton said.

It is very unlikely that the UN Security Council will agree on a set of sanctions against Iran as both Russia and China still insist on diplomacy as sanctions have always proven to be counter productive. Even Iran shrugged off the prospect of sanctions and said that their effect on Iran will be minimal and might hurt the West more than Iran.

Sanctions

As is evident now, both diplomacy and European commercial incentives have failed to wean Iran off its enrichment activities. Whatever sanctions are applied assuming that both Russia and China will fall in line will have zero chance of persuading Iran to abandon its nuclear ambitions. Most certain is the fact that Iran will continue its development without any slowdown until it has passed the "redline" of possessing the necessary raw material to produce nuclear bomb when ever it chooses to do so.

On the contrary, Iran is racing ahead with its nuclear programme, resigned to the fact that war against it verges on the insane and will never be seriously considered. Iran finds it extremely difficult to believe that President Bush could actually do anything so crazy as to launch a military attack and that even if he wanted to, the Congress, the Pentagon and the American public would never countenance such an action.

We hope that Iran is not misreading Bush's intentions again as was the case with Iraq. Hopefully, Iran will not be drawn into this faulty premise. The present US administration is determined not to allow Iran to become a nuclear power.

As John McCain once asserted: "The only thing worse than exercising the military option on Iran, is a nuclear armed Iran." President Bush, on the other hand, vowed that he will not leave office without first ensuring that Iran cannot become a nuclear power. He has probably given the leaders of Israel a similar promise.

That means that he is committed to attack Iran militarily before the end of his second term if all other means fail which they are it seems destined to fail. Bush deeply believes that Iran poses an existential threat to Israel and to the American people as well. Furthermore, the present American administration has a deep conviction that Iran is a stumbling block in the face of the American objective of reconfiguring the Middle East in a way to become more amenable to American and Israeli interests.

Accordingly, the negation of Iran's nuclear programme in the eyes of some analysts is a sine qua non equal if not higher on his list of priorities than victory in Iraq. The catastrophic consequences of such a showdown are too numerous to catalogue. It is simply the height of folly but with the neocons having the upper hand in Washington, the world cannot rule out the possibility of witnessing another act of foolishness.

Professor As'ad Abdul Rahman is the Chairman of the Palestinian Encyclopedia.