Were it not that Iraq proved to be such an endless and costly venture, the United States would have moved long ago against Iran, #2 on the axis-of-evil hit list. As early as January 2005 Vice President Cheney was accusing Iran of sponsoring terrorism against Americans and building a “fairly robust new nuclear program” that threatened Middle East stability and world peace. Iran might emerge as a dominant power in the region and—as with Iraq—we must not allow that to happen, Cheney warned.40 In 2007, according to one Washington official, the vice president was holding meetings in his office on “how to create a casus belli between Tehran and Washington.”41
Iran had other traits akin to pre-invasion Iraq: a high literacy rate, a better than usual Third-World living standard, a recycling of some of the oil profits into the social wage, and a leadership that was charting an independent course. And as we might expect, Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was diagnosed by US media pundits as “dangerously unstable” and “crazy”(except for those commentators who saw him as devilishly “cunning”).
All sorts of caveats were directed at Tehran for having pursued an enriched uranium program—which every nation in the world has a right to do. It was repeatedly assumed by US and Israeli leaders that Iran would want a nuclear program for the purpose of building bombs. In fact, Tehran planned to make the country less oil-dependent by building nuclear power plants. Iran was the world’s fifth largest exporter of crude oil, but its crude reserves were likely to run out within twenty years. Even today, the lack of refining capacity forces the Iranians to import about 30 percent of their gasoline.42
By 2007 the US Navy was stopping Iranian ships to check for arms shipments. US secret operatives were training Iranian mercenaries to spy, recruit, and conduct terrorist attacks within that country. Washington also imposed economic and political sanctions on Tehran.43 The Pentagon announced that 10,000 sites in Iran had been mapped and targeted for aerial destruction, a threat reiterated by the Obama White House in 2010. President Obama augmented the already massive military buildup with nuclear-armed Trident submarines and two US carrier groups capable of delivering death and destruction upon Iran and its eighty million inhabitants.44
These increasingly menacing threats were in violation of UN Security Council Resolution 1887 (September 2009), which requires nation-states to peacefully resolve disputes related to nuclear issues, in accordance with the ban laid down by the UN Charter on the use or threat of force.45 Meanwhile, in a moment of truth, the CIA stated its inability to find credible evidence that Iran posed any kind of threat to the United States, nuclear or otherwise.46
In 2009 Obama stated, “No single nation should pick and choose which nation holds nuclear weapons.”47 But that is exactly what the United States was trying to do in regard to a benighted North Korea and Iran. The US policy has been to maintain and expand its own immense nuclear arsenal while pressuring other nations to refrain from developing such weapons. The empire never has to abide by rules it imposes on others.48