AMIDST IRANIAN WARNINGS AND DENIALS, US MAINTAINS CHARGES
By Safa Haeri
PARIS 4TH Feb (IPS) Ignoring Iran’s denials and counter-warnings, the Bush Administrations upheld and renewed its accusations against the Islamic Republic of Iran, denounced by President George W. Bush as forming an "axis of evils" with North Korea and Iraq.
While Iranian Foreign Affairs Ministry’s senior spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi called American outbursts as "hallucinations", Ayatollah Ali Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani, the Iranian regime’s number two man after the leader, told the Americans not to play with fire and remember that Iran was not a "place for adventurism", a reference to American military intervention in neighbouring Afghanistan.
Appearing on the leader-controlled, state-run television on Monday, he also warned that in case Washington attacks Iran, oil prices would shoot up, reaching more than 50 US Dollars a barrel and may be more, a forecast that oil experts contested, observing that there is more offer on the oil market than demand and anyhow, Iran was not in a position to use its oil export as weapon.
In a letter dated Sunday February 3, addressed to Mr. Kofi Annan, the UN Secretary General, the Iranian Foreign Affairs Minister Kamal Kharrazi denounced the "unfounded allegations" and "profanity" used by the US President "George Bush" in his "state of Union" speech, against Iran as "diversionary sensationalism".
Expressing "grave disappointment and strong indignation" about overall approach of the speech, Kharrazi stressed that " a self-centred, unilateral and naive policy" focusing on "threat and use of force" against what "US has arrogated to itself to call terrorism" while ignoring the root of terrorism, derogates the global momentum against the menace, the official Iranian news agency IRNA reported from New York.
At the same time, the regime’s highest military officers from both the regular army and Revolutionary Guards, including commanders of Air Force and Navy, all under the direct command of Ayatollah Khameneh'i, assured the population that "everything was under control", ready to thwart American military attacks on the country.
As Mr. Bush renewed his charges, his hawkish top adviser for national security, Ms. Condoleezza Rice said the Islamic Republic was "globally active in destabilising many sensitive regions in the world".
"They are a clear and present threat to us and to all the responsible and civilised world", Ms. Rice said of the three "evil" regimes.
For their part, both Defence and Foreign Affairs ministers Donald Rumsfeld and Collin Powell reiterated accusations that Tehran of helping members of the defeated Taleban and "Al-Qa’eda" terrorists, presumed by Washington to be behind the 11 September attacks on the United States, to escape Americans from Afghanistan to sanctuaries in Iran in the one hand and sending arms, money and professional saboteurs to Heart in order to undermine the authority of the pro-American Hamed Karzai’s interim government on the other.
The Province is controlled by General Esma’il Khan, an Afghan warlord who, after escaping Taleban prison two years ago, settled in Mash-had, the capital city of the north-eastern Iranian Province of Khorasan, where he was offered facilities by the Iranian authorities to combat the then ruling Taleban.
"Iranians must be reminded that the time of the Great Game is over", said Mr. Powell in reference to the famous war of influence in Central Asia between the British Empire and Tsarist Russia in nineteen century.
And as the American accusations were not enough, Mr. Shimon Peres, the Israeli Foreign Minister who is in New York attending the World Economic Forum told the Paris-based and headquartered "International Herald Tribune" that Tehran had supplied its Lebanese Hezbollah surrogate 8000 Katiusha missiles and rockets capable of hitting Israeli cities as far as Haifa.
He also said in the same interview that Islamic Iran and communist North Korea were co-operating actively in the production of 10.000-range ballistic missiles capable to reaching the United States.
Washington and Tel-Aviv also accused Iran to have tried to smuggle arms and ammunitions to the Palestinian Authority.
Iranian authorities reject all the charges as "baseless", "scenarios worked out by the "Zionists" and, in the words of the former president, made "for local consumption".
"Recent American accusations against Iran are inspired and dictated by the Zionist (Israeli) regime and is a proof that the Americans are not sincere in their so-called desire for rapprochement with the Islamic Republic", said the Iraqi-born Asefi.
Obviously, the Russians, Chinese and the Europeans who overtly questioned the American characterisation of Tehran-Baghdad-Pyongyang as "axis of evil" at the just ended Munich Conference of Security encouraged the Iranians.
"We don’t have one single proof that the Iranians are implicated in international terrorism", said the Russian Defence Minister Serguei Ivanov at the meeting, adding that Moscow would continue its nuclear co-operation with Iran, referring to the Russian-supplied1000 Megawatts nuclear power plant that is under construction in the Persian Gulf port of Bushehr, a project that Israel and the United insist that would serve the Iranians to develop their own atomic bomb.
Iranian Defence Minister Admiral Ali Shamkhani meanwhile warned Israel on Monday not to consider attacking its nuclear power plant, saying the Islamic republic would retaliate in ways "unimaginable" to the Jewish state.
"If Israel carries out any military action against Iran, it will face a response that will be unimaginable to any Israeli politician", he told Arabic-language "Al-Jazira" satellite television, stressing that he was not referring to a nuclear response.
"If the Americans have their list of rogue states, we also have our own list of such countries", Ivanov said, defending strongly Moscow’s ties with Tehran and Baghdad, but ignoring the North Korean "Evil".
The EU also faulted Mr. Bush, saying that it was not up to the Americans to divide nations and regime into the good and bad ones.
At the same meeting of Munich, German’s Defence Minister openly said the 15-nations European Union would not back Washington if it goes to war against Iran or Iraq.
Former US Secretary of State, Ms. Madeleine Albright, now working closely with the Iranian-American Council that lobby for Iran-US normalisation, also rejected President Bush’s "axis of evil", saying lumping the three together "seems to make little sense".
The 57-nations Islamic Conference Organisation also entered the controversy by rejecting both President Bush’s remarks and what it termed as "campaign against Muslim states" as "unjustified" and warned that such actions "take away all credibility from the international coalition against terrorism".
The Iranians also assure that their long and porous borders with Afghanistan are closed, not only they would not allow Taleban or Al-Qa’eda members to cross to Iran, but if they found any fugitives, they would be immediately arrested, "but not handed over to the Americans".
But while Iranian officials insist that the Americans lack convincing documents to back their accusations, Iranian analysts and experts both inside and outside the country turn the heat on their own leaders, particularly on Ayatollah Ali Khameneh'i whom they squarely accuse of "betrayal".
"Fully aware of his and the ruling conservatives growing unpopularity among the Iranian public, and in order to reverse the trend by mobilising the people behind himself, Ayatollah Khameneh'i, on advise from his friend and mentor, Ayatollah Hashemi-Rafsanjani, is deliberately provoking the Americans and Israelis to create a climate of fear, insecurity and chaos by giving the impression that the country might be attacked by the Yankees", explained one Iranian political expert.
"I would not be surprised to see Mr. Khameneh'i and his acolytes going as far as to engage the Americans into a limited military hostility", said Dr. Mehdi Mozzaffari, an Iranian professor of International Politics at Copenhagen University.
However, the strategy did not work so far, as the nation’s civil society, the youth, the middle class and particularly the elite, not only remained indifferent in the ongoing Iran-US war of words, but also blamed the ruling ayatollahs for the American hostile and aggressive attitude.
"If the Americans have failed to document their accusations (against Iran), our foreign diplomacy also failed to prove our innocence. They repeat our borders with Afghanistan are closed, but even a child knows that not only it is impossible, that the borders are wide open to smugglers of all kind, but also Afghan refugees can easily come to Iran using southern frontiers with Pakistan. Furthermore, how can we identify genuine refugees from the fleeing Taleban, noted the Iranian scholar, echoing similar remarks from colleagues and some reformers inside Iran, including lawmakers.
Highly informed Iranian sources confirmed the presence of Iranian revolutionary guards and security agents in Heart Province.
"On orders from Mr. Khameneh'i, General Naseri, a high-ranking officer of the revolutionary guards elite force of "Al Qods" (Jerusalem), is in charge of Iranian agents provocateurs and professionals from the Intelligence Ministry are in Heart, assisting Esma’il Khan with plans to destabilise the Karzai government", said Mr. Mostafa Danesh, an Iranian expert on Afghanistan based in Germany.
Reporting from Kabol, the French news agency AFP quoted Afghan officals as having said that groups from Mr. Osama Ben Laden’s "Al-Qa’eda" are hiding in Eastern parts of the country.
[In letters, faxes and e-mails to the White House, many Iranian expatriates expressed satisfaction at President Bush’s distinction -- contained in his State of the Union address --, between the Iranian people and the ruling ayatollahs he described as an "un-elected minority imposing its evil will over the Iranian people aspiring for freedom and democracy".
[However, they also warned him not to interfere in Iranian affairs and leave it to the Iranians to deal with the "power-thirsty" theocrats".] ENDS US IRAN WAR OF WORDS 4202