The USA and its NATO partners continue, with maniacal persistency, to view Israel as their strategic ally and assign to it the role of a gendarme – guardian of law and order in the region, a promoter of Western values and “democracy” American-style. They are stubbornly unwilling to see that Tel Aviv does not only destroy all efforts to peacefully resolve the regional conflicts but, in fact, initiates the further militarisation of the Near and Middle East, and the violation of the NPT regime. Arab countries rightfully ask themselves the question: Why is Israel allowed to have nuclear weapons and Arabs are not? Such a provocative policy of Israel’s leadership supported by the Israeli lobby and “hawks” in Washington is hardly in the interests of the American and Israeli peoples. The United States encourages, in many ways, Israel’s military preparations, including nuclear missile capacity building, along with financing the procurement by Tel Aviv of the most advanced American weapons. At the same time, the White House policy in regard to Iran and Syria assumes an openly hostile nature, often on the verge of hysteria.
Representatives of the USA and other Western countries have recently coined a new term – “responsible government” – by which they refer to Israel. Nearly all political analysts and the media, including some of the Russian ones, readily took the bait thrown to them from the corridors of the State Department and the Knesset, and started to bandy the term around. Supposedly, Israel’s leadership consists of civilized people who understand what nuclear weapons are and they treat them responsibly (at this point it is forgotten that, in the last 30 years, virtually all wars and armed conflicts in the region have been triggered exactly by this so-called “responsible government”), and as for the leaders of the other countries of the region – they are savages threatening our civilization. In spite of the fact that Iran and all Arab countries, unlike Israel, have signed the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons and comply with it, it is them who are becoming the targets of aggressive actions of Washington and its allies.
According to the logic of the White House, Muammar Gaddafi was an irresponsible politician and he was to be eliminated by any method, whilst the multifarious Islamist militants who succeeded him are “carriers of democracy”. In reality, it turned out to be the other way around. The Americans had to find this out very soon for themselves when a violent mob did away with a US ambassador and several diplomats in the same way as Gaddafi had been killed shortly before that. Washington’s expectations that the “Arab Spring” will result in the fact that emigrants, raised in American traditions, and puppet regimes will come to power in the Middle East have not been met. Radical Islamists are seizing power everywhere, and as a result chaos and violence are well established. Iraq is a graphic example of that: after the US occupation of many years, the spiral of terror and violence churns more forcefully each day.
Based only on the unfounded suspicions regarding the mythical military aspect of Iran’s nuclear programme, Washington literally squeezed out of the UN Security Council the adoption of four discriminatory resolutions in regard to Tehran, adopted dozens of unilateral restriction acts and ensured the involvement of its EU partners and other countries in the anti-Iran campaign. The USA welcomed the facts of the elimination of Iranian nuclear scientists with the help of Israeli agents. These crimes cannot be construed otherwise than as state terrorism.
In recent years, Israel in close cooperation with the USA and some other Western countries has launched massive cyber-attacks against Iranian industrial, nuclear and government facilities. The computer virus Stuxnet, which affected Iran’s nuclear centrifuges, had been created and released by Israel in cooperation with the National Security Agency of the United States. Former employee of the CIA and the NSA Edward Snowden confirmed this information in his interview to the German magazine Spiegel. According to him, the USA is actively cooperating with Israel in this field, and there is a specifically created body in Washington – the Directorate of Foreign Affairs – which is responsible for cyber-attacks. The American editions Washington Post and New York Times have also reported, referring to their sources, that the intelligence services of the USA and Israel are responsible for creating the malicious codes Flame and Stuxnet, which attacked the Iranian computers connected to the centrifuges enriching uranium in a nuclear reactor. It should be noted that Israeli and American hackers did not only try to put out of action the nuclear facilities of Iran, but they also attacked the control systems of power plants, oil, gas and other vital facilities. There was a real danger of major accidents and disasters which could have not only caused damage to the IRI’s economy and population, but they could also have created a threat of the emergence of environmental disasters and catastrophes at the regional scale (fires and spills at oil stocks and oil pipes, pollution of the Caspian Sea etc.).
The USA and Israel’s extensive propaganda campaign against Iran has not stopped either. Almost every day, threats of attacks on the IRI’s nuclear and other vital facilities are voiced by the leadership of these countries, including the first persons. Plans of various military operations are discussed and approved, with large-scale exercises and manoeuvres of the US and NATO Navy and Air Force regularly conducted in the Gulf, in the immediate vicinity of Iran’s territorial waters. The consequences of these threats and muscle-flexing are becoming increasingly obvious. Iranian citizens are constantly under stress, the Iranian national currency depreciates, businesses close down and are taken out of the country, people cannot plan their future, foreign investments have reached the historic bottom low etc.
In fact, Washington has since long been waging an undeclared war against Iran, and the numerous packages of international and unilateral sanctions are turning into some sort of choke collar around the neck of the Iranian people.
It is known that international terrorism forces, with obvious consent and sometimes direct support from Washington and its regional satellites such as Riyadh, Doha and Ankara, are enhancing their efforts and capacity in the Middle East and have markedly increased their terrorist and subversive activity. This also constitutes the double standards of the Western policy: for example, in Syria, where Washington-supported armed opposition forces, represented by the Free Syrian Army, and militants of the known terrorist groups – Al-Qaeda, Jabhat al-Nusra, Hizb ut-Tahrir – found themselves on the same side of the barricade. In their desire to overthrow Bashar al-Assad’s regime by all means, the USA turned a blind eye to the legalisation (which happened with its silent consent) of the armed gangs which are officially listed in the USA as terrorist organisations. It is also not by chance that, very shortly after the US Congress adopted the decision to render military assistance to the Syrian armed opposition, dozens of new terrorist acts and attacks on prisons were undertaken in Middle East countries, and as a result hundreds of Al-Qaeda militants escaped to freedom in order to continue Jihad and new killings in Syria. It is most likely that the American weapons and ammunition are meant exactly for them.
Paradoxically, the latter-day strategists from the Pentagon and Langley have learned nothing from history. Osama bin Laden, once raised in the depths of the CIA, got out of control of his masters and shocked America with the terrorist act of 11 September 2001. The same is happening now, when thousands of Islamist mercenaries and volunteers, hired with the money of Saudi Arabia and Qatar, have received American weapons, undergone military training in Turkey, Jordan, Pakistan and other countries, and are now fighting against Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria. Washington does not realise that all this human scum will soon spread all over the world and increase the threat of international terrorism many-fold.
Washington’s unilateral encouragement of Israel’s aggressive policy, nuclear ambitions, claims for dominance in the region as well as the instigation of the Gulf monarchies against Iran and Syria add to the rising tensions in such an explosive region. It is high time for the White House to make its imperial ambitions modest and shift from the policy of double standards in regard to Israel, Iran, Syria and other countries of the region. It is time for American strategists to understand that only through common efforts, with the participation of all countries of the Near and Middle East, without exception, it is possible to create a solid collective system of regional security and put an end to terrorism.
Stanislav Ivanov, Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Candidate of Historical Sciences, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.
