Waste of Money

U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. John Bolton predicted the U.N. would suffer “grave harm” unless Secretary-General Kofi Annan “personally and publicly” repudiated his colleagues June 6 speech calling for more consistent and less hostile engagement from America. The Secretary-General has refused to do so. The question now is whether the U.N. is at death’s door?

The U.S. is the largest donor to the U.N. It contributes 22 percent of the regular operating budget and nearly 27 percent of the peacekeeping budget. It contributed $438 million to the U.N.’s 2005 budget of more than $1.8 billion. Congress repeatedly threatens to withhold or cut U.S. dues unless the U.N. reforms. In the 1990’s, the U.S. piled up so much debt in delinquent dues that its voting rights in the General Assembly were jeopardized. A U.S. proposal to tie the 2006 and 2007 budget process to reforms was opposed. The U.S. proposed the U.N. set an interim budget for the first three or four months of 2006 pending the resolution of a stalemate over management reforms.

The latest proposed reforms were recommended by a panel mandated by Congress led by Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker, and George Mitchell, a former Senate Democratic leader. The panel’s report, released in June 2005, called for corporate-style oversight bodies, personnel standards and accounting reforms. It also recommended the creation of a rapid reaction capability from its member states’ armed forces to prevent genocide, mass killing and sustained major human rights violations before they occur.

The Gingrich-Mitchell task force was one of six investigations of the U.N. initiated in Washington. Five Congressional committees and the Justice Department conducted investigations into the U.N. oil-for-food program. Isn’t it time the hearings, studies and money wasted by Congress on the U.N. be put to better use?

Is it any wonder so many Americans are opposed to the U.S. paying its dues to the U.N. -- including U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. John Bolton before he was appointed to the post, who maintained that the U.S. has no legal obligation to pay its U.N dues. – and expressed his opposition to the U.N. as an organization or being in the U.S.?

The time wasted by the Senate on confirmation hearings of John Bolton’s nomination as U.S. ambassador to the U.N. was epic and classic waste of U.S. taxpayer time and money. After countless hearings and debates, his nomination was rejected by the Senate yet President Bush used a constitutional provision that allows presidents to make temporary appointments without Senate approval during a congressional recess. It is doubtful the presidential power to bypass the Senate was intended to be used to escape opposition to a sensitive appointment. It was the first time since the U.N.’s founding in 1945 that the U.S. has made the appointment using a backdoor procedure.

Military Change

“The Bush administration is looking at this as a huge war zone. Next we’re going to have the Iranian campaign,” according to a former high-level intelligence official who spoke to reporter Seymour Hersh. The former intelligence official told Hersh that an American commando task force in South Asia was working closely with a group of Pakistani scientists who had dealt with their Iranian counterparts. This task force had been going into eastern Iran in a hunt for underground nuclear weapons installations.
In exchange for this co-operation, Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf had received assurances his government would not have to turn over Abdul Qadeer Khan – the father of Pakistan’s atomic bomb – to face questioning about his role in selling nuclear secrets to Iran, Libya and North Korea.

The Mujahedeen-e-Khalq, an organization of Iranian exiles who are opposed to Iran’s theocratic regime, is prepared to lead America’s charge for regime change the same way the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan did.

Israel is also prepared to repeat its 1981 Iraq mission and is believed to have built replicas of Bushehr and other Iranian facilities in the Negev desert for target practice. Iran has a publicly stated goal of destroying the Jewish state, something Israel cannot allow.

Iran has at least 12 nuclear-capable Kh55 cruise missiles, with a range of 2,975 km, it received from the Ukraine, putting Israel and several other U.S. allies within reach.

Iran is also quietly building a stockpile of thousands of small, hi-tech armor-piercing snipers’ rifles with scopes from Austria through the U.N. anti-drug program.

Any military action against Iran will reap dire consequences. Within minutes of any attack, Iran’s antiquated air and sea forces could threaten oil shipments in the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman. Iran controls the northern coast of the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow waterway oil tankers must navigate to get out of the Gulf.

Iran could activate Hezbollah militia in Lebanon to launch attacks on Israel and operatives could also attack U.S. interests in Azerbaijan, Central Asia or Turkey. “Iran can escalate the war,” said Nasser Hadian, Professor of Political Science at the University of Tehran. “It’s not going to be all that hard to target US forces in these countries,” he added.

Iran’s trump card would be to unleash havoc in neighboring Iraq, where Iraqis who spent years in exile in Iran have assumed control of the government. Though the U.S. alleges Tehran has already been interfering in Iraq, the low-level infiltration is minor compared to the damage Iran could cause by allowing Iraqi militiamen to operate from bases in Iran, or backing extreme Islamist groups.

Regime Change-Policy Change

The Islamic Republic of Iran is an “outpost of tyranny” and “remains the world’s primary state sponsor of terrorism – pursuing nuclear weapons while depriving its people of the freedom they seek and deserve,” President Bush said. He added in his State of the Union address: “To the Iranian people, I say tonight: As you stand for your own liberty, America stands with you.” The Iranian mullahs’ own polls show that 70 percent of Iranians hate the regime and want “regime change”.

Regime change did take place in 1979 when the Shah was sent into exile. So did America’s nuclear policy towards Iran. Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz all held key national security posts in the administration of President Gerald Ford in 1976 when it endorsed plans to build a multibillion dollar nuclear energy industry in Iran.

Their plan would have given Iran control of large quantities of plutonium and enriched uranium – the two key ingredients to producing a nuclear weapon. President Ford signed a directive in 1976 offering Teheran the chance to buy and operate a US-built reprocessing facility for extracting plutonium from nuclear reactor fuel. The deal was for a complete “nuclear fuel cycle” – reactors powered by and regenerating fissile materials on a self-sustaining basis – the exact ability the Bush administration is trying to prevent Iran from acquiring today. “I don’t think the issue of proliferation came up,” said Henry Kissinger who was Ford’s secretary of state.

President Ford’s administration commended Iran’s decision to build a massive nuclear energy industry, noting in a declassified 1975 strategy paper that Teheran needed to “prepare against the time – about 15 years in the future – when Iranian oil production is expected to decline sharply.” The Ford strategy paper went on to say the “introduction of nuclear power will both provide for the growing needs of Iran’s economy and free remaining oil reserves for export or conversion to petrochemicals.” Energy experts and U.S. intelligence estimates continue to project that Iran will need an alternative energy source in the coming decades. Iran’s population has more than doubled since the 1970s, and its energy demands have increased even more. Yet Vice President Cheney said: “They’re already sitting on an awful lot of oil and gas. Nobody can figure why they need nuclear as well to generate energy.”

“It is absolutely incredible that the very same players who made those statements then are making completely the opposite ones now,” said Joseph Cirincione, a nonproliferation expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “Do they remember that they said this? Because the Iranians sure remember that they said it,” said Cirincione, upon his return from a nuclear conference in Teheran in early 2005.

What is the best way to bring about the next regime and policy changes?

Iran Connection

The U.S. claims that Iran enriches uranium to weapons grade at its Bushehr nuclear facility in violation of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and that Iran did co-operate and work with al-Qaeda. Iran also has oil. Iran is the world’s second-largest oil producer, boasts 10 percent of global deposits and its natural gas deposits are the largest after Russia. Yet the Bush administration ignored the Iran connections because of its obsession to blame Iraq, according to former White House counter-terrorism chief Richard Clarke. It was also an Iranian, Saif al-Adel, the military head of al-Qaeda, who planned the 9/11 attacks. The 9/11 Commission report says Iran may have provided eight to 10 of the al-Qaeda hijackers with safe passage to and from training camps in Afghanistan. Iran provided “clean” passports for the “muscle hijackers” to transit Iran to and from bin Laden’s training camps between October 2000 and February 2001.

The Commission report says at one point Iran proposed collaborating on attacks against America but bin Laden declined, saying he did not want to alienate his supporters in Saudi Arabia. Iran granted safe haven and harbored al-Qaeda militants who escaped from Afghanistan. So the obvious question is, why did America not go to war against Iran where it will truly be welcomed as a liberator? Did America go to war against the wrong country because of another Bush mispronunciation?

Of course I say this with tongue in cheek because going to war against Iran is going to make the Iraq war look like a picnic. However, if they have verifiable nuclear programs that pose a threat to America then all the U.S. has to do with its sophisticated military machine is target and take out those nuclear facilities as Israel did in 1981 on the Osirak nuclear facility in Iraq without committing any ground forces.