Now is the time for clarity over Iran

Conflict isn't inevitable, it's not even likely ... yet. It is still possible to build alliances to wean Tehran from the bomb and America from an attack

by Mary Riddell, The Observer - November 4, 2007

The drums of war are beating. In America, talk of a strike against Iran grows louder. In Israel, hardliners claim Tehran is close to getting the bomb. In Bahrain, host to the US Fifth Fleet, the state's foreign minister imagines doomsday. 'We don't want to wake up and see our skies dark, our sirens blaring,' he says.

Last summer, the prospect of attack was negligible. Now a leading London risk analyst puts the likelihood at 30 per cent, and others think that estimate conservative. A security specialist at Chatham House tells me he 'cannot imagine George W Bush not doing something' if he thinks Iran is close to acquiring a nuclear weapon.

This is not about some distant tomorrow. If Bush launches an offensive, he is likely to act early next year, before the US presidential election campaign begins. The opening salvos of the Third World War could be fired within months. Catastrophe has rarely looked so close or felt so distant.

In Britain, there is barely a ripple of protest or fear. News that bacon sandwiches can cause cancer has provoked more alarm than any meltdown incubating in Washington or Tehran. The spectre of a nuclear-armed Iran has failed to ignite public fears on either side of the Atlantic, partly because people have heard it all before. Hundreds of thousands have died in Iraq in a war waged to wipe out non-existent WMDs.

This time round, the intelligence is just as thin, but the Tehran weapon, unlike the phantom Baghdad bomb, is a real and dreadful prospect. If developed, it will ignite an arms race in the Gulf states with consequences too ominous to imagine. But such a threat cannot be eradicated by war. It is no more possible to bomb knowledge out of existence than it is to crush 'terror' by conventional force. A pre-emptive strike on Iran's nuclear installations would plunge the Middle East into a war without boundary or end.

Undaunted, US hawks have advanced a second casus belli. Shia militias allegedly armed by the Iranian government are targeting American and British troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. Iran's Revolutionary Guards have been officially labelled 'terrorists', and there is talk of surgical hits against their bases. This war, though no less disastrous, is the kind that Americans could sign up to. And so might others. Unnamed Pentagon sources are reported to be saying that the British are 'on board' for such a mission.

One of Gordon Brown's closest allies told me recently that it was 'nonsense that Britain had agreed to write the US an open cheque on Iran'. No doubt that's true. But, equally, both Brown and David Miliband, perhaps mindful of the real threat to British troops, have declined to endorse Jack Straw's view that an attack on Iran is 'inconceivable'. Brown's inscrutability is, in other ways, not surprising. As Professor Ali M Ansari of Chatham House says, the Prime Minister is determined 'not to be Tony Blair', with all the global grandstanding that implies. So Brown, officially, is 'ruling nothing out'.

This caution seems not to mask any secret dissent from American policy. Despite Bush's recent, and inflammatory, US sanctions against Iran, Brown considers him a multilateralist in search of an international solution. A meeting last week with the moderate State Department third-in-command, Nicholas Burns, may have reassured the Prime Minister further at the start of a crunch month.

Reports by the IAEA nuclear regulator, Mohamed ElBaradei, and by Javier Solana, the EU foreign policy chief, seem likely to conclude that Tehran is not bending to international will to stop uranium enrichment. Moves towards a third round of UN sanctions are already foundering on Russian and Chinese objections.

In the absence of UN consensus, Brown will push for tougher European measures. Europe, with its close trade and banking links, is ideally placed to squeeze Tehran, especially now that the rogue elite is switching from dollars to euros. But Germany and Italy are likely to drag their feet, and Brown has no wish, insiders say, to 'thump his chest and say he's the man who can deliver Europe'.

Well, someone's got to. A united Europe is vital in weaning Tehran away from the bomb and America away from war. Instead, as the EU dithers, the only coalition of the like-minded appears to be the Bush administration, Britain and a sabre-rattling France. Despite dispiriting signs, disaster is not yet assured. Russia does not want a nuclear Tehran. Iran has nothing to gain from a collapsed Iraq. Professor Michael Cox of the LSE believes that, for Bush, a costly and reckless war is still 'plan B and not plan A'.

In addition, Ahmadinejad is a pre-modern despot, not a leader for the future. The West, obsessed by his external threat, has done shamefully little to highlight the internal danger of a cruel and audacious President. Not long ago, he informed students at Columbia University that there were no gays in Iraq, while omitting to explain why, in that case, he was busy executing them. Wider condemnation of such atrocities might, at the least, forge some bonds with Iranian moderates hoping to win next March's parliamentary elections and so pave the way to eject Ahmadinejad in 2009.

That outcome, though, is by no means certain. Democrats may be debarred from standing, and Ahmadinejad holds many aces. Oil at almost $100 a barrel props up the economy he has wrecked and buys him time for more brinkmanship. Any US aggression will rally Iran's people behind him. Surviving under their own delusional tyrant beats being bombed by someone else's.

Meanwhile, Bush lacks time and opposition. Barring Barack Obama, every leading presidential hopeful is ready to take a whack at Iran. Already, blue touchpapers are smouldering along the Iran-Iraq border, where any atrocity against coalition soldiers could be a curtain-raiser to war. It's also possible, according to Professor Paul Rogers of OpenDemocracy, that the Iranian Revolutionary Guards will fire the starting gun by a provocative act, such as seizing US sailors.

It is still conceivable that the Iran stand-off ends with a more peaceful world in which the nuclear nations look to their own hypocrisies (Trident included) and forge a new global compact on non-proliferation. But, first, the US will have to negotiate with Iran, no strings attached. A carrot-and-stick approach could work, but the carrot-and-bomb variant merely ratchets up the chance of cataclysm.

That is why war against Iran remains inconceivable. Gordon Brown and all leaders of good faith should say so. That marker against a ruinous conflict would find echoes in all the more sane corners of the world. Besides, the time for ambiguity is running out. Someday soon, the Prime Minister may find there is no fence left to sit on. Within the next few months, Britain could be asked to give the nod or wink required to sanction B2 bombers to fly out of UK bases in Diego Garcia and Fairford, Gloucestershire.

And then Britons would be on the streets, with billboards and loud-hailers, protesting against a folly that could make Iraq, for all its blood and heartbreak, seem a sideshow. War on Iran is not inevitable. It is not even probable. But the threat drifts closer every day. This is the greatest looming crisis in the world. And the West is staring at it, eyes tightly shut.