Oiling the wheels of fear

THIS month, Iran is aiming to shift its dealing in petro or oil based dollars, into the euro currency. Despite meetings and attention from the European Economic Community and the UN this week, this is why Iran may be the next disastrous episode of US led military activity - and not the spun threat of nuclear warheads that we are being force fed to digest in our media.

I was working in Tehran in 2001, just prior to 9/11, and my experience at that time, and since, leads me to conclude that we are on the brink of yet another disastrous episode of military mayhem. As the 103rd British soldier dies in Iraq, and that country slips ever more into the quagmire of desperation, despair and civil war, the mistake which has been the invasion of that country has extreme implications for its neighbour, Iran.

Civil war in Iraq will increase the tension between Iran, the US and the United Nations, but the major players in this particular war game may be quick to look for diversionary scapegoats in the form of Iran, which the Bush administration may all too easily assume is an oil-rich fruit for easy picking.

I would like to put some context into what may be yet another bloody episode which Britain needs to avoid on the back of an increasingly discredited and desperate US political machine. At the moment, things seem to be all too quiet on the Iranian front, something we should be very sceptical about, especially as Iraq is imploding and the military machine (including its stalwarts such as Colonel Tim Collins and General Sir Peter Rose) are arguing for structured, face-saving withdrawal. Unlike Vietnam, the situation in Iraq has created a civil war. At least in Vietnam, the US intervention followed civil war in that country. The debate over Iran's nuclear capacity is a simmering pot waiting to boil.

Barbara Tuchman, in her book, The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam, describes the then President, Lyndon B Johnson, as having three essential characteristics - an ego that was insatiable and never secure, an endless capacity to exercise the power of his office, and, most striking for our current purposes, "a profound aversion, once fixed upon a course of action, to any contradiction". I believe that these elements can be found in the power players in Iraq, and the same will be the case in Iran. But exactly where is the threat from Iran? Is this, like Iraq, going to be an episode of fudged rhetoric, economic truths and negligent intelligence, largely based on the views of prejudiced exiled Iranians?

The Iranian people are renowned fighters who like the Serbs, know about defending themselves. One of the things I encountered in Iran was the prevalence of two factors - women and youth. Following the catastrophic Iran/Iraq war (in which the West happily brokered and supplied the Iraqi arsenal) 70 per cent of Iran is under 30 years of age. Unemployment is around 30 per cent and the young are generally well educated and frustrated.

The poor in Iran are hounded by the religious police and severely dealt with. When I was there a woman was stoned to death for adultery. People with placards denouncing themselves were paraded through the streets before they were whipped publicly outside governmental buildings. And this example is at the heart of the tension in Iran now.

There are the politicians and government officials who, along with the vast majority of the liberal thinking and seeking population, desperately want western values, western democracy and choice (which does not mean that they wish to change traditional and religious customs).

Women want to be able to choose what to wear, and the young want to be able to listen and watch what they want. And then there are the hugely influential religious members of the judiciary. While I travelled around the mountains in Iran and the middle class young listened to Western music far away from the police, there were those who demonise the West. Both I and the special advisor to the late Mo Mowlam were once chased through the streets by a stone-throwing mob. The vast majority of Iranians want to know more about the outside world and are simply desperate for more freedom at home. In a defiant gesture against the ruling religious fundamentalists, there are 64,000 current Internet "blogs" or web diaries - compared with a mere 50 in Iraq.

According to Nasrin Alavi, in the book, We Are Iran, there are more Iranian blogs than there are in Germany, Italy, China and Russia. Iranians want to talk to us and yet we are contemplating war against this already war-torn land.

So what would the war against Iran be all about, in reality? It's about money, and oil. Just as in Iraq, this is not about supposed weapons of mass destruction. Washington, and if we are not careful, the British Government, is managing to coerce members of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) into a diplomatic charade with the United Nations, who are falling for it just as they did in relation to Iraq.

The head of the IAEA, Mohamed ElBaradei has repeatedly stated that the inspectors have found nothing to support the claims of the US, Britain or Israel. It has complied with its obligations under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty whereas Israel has 200-500 thermonuclear weapons targeted at Iran.

John Pilger, the leading investigative journalist with whom I worked when I carried out legal work in London, has recently asserted that what the Bush regime fears is not Tehran's nuclear ambitions, but the threat Tehran is making over breaking the US monopoly in trading in oil by way of dollar currency. The effect on the US economy, Pilger argues, could potentially be disastrous. The dollar is becoming a meaningless currency. The US national debt exceeds $8trillion with a trade deficit exceeding $600bn. The estimated cost of the Iraq venture alone is put at $2trillion. In essence, the US empire building has been funded by creditors in Asia, and mainly China (which is probably why that other nation in the "axis of evil", North Korea, is left to its own devices). The fact that oil is traded in dollars is crucial to maintaining the dollar as the world's reserve currency. With Iran being the fourth-largest supplier of oil in the world, if they changed to deal in euros, other major institutions may follow and the US would be heading for bankruptcy. And the last person who threatened to shift from the dollar as a reserve currency was none other than - Saddam Hussein.

Ninety per cent of Iranian oil is in the strip of land called Khuzestan that runs along the border with Iraq. In January the Iranian government alleged that British Special Forces were already involved in undercover reconnaissance in this region, including attacks with explosives. So, it may be that Britain is already exploring the possibilities on behalf of the increasingly militarily incompetent US, leading the way for a predictable carpet bombing of key Iranian sites and cities, killing thousands of innocent people like you and me. Just like those who only wanted to listen to the world of pop music and use the Internet to talk to their fellow human beings.

The possibility that a British government could collude with the Bush administration over such a foreign excursion is a cause for utmost concern. For more than 50 years, Britain and the US have been huge players in Iran. In 1953, MI6 and the CIA overthrew a democratic regime and installed the Shah. The democratic leader of Iran believed that Iranian oil belonged to Iran. A bad mistake. The US and, potentially, Britain are now picking up the pieces of over 50 years ago, and could, yet again, make a right mess of it.

* Dr Glen Reynolds is a Darlington councillor and a lawyer for the Campaign Against Arms Trade.