In another article Webster Tarpley points to Tony Benn, 'the grand old man of the left wing of the British Labour Party', who opens his editorial in The Guardian with the sentence: 'Now that the US president has announced that he has not ruled out an attack on Iran, if it does not abandon its nuclear programme, the Middle East faces a crisis that could dwarf even the dangers arising from the war in Iraq.'

The new Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad puts the charges against his country into perspective: '"A country, which possesses the biggest nuclear arsenal, embarks on proliferation of nuclear weapons in defiance of the safeguards and threatens to use them against others, is not competent to comment on peaceful use of nuclear know-how by other states." [... Ahmadinejad] stressed that instead of raising any claims, such a country should be brought under the supervision of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and be accountable for its conducts and measures.'

Iran unjustly accused
The Hindu writes that it would be unreasonable to summon Iran before the U.N. Security Council (precisely what that country is now being threatened with) because the IAEA 'in the past two years, has found discrepancies in the utilisation of nuclear material in as many as 15 countries. Among these are South Korea, Taiwan, and Egypt.' The newspaper probes the subject matter and then lists three arguments that illustrate how bringing Iran before the U.N. Security Council would be the wrong thing to do: 'First, the NPT allows uranium conversion and other processes central to enrichment. Secondly, the Esfahan facility is under IAEA safeguards and as recently as September 2, i.e. nearly a month after Iran resumed uranium conversion there, the Director-General of the Agency, Mohammad El-Baradei, certified that "all the declared nuclear material in Iran has been accounted for and, therefore, such material is not diverted to prohibited activities."' Thirdly, The Hindu believes that it is not a violation to bring the voluntary suspension of the pre-stage of uranium enrichment process to an end, which is what Iran recently did.

Webster Tarpley writes: 'Underlying the entire Iran nuclear question is the hypocrisy of the double standards applied by the US. Just a few weeks earlier, the US had granted India various forms of nuclear assistance, despite India's active nuclear bomb program. Brazil was getting ready to export nuclear fuel, and yet was not targeted in the same way as Iran. The lesson is clear: countries the US is seeking to cultivate are not harassed, but critics of US policy are put through the wringer.'

Tarpley: Strategy for attack on Iran is divide and conquer
Not everyone views strategic oil and military interests, or the removal of a threat to Israel, as the only objectives behind the coming war against Iran. Webster Tarpley finds an interesting reason for an attack on Iran in the strategy of divide and conquer. According to Tarpley the same strategy is now being pursued in Iraq. He quotes Bernard Lewis, currently professor emeritus, who during World War II was an agent of the 'British Arab Bureau, the imperialist agency charged with keeping the Arab world weak so as to preserve London's domination'. Tarpley writes: 'Over more than a century, the British have sought to control the Arab and Islamic sense of identity by finding, publicizing, and glorifying the most backward and self-destructive tendencies in one and a half millennia of Moslem history, attempting to accredit these as the true essence of Islam. Bernard Lewis' glorification of Moslem irrationalism thus prepares the way for the ideology attributed to al Qaeda. Lewis' second idea is that the existing Arab countries are illegitimate, and need to be carved up into a crazy quilt of ridiculous petty states who will be unable to threaten any important interest of Anglo-American imperialism.' Tarpley sees Lewis as a follower of T. E. Lawrence (of Arabia), whose stated goal was: '[...] the breakup of the Islamic bloc and the disruption of the Ottoman Empire [...]. [...] If properly handled the Arab states would remain in a state of political mosaic, a tissue of jealous principalities incapable of cohesion, and yet always ready to combine against an outside force.' Tarpley: 'In other words, the eternal British mantra of divide and conquer, now embraced with giddy enthusiasm by fanatical parvenu neocons, greedy barbarian Bushmen, and cost-plus arrivistes along the Potomac.'

Lubbers allows nuclear scientist to go free at direction of CIA
In mid-January of this year Seymour Hersh wrote in The New Yorker about one of the ways in which Pakistan has benefited from its cooperation with the US: 'The official added that the government of Pervez Musharraf, the Pakistani President, has won a high price for its cooperation—American assurance that Pakistan will not have to hand over A. Q. Khan, known as the father of Pakistan's nuclear bomb, to the I.A.E.A. or to any other international authorities for questioning.' That high price was collected earlier, as became evident about a half year after the publishing of Hersh's article. It was then that former Dutch Prime Minister Ruud Lubbers confirmed in an interview on the Dutch radio program Argos that the CIA asked him in 1975 and again in 1986 to refrain from arresting Khan. Writing earlier this month in reference to a broadcast by the Dutch TV news magazine Nova on this issue, the Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad said: 'The case file of the Pakistani nuclear scientist Khan has gone missing from the legal archives at the Amsterdam District Court. It was there that he had been convicted for the theft of classified information related to nuclear weapons technology. Neither the judges nor the record-keepers at the court have any idea what happened to the file.' It took place at the direction of the CIA, claims the departing vice-president of the Amsterdam District Court, Minister Anita Leeser. A few days later the NRC Handelsblad responded with an article bearing the headline: ''CIA involvement? Absurd'