by EDWARD S. HERMAN
Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare, by Gareth Porter, Just World Books, 2014, 310 pp. IMAGE/Just World Books
ournalist-scholar Gareth Porter has published another fine book on U.S. aggression, Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare, which follows in the footsteps of his 2005 study, The Perils of Dominance. The earlier book had as its main theme the idea that dominant U.S. military power in the 1950s and 1960s caused the U.S. leadership to believe that the threat of indefinite escalation would induce their Vietnamese enemy to surrender on U.S. terms, which the Vietnamese refused to do (his subtitle was Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam).
A main theme of the new book is that U.S. power has permitted it to bully and manipulate the UN, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and other elements of the “international community,” with the collaboration of Israel and its other Western allies, into selective harassment and even low-level warfare against Iran for its alleged quest for nuclear weapons. A semi-permanent crisis has been manufactured and institutionalized by the militarily dominant world bully, damaging the well-being of millions of Iranian civilians and posing the threat of open warfare.
Porter points out that the United States was highly supportive of the nuclear program of the Shah of Iran, who had plans for 23 nuclear power stations at the time of his 1979 ouster. Following that political change the United States quickly turned from encouraging Iran’s nuclear program to active hostility, going to great pains to discourage any material or technology transfers to the new regime, even browbeating suppliers from fulfilling contracts that would have permitted Iran to complete its single nuclear reactor.
There is no reason to disbelieve the Iranian claim that its aims initially were confined to completing its plant at Bushehr and continuing the operation of its Tehran Research Reactor for medical services. Porter makes the important point that the eventual Iranian effort to enrich uranium at home was a result of that Reagan era refusal to allow Iran to import that material. The refusal to allow Iranian imports of nuclear materials was also a denial of its rights under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. In the early years of the U.S. boycott of nuclear materials and know-how there was no suggestion that this was out of fear of weaponization. It was just hostility to a government that had replaced a U.S. puppet and was independent, i.e., no longer a U.S. client.
This U.S. hostility was displayed early in the Carter administration’s failure to try to stop the Iraqi invasion of Iran, for which the United States had advance notice in 1980. There was the hope that this war would bleed Iran and perhaps even overthrow the regime. Porter quotes Walter Mondale: “We believed that this war would put further pressure on the Iranian regime.” Reagan-era hostility went far in supplying Iraq with war materials, including cluster bombs, providing strategic advice, and working to persuade other countries not to supply arms to Iran. This country made no protest at Iraq’s massive use of chemical weapons against Iranian troops and civilians.
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