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As the two weeks’ truce between Iran and the United States enters extended time, it should be obvious to anyone who has not been taken in by the propaganda barrage launched by the US and Western governments against Iran that Washington is not genuinely interested in peace, and that its main, if not only,  purpose in agreeing to the Islamabad talks was to get time to replenish its  armoury of weapons in West Asia after Iran destroyed its bases in the Persian Gulf and Saudi Arabia.  A secondary purpose may also have been to  gain a respite for Israel from the merciless pounding it was receiving from Iran’s hypersonic and cluster missiles after it had exhausted  its much vaunted anti- missile defences.

Trump’s 15-point plan had been nothing but a demand for abject surrender that no one in the US could have believed would be accepted. By contrast,  Iran’s 10 points constituted  a genuine  peace offer that, if accepted,  would have helped resolved all remaining tensions in the Middle East. The  key requirement of this  plan was that the peace be regional, i.e. that it had to  be observed by not just the US but also by Israel. Israel destroyed that requirement on the very eve of the Islamabad conference by carpet bombing south Beirut. When, instead of roundly condemning Tel Aviv, Trump’s chief envoy J.D. Vance stated that  Lebanon was not covered by the two week truce, the talks turned into a farce, and Vance flew away empty handed. 

Today the war is on the verge of starting anew. Israel has taken the US’s blatant lie that the truce did not cover Lebanon,  as a green light to turn South Lebanon into another Gaza, before absorbing it into “Eretz Yisrael”. Despite a separate ceasefire agreement with the Lebanese government, it continues to bomb targets, especially civilian ones, in Lebanon. The US is blockading Iranian ports.   Iran has responded by lightly firing on three Indian oil tankers with, one suspects,  only small arms in order to turn them back and inform the world that the Straits are now closed. There is therefore  every likelihood that the war will resume when the US-extended truce comes to an end. If that happens, the only difference will be that this time it may become nuclear. 

I explained my reasons for believing this in a previous article in these columns. But the threat is so dire that its main conclusions need to be re-stated: To put it in brief, Netanyahu was able to get away, literally with mass murder,  and eventually genocide,  because the US, and for that matter the whole of Europe , was perfectly willing to let him. The only country in his gunsights that had the capacity to make nuclear weapons was Iran. Iran had attained 5 percent uranium enrichment with the highly fissile Uranium -235, as far back as in 2003, but had decided not  to go no further because – as its Supreme Leader officially declared – even  building, much less using,  a nuclear weapon would be sacrilege in the eyes of Islam.  

Despite years of alarmist rhetoric, much of it voiced by Benjamin Netanyahu at the United Nations General Assembly every year, US intelligence assessments repeatedly concluded that Iran was not moving towards developing nuclear weapons. But in the past year, and especially after the targeted assassination of Ayatollah Khamenei and most of his family, Iran could be forgiven for abandoning its resolve. 

As reported earlier in these columns a fortnight ago, a visibly stressed out Theodore Postol, emeritus  Professor of Science, Technology, and National Security Policy at MIT’s Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering,  had described in detail how Iran would need only five weeks to convert its 440.9 kg (972 lbs) of 60% enriched uranium hexafluoride into between 11 and 13 nuclear bombs.

After two surprise attacks by Israel,  the carpet bombing of Iran by the US and Israel designed to take it back to the stone ages, and the appointment of Mojtaba Khamenei as Iran’s supreme leader, it would be sheer madness to continue believing that Iran has not recognised the folly of its earlier commitment not to make nuclear weapons, and developed a sufficient number of bombs to obliterate Israel should it feel compelled to do so. 

Despite this,  Netanyahu, has continued to  launch  assaults on Iran  because this is the one way he has left of staying out of an Israeli prison on three charges of corruption– the fate that  one of his predecessors, Ehud Olmert,  suffered in 2016. Each and every one of Netanyahu’s actions since he became prime minister has been designed to keep him out of jail—his lawless takeover of Palestinian lands and properties in the West Bank and  East Jerusalem; his  genocide in Gaza, his two surprise attacks on Iran, and finally his brutal assault on Lebanon south of the Litani river and on South Beirut, of which the latter was  inflicted  with the sole purpose of derailing the Islamabad talks. 

Today the US Congress and Senate need to wake up to the danger that Trump and Netanyahu pose. The risk is of escalation into a wider nuclear war whose environmental consequences could be globally catastrophic. History offers only rough analogies: the Bronze Age eruption of Santorini devastated parts of the Aegean world and effectively helped finish off the Minoan civilisation. A large-scale nuclear conflict, however, could have far more severe and truly global climatic effects, potentially triggering a “nuclear winter” with consequences far beyond any ancient precedent.

Today’s victims of a nuclear winter will be the poor of the Earth, mainly in Sub-Saharan Africa, central and South Asia. That includes us. It is therefore not only Iran but the entire world that has a vital interest in the ending of the US-Israel war on Iran. There is only one set of terms on which this can be made to happen. This is:

Iran must not only re-open every nuclear enrichment plant  it possesses to inspection by the IAEA, but also every  laboratory or manufacturing facility  where it is capable of converting its enriched uranium into nuclear weapons. 

Israel must declare its stockpile of nuclear weapons and  accept inspection by the IAEA on the same terms that  Iran had accepted in 2015.   

 Israel must withdraw to its forces from Lebanon to the pre-1973 border between  it,  Syria and Lebanon,    following which Hezbollah must disarm completely and return to be being solely a political party in Lebanon. 

Iran must open the straits of Hormuz forthwith but be allowed to charge a toll from ships passing through them till it has fully repaired  the damage that the US and Israel have inflicted upon it in the last ten months.

Israel must withdraw completely from not only Gaza and the West Bank, but also  return  the property that Israeli settlers, backed by the Israeli Defence Forces,  have purchased or stolen at gunpoint from the residents of East Jerusalem.

The Agreement / Treaty must be signed by all three parties in the present conflict, i.e Iran, the USA and Israel, and its observance must be enforced jointly by Russia and China with the full backing of BRICS.

One has only to spell these requirements out to see how far away the US and  Israel are from  even considering them. But Russia, China and BRICS can jointly compel them to see sense. India, which was a founder -member of the non-aligned movement during the Cold War, and a founder -member of  BRICS, could have made a pivotal difference between success and failure  in this collective effort. But Prime minister Modi is now widely considered by the rest of the world to have  subordinated India’s foreign policy  to Israel in exchange for  a bagful of defence-related and spyware technologies.

 That is what has allowed Pakistan to step into the breach. But Pakistan does not command anything close to the influence India used to have. So treating it with cavalier disdain as Vance, Trump and Netanyahu have done, has been easy. The world is therefore on a roller coaster towards a nuclear holocaust. Russia and China have the power to stop it but are too severely compromised in western eyes to be able to do it through anything but the threat, and possible use,  of force.  The India of Mahatma Gandhi,  Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi  could have done it . The India of Narendaer Modi cannot.

© The Wire