Consequences for Iran's Defiance

"There will be consequences for Iran's defiance"

"There will be consequences for Iran's defiance". Or so President Bush has decreed. Iran must face the consequences for asserting its national sovereignty and international rights under the NPT. Iran is to be held accountable for refusing to acquiesce to the caprices of the United States; for refusing to surrender to Zionist hegemony in the region and for being an unabashed Islamic State. In short, Iran has dared to challenge the imperial authority of the United States; so in the parlance of the Bush regime, it is a "Rogue State".

Iran shall once again be associated with Islamic fanaticism, although for the Bush administration, which is itself open to accusations of religious fundamentalism and extremism, the preferred phrase is Islamic fascism. Of course the term is intellectually vacuous: it would be far more sensible to do away with the hyperbolic and pejorative suffix and simply refer to Iran as an Islamic State.

However, no amount of sophistry or religious malediction will obscure the fact that US imperialism lacks political credibility in the World today. The Bush doctrine of a "clash of civilisations" (or more accurately a clash of ideologies) in the terms of good and evil is nihilistic; it leaves no room for compromise.

The problem with this worldview is that it is dependent upon two key factors: the first that the rest of the World is prepared to be polarised along these lines; and secondly that the United States can win this conflict. This is where it falls down, even if the United States could walk the rest of the West into this apocalypse – which it was unable to do with Iraq – the US has proved more effective at projecting its power through diplomacy and intimidation than through military might.

This is where we are in the Iranian nuclear dispute; the bombast and rhetoric of the Bush administration does not veil US impotence: they are utterly incapable of preventing Iran from continuing with its nuclear energy programme, as they are well aware. All that they can do is engage in diplomacy with Iran, yet due to the ideological fanaticism at the core of the Bush administration, the US is unwilling to do this. In fact, this conflict is entirely of the United States making, yet paradoxically, having stage-managed the crisis, the US finds itself unable to resolve it.

Undoubtedly there will be consequences for Iran's defiance but they are unlikely to be to Bush's liking.