[Marxism] UFPJ: Tell Bush and Cheney: Don't Attack Iran!

[Walter Lippmann <walterlx@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Tell Bush and Cheney: Don't Attack Iran!
April 14th, 2006

http://www.unitedforpeace.org/article.php?id=3238

United for Peace and Justice opposes any military action against
Iran, as well as covert action and sanctions. We reject the doctrine
of "preventive war." All diplomatic solutions must be pursued.

Send a clear message to the Bush Administration: Don't Attack Iran!
As a first and immediate step, we urge you to add your signature and
comments to AfterDowningStreet's petition to President Bush and
Vice-President Cheney opposing an attack on Iran.

Many UFPJ member groups, including AfterDowningStreet, Gold Star
Families for Peace, CodePINK: Women for Peace, Progressive Democrats
of America, Democracy Rising, and others, are all promoting this
petition. UFPJ encourages you to circulate this message and help
expand the growing list of signers.

Efforts to resolve any dispute with Iran should include promoting
negotiations â??- including Israel â??- on a Weapons of Mass Destruction
Free Zone in the Middle East. We call for the global elimination of
nuclear weapons. The United States should stop blocking negotiations
on abolition and demonstrate leadership by taking steps to fulfill
its own nuclear disarmament obligation. We call for the development
and promotion of sustainable energy alternatives. We need to stop
going to war for oil. And we need to address climate change. But
nuclear power is not the answer: Every nuclear power plant is a
potential bomb factory and a source of radioactive waste that will
remain deadly forever.

Additional Iran resources and action items will be available shortly
on the UFPJ website.

And, be sure to join us in New York on April 29 in the national March
for Peace, Justice and Democracy.

BACKGROUND

Seymour Hersh's stunning article in the April 17 New Yorker, "The
Iran Plans," revealed that the Bush administration has intensified
planning for bombing Iran, and that U.S. combat troops are already in
Iran preparing for military operations and recruiting local
supporters from minority groups. Of gravest concern, Hersh reported
that the Bush administration is giving serious attention to the
option of using nuclear weapons to attack buried targets.

>From Hersh's article and other sources, it has become clear that the
administration is prepared to launch an attack should Iran not accede
to U.S. demands that it abandon its uranium enrichment activities.
Regardless of whether the nuclear issues can be resolved, the
administration seems committed to regime change in Iran.

An attack on Iran would be an act of aggression, barred by the UN
Charter and prosecuted at Nuremberg. If executed, U.S. military
action would apply the Bush doctrine of â??preventiveâ?? war in an
unprecedented way that would set the template for years or decades of
regional and global violence, unrestrained by law. U.S. use of
nuclear weapons against Iran would be an atrocious act violating the
existing near taboo that has held since the U.S. devastation of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki. That would in turn make it far more likely
that the weapons will be used elsewhere as well -- including against
cities in the U.S.

While Washington accuses Iran of seeking nuclear weapons under cover
of a civilian nuclear power program, in violation of its obligations
as a non-nuclear nation under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty
(NPT), the U.S. is itself in blatant violation of its own NPT
obligation to eliminate its vast and sophisticated nuclear arsenal.
There is no evidence that Iran has a nuclear weapons program. The
U.S., however, retains a nuclear arsenal of more than 10,000 weapons,
some 2,000 on hair-trigger alert. With nearly 500 tactical nuclear
weapons deployed in 6 NATO countries, the U.S. is the only country
with nuclear weapons deployed on foreign soil. And the U.S. is
modernizing its existing nuclear weapons and publicly making plans to
develop and produce new ones.




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