A comment by Robert Crawford at Protein Wisdom led me to a letter from “Iranian-British academics and anti-war campaigners” that was published on February 2 in The Guardian. In the letter, they expressed their “deepest concern about the decision by the UK, France, Germany, US, Russia and China to report Iran to the UN security council.” In their view, this was “a step towards an international crisis which can lead the US to embark on another doomed military ‘solution’.”

Now let me get this straight. Here we have a bunch of academics and anti-war types (rather redundant, I’d say) complaining about a referral to the Security Council having as its purpose the prevention of nuclear proliferation. And here I’d always thought that the purpose of the Security Council was to prevent wars and that anti-war activists were in favor of using international organizations to prevent proliferation. How terribly naive of me!

The signatories to the letter were:

Anthony Neil Wedgwood Benn (born April 3, 1925), known as Tony Benn, formerly 2nd Viscount Stansgate, is a British politician on the left of the Labour Party. In 2001 he retired from Parliament “to devote more time to politics”. He became a leading figure of the British opposition to the War on Iraq, and in February 2003 he travelled to Baghdad to again meet (and interview) Saddam Hussein. The interview was shown on British television. He also spoke out against the Iraq war at the February 2003 protest in London organised by the Stop the War Coalition, attended by over 1 million people. In February 2004 he was elected the first President of the Stop the War Coalition.

He is a member of the Labour Party and has been in the House of Commons since 1983. An old boy of Adams’ Grammar School in Shropshire, he is a left-wing member of the Labour Party and is in the Socialist Campaign Group. He has a column in The Morning Star. A long-time supporter of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, he sits on its National Council. Before his election to parliament he was an elected councillor in the London Borough of Haringey (1974-1983). He is an elected member of the Stop the War Coalition steering committee.

John Rees is a British Trotskyist politician and a member of the Central Committee of the Socialist Workers Party. He is a former editor of International Socialism, National Secretary of the Respect coalition, co-founder of the Stop the War Coalition and vice-president (Europe) of the International Campaign Against Aggression on Iraq.

    Abbas Edalat—Imperial College & Campaign Against Sanctions & Military Intervention in Iran

    Ziba Mir-Hosseini—London Middle East Institute

    Elaheh Rostami-Povey—School of Oriental and African Studies

    Reza Sheikholeslami—Oxford University

    Hans Von Sponeck—former UN humanitarian coordinator for Iraq