News Update - War on Iran

News Update - War on Iran

Weather clears for a US strike on Iran
By Victor Kotsev

War drums are beating in the Middle East. In a short time, the
United States has increased the number of its carrier strike
groups opposite Iran to three, and reports are raining down of a
tightening ring of American and Israeli concentrations all around
the Islamic Republic. On the diplomatic front, the Israelis are
unusually concerned about their international image (for
example, making concessions in Gaza) while their top officials -
including Defense Minister Ehud Barak and Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu himself - are shuttling between Jerusalem
and Washington.

Everybody in the region is restless. Turkey is making
spectacular diplomatic pirouettes. Egypt is quietly seething, and
Saudi Arabia less quietly so. Jordan's king had ruefully predicted
war if no peace was achieved by the summer [1], and summer
has now come. Syria and Lebanon are positioning themselves to weather
the coming storm [2]. Yemen is in disarray. Russia, China, India,
and a host of other powers are vying to make the best of the
fracas. The Iranian regime itself appears to be digging in for a
fight.

By most accounts, a cataclysm is approaching. The situation,
according to analyst Tony Badran, is "arguably similar to the one
immediately preceding the 1967 Arab-Israeli war". Some very
detailed analyses of the technical details of an Israeli strike on
Iran are also available, such as David Moon's Asia Times Online
story "The anatomy of an attack on Iran" [3]. An Israeli
expedition into Iran may well take this course; however, at this
point it seems very likely that if a strike occurs, it will involve
Israel and the US acting in tandem.

The US appears to have stepped up covert operations and
preparations for action against Iran. Persistent reports reveal that
American forces have been concentrating around the Persian
Gulf and the Caucasus, most remarkably in Yemen and
Azerbaijan, and that US and Israeli air forces have recently been
practicing joint bombing drills. It may be, therefore, that the US
is simply on a geostrategic collision course with Iran, and
doesn't feel confident enough that Israel will be able to do the
job.

According to a Stratfor monograph from February 27 titled "The
Geopolitics of Iran", for example, the Islamic Republic cannot put
up with a US presence on its borders, and has consequently
tried hard to "manipulate ethnic and religious tensions in Iraq
and Afghanistan to undermine the American positions there and
divert American attention to defensive rather than offensive
goals".

Writes Stratfor:
The greatest threat to Iran in recent centuries has
been a foreign power dominating Iraq - Ottoman or
British - and extending its power eastward not
through main force but through subversion and
political manipulation. The view of the
contemporary Iranian government toward the
United States is that, during the 1950s, it assumed
Britain's role of using its position in Iraq to
manipulate Iranian politics and elevate the shah to
power.

This in itself - not to mention the interests of other vital American
allies such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt - might be reason enough
for an American military intervention.

However, all this is only a part of the picture. An attack on Iran
will likely spark a conflict that is brutal and intense, but relatively
short-lived and militarily inconclusive. The US interest is to end
up with as little spilt blood as possible. As a rule, no Middle East
war in the last 60 years has lasted for much longer than a
month (the shortest and most spectacular one ended in just six
days), and this is no coincidence. Nobody in the region, Iran and
Israel included, can sustain an all-out campaign for very long,
and in fact, nobody is likely to even attempt an all-out campaign.
Such an option would be too devastating given the
destructiveness of modern military technology and carry too
great a risk of outside intervention. Russia has also repeatedly
warned that it would not tolerate a major war close to its borders.
Stratfor's broader geostrategic prognosis also points to a
deadlock of sorts:

As always, the Persians face a major power
prowling at the edges of their mountains. The
mountains will protect them from main force but not
from the threat of destabilization. Therefore, the
Persians bind their nation together through a
combination of political accommodation and
repression. The major power will eventually leave.

Persia will remain so long as its mountains stand.
The main impact of a military campaign, therefore, would not be
military. The true battle will be one of persuasion, and the target
will be the Iranian people as well as the Muslim and broader
international community. Luckily for the US, Israel, and their
Middle Eastern allies, it appears that there is a growing
international consensus against Iran, and that at the very least
most states would once again refrain from too much criticism of
the dominant superpower. If that happens, the Iranian regime
could be quickly humiliated and weakened, its nuclear program
set back by many years, and its international isolation deepened.
In this case, seething internal tensions would eventually lead to
regime change in the Islamic Republic.

Moreover, such a development would shake up the status quo in
the Middle East, giving US President Barack Obama much
needed leverage to push through an Arab-Israeli peace
agreement. Having fulfilled his most important pre-election
promise, in turn, would make Netanyahu more prone to
compromise. Hamas would be left adrift, more or less, and
initiatives like Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas'
recent peace public relations campaign might be able to take
hold and to galvanize some support in otherwise disillusioned
Israeli and Palestinian publics. [4]

Pessimistic scenarios also exist, but apocalyptic predictions of a
major war involving Syria and Lebanon are unlikely to
materialize. In that respect, right-wing Israeli blog Samson
Blinded makes a couple of unusually sharp observations:
"[Syrian President Bashar al-]Assad remembers that the
ayatollahs did not help him when the IAF [Israeli Air Force]
flattened his nuclear reactor, and wouldn't be eager to help
them. He understands that launching Scuds at Israel would cost
him Damascus, and perhaps something more important - his
throne. As the Arab saying goes, 'Syria is ready to fight Israel to
the last Egyptian soldier'."

Still, it is unclear weather at least some large-scale bloodletting
could be avoided, and Iran would likely be hit hard. Iraq and
Afghanistan, already on the verge of chaos, could be additionally
destabilized, though a perceived US victory against Iran would
add some credibility to the American presence. Even minor
disruptions in shipping through the Strait of Hormuz could wreak
havoc on world economies.

Despite these potential problems, Obama could get a chance to
make something of a generally bad situation he faces in the
Middle East (for an insightful analysis of the Afghanistan
situation, see Obama risks all on flip of a COIN Asia Times
Online, June 29, 2010.

If he succeeds in minimizing the immediate fallout from an Iran
campaign and capitalizing on it to achieve even partial progress
in the Israeli-Arab peace talks, the embattled US president
would get some major foreign policy credit to compensate for the
dark clouds looming elsewhere.

In all, it appears that some sort of a military showdown is all but
unavoidable between the Americans, the Israelis, and the
Iranians. The most important question, then, becomes to what
extent the damage can be contained and what opportunities
might arise in it.

Comment: There is an almost total media blackout in western media concerning US preparations for a war on Iran. Such a war could also be a convenient excuse for the elite to smash the tea party movement, further restrict freedom of speech and other civil liberties, and convert the failing economy to a wartime economy comparable to World War II. And then it's a convenient method for deflecting people's attention from internal to external problems. Some say, the elite won't make war on Iran, but don't bet on it. The elite are capable of changing and adapting their plans anytime. They call this "intuitive logic". I call this "intuitive ignorance".