6 March 2006
Iran: "Everything Is On The Table"
By Gwynne Dyer
The biggest pitfall in predicting the behaviour of radical groups
like the inner circle of the Bush Administration is that you keep telling
yourself that they would never actually do whatever it is they're talking
about. Surely they must realise that acting like that would cause a
disaster. Then they go right ahead and do it.
"(The Iranians) must know everything is on the table and they must
understand what that means," US ambassador to the United Nations John
Bolton told a group of visiting British politicians last week. "We can hit
different points along the line. You only have to take out one part of
their nuclear operation to take the whole thing down." In other words, he
was calmly proposing an illegal attack on a sovereign state, possibly
involving nuclear weapons.
Bolton knew his words would be leaked, so maybe it was just
deliberate posturing to raise the pressure on Iran. But on Sunday,
addressing the American-Israeli Public Affairs Committee in Washington,
Bolton repeated the threat: "The longer we wait to confront the threat
Iran poses, the harder and more intractable it will become to solve...We
must be prepared to rely on comprehensive solutions and use all the tools
at our disposal to stop the threat...." He may really mean it -- and no
one in the White House has told him to shut up.
With the US army already mired in Iraq, the Bush administration
lacks the ground strength to invade Iran, a far larger country, but the
strategic plans and command structure for an air-attacks-only strike are
already in place. The National Security Strategy statement of September
2002 declared a new doctrine of "preemptive" wars in which the US would
launch unprovoked attacks against countries that it feared might hurt it in
the future, and in January 2003 that doctrine was elaborated into the
military strategy of "full spectrum global strike."
The "full spectrum" referred specifically to the use of nuclear
weapons to destroy hardened targets that ordinary weapons cannot reach.
Earth-penetrating "mini-nukes" were an integral part of Conplan 8022-02, a
presidential directive signed by Bush at the same time that covered attacks
on countries allegedly posing an "imminent" nuclear threat in which no
American ground troops would be used. Indeed, the responsibility for
carrying out Conplan 8022 was given to Strategic Command (Stratcom) in
Omaha, a military command that had previously dealt only with nuclear
weapons.
Last May, Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld issued an "Interim
Global Strike Alert Order" putting Stratcom on high military readiness 24
hours a day. Logic says there is no "imminent" danger of Iranian nuclear
weapons: last year's US National Intelligence Estimate put the time needed
for Iran to develop such weapons at ten years. But experience says that
this administration can talk itself into a "preemptive" attack on a country
that really does not pose any threat at all.
So what happens if they talk themselves into unleashing Conplan
8022 on Iran? Thousands of people would die, of course, and the surviving
70 million Iranians would be very cross, but how could they strike back at
the United States? Iran has no nuclear weapons, no weapons of any sort
that could reach America. Given the huge American technological lead, it
can't even do much damage to US forces in the Gulf region. But it does have
two powerful weapons: its Shia faith, and oil.
Iran is currently playing a long game in Iraq, encouraging the Shia
religious parties to cooperate with the American political project so that
a Shia-dominated government in Baghdad will turn Iraq into a reliable ally
of Iran once the Americans go home. But if Tehran encouraged the Shia
militias to attack American troops in Iraq, US casualties would soar. The
whole American position there could become untenable in months.
Iran would probably not try to close the Strait of Hormuz, the
choke-point through which most of the Gulf's oil exports pass, for US
forces could easily dominate or even seize the sparsely populated Iranian
coast on the north side. But it would certainly halt its own oil exports,
currently close to 4 million barrels a day, and in today's tight oil market
that would likely drive the oil price up to $130-$150 a barrel. Moreover,
Tehran could keep the exports turned off for months, since recent oil
prices, already high by historical standards, have enabled it to build up a
large cash reserve. (Iran earned $45 billion from oil exports last year,
twice the average in 2001-03.)
So a "preemptive" American attack on Iran would ignite a general
insurrection against the American presence in Shia-dominated areas of Iraq
and trigger a global economic crisis. The use of nuclear weapons would
cross a firebreak that the world has maintained ever since 1945, and
convince most other great powers that the United States is a rogue state
that must be contained. All this to deal with a threat that is no more real
or "imminent" than the one posed by Iraq in 2003.
No American policy-maker in his right mind would contemplate
unleashing such a disaster for so little reason. Unfortunately, that does
not guarantee that it won't happen. |
