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How can the West counter Iran's apocalyptic mindset?
By MICHAEL BURLEIGH
Last updated at 4:18 PM on 28th December 2011
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Every country has the right to develop an atomic energy industry, but not every country has the right to covertly develop nuclear bombs to bully and intimidate its neighbours.
For years now Iran has defied the international community with a covert nuclear weapons programme, whether to deter attack or to gain stategic leverage in the wider Middle East. The key act of defiance has been to deny the International Atomic Energy Authority access to sites where uranium is being enriched to weapons grade and other related technologies - such as bomb triggers - are being manufactured and tested.
Short of war, the international community has responded by tightening sanctions against Iran, which is essentially a mono-economy based on oil and natural gas, if you discount pistachio nuts and carpets. Hitherto the domestic price of fuel has been heavily subsidised, though petrol is rationed because of a chronically weak domestic refining capacity. Iran exports crude oil, but it imports petrol.
Defiance: Iran is pressing ahead with its nuclear programme despite the protestations of the international community
Today, President Obama is signing into law more stringent sanctions which force companies to choose whether they want to do any future business with the US or with the Bank of Iran, which processes payments for its oil and gas.
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Obama's strategy is to avoid doing anything that will result in a spike in the price of oil (around US$100 a barrel at present), even as America itself successfully develops its own shale oil and natural gas supplies through fracturing. Any spike in oil and gas prices would only benefit Iran. What he is hoping to do is to depress the volume of Iranian sales, so as to force them to sell oil and gas at a discounted price, further tipping their economy into difficulties that might in time destabilise the clerical regime. It is likely that the EU will also follow this course. Britain has already effectively criminalised any dealings with the Bank of Iran. He will also be urging allies like Saudi Arabia to increase daily output to maximum levels, which will also depress the price.
Military personnel place an Iranian flag on a submarine in the Straits of Hormuz, as tensions escalate over the country's apparent design of nuclear weapons
Iran's navy chief Habibollah Sayyari briefs media on the naval exercise in the Straits of Hormuz
The Iranians have responded by threatening to blockade the Straits of Hormuz, between Iran and the UAE, through which about a third of the world's oil moves, via a channel about four or five miles wide. The seniority of those making this threat has risen in the last couple of weeks. That waterway is patrolled by the US Navy, which is confident that it could repel any attempts to mine the waterway or use suicide boats against ships. They would clear the mines on Day One, and then sink all of Iran's minelayers on Day Two. The high powered computer operated weapons on US ships would make mincemeat of any suicide boats. So I am reliably told.
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I suspect it won't come to any of that, despite all the huffing and puffing from Tehran. As yet, no one has convincingly demonstrated to me that the Iranians are capable of building a nuclear bomb, let alone mounting it on a ballistic missile, as distinct from having bits and pieces incapable of assembly. It is important to separate the facts from the wishful thinking of those who are actively seeking to attack Iran for their own reasons.
When they achieve that stage, then we will have to think in terms of an effective deterrent, whether on the part of the US or, more likely, a rapidly nuclear armed neighbourhood, for the Chinese have recently agreed to build 16 nuclear power plants in Saudi Arabia, even as they are the biggest consumer of Iran's oil.
One should not underrate the importance of nuclear bluff. Down to about 1965 the Soviets did this very expertly since the US had an arsenal of weapons, and means of delivery, that dwarfed Moscow's, whatever huge bombs they tested. It lacked any equivalent to the solid-fuelled Minuteman intercontinental ballistic missile, and had nothing to match the mid-air refuelled bombers of Strategic Air Command which surrounded Russia from all points of the compass. That was why Khruschchev sought to surreptitiously deploy nuclear weapons to Cuba in 1962; to gain an immediate strategic edge that neutralised US might.
Had it come to the crunch, America could have wiped out most of Russia for much of the Cold War. Iran thinks that if it were capable of acquiring the minimal nuclear arsenal of North Korea, then it can bully its way to great power status in its region, or at least ensure that its wishes are always taken into account. That is the thinking that has to be proved wrong.
How you do that with a leadership that has an apocalyptic mindset is at the heart of the problem, which is why the CIA and others are spending a lot of time looking at books on religious psychoses, including, I am told, a couple of mine. What do you do with people who think massive destruction may be the prelude to some kind of terrestial paradise?
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