US-Iran: A long game with
pitfalls By Kaveh L Afrasiabi
A new report on United States-Iran
strategic competition by the Washington think-tank
Center For Strategic and International Studies
(CSIS), focuses on the pros and cons of a "long
game" between the two countries, centered on
sanctions, arms control and regime change. [1]
Penned by Anthony Cordesman and Bradley
Bosserman, the report provides useful information
on the Iranian energy sector, presently subjected
to tightening Western sanctions, predicting that
despite the mounting pressures, Iran will not
forfeit its controversial nuclear program for
national security reasons. In fact, it has a
decent chance of success in a protracted "long
game", in light of similar successes by countries
such as
Pakistan, North Korea and
India.
Even so, according to the authors,
Iran would pay "a steadily higher cumulative cost
... and popular support for the regime might well
erode".
It is a race against time, the
argument goes, and Iran may soon reach the
threshold of nuclear capability, at which point
the international community would realize, just as
it did in other proliferation cases mentioned
above, that it would have to give up the game and
come to terms with a nuclear Iran.
"A
period of confrontation and sanctions that lasted
for several years would give Iran time to steadily
improve its options and tactics for asymmetrical
attacks and political warfare," the report states,
adding that the recent example of Libya, which
agreed to discard its nuclear weapons program only
to see itself subjected to foreign invasion, has
provided Iran with fresh stimulus to push on with
its supposed nuclear weapons program.
Counseling an American strategy of
"extended deterrence", consisting of sanctions,
arms-control efforts and "continued deployment of
military capabilities", the report discounts its
own insights on Iran's probability of success in a
"long game" and thus recycles the familiar
American security discourse on Iran without adding
any element of novelty to revise it.
The
report neither questions the large heap of
disinformation on Iran's currently peaceful
nuclear program designed to hype the "Iran
threat", nor does it explore the egregious flaws
of the latest report on Iran by the (blatantly
pro-American) Yukiya Amano, the head of the
International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA); nor
does it mention the US and other Western countries
manufacturing pretexts for escalating pressures on
Iran.
Concerning the latter, the report
repeatedly blames Iran for "spurring" this
escalation by its "ongoing missile deployments and
nuclear program", its recent alleged role in an
assassination plot in Washington DC against a
Saudi Arabian diplomat, and the
"government-sponsored mob attack on the British
Embassy" in Tehran last November.
The
authors have turned a blind eye to the US's own
mischief, such as concocting a fictitious terror
plot to incriminate Iran and up the ante against
it. Instead of attempting to debunk the US
accusation, which has been questioned by a sizable
pool of Iran experts in the West, the authors
adopt the terror plot as fact, just as they
dispense with any critical analysis of the
deafening Iran-phobic alarms on a coming "nuclear
Iran".
Suffice to say that even the
compliant Amano in his recent trip to Germany
confided to German lawmakers that there "is no
evidence" that Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons.
United States Defense Secretary Leon
Panneta has pretty much relayed the same
sentiment, by recently admitting that the US has
no evidence that Iran is seeking a nuclear bomb.
The question, then, is where does this
report's sure-footed conviction, or belief, on
Iran's steady march toward nuclear weapons come
from?
As a clue, they mention the attack
on the British Embassy, without adding that it
came in response to unilateral British sanctions
on Iran's central bank and closure of all
financial relations with the Islamic Republic.
Such important oversights, reversing the
position of causes and effects, are typical of
American analyses of US-Iran relations nowadays,
that serve as rationalizing discourses first and
foremost for a coercive, and increasingly
dangerous, US approach toward Iran that, by the
authors' own admission, has little prospect of
success.
The report could have mentioned
Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad's explicit
offer, in September 2011, to suspend Iran's 20%
uranium enrichment in exchange for an outside
supply of fuel for a Tehran medical reactor, or
for that matter Iran's January 2006 offer to
suspend its enrichment program for two years. (See
Sideshow
to Iran's frogmarch to UN Asia Times Online,
February 7, 2006.)
The fact is that the
Iran nuclear crisis has been good business for
both the US and the Western military-industrial
complex, in light of the exorbitant arms sales to
Arab oil states in the Persian Gulf, who are also
signing lucrative contracts for nuclear reactors.
According to reports in the US media, the
US has now dropped its demand that countries such
as Jordan and the United Arab Emirates agree not
to enrich uranium as part of their growing nuclear
relations with the US. Simultaneously, the US and
Europe continue to insist that Iran should divest
itself of this right, thus giving a new edge to
double standards.
The CSIS report admits
that Iran's arms transfers are "a fraction" of
what Saudi Arabia and other member states of Gulf
Cooperation Council spend annually on arms
shipments from the US and other Western powers,
who nominally at least should be wary of an
unwanted arms race in the volatile region.
Another problem with this analysis of the
"long game" between the US and Iran is that it
underestimates the short-term Iranian reaction to
the mounting economic warfare declared by the West
against Iran, which may resort to retaliatory
action to prevent the repetition of the "Iraq
scenario" that serves the Iranian leadership with
a sobering lesson - of what happens when a country
responds passively to biting sanctions that weaken
it and ripen it for attacks.
The authors
dwell on Iran's "options", such as mining the
Strait of Hormuz, and other "asymmetrical tactics"
that may well include the use of a civilian
flotilla to disrupt normal oil shipping in the
Persian Gulf.
This is not to mention
Iran's ability to cause a serious headache for
North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) forces
stationed in Afghanistan, simply by funneling arms
to anti-NATO forces. Too much emphasis on the long
term runs the risk of immediate threats to
regional peace and stability triggered by
countries that are desperately lusting after
regime change in post-revolutionary Iran.
The authors do highlight various aspects
of the US's propaganda campaign against Iran that
includes a "virtual US embassy" geared toward
recruiting young Iranians against their
government, tacitly acknowledging the low
probability of the US's ability to instigate
regime change in Iran.
Both Russia and
China are adamantly opposed to the Western
strategy against Iran, and yet the authors fail to
attach sufficient attention to the pro-Iran
geostrategic considerations of Moscow and Beijing.
At a time of more intrusive NATO strategy
in Asia and the Middle East, as well as a new US
military posture in the Pacific, aimed explicitly
at China, US policymakers and their wealth of
strategic brains are simply deluding themselves
into thinking that China and Russia could ever be
persuaded into taking part in their
destabilization game against the assertive Iran
that has consistently acted as a regional bulwark
against Western hegemony.
Head
Office: Unit B, 16/F, Li Dong Building, No. 9 Li Yuen Street East,
Central, Hong Kong Thailand Bureau:
11/13 Petchkasem Road, Hua Hin, Prachuab Kirikhan, Thailand 77110
