US
strikes a military pose for
Iran By Kaveh L Afrasiabi
For all the talk of the United States'
long-standing hegemony in the oil-rich Persian
Gulf, its military superiority is not without
shortfalls that, in turn, show significant flaws
in its ability to maintain a "credible military
threat" against Iran, the stand that nowadays
complements its coercive diplomacy vis-a-vis
Iran's nuclear program.
With the next
round of talks between Iran and the "P5+1" (also
known as the "Iran Six", the permanent members of
the United Nations Security Council - the United
States, Britain, France, China and Russia - plus
Germany) nations scheduled in Iraq on May 23,
Washington has skillfully combined the carrot of
softening its "red line" by reportedly considering
the option of tolerating Iran's low-enriched
uranium program, with the "long stick" of adding
new layers of military threats aimed at convincing
Tehran to be beware
that, should the Baghdad talks fail, the wrath of
Uncle Sam is likely to fall.
This is in
light of the widely-disseminated news over the
weekend that the US has deployed its latest
generation of stealth bombers at "Iran's doorway",
possibly in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), which
is in dispute with Tehran over the three islands
of Abu Musa, Little Tub and Big Tunb,
strategically situated near the Strait of Hormuz.
The United States has deployed a number of
stealth jets, its most modern, fifth-generation
fighter bomber, to an air base in Southwest Asia,
according to the US Air Force, the Washington Post
reported. The service would not say where the F-22
Raptors would be based, but the US military has
recently moved other assets into the Persian Gulf
amid concerns about a confrontation with Iran, the
paper added.
The tacit message sent to
Tehran is that the US is now poised to attack
Iran's nuclear facilities, especially the bunkered
one known as Fordo, if Iran refuses the US's
demands. Also, it indicates a new tilt in the
UAE's favor, in light of pro-UAE statements by the
US and a number of European officials with regards
to the three islands, often referred to Iranian
media as "Iran's aircraft carriers in the Persian
Gulf", in reference to Iran's occasional forays
into the idea of militarizing those islands by
placing missiles and other military hardware that
would improve Iran's counter-strike capability.
"Those islands were legally ceded to Iran
in 1971 by the British government before the
independence of the UAE and it took the UAE 20
years to complain about them to United Nations,
which refused to take action in 1992. This was
part of a double deal between Tehran and London,
the other one concerning Bahrain that was
historically owned by Iran and yet Tehran agreed
to forfeit its claim," said a Tehran political
science professor who spoke to the author on the
condition of anonymity.
Since President
Mahmud Ahmadinejad's visit to Abu Musa three weeks
ago, the UAE and other Gulf Cooperation Council
(GCC) states have embarked on a virulent
international campaign to renew the UAE's
sovereignty claim over the islands as well as
calls on Iran to consent to arbitration by the
International Court of Justice, rejected by Iran
that insists its agreement with Great Britain is
valid as a matter of international law and there
is no need for the ICJ's intervention.
A
UAE military official has threatened to rain
military hell on those islands, a threat that
Tehran cannot ignore in light of the US's growing
proclivity to side with the UAE against Iran.
Hypothetically, if the UAE somehow managed
to wrest those islands from Iran's hands, then the
US could conceivably overcome its present military
deficit in the Strait of Hormuz by joining the UAE
forces in protecting those islands and offsetting
any Iranian move to scuttle oil flows in the event
of a military flare-up.
This is reason
enough for Iran to openly contemplate beefing up
its military presence in the Persian Gulf and
fortifying the three islands considered as
"integral parts of Iran". The consensus in Iran is
that as long as Iran has the choking capability in
the Strait of Hormuz the US would not dare to
attack Iran since the results for the world
economy would be disastrous.
Inevitably,
the three islands play a key role in the current
geostrategic calculations that, no matter how the
compliant US media pundits cut it, favors Iran in
some respects.
Add to this the economic
factor - ie, the several hundred billion dollars
of Iranian capital in the UAE, the burgeoning
trade and sizable presence of an Iranian merchant
class there - that on the whole weighs heavily on
the UAE's calculations vis-a-vis Iran and, bottom
line, pose a significant bar to the military
option.
In a word, the ties of economic
interdependence may well suffer a long-term
setback in a military scenario, to the detriment
of a UAE that is still grappling with the recent
economic meltdown.
Meanwhile, a number of
Iran's parliamentary deputies have renewed Iran's
discourse on collective security in Persian Gulf,
thus complementing Iran's hard power strategy with
the soft power approach that focuses on "shared
security concerns" and the like. The idea
first emerged during the presidency of Ali Akbar
Hashemi Rafsanjani in the early 1990s (Iran
unveils a Persian Gulf security plan Asia
Times Online, April 14, 2007) and now has the
added benefit of potentially counting on Iraq,
which under Saddam Hussein zeroed in on the three
islands to rally Arab support, as a junior
partner.
The mere prospect of an Iran-Iraq
concert in the Persian Gulf has rattled the GCC
states to the point that they are now trying to
influence Washington's Iraq policy to shift in
favor of the rebellious Kurds, but only to the
point of weakening the central government in
Baghdad yet short of a break-up of an Arab state.
This is playing with fire since Iraqi
Kurds have their own plan of action that reflects
a growing concert with non-Arab Turkey, in light
of the recent Ankara visit by Kurdish leader
Masoud Barazani, coinciding with the Tehran visit
by Iraq's Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki.
All this involves a complex interaction
between nuclear, security and economic issues and
other considerations that has introduced policy
headaches for Washington - that suffers from
noticeable military deficits in its traditional
turf - the Persian Gulf, informally coined an
"American lake".
A huge influx of ground
forces incurring major expenses for Pentagon's
shrinking budget would be required to compensate
for those deficits, simply because air and naval
power alone does not suffice.
Fully
cognizant of those limitations, Tehran remains
unconvinced of the "credible" in the US's military
postures cited above, seen simply as maneuvers
bordering on bluff more than anything else.
In essence, this means that Iran remains
the custodian and gatekeeper of the Strait of
Hormuz for the indefinite future, thanks in part
to its vital possession of the three islands.
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