SPENGLER All-out Middle East war as good as
it gets By Spengler
TEL AVIV - It is hard to remember a moment
when the United States' foreign policy
establishment showed as much unanimity as in its
horror at the prospect of a unilateral Israeli
strike on Iran.
In a September 10 report
for Georgetown University's Center for Strategic
and International Studies, Anthony Cordesman
warns, "A strike by Israel on Iran will give rise
to regional instability and conflict as well as
terrorism. The regional security consequences will
be catastrophic."
And a "bi-partisan"
experts' group headed by former National Security
Advisor Brent Scowcroft and co-signed by most of
the usual suspects states, "Serious costs to US
interests would also be felt over the longer term,
we believe, with problematic consequences for
global and regional stability, including
economic
stability. A dynamic of escalation, action, and
counteraction could produce serious unintended
consequences that would significantly increase all
of these costs and lead, potentially, to all-out
regional war."
If a contrarian thought
might be permitted, consider the possibility that
all-out regional war is the optimal outcome for
American interests. An Israeli strike on Iran that
achieved even limited success - a two-year delay
in Iran's nuclear weapons development - would
arrest America's precipitous decline as a
superpower.
Absent an Israeli strike,
America faces:
A nuclear-armed Iran;
Iraq's continued drift towards alliance with
Iran;
An overtly hostile regime in Egypt, where the
Muslim Brotherhood government will lean on
jihadist elements to divert attention from the
country's economic collapse;
An Egyptian war with Libya for oil and with
Sudan for water;
A radical Sunni regime controlling most of
Syria, facing off an Iran-allied Alawistan
ensconced in the coastal mountains;
A de facto or de jure Muslim Brotherhood
takeover of the Kingdom of Jordan;
A campaign of subversion against the Saudi
monarchy by Iran through Shi'ites in Eastern
Province and by the Muslim Brotherhood internally;
A weakened and perhaps imploding Turkey
struggling with its Kurdish population and the
emergence of Syrian Kurds as a wild card;
A Taliban-dominated Afghanistan; and
Radicalized Islamic regimes in Libya and
Tunisia.
Saudi Arabia is the biggest loser
in the emerging Middle East configuration, and
Russia is the biggest winner. Europe and Japan
have concluded that America has abandoned its
long-standing commitment to the security of energy
supplies in the Persian Gulf by throwing the Saudi
monarchy under the bus, and have quietly shifted
their energy planning towards Russia. Little of
this line of thinking will appear in the news
media, but the reorientation towards Moscow is
underway nonetheless.
From Israel's
vantage point, the way things are now headed is
the worst-case scenario. The economic sanctions
are a nuisance for Iran, but not a serious
hindrance to its nuclear ambitions. When US Joint
Chiefs of Staff Chairman General Martin Dempsey
intoned on August 30 that he "did not want to be
complicit" in an Israeli strike on Iran, he was
stating publicly what the Pentagon has signaled to
Tehran for the past six months. The US wants no
part of an Israeli strike.
This
remonstrance from the Pentagon, along with the
State Department's refusal to identify a "red
line" past which Iran would provoke American
military action, amounts to a green light for Iran
to build an atomic bomb, Israeli analysts believe.
What if Israel were to strike Iran? From a
technical standpoint, there is no question that
Israel could severely damage the Iranian nuclear
program. As the respected German military analyst
Hans Ruhl wrote earlier this year: There are 25 to
30 installations in Iran that are exclusively or
predominately dedicated to the nuclear program.
Six of them are targets of the first rank: the
uranium enrichment facility at Natanz, the
conversion works in Isfahan, the heavy water
reactor in Arak, the weapons and munitions
production facility in Parchin, the uranium
enrichment facility in Fordow, and the Bushehr
light water reactor.
The information about
Natanzare is solid. The project has been under
satellite surveillance from the beginning and been
watched by Israeli "tourists". At the moment there
are a good 10,000 centrifuges installed, of which
6,500 are producing. Israel's strongest "bunker
buster" is the GBU-28 (weight 2.3 tons), which
demonstrably can break through seven meters of
reinforced concrete and 30 meters of earth. It
would suffice to break through the roof at Natanz.
In case of doubt, two GBU-28s could be used in
sequence; the second bomb would deepen the first
bomb's crater and realize the required success.
The trick is to put a second
bunker-buster directly into the crater left by a
previous one. According to Cordesman, the
probability of a direct hit with existing
smart-bomb technology is 50%. Half a dozen bombs
should do for each of the six key sites - assuming
that the Israelis don't have something more
creative in the works. Israel has had 10 years to
plan the operation, and it is a fair assumption
that the Israeli Air Force can accomplish the
mission. The deeper
question is: what constitutes success?
"When Israel bombed [Iraq's] Osiris
[nuclear reactor in 1981]," said an Israeli who
took part in the planning, "we expected a
three-year setback of Iraq's nuclear program. It
was delayed by 10 years. But that wasn't the most
important thing. What was most important to us is
the ripple effect through the region."
The
ripple effects are what America's foreign policy
establishment fears the most. The vision shared by
the George W Bush and Barack Obama
administrations, albeit with some variation, of a
Middle East dotted with democratic regimes
friendly to the United States would pop like a
soap-bubble. What ripples would ensue from a
successful Israeli strike on Iran?
Iran
probably would attempt to block the Straits of
Hormuz, the gateway for a fifth of the world's oil
supply, and America would respond by destroying
Iranian conventional military capabilities and
infrastructure from the air. This would add to
Tehran's humiliation, and strengthen the domestic
opposition.
Iran's influence in Iraq and
Syria would diminish, although Iran's supporters
in both countries probably would spill a great
deal of blood in the short run.
Hizbollah
almost certainly would unleash its missile arsenal
at Israel, inflicting a few hundred casualties by
Israeli estimates. Israel would invade southern
Lebanon and - unlike the 2006 war - fight without
fear of Syrian intervention. In 2006, the Olmert
government restricted the movements of the IDF out
of fear that the Syrian Army would intervene.
Syria's army is in no position to intervene today.
There is a possibility, to be sure, that
Syria would launch chemical and biological
warheads against Israel, but if the Assad
government employed weapons of mass destruction,
Israel would respond with a nuclear bombardment.
In this case deterrence is likely to be effective.
Iran's influence in Lebanon would be drastically
diminished.
Stripped of support from its
Iranian sponsor, the Alawite regime would fall,
and Syria would become a Saudi-Turkish
condominium. Ethnic butchery would go on for some
time.
Egypt would be cut off from
financial support from the Gulf States as
punishment for its opening to Iran. The domestic
consequences for Egypt would be ugly. The country
is almost out of money; some of its oil suppliers
stopped deliveries last August, and Egypt's
refineries lack funds to buy oil from the
government.
Al-Ahram reported September 12
that Upper Egypt now suffers a 30% shortage of
diesel fuel. The newspaper wrote,
Egyptians started feeling another
diesel crisis at the end of last week, with
amounts available shrinking and prompting
lengthy queues at stations. A shortage of
liquidity in the Ministry of Petroleum has
delayed payments to refineries that provide the
crude needed to produce diesel. "The Finance
Ministry is late delivering the required funds
to the Ministry of Petroleum," Hossam Arafat,
head of the division of petroleum industries at
Egypt's Chambers of Commerce, explained. The
total daily supply of diesel on the Egyptian
market has fallen to 33,000 tonnes from 40,000,
press reports estimate.
Cairo well
might become a radical Islamic state, a North
Korea on the Nile, as I wrote in this space last
month (see North
Korea on the Nile Asia Times Online, August
29, 2012.) But the consequences of such a
devolution would be limited. With Iran neutralized
, Egypt would be less of a threat to Saudi Arabia.
It might become a threat to Libya and Sudan. That
is unfortunate, but what have Libya and Sudan done
for us lately?
In the absence of an
American leadership willing to assert American
strategic interests in the region, Israel well
might save the United States.
In the long
view of things, there is not much cause for
optimism about the Muslim world. It contains two
kinds of countries: those that can't feed their
children, like Egypt, and those that have stopped
having children, like Iran, Turkey, Algeria and
Tunisia. Muslim nations seem to pass directly from
infancy to senescence without stopping at
adulthood, from the pre-modern directly to the
post-modern, as I wrote in my book Why
Civilizations Die (and Why Islam is Dying,
Too).
Turks have just 1.5 children per
family, like the infecund Europeans, while Turkish
Kurds have four or five children. That makes the
redrawing of the map of Turkey inevitable sooner
or later. In a generation, Iran will have an
inverted population pyramid like the aging
industrial countries, but without the wealth to
support it.
There is no reason to expect
most of the Muslim countries to go quietly into
irreversible decline. All-out regional war is the
likely outcome sooner or later. We might as well
get on with it.
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