TEHRAN - The United States and Israel may be contemplating military operations
against Iran, as per recent media reports, yet Iran is not wasting any time in
preparing its own counter-operations in the event an attack materializes.
A week-long combined air and ground maneuver has just concluded in five of the
southern and western provinces of Iran, mesmerizing foreign observers, who have described
as "spectacular" the
massive display of high-tech, mobile operations, including rapid-deployment
forces relying on squadrons of helicopters, air lifts, missiles, as well as
hundreds of tanks and tens of thousands of well-coordinated personnel using
live munition. Simultaneously, some 25,000 volunteers have so far signed up at
newly established draft centers for "suicide attacks" against any potential
intruders in what is commonly termed "asymmetrical warfare".
Behind the strategy vis-a-vis a hypothetical US invasion, Iran is
likely to recycle the Iraq war's scenario of overwhelming force, particularly
by the US Air Force, aimed at quick victory over and against a much weaker
power. Learning from both the 2003 Iraq war and Iran's own precious experiences
of the 1980-88 war with Iraq and the 1987-88 confrontation with US forces in
the Persian Gulf, Iranians have focused on the merits of a fluid and complex
defensive strategy that seeks to take advantage of certain weaknesses in
the US military superpower while maximizing the precious few areas where
they may have the upper hand, eg, numerical superiority in ground forces,
guerrilla tactics, terrain, etc.
According to a much-publicized article on the "Iran war game" in
the US-based Atlantic Monthly, the estimated cost of an assault on Iran is a paltry
few tens of millions of dollars. This figure is based on a one-time
"surgical strike" combining missile attacks, air-to-surface bombardments, and
covert operations, without bothering to factor in Iran's strategy, which aims
precisely to "extend the theater of operations" in order to exact heavier and
heavier costs on the invading enemy, including by targeting America's military
command structure in the Persian Gulf.
After this
Iranian version of "follow-on" counter-strategy, the US
intention of localized warfare seeking to cripple Iran's
command system as a prelude to a systematic assault on
key military targets would be thwarted by "taking the war to
them", in the words of an Iranian military strategist who emphasized America's soft
command structure in the southern tips of the Persian Gulf. (Over the past
few months, US jet fighters have repeatedly violated Iran's air space over
Khuzestan province, testing Iran's air defense system, according to Iranian military officials.)
Iran's proliferation of a highly sophisticated and
mobile ballistic-missile system plays a crucial role in its strategy, again relying on
lessons learned from the Iraq wars of 1991 and 2003: in the earlier war over
Kuwait, Iraq's missiles played an important role in extending the warfare to
Israel, notwithstanding the failure of America's Patriot missiles to deflect
most of Iraq's incoming missiles raining in on Israel and, to a lesser extent,
on the US forces in Saudi Arabia. Also, per the admission of the top US
commander in the Kuwait conflict, General Norman Schwarzkopf, the hunt for
Iraq's mobile Scud missiles consumed a bulk of the coalition's air strategy and
was as difficult as searching for "needles in a haystack".
Today, in the evolution of Iran's military doctrine, the country relies on
increasingly precise long-range missiles, eg, Shahab-3 and Fateh-110, that can
"hit targets in Tel Aviv", to echo Iranian Foreign Minister Kemal Kharrazi.
Chronologically speaking, Iran produced the 50-kilometer-range Oghab artillery
rocket in 1985, and developed the 120km- and 160km-range Mushak artillery
rockets in 1986-87 and 1988 respectively. Iran began assembling Scud-Bs in
1988, and North Korean technical advisers in Iran converted a missile
maintenance facility for missile manufacture in 1991. It does not seem,
however, that Iran has embarked on Scud production. Instead, Iran has sought to
build Shahab-3 and Shahab-4, having ranges of 1,300km with a 1,600-pound
warhead, and 200km with a 220-pound warhead, respectively; the Shahab-3 was
test-launched in July 1998 and may soon be upgraded to more than 2,000km, thus
capable of reaching the middle of Europe.
Thanks to excess revenue from high oil prices, which constitute more
than 80% of the government's annual budget, Iran is not experiencing the
budget constraints of the early and mid-1990s, when its military expenditure
was outdone nearly one to 10 by its Arab neighbors in the Persian Gulf who are
members of the Gulf Cooperation Council; almost all the Arab states possess one
or another kind of advanced missile system, eg, Saudi Arabia's CSS-2/DF,
Yemen's SS-21, Scud-B, Iraq's Frog-7.
There
are several advantages to a ballistic arsenal as far as Iran is
concerned: first, it is relatively cheap and manufactured domestically without
much external dependency and the related pressure of "missile export control"
exerted by the US. Second, the missiles are mobile and can be concealed from
the enemy, and third, there are advantages to fighter jets requiring fixed air
bases. Fourth, missiles are presumed effective weapons that can be launched
without much advance notice by the recipient targets, particularly the "solid
fuel" Fatah-110 missiles that require only a few short minutes for installation
prior to being fired. Fifth, missiles are weapons of confusion and a unique
strike capability that can torpedo the best military plans, recalling how the
Iraqi missile attacks in March 2003 at the US military formations assembled at
the Iraq-Kuwait border forced a change of plan on the United States' part,
thereby forfeiting the initial plan of sustained aerial strikes before engaging
the ground forces, as was the case in the Kuwait war, when the latter entered
the theater after some 21 days of heavy air strikes inside Iraq as well as
Kuwait.
Henceforth, any US attack on Iran will likely be met first and foremost by
missile counter-attacks engulfing the southern Persian Gulf states playing host
to US forces, as well as any other country, eg, Azerbaijan, Iraq or Turkey,
allowing their territory or airspace to be used against Iran. The rationale for
this strategy is precisely to pre-warn Iran's neighbors of the dire
consequences, with potential debilitating impacts on their economies for a long
time, should they become accomplices of foreign invaders of Iran.
Another key element of Iran's strategy is to "increase the arch of
crisis" in places such as Afghanistan and Iraq, where it has considerable
influence, to undermine the United States' foothold in the region, hoping to
create a counter-domino effect wherein instead of gaining inside Iran, the US
would actually lose territory partly as a result of thinning its forces and
military "overstretch".
Still another component of Iran's strategy is psychological warfare, an area
of considerable attention by the country's military planners nowadays, focusing
on the "lessons from Iraq" and how the pre-invasion psychological warfare by
the US succeeded in causing a major rift between the top echelons of the
Ba'athist army as well as between the regime and the people. The United States'
psychological warfare in Iraq also had a political dimension, seeing how the US
rallied the United Nations Security Council members and others behind the
anti-Iraq measures in the guise of countering Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass
destruction.
Iran's counter-psychological warfare, on the other hand, seeks to take
advantage of the "death-fearing" American soldiers who typically lack a strong
motivation to fight wars not necessarily in defense of the homeland. A war with
Iran would definitely require establishing the draft in the US, without which
it could not possibly protect its flanks in Afghanistan and Iraq; imposing the
draft would mean enlisting many dissatisfied young soldiers amenable to be
influenced by Iran's own psychological warfare focusing on the lack of
motivation and "cognitive dissonance" of soldiers ill-doctrinated to President
George W Bush's "doctrine of preemption", not to mention a proxy war for the
sake of Israel.
This aside, already, Iranians today consider themselves subjected to the
machinations of similar psychological warfare, whereby, to give an example, the
US cleverly seeks to capitalize on the discontent of the (unemployed) youth by
officially shedding crocodile tears, as discerned from a recent interview of
the outgoing Secretary of State Colin Powell. Systematic disinformation
typically plays a key role in psychological warfare, and the US has now tripled
its radio programs beamed to Iran and, per recent reports from the US Congress,
substantially increased its financial support of the various anti-regime TV and
Internet programs, this while openly trumpeting the cause of "human
intelligence" in a future scenario of conflict with Iran based in part on
covert operations.
Consequently, there is a sense of a national-security siege in Iran these days,
in light of a tightening "security belt" by the US benefiting from military
bases in Iraq, Turkey, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, as well
as Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain, Oman and the island-turned-garrison of
Diego Garcia. From Iran's vantage point, the US, having won the Cold War, has
turned into a "leviathan unhinged" capable of manipulating and subverting the
rules of international law and the United Nations with impunity, thus requiring
a sophisticated Iranian strategy of deterrence that, in the words of certain
Iranian media pundits, would even include the use of nuclear weapons.
But such voices are definitely in a minority in Iran today, and by and
large there is an elite consensus against the manufacturing of nuclear weapons,
partly out of the conviction that short of creating a "second-strike
capability" there would be no nuclear deterrence against an overwhelming US
power possessing thousands of "tactical nuclear weapons". Still, looking at
nuclear asymmetry between India and Pakistan, the latter's first-strike
capability has proved a deterrence against the much superior nuclear India, a
precious lesson not lost on Iran.
Consequently, while Iran has fully submitted its nuclear program to
international inspection and suspended its uranium-enrichment program per a
recent Iran-European Union agreement inked in Paris in November, there is
nonetheless a nagging concern that Iran may have undermined its deterrence
strategy vis-a-vis the US, which has not endorsed the Paris Agreement,
reserving the right to dispatch Iran's nuclear issue to the Security Council
while occasionally resorting to tough saber-rattling against Tehran.
At times, notwithstanding a media campaign in the US, particularly by the New
York Times, through news articles carrying such provocative titles as "US
versus a nuclear Iran", the US continues its hard-power pre-campaign against
Iran unabated, in turn fueling the national security concern of those groups of
Iranians contemplating "nuclear deterrence" as a national survival strategy.
Concerning the latter, there is a growing sentiment in Iran that no matter how
compliant Iran is with the demands of the UN's International Atomic Energy
Agency , much like Iraq in 2002-03, the US, which has lumped Iran into a
self-declared "axis of evil", is cleverly sowing the seeds of its next Middle
East war, in part by leveling old accusations of terrorism and Iran's
complicity in the 1996 Ghobar bombing in Saudi Arabia, irrespective of the
Saudi officials' rejection of such allegations totally overlooked in a recent
book on Iran, The Persian Puzzle by Kenneth M Pollack (see Asia Times
Online,
The Persian puzzle, or the CIA's?, December 3.)
Thus there is an emerging "proto-nuclear deterrence" according to which
Iran's mastery of the nuclear fuel cycle would make it "nuclear weapon capable"
in a relatively short time, as a sort of pre-weapon "threshold
capability" that must be taken into account by Iran's enemies
contemplating attacks on its nuclear installations. Such attacks would be met
by stiff resistance, born of Iran's historic sense of nationalism and
patriotism, as well as by a counter-weaponization based on quick conversation
of the nuclear technology. Hence the longer the US, and Israel, keep up the
military threat, the more powerful and appealing the Iranian yearning for a
"proto-nuclear deterrence" will grow.
In fact, the military threat against Iran has proved poison for the Iranian
economy, chasing away foreign investment and causing considerable capital
flight, an intolerable situation prompting some Iranian economists even to call
for filing complaints against the US in international tribunals seeking
financial remedies. This is a little far-fetched, no doubt, and the Iranians
would have to set a new legal precedent to win their cause in the eyes of
international law. Iran cannot possibly allow the poor investment climate
caused by the military threats to continue indefinitely, and reciprocating with
an extended deterrence strategy that raises the risk value of US allies in the
region is meant to offset this rather unhappy situation.
Ironically,
to open a parenthesis here, some friends of Israel in
the US, such as Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz,
an avid supporter of "torturing the terrorists", has
recently inked a column on a pro-Israel website calling
for the revision of international law allowing
an Israeli, and US, military assault against Iran.
Dershowitz has clearly taken flight of the rule of law,
making a mockery of the esteemed institution that is
considered a beacon on the hill in the United States;
the same Ivy League university is home to the hate
discourse of "clashing civilizations", another ornament
for its cherished history. Even Harvard's Kennedy School
dean, Joseph Nye, a relative dove, has replicated
the US obsession with power by churning out books
and articles on "soft power" that reifies every facet of
American life, including its neutral culture or
entertainment industry, into an appendage or
"complement" of US "hard power", as if power
reification of what Jurgen Habermas calls "lifeworld"
(Lebenswelt) is the conditio sine qua non of Pax Americana.
The ruse of power, however, is that it is often blind to the opposite momentum
that it generates, as has been the case of the Cuban people's half a century
of heroics vis-a-vis a ruthless regime of economic blockade, Algerian nationalists
fighting against French colonialism in the 1950s and 1960s, and, at present, the
Iranian people finding themselves in the unenviable situation of contemplating
how to survive against the coming avalanche of a US power led entirely by
hawkish politicians donning the costumes of multilateralism on Iran's nuclear
program. Yet few inside Iran actually believe that this is more than pseudo-multilateralism
geared to satisfy the United States' unilateralist militarism down
the road. One hopes that the road will not wind down any time soon, but just in
case, the "Third World" Iranians are doing what they can to prepare for the
nightmare scenario.
The whole
situation calls for prudent crisis management and
security confidence-building by both sides, and,
hopefully, the ugly experience of repeated warfare in
the oil-rich region can itself act as a
deterrent.
Kaveh L Afrasiabi, PhD, is the author of After Khomeini: New
Directions in Iran's Foreign Policy (Westview Press) and "Iran's Foreign Policy
Since 9/11", Brown's Journal of World Affairs, co-authored with former deputy
foreign minister Abbas Maleki, No 2, 2003. He teaches political science at
Tehran University.
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