Page 2 of 2 US steps closer to war with
Iran By Kaveh L Afrasiabi
coercive
diplomacy toward Iran. The first casualty could be
the US-Iran dialogue on Iraq's security, although
this would simultaneously appease Israeli hawks
who dread dialogue and any hints of Cold War-style
detente between Tehran and Washington.
It
would also become more difficult for Syria to
collaborate with Iran with respect to Lebanon's
Hezbollah, who owe much to the
IRGC
since their inception in the early 1980s. The
consensus in Iran is that chaos in Iraq is in
Israel's interests, but not that of the US, and
that the United States' Middle East policy is
being held hostage by pro-Israel lobbyists who
have painted an enemy image of the dreaded IRGC
that is neither accurate nor in tune with the
history of US-IRGC interaction.
The US
and the IRGC The current noise masks a
hidden history of cooperation between the US
military and the IRGC - in Bosnia-Herzegovina,
Afghanistan and, more and more likely, Iraq.
In Bosnia, the US military and
intelligence interacted with the IRGC, which had
trained Bosnian Muslims, and fought alongside it
against their Serbian enemies. They also funneled
arms to the IRGC, mainly through Croatia, with the
tacit consent of the US government.
In
Afghanistan, US military commanders have had
similar interaction with commanders of the IRGC,
including the elite Quds division of the IRGC,
which supported anti-Taliban forces and helped
those forces take over Kabul in 2001 with relative
ease.
In Iraq, the IRGC has supported
various Shi'ite militias as well as the Iraqi
military and intelligence and, unofficially, it
can credit for the relative stability of the eight
Shi'ite provinces, including those in the south.
The new US diplomatic engagement of Iran over Iraq
is having direct and immediate effects on Iran's
behavior inside Iraq, promising further results by
the joint expert committees set up as a result of
the latest round in the dialogue.
Yet true
to the United States' traditional Janus-faced
approach toward Iran, just as Iranian and US
military and intelligence officials are about to
embark on systematic discussions over Iraq and
regional security, they will in effect be
prevented from doing so by the labeling of the
IRGC as terrorist.
Coming 'war of
attrition'? The idea of an all-out military
confrontation between the US and Iran, triggered
by a US attack on the IRGC, has its watered-down
version in a "war of attrition" whereby instead of
inter-state warfare, we would witness
medium-to-low-intensity clashes.
The
question, then, is whether or not the US
superpower, addicted to its military doctrine of
"superior and overwhelming response", will
tolerate occasional bruises at the hands of the
Iranians. The answer is highly unlikely given the
myriad prestige issues involved and, in turn, this
raises the advisability of the labeling initiative
with such huge implications nested in it.
No matter, the stage is now set for direct
physical clashes between Iran and the US, which
has blamed the death of hundreds of its soldiers
on Iranian-made roadside bombs. One plausible
scenario is the United States' "hot pursuit" of
the IRGC inside Iranian territory, initially
through "hit and run" commando operations,
soliciting an Iranian response, direct or
indirect, potentially spiraling out of control.
The hallucination of a protracted "small
warfare with Iran" that would somehow insulate
both sides from an unwanted big "clash of titans"
is just that, a fantasy born and bred in the minds
of war-obsessed hawks in Washington and Israel.
Note 1. The Algiers
Accords of January 19, 1981, were brokered by the
Algerian government between the US and Iran to
resolve the situation that arose from the capture
of American citizens in the US Embassy in Tehran
in 1979. Through this accord the US citizens were
set free. Among its provisions it was stated that
the US would not intervene in Iranian internal
affairs. - Wikipedia
Kaveh L
Afrasiabi, PhD, is the author of After
Khomeini: New Directions in Iran's Foreign Policy
(Westview Press) and co-author of "Negotiating
Iran's Nuclear Populism", Brown Journal of World
Affairs, Volume XII, Issue 2, Summer 2005, with
Mustafa Kibaroglu. He also wrote "Keeping Iran's
nuclear potential latent", Harvard International
Review, and is author of Iran's Nuclear
Program: Debating Facts Versus Fiction.
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