SPEAKING
FREELY US may attack, but will Iran fight
back? By Alan G Jamieson.
Speaking Freely is an Asia Times
Online feature that allows guest writers to have
their say. Please click hereif you are interested in
contributing.
For several years
tensions between the United States and Iran over
the latter's nuclear program have waxed and waned.
War between the two sides has been confidently
predicted, with even
the
date of the US attack given by Internet pundits.
Nothing happened. With so many past false alarms
it is hard to take seriously the renewed rumors of
war between the two sides. However, this time
things may be different.
US President
George W Bush has said he will not leave office
(in January 2009) with Iran retaining the
capability to develop nuclear weapons. Unless Iran
agrees to give up all hope of a nuclear-weapons
program, as Libya and North Korea have done, a US
military strike against Iran will probably occur
at some point between now and the US presidential
elections in November 2008. A short, victorious
war with Iran, leaving its nuclear facilities in
ruins, will, it is hoped, assure the Republican
candidate of victory in that election.
With a time frame of only a little over a
year, the Bush administration is anxious to
arrange a showdown with Iran as soon as possible.
The United Nations route, with sanctions imposed
on Iran by the Security Council, is proving too
slow and uncertain. The International Atomic
Energy Authority's attempt to broker a deal with
Iran over its nuclear plans will undoubtedly be
disregarded by the Americans in the same way every
plan to search for weapons of mass destruction in
Iraq was ignored in the run-up to the attack on
Saddam Hussein in 2003.
Even those
Americans actively seeking to provoke a war with
Iran have had little success in finding or
provoking a suitable incident that can be
presented to the American people as a good reason
to launch an attack on Iran. Despite the seizure
of Iranian personnel in Iraq, at Irbil in January
and more recently in Baghdad, the Iranians have
refrained from any reckless response, although
only their people seized in Baghdad have been
returned. The capture of British sailors in March
by Iranian Revolutionary Guards might have been a
suitable flash point. However, Tehran soon
released the sailors after squeezing every
propaganda advantage from their capture, and
Britain specifically asked the United States not
to exacerbate the situation.
Since the
beginning of the year there have been constant US
claims of Iranian interference in Iraq and of the
Iranians supplying arms to militias and insurgents
in that country. However, no clear link has ever
been established between the Iranians and any
particular attack on US forces. Even if the United
States chose to respond to these alleged Iranian
hostile acts with "hot pursuit" Special Forces
raids into Iran or the bombing of alleged
terrorist training camps in that country, this
would not precipitate the sort of crisis needed to
justify a wholesale assault on Iran's nuclear
facilities and its armed forces in the near
future.
Any idea that a US attack on
Iran's nuclear facilities would be merely a
scaled-up surgical strike like Israel's bombing of
Saddam's Osirak nuclear reactor in 1981 must be
put aside. The attack on Iran would encompass not
only its nuclear sites, but all its air defenses
and all its means of military retaliation, in fact
all sections of its armed forces, as well as
government command and control facilities. It has
been suggested that this would be accomplished by
the destruction of 1,200 Iranian targets in three
days of massive aerial assaults, the sort of
"shock and awe" attacks that were promised in Iraq
in 2003 but had less impact than expected.
With time running out and convincing
pretexts for war hard to find, the Bush
administration may well decide to launch an attack
on Iran anyway. Iran is already diplomatically
isolated, but if the United States undertakes
unprovoked aggression against a sovereign state,
it may well find itself equally isolated. No doubt
the British would find a few planes and warships
to provide a token force to show solidarity with
their US ally, but wider support would be hard to
find. Since one of the declared aims of any attack
on Iran is, in the words of Bush, "to prevent a
second Holocaust", some Israeli participation is
likely. A few Israeli planes might join the US
aerial assault on Iran, but Israel's most likely
role would be to attack Hezbollah in Lebanon, and
perhaps the Syrians, should they decide to support
the Iranians.
In the US scenario, when the
dust settles after the aerial onslaught, the
chastened ayatollahs will crawl out of the ruins
and give in to all of Bush's demands. But what if
they do not? US plans for the attack on Iran rule
out a land war because the United States lacks
sufficient troops, but why should the victim
tailor his response to suit the aggressor's
preconceptions? The vital question in the
unfolding US-Iran crisis is not whether the
Americans plan to attack Iran, since they are
clearly prepared to do so, but whether the
Iranians, after enduring the initial onslaught,
have the will and resources to fight back.
With Iran's regular armed forces largely
destroyed, the Iranian government would have to
fall back on the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps
(IRGC) to organize further resistance and
retaliation. According to its new commander, the
IRGC is ready and able to undertake extensive
operations in asymmetrical warfare with a superior
military opponent. Mining and suicide attacks by
boats and planes might well disrupt tanker traffic
through the Strait of Hormuz, leading to a rapid
increase in world oil prices. No doubt the United
States would organize tanker convoys with full air
and sea protection, but the mosquito forces of the
IRGC might still pierce such defenses. If the
Iranians could carry out a sustained campaign
against shipping in the Persian Gulf, the US might
well be forced to start occupying Iranian ports to
deny bases to the attackers. Once troops were
ashore, they would soon be drawn into battles with
guerrillas in the Iranian hinterland.
While not all Iraqi Shi'ites are as
pro-Iranian as some reports suggest, there can be
little doubt that many in Iraq's majority
population would fight in support of their
neighbors and co-religionists. The war against the
US in Iraq would be intensified, and no doubt
Iranian forces would openly enter Iraq to support
that struggle as well as supplying resisters with
more advanced weaponry such as shoulder-launched
anti-aircraft missiles.
Indeed, given the
present power vacuum in southern Iraq, the
Iranians might even manage to occupy important
cities such as Basra. If a major land war
developed in Iraq, the United States would be
compelled to expand its army there considerably.
This could only be done in the short run by
stripping the US and overseas garrisons such as
South Korea and Okinawa of all combat troops. In
the longer term, the US government might have to
consider reintroducing conscription to sustain
troop numbers, whatever the domestic political
consequences.
As in Iraq in 2003, the US
plan for a military attack on Iran presupposes
that once the enemy has suffered a massive initial
blow he will accept the inevitable and surrender.
In Iraq, the conventional armed forces were easily
broken, but the unconventional war with local
insurgents and militias is still raging more than
four years later. Similarly, the Iranian armed
forces might be severely damaged by America's
aerial assault, but the IRGC and other less
conventional forces might continue the struggle in
Iraq, in Iran's borderlands, and in the waters of
the Persian Gulf for years to come. Fears of the
"Shi'ite crescent" will have given birth to an arc
of war stretching from Palestine to Pakistan.
Alan G Jamieson is the author of
Faith and Sword: A Short History of
Christian-Muslim Conflict (London: Reaktion
Books, 2006).
(Copyright 2007 Alan G
Jamieson.)
Speaking Freely is an
Asia Times Online feature that allows guest
writers to have their say. Please click hereif you are interested in
contributing.
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