Iran
sanctions: war by other
means By Conn Hallinan
Now that talks with Iran on its nuclear
program appear to be on the ropes, are we on the
road to war? The Israelis threaten it almost
weekly, and the Barack Obama administration has
reportedly drawn up an attack plan. But in a
sense, we are already at war with Iran.
Carl von Clausewitz, the great
theoretician of modern warfare, defined war as the
continuation of politics by other means. In the
case of Iran, international politics has become a
de-facto state of war. According to reports, the
annual inflation rate in Iran is 22.2%, although
many economists estimate it at double that. In the
last week of June, the price of chicken rose 30%,
grains were up 55.8%, fruits up 66.6%, and
vegetables up 99.5%. Iran's Central Bank estimates
unemployment among the young is
22.5%, although the
Financial Times says "the official figures are
vastly underestimated". The production sector is
working at half its capacity.
The value of
the Iranian rial has fallen 40% since last year,
and there is a wave of business closings and
bankruptcies due to rising energy costs and
imports made expensive by the sanctions.
Oil exports, Iran's major source of
income, have fallen 40% in 2012, according to the
International Energy Agency, costing the country
nearly US$32 billion over the past year. The
27-member European Union ban on buying Iranian oil
will further depress sales, and an EU withdrawal
of shipping insurance will make it difficult for
Tehran to ship oil and gas to its diminishing
number of customers. Loss of insurance coverage
could reduce Iran's oil exports by 200,000 barrels
a day, or $4.5 billion a month. Energy accounts
for about 80% of Iran's public revenues.
Whipsawed by energy sanctions, the worst
may be yet to come. The United States has already
made it difficult for countries to deal with
Iran's Central Bank, and the US Congress is
considering legislation that would declare the
Iranian energy sector a "zone of proliferation
concern", which would strangle Tehran's ability to
collect payments for its oil exports. Other
proposals would essentially make it impossible to
do business with Iran's other banks. Any country
that dared to do so would find itself unable to
conduct virtually any kind of international
banking.
If the blizzard of legislation
does pass, "this would be a significant
ratcheting-up of the economic war against Iran,"
Mark Dubowitz told the Financial Times. Dubowitz
is executive director of the neo-conservative
Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, which
has lobbied for a series of economic assaults
against the Palestinians, China, and Hezbollah.
But the "war" has already gone far beyond
the economic sphere.
In the past two
years, five Iranian nuclear scientists have been
assassinated. The hits have been widely attributed
to the Israeli intelligence service, Mossad, and
the People's Mujahedin of Iran (MEK), an
organization the US State Department designates as
"terrorist".
Last year, a massive
explosion rocked the Bid Ganeh military base near
Tehran, killing 17 people, including the founder
of Iran's missile program, General Hassan Tehrani
Moghaddam. According to Israeli media, the camp
was sabotaged by the MEK working with Mossad.
Deadly attacks directed at Iran's Revolutionary
Guard have been tied to Jundallah, a Sunni group
with ties to US and Israeli intelligence.
It is no secret - indeed, President Obama
openly admitted it - that under the codename
"Olympic Games" the United States has been waging
cyber war against Iran. The Stuxnet virus shut
down a considerable portion of Iran's nuclear
program, although it also infected infrastructure
systems, including power plants, oil rigs, and
water supplies. The virus was designed to attack
systems made by the German company Siemens and has
apparently spread to China, Pakistan, and
Indonesia.
The United States is also
suspected of being behind the Flame virus, a
spyware program able to record keystrokes,
eavesdrop on conversations near an infected
computer, and tap into screen images. Besides
Iran, Flame has been found in computers in the
Palestinian West Bank, Lebanon, Hungary, Austria,
Russia, Hong Kong, and the United Arab Emirates.
Because "malware" seeks out undefended computers
no matter where they are, it has a habit of
spreading beyond its initial target.
Most
of the media is focused on whether the failure of
the talks will lead to an Israeli or American
attack on Iran's nuclear facilities, and there is
certainly considerable smoke out there.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
and Defense Minister Ehud Barak have been
threatening to attack Iran for the past two years.
According to Gideon Rachman, a leading columnist
for the Financial Times, some Israeli officials
have told him Tel Aviv will attack sometime this
summer or early fall. One source told him "Israel
will wait until September or October because the
weather is better and it's closer to the US
elections."
But the Independent's (UK)
Patrick Cockburn, one of the more reliable
analysts on the Middle East, thinks the Israeli
threats are "the bluff of the century". Cockburn
argues that there is simply no reason for Tel Aviv
to go to war, since the Iranian economy is being
effectively strangled by the sanctions. But the
saber rattling is useful because it scares the EU
into toughing up the siege of Tehran, while also
shifting the Palestinian issue to a back burner.
There are serious divisions within Israel
on whether to go to war, with the Israeli
intelligence and military generally opposed. The
latter's reasons are simple: militarily Tel Aviv
couldn't pull it off, and politically an attack
would garner worldwide sympathy for Iran. Recent
statements downgrading the threat of Iran by
Israeli Deputy Prime Minister Shaul Mofaz suggest
the Netanyahu government is finally feeling the
pressure from divisions within its own ranks and
may be backing off from a military confrontation.
And the United States?
According
to Paul Rogers, a Department of Peace Studies
professor at Bradford University and
OpenDemocracy's international security editor, the
Pentagon has drawn up plans for a concentrated
attack on Iran's nuclear industry, using a
combination of bombers and cruise missiles. The
United States recently beefed up its military
footprint in the region.
But while the
possibility of such an attack is real - especially
if congressional hawks get their way - the
Pentagon and the US intelligence establishment are
hardly enthusiastic about it. In any case, the
United States is carpet-bombing Iran's economy
without firing a shot or sending air crews into
harm's way.
Although Iran is generally
depicted as the recalcitrant party in the current
nuclear talks, it has already compromised
extensively, even agreeing to ship some of its
enriched uranium out of the country and to
guarantee the International Atomic Energy Agency
(IAEA) access to all nuclear facilities. Tehran
has also converted one-third of its 20%-enriched
uranium into plates, making it almost impossible
to use the fuel for nuclear weapons. Weapons-grade
uranium is enriched to 90%.
In return,
Tehran is demanding the right to enrich to 3.5% -
the level needed to power a civilian reactor - and
an end to sanctions.
The Nuclear
Non-Proliferation Treaty does not ban enriching
uranium - indeed, it is guaranteed by Articles III
and IV - as long as the fuel is not weaponized.
"Iran is raising eyebrows," says Yousaf M Butt of
the American Federation of Scientists, "but what
it is doing is a concern - not illegal."
However, the P5+1 - the permanent UN
Security Council members, Britain, France, the US,
Russia, China, plus Germany - is demanding an end
to all enrichment, an Iranian commitment to ship
the enriched fuel out of the country, and closure
of the enrichment plant at Fordo: "stop, shut, and
ship."
In return, Iran would get enriched
fuel for medical use and some spare parts for its
civilian airlines. The sanctions would remain in
place, however, although it would open the subject
up for discussion. The problem is that many of the
more onerous sanctions are those independently
applied by the United States and the EU. Russia
and China have expressed opposition to the
independent sanctions, but so far have not shown a
willingness to openly flaunt them.
It will
be hard for Tehran to make further concessions,
particularly if there is no light at the end of
the sanction tunnel. Indeed, some of the demands
seem almost crafted to derail a diplomatic
solution, raising the suspicion that the dispute
is less about Iran's nuclear program than a
concerted drive to marginalize a country that has
resisted European and US interests in the Middle
East. Isolate Iran enough, the thinking goes, and
it might bring about regime change. Moscow and
Beijing don't support such an outcome, but they
have little influence over what Washington and
Brussels do independently.
There is still
no evidence that Iran is trying to build nuclear
weapons. Indeed, the body of evidence suggests the
opposite, including the 2007 US National
Intelligence Estimate that Tehran mothballed its
program in 2003. But evidence is irrelevant when
the enormous economic power of the United States
and the EU can cow the rest of the world, and
force a country to its knees without resorting to
open hostilities.
In short, war by other
means.
Conn Hallinan is a
columnist for Foreign Policy In Focus.
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