I
am running out of juice but will return to Iran tomorrow
Cockburn:
Trump May Be In Too Deep To Avoid War With Iran
President
Trump’s last-minute change of mind over launching US airstrikes
against Iran shows
that a
military conflict of some description in the Gulf is becoming highly
probable.
His
hesitation was most likely less connected with an Iranian
surface-to-air missile shooting down a US surveillance drone than
with his instinct that militarising the crisis is not in America’s
best interests.
If
Trump had not pulled back and the strikes against Iranian radars and
missile batteries had gone ahead, where exactly would that have got
him?
This
sort of limited military operation is usually more effective as a
threat than in actuality.
The
US is not going to launch an all-out war against Iran in pursuit of a
decisive victory and anything less creates more problems than it
resolves.
Iran
would certainly retain post-strike the ability to launch pin-prick
attacks up and down the Gulf and, especially, in and around the
35-mile wide Strait of Hormuz through which passes 30 per cent of the
world’s oil trade. Anything affecting this choke point reverberates
around the word: news of the shooting down of the drone immediately
sent the price of benchmark Brent crude oil rocketing upwards by 4.75
per cent.
Note
that the Iranian surface-to-air missile shot down a $130m (£100m)
drone, in practice an unmanned aircraft stuffed with electronic
equipment that was designed to be invulnerable to such an attack. The
inference is that if US aircraft – as opposed to missiles – start
operating over or close to Iranian airspace then they are likely to
suffer losses.
But
the dilemma for Trump is at a deeper level. His
sanctions against Iran, reimposed after he withdrew the US from the
Iran nuclear deal in 2018, are devastating
the Iranian economy. The
US Treasury is a more lethal international power than the Pentagon.
The EU and other countries have stuck with the deal, but they have in
practice come to tolerate the economic blockade of Iran.
Iran
was left with no choice but to escalate the conflict. It wants to
make sure that the US, the European and Asian powers, and US regional
allies Saudi
Arabia and
United Arab Emirates, feel some pain.
Tehran
never expected much from the EU states, which are still signed up to
the 2015 nuclear deal, and has found its low expectations are being
fulfilled.
A
fundamental misunderstanding of the US-Iran confrontation is shared
by many commentators. It may seem self-evident that the US has an
interest in using its vast military superiority over Iran to get what
it wants. But after
the failure of the US ground forces to win in Iraq and Afghanistan,
not to mention Somalia, no US leader can start a land war in the
Middle East without endangering their political survival at home.
Trump
took this lesson to heart long before he became president. He is a
genuine isolationist in the American tradition. The Democrats and
much of the US media have portrayed Trump as a warmonger, though he
has yet to start a war.
His
national security adviser John Bolton and secretary of state Mike
Pompeo issue bloodcurdling threats against Iran, but Trump evidently
views such bellicose rhetoric as simply one more way of ramping up
the pressure on Iran.
But
if a ground war is ruled out, then Iran is engaged in the sort of
limited conflict in which it has long experience. A senior Iraqi
official once said to me that the Iranians “have a PhD” in this
type of part political, part military warfare. They are tactics that
have worked well for Tehran in Lebanon, Iraq and Syria over the past
40 years. The Iranians have many pressure points against the US, and
above all against its Saudi and Emirati allies in the Gulf.
The
Iranians could overplay their hand:
Trump is an isolationist, but he is also a populist national leader
who claims in his first campaign rallies for the next presidential
election to “have made America great again”. Such boasts make
it difficult
to not retaliate against Iran,
a country he has demonised as the source of all the troubles in the
Middle East.
One
US military option looks superficially attractive but conceals many
pitfalls.
This
is to try to carry out operations along the lines of the limited
military conflict between the US and Iran called the “tanker war”.
This was part of the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s and the US came out
the winner.
Saddam
Hussein sought to throttle Iran’s oil exports and Iran tried to do
the same to Iraq. The US and its allies weighed in openly on Saddam
Hussein’s side – an episode swiftly forgotten by them after the
Iraqi leader invaded Kuwait in 1990. From 1987 on, re-registered
Kuwaiti tankers were being escorted through the Gulf by US warships.
There were US airstrikes against Iranian ships and shore facilities,
culminating in the accidental but very avoidable shooting down of an
Iranian civil airliner with 290 passengers on board by the USS
Vincennes in 1988. Iran was forced to sue for peace in its war with
Iraq.
Some
retired American generals speak about staging a repeat of the tanker
war today but circumstances have changed. Iran’s main opponent in
1988 was Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and Iran was well on its way to
losing the war, in which there was only one front.
Today
Saddam is gone and Iraq is ruled by a Shia-dominated
government. Baghdad
is trying to stay neutral in the US-Iran crisis, but no Iraqi leader
can afford to oppose Iran as the greatest Shia power. The political
geography of this part of the Middle East has been transformed since
the Iran-Iraq war, with change very much to the advantage of
Iran.
From
the Afghan border to the Mediterranean – in Iran, Iraq, Syria,
Lebanon – Shia communities are in control or are the most powerful
forces in the state. The US and UK often refer to them as “Iranian
proxies” but in practice Iran leads a sectarian coalition with a
religious basis.
It
is a coalition which has already won its main battles – with Shia
parties in Iraq, Bashar al-Assad in Syria, Hezbollah in Lebanon –
and this outcome is not going to change. The Houthis in Yemen, who
belong to a different Shia variant, have survived a prolonged attempt
by Saudi Arabia and UAE to defeat them.
Compared
with 28 years ago in the Gulf when the US was last fighting a limited
war with Iran, the US is in a weaker position.
Israel,
Saudi Arabia and UAE may have urged Trump to tear up the nuclear deal
and confront Iran, but they show no enthusiasm to join any war that
ensues. Supposing that this month’s pin-prick attacks on tankers
were indeed carried out by Iran, which seems likely, then the purpose
will have been to send message that, if Iran’s oil exports can be
cut off, so too can those of the other Gulf producers.
Trump
thinks he can avoid the quagmire of another Middle East war, but he
may already be in too deep.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: only a member of this blog may post a comment.