Cernig: A Recipe For Accidental Disaster
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Posted By Cernig
Yesterday in Mexico City, secDef Gates told reporters that a second U.S. aircraft carrier and it’s escorting fleet steaming into the Gulf was a “reminder” to Iran.
Gates flatly denied a suggestion that the presence of two US carriers in the Gulf could be a precursor to military action against Tehran.
‘This deployment has been planned for a long time,’ Gates said. ‘I don’t think we’ll have two carriers there for a protracted period of time. So I don’t see it as an escalation. I think it could be seen, though, as a reminder.’
He declined to elaborate on his remarks and provided no details about the deployment.
Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell said the second carrier arrived in the Gulf on Tuesday to replace one on duty that was expected to depart the region in two days.
US Navy officials were not immediately available for comment.
News of the second carrier came amid simmering tension between the United States and Iran that has fed speculation about a possible US military strike.
If the handover between the two carrier groups happens on schedule in a couple of days then fair enough - but Gate’s words themselves are an additional escalation in a new round of sabre-rattling the U.S. has directed at Iran. The Chair of the Joint Chiefs, Admiral Mullen, has already indicated that the U.S. has “reserve capability” to attack Iran and now CBS is reporting a deliberate leak from the Pentagon that says it is developing strike options for an attack that would involve limited strikes on “plants where weapons are made” and the Qods Force Headquarters (in Tehran).
Over at VetVoice, though, diariest “DM” points out that there’s no such thing as a limited strike package against a nation like Iran.
I think the media needs to wake up to what an attack on Iran would really look like. Even assuming that the objective of the attack is limited to reducing Iranian exportation of weapons and training to Iraq, the attack itself would not be limited. Remember, Iran possesses a fairly substantial defensive and retaliatory capability.
First of all, any air attack would involve strikes on Iranian air defense and communications nodes, as well as on airfields housing military aircraft. This is necessary to protect our aircraft. Political and military centers of gravity would also be attacked in order to disrupt and delay the Iranian response.
Second, Iranian naval forces possess conventional surface ships, fast attack craft, sophisticated submarines, naval mines, and anti-ship cruise missiles. Therefore, Iran can disrupt shipping (both commercial and military) in the Arabian Gulf and possibly the Arabian Sea. This is a crucial supply route for US forces and for global oil distribution. The entire Iranian naval apparatus would have to be destroyed.
Third, Iran possesses ballistic missiles which could be used to attack US forces and friendly nations throughout southwest Asia. The US would have to seek out and destroy these missiles. Additionally, US forces (probably the Navy) would have to operate in the Arabian Gulf and elsewhere to provide a defense against any missiles that leave the ground.
Last, but certainly not least, we can’t leave out the Iranian nuclear program. Whether or not you believe that the program is designed to produce a weapon, the Bush Administration is obviously not going to risk seriously pissing off a country that builds nukes. Facilities related to this program will have to be destroyed.
Then, beyond the strike package itself, there’s the blowback. A Shiite insurrection in Iraq followed by a Sunni rising and Turkish invasion of the North. The alienation of every Middle Eastern nation who will see major attacks on two Muslim (and oil-producing) nations in a row. A massive uptick in world-wide terrorism whether at Iran’s direction or not. A further breakdown in world stability as many come to the conclusion that the planet’s only superpower is wedded to the bomb as its primary method of negotiation. The notion that there’s any variety of “cakewalk” involved in striking Iran is deliberately misleading at best and delusional at worst.
Unfortunately, we’ve seen time and again that the Bush administration is willing to believe it’s own spin and propaganda when acting - with always disasterous results. And there has never yet been a time when this administration’s claims of a treat against American interests has not turned out to be exaggerated.
That’s true again with the narrative against Iran. Every nation on earth has politicos who tag along on junkets just to see and be seen, but when the Iranian Defense Minister appears on a presidential visit to Iran’s enrichment facility it’s seen as “deliberately mocking a recent finding by U.S. intelligence that Iran had ceased work on a nuclear weapon.” Paranoid much? Iran’s enrichment facilities are under IAEA surveilance and seal and the atom-watchdog agency has guaranteed that no fuel from that facility can be redirected to weapons production without its knowledge. Iran today could not produce a weapon using that facility without international forewarning. At every stage, though slowly, Iran’s protestations of civilian purposes for its nuclear program have been upheld by the IAEA. That’s the ground reality never stated by mainstream media reporting and utterly ignored by Bush administration propaganda.
Russia, which is probably more involved in Iranian nuclear work than any other nation, today released a statement:
TEHRAN, April 30 (Itar-Tass) - Russia believes that Iran is not conducting military nuclear research at the moment, but all countries have to be sure of this, acting secretary of Russia’s Security Council, Valentin Sobolev, told Itar-Tass on Wednesday after three-day talks in Tehran.
“We believe that Iran is not engaged in any military nuclear research, but we are confident that not only Russia should think so but all countries that are involved in the settlement of the situation [revolving around the Iranian nuclear programme],” he said.
There’s a yawning gap between IAEA and Russian views and those of the Bush administration - and the gap is primarily composed of black-helicopter conspiracy theories. Yet the U.S. might still be led to war by those neoconservative paranoias.
On the “Iran meddling in Iraq” front, exaggerated claims and pure spin that then feed back into policy planning as if true are also the order of the day. Today the LA Times reports that:
Baghdad says it agrees with the United States that Iran has continued to supply weapons to anti-government militants in southern Iraq, including arms with markings indicating they were produced this year. On the other hand, the Iraqi government seems eager to send a message to the Bush administration to back off threats of military action and allow Baghdad to pursue diplomatic solutions more quietly with Tehran.
…The United States for more than a year has accused Iran of meddling in Iraq. A U.S. military official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the political sensitivity of the issue, said the newest evidence included munitions with 2008 manufacture dates found in Basra during recent fighting between Iraqi and U.S. forces and Shiite militiamen. They bore the hallmarks of Iranian workmanship, including fuses only found on Iranian-made arms, he said.
But in a repeat of a scenario seen here for more than a year, neither the United States nor Iraq has unveiled the evidence, and nobody is saying when or if it will be made public. The U.S. military official said it was up to the Iraqis to decide when and how to present the evidence.
…A White House official said Basra was a “clarifying moment” for Iraqi government officials, who he said are “tired of the Iranians meddling in Iraq.”
Iraq’s national security advisor, Mowaffak Rubaie, and Ministry of Defense spokesman Mohammed Askari said caches found in Basra included Iranian-made arms with markings showing they were manufactured in 2008. Rubaie said the government was preparing to present the evidence to the Iranians soon, but he did not say when.
Despite the heated-up rhetoric, neither the United States nor Iraq has said it believes Iran has increased its smuggling of weapons, including rockets and roadside bombs blamed for most U.S. troop deaths. They appear instead to be accusing Iran of not keeping a promise it made late last year to Maliki to reduce activities here.
That raises the question of why the uptick in finger-pointing now.
Rubaie said there was “other evidence” in addition to the apparently new weapons, but he did not say what it was. He and other officials stressed that it was not just the weapons that bothered them, but the “extent” of Iranian involvement in other, unnamed aspects of the conflict.
What isn’t being reported in the U.S., but is getting widespread coverage in the region, is that Prime Minister Maliki has told off Rubaie and Askari for speaking out of turn, suggested that their claims were overly fulsome, and told reporters that only official pronouncements from his own office carry the weight of official Iraqi government opinion on the issue. Maliki is visiting Tehran shortly, presumably to receive guidance on how to navigate the current round of sabre-rattling. Its unlikely that he’ll carry through on U.S. wishes to tell Iran to butt out, since that would mean cutting off aid to his largest ally rather than to the Sadrists.
Sadr spokesman Salah al-Obeidi (al-Ubaydi) in Najaf bitterly attacked Iran, accusing it of seeking to share with the US in influence over Iraq. He pointed to the Iranian’s regime’s failure to condemn the long-term mutual security agreement being crafted by the Bush administration and the al-Maliki government. Al-Obeidi’s angry denunciation suggests that Iran is backing PM Nuri al-Maliki and his current chief ally, the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq led by Abdul Aziz al-Hakim against the Sadr Movement of Muqtada al-Sadr.
Rubaie, meanwhile, is never asked about his own involvement in Iranian “meddling”. When the first set of alleged Iranian Qods Force meddlers were arrested in Iraq by U.S. forces, it was at the compound of his sponsor, Hakim of the ISCI. Rubaie had been at the meeting, which supposedly involved a shopping-list of weaponry for the ISCI’s Badr Brigade. The ISCI has good reason to go along with demonising the Mahdi Army by association with Iran right now and Askari, a Sunni, likewise has cause to want to see Iran brought to heel.
On a broader note, U.S. claims about Iranian weapons and assistance to groups inside Iraq have been characterised all along by hype rather than proof. The abortive briefing in Baghdad last year that was supposed to prove these claims fell flat on its face and led to an evolving narrative on EFP devices, for instance, that ended up with the ludicrous claim that Iraqis didn’t have the knowledge or capability to make these devices on their own - even though terror groups from the IRA to FARC to Hezboullah have done so with far less in the way of available equipment. Meanwhile, porous borders and a regional black market trade in arms (from all nations, including U.S. ones misplaced in Iraq) which is at an all-time high make allegations of Iranian arms smuggling likewise dubious. As one regional expert told the LA Times today:
“I find it difficult to believe that Iranians would allow weapons to be traced back to them easily with manufacture dates on them,” said Vali Nasr, an expert on Shiite politics at Tufts University. He said nothing in the allegations was new. What is new, he said, is the United States’ need to justify its expansion of its operations to southern Iraq in support of Maliki’s offensive.
The Iranian angle provides that justification, especially in the eyes of most Americans, Nasr said. “The threshold for demonization of Iran is fairly low. The public would readily believe the worst about Iran,” he said.
In summary, then, the U.S. may not be actually intending to strike Iran - or it might, while pretending it’s just rattling sabres as a “reminder” of U.S. power. But what is certainly true is that sabre-rattling on the basis of exaggerated stories, which then feed back as if true into policy making, is a recipe for an accidental confrontation which will rapidly escalate into a disasterous war.
Posted by Cernig on April 30, 2008 at 02:31 PM
