AZG Armenian Daily #044, 11/03/2006

World press

IRAN: “EVERYTHING IS ON THE TABLE”

The biggest pitfall in predicting the behaviour of
radical groups like the inner circle of the Bush
Administration is that you keep telling yourself that
they would never actually do whatever it is they’re
talking about. Surely they must realise that acting
like that would cause a disaster. Then they go right
ahead and do it.

“(The Iranians) must know everything is on the table
and they must understand what that means,” US
ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton told a
group of visiting British politicians last week. “We
can hit different points along the line. You only have
to take out one part of their nuclear operation to
take the whole thing down.” In other words, he was
calmly proposing an illegal attack on a sovereign
state, possibly involving nuclear weapons.

Bolton knew his words would be leaked, so maybe it was
just deliberate posturing to raise the pressure on
Iran. But on Sunday, addressing the American-Israeli
Public Affairs Committee in Washington, Bolton
repeated the threat: “The longer we wait to confront
the threat Iran poses, the harder and more intractable
it will become to solve…We must be prepared to rely
on comprehensive solutions and use all the tools at
our disposal to stop the threat….” He may really
mean it – and no one in the White House has told him
to shut up.

With the US army already mired in Iraq, the Bush
administration lacks the ground strength to invade
Iran, a far larger country, but the strategic plans
and command structure for an air-attacks-only strike
are already in place. The National Security Strategy
statement of September 2002 declared a new doctrine of
“preemptive” wars in which the US would launch
unprovoked attacks against countries that it feared
might hurt it in the future, and in January 2003 that
doctrine was elaborated into the military strategy of
“full spectrum global strike.”

The “full spectrum” referred specifically to the use
of nuclear weapons to destroy hardened targets that
ordinary weapons cannot reach. Earth-penetrating
“mini-nukes” were an integral part of Conplan 8022-02,
a presidential directive signed by Bush at the same
time that covered attacks on countries allegedly
posing an “imminent” nuclear threat in which no
American ground troops would be used. Indeed, the
responsibility for carrying out Conplan 8022 was given
to Strategic Command (Stratcom) in Omaha, a military
command that had previously dealt only with nuclear
weapons.

Last May, Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld issued an
“Interim Global Strike Alert Order” putting Stratcom
on high military readiness 24 hours a day. Logic says
there is no “imminent” danger of Iranian nuclear
weapons: last year’s US National Intelligence Estimate
put the time needed for Iran to develop such weapons
at ten years. But experience says that this
administration can talk itself into a “preemptive”
attack on a country that really does not pose any
threat at all.

So what happens if they talk themselves into
unleashing Conplan 8022 on Iran? Thousands of people
would die, of course, and the surviving 70 million
Iranians would be very cross, but how could they
strike back at the United States? Iran has no nuclear
weapons, no weapons of any sort that could reach
America. Given the huge American technological lead,
it can’t even do much damage to US forces in the Gulf
region. But it does have two powerful weapons: its
Shia faith, and oil.

Iran is currently playing a long game in Iraq,
encouraging the Shia religious parties to cooperate
with the American political project so that a
Shia-dominated government in Baghdad will turn Iraq
into a reliable ally of Iran once the Americans go
home. But if Tehran encouraged the Shia militias to
attack American troops in Iraq, US casualties would
soar. The whole American position there could become
untenable in months.

Iran would probably not try to close the Strait of
Tiran, the choke-point through which most of the
Gulf’s oil exports pass, for US forces could easily
dominate or even seize the sparsely populated Iranian
coast on the north side. But it would certainly halt
its own oil exports, currently close to 4 million
barrels a day, and in today’s tight oil market that
would likely drive the oil price up to $130-$150 a
barrel. Moreover, Tehran could keep the exports turned
off for months, since recent oil prices, already high
by historical standards, have enabled it to build up a
large cash reserve. (Iran earned $45 billion from oil
exports last year, twice the average in 2001-03.)

So a “preemptive” American attack on Iran would ignite
a general insurrection against the American presence
in Shia-dominated areas of Iraq and trigger a global
economic crisis. The use of nuclear weapons would
cross a firebreak that the world has maintained ever
since 1945, and convince most other great powers that
the United States is a rogue state that must be
contained. All this to deal with a threat that is no
more real or “imminent” than the one posed by Iraq in
2003.

No American policy-maker in his right mind would
contemplate unleashing such a disaster for so little
reason. Unfortunately, that does not guarantee that it
won’t happen.

By Gwynne Dyer