Is War With Iran on the Horizon?
March 11, 2019
Despite growing Trump administration tensions with Venezuela and even with
North Korea, Iran is the likeliest spot for Washington's next shooting war,
says Bob Dreyfuss for TomDispatch.
The Trump Administration is Reckless Enough to Turn the Cold War With Iran
Into a Hot One
By Bob Dreyfuss
TomDispatch.com
Here's the foreign policy question of questions in 2019: Are President
Donald Trump, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and Saudi Crown
Prince Mohammed bin Salman, all severely weakened at home and with few
allies abroad, reckless enough to set off a war with Iran?
Could military actions designed to be limited - say, a heightening of the
Israeli bombing of Iranian forces inside Syria, or possible U.S.
cross-border attacks from Iraq, or a clash between American and Iranian
naval ships in the Persian Gulf - trigger a wider war?
Worryingly, the answers are: yes and yes. Even though Western Europe has
lined up in opposition to any future conflict with Iran, even though Russia
and China would rail against it, even though most Washington foreign policy
experts would be horrified by the outbreak of such a war, it could happen.
Despite growing Trump administration tensions with Venezuela and even with
North Korea, Iran is the likeliest spot for Washington's next shooting war.
Years of politically charged anti-Iranian vituperation might blow up in the
faces of President Trump and his two most hawkish aides, Secretary of State
Mike Pompeo and National Security Advisor John Bolton, setting off a
conflict with potentially catastrophic implications.
Such a war could quickly spread across much of the Middle East, not just to
Saudi Arabia and Israel, the region's two major anti-Iranian powers, but
Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, and the various Persian Gulf states. It might
indeed be, as Iranian President Hassan Rouhani suggested last year
(unconsciously echoing Iran's former enemy, Iraqi ruler Saddam Hussein) the
"mother of all wars."
Rouhani: "Mother of all wars." (Kremlin photo)
With Bolton and Pompeo, both well-known Iranophobes, in the driver's seat,
few restraints remain on President Trump when it comes to that country.
White House Chief of Staff John Kelly, National Security Advisor H.R.
McMaster, and Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis, President Trump's former
favorite generals who had urged caution, are no longer around. And though
the Democratic National Committee passed a resolution last month calling for
the United States to return to the nuclear agreement that President Obama
signed, there are still a significant number of congressional Democrats who
believe that Iran is a major threat to U.S. interests in the region.
During the Obama years, it was de rigueur for Democrats to support the
president's conclusion that Iran was a prime state sponsor of terrorism and
should be treated accordingly. And the congressional Democrats now leading
the party on foreign policy - Eliot Engel, who currently chairs the House
Foreign Affairs Committee, and Bob Menendez and Ben Cardin, the two ranking
Democrats on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee - were opponents of the
2015 nuclear accord (though all three now claim to have changed their
minds).
Deadly Flashpoints for a Future War
On the roller coaster ride that is Donald Trump's foreign policy, it's hard
to discern what's real and what isn't, what's rhetoric and what's not. When
it comes to Iran, it's reasonable to assume that Trump, Bolton, and Pompeo
aren't planning an updated version of the unilateral invasion of Iraq that
President George W. Bush launched in the spring of 2003.
Yet by openly calling for the toppling of the government in Tehran, by
withdrawing from the Iran nuclear agreement and reimposing onerous sanctions
to cripple that country's economy, by encouraging Iranians to rise up in
revolt, by overtly supporting various exile groups (and perhaps covertly
even terrorists), and by joining with Israel and Saudi Arabia in an informal
anti-Iranian alliance, the three of them are clearly attempting to force the
collapse of the Iranian regime, which just celebrated the 40th anniversary
of the 1979 Islamic revolution.
There are three potential flashpoints where limited skirmishes, were they to
break out, could quickly escalate into a major shooting war.
Netanyahu: Boasts about striking Iranian targets. (Kremlin photo)
The first is in Syria and Lebanon. Iran is deeply involved in defending
Syrian President Bashar al-Assad (who only recently returned from a visit to
Tehran) and closely allied with Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shiite political
party with a potent paramilitary arm. Weeks ago, Israeli Prime Minister
Netanyahu openly boasted that his country's air force had successfully taken
out Iranian targets in Syria. In fact, little noticed here, dozens of such
strikes have taken place for more than a year, with mounting Iranian
casualties.
Until now, the Iranian leadership has avoided a direct response that would
heighten the confrontation with Israel, just as it has avoided unleashing
Hezbollah, a well-armed, battle-tested proxy force. That could, however,
change if the hardliners in Iran decided to retaliate. Should this simmering
conflict explode, does anyone doubt that President Trump would soon join the
fray on Israel's side or that congressional Democrats would quickly succumb
to the administration's calls to back the Jewish state?
Next, consider Iraq as a possible flashpoint for conflict. In February, a
blustery Trump told CBS's Face the Nation that he intends to keep U.S.
forces in Iraq "because I want to be looking a little bit at Iran because
Iran is the real problem." His comments did not exactly go over well with
the Iraqi political class, since many of that country's parties and militias
are backed by Iran.
Trump's declaration followed a Wall Street Journal report late last year
that Bolton had asked the Pentagon - over the opposition of various generals
and then-Secretary of Defense Mattis - to prepare options for "retaliatory
strikes" against Iran. This roughly coincided with a couple of small rocket
attacks against Baghdad's fortified Green Zone and the airport in Basra,
Iraq's Persian Gulf port city, neither of which caused any casualties.
Writing in Foreign Affairs, however, Pompeo blamed Iran for the attacks,
which he called "life-threatening," adding, "Iran did not stop these
attacks, which were carried out by proxies it has supported with funding,
training, and weapons." No "retaliatory strikes" were launched, but plans do
undoubtedly now exist for them and it's not hard to imagine Bolton and
Pompeo persuading Trump to go ahead and use them - with incalculable
consequences.
Finally, there's the Persian Gulf itself. Ever since the George W. Bush
years, the U.S. Navy has worried about possible clashes with Iran's naval
forces in those waters and there have been a number of high-profile
incidents. The Obama administration tried (but failed) to establish a
hotline of sorts that would have linked U.S. and Iranian naval commanders
and so make it easier to defuse any such incident, an initiative championed
by then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Admiral Mike Mullen, a longtime
opponent of war with Iran.
Under Trump, however, all bets are off. Last year, he requested that Mattis
prepare plans to blow up Iran's "fast boats," small gunboats in the Gulf,
reportedly asking, "Why don't we sink them?" He's already reinforced the
U.S. naval presence there, getting Iran's attention. Not surprisingly, the
Iranian leadership has responded in kind. Earlier this year, President
Hassan Rouhani announced that his country had developed submarines capable
of launching cruise missiles against naval targets. The Iranians also began
a series of Persian Gulf war games and, in late February, test fired one of
those sub-launched missiles.
An Iranian submarine launched missile.
Add in one more thing: in an eerie replay of a key argument George Bush and
Dick Cheney used for going to war with Iraq in 2003, in mid-February the
right-wing media outlet Washington Times ran an "exclusive" report with this
headline: "Iran-Al Qaeda Alliance may provide legal rationale for U.S.
military strikes."
Back in 2002, the Office of Special Plans at Secretary of Defense Donald
Rumsfeld's Pentagon, under the supervision of neoconservatives Paul
Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith, spent months trying to prove that al-Qaeda and
Iraq were in league. The Washington Times piece, citing Trump administration
sources, made a similar claim - that Iran is now aiding and abetting
al-Qaeda with a "clandestine sanctuary to funnel fighters, money, and
weapons across the Middle East."
It added that the administration is seeking to use this information to
establish "a potential legal justification for military strikes against Iran
or its proxies." Needless to say, few are the terrorism experts or Iran
specialists who would agree that Iran has anything like an active
relationship with al-Qaeda.
Will the Hardliners Triumph in Iran as in Washington?
The Trump administration is, in fact, experiencing increasing difficulty
finding allies ready to join a new Coalition of the Willing to confront
Iran. The only two charter members so far, Israel and Saudi Arabia, are,
however, enthusiastic indeed. Last month, Prime Minister Netanyahu was heard
remarking that Israel and its Arab allies want war with Iran.
At a less-than-successful mid-February summit meeting Washington organized
in Warsaw, Poland, to recruit world leaders for a future crusade against
Iran, Netanyahu was heard to say in Hebrew: "This is an open meeting with
representatives of leading Arab countries that are sitting down together
with Israel in order to advance the common interest of war with Iran." (He
later insisted that the correct translation should have been "combating
Iran," but the damage had already been done.)
That Warsaw summit was explicitly designed to build an anti-Iranian
coalition, but many of America's allies, staunchly opposing Trump's decision
to pull out of the Iran nuclear accord, would have nothing to do with it. In
an effort to mollify the Europeans in particular, the United States and
Poland awkwardly renamed it: "The Ministerial to Promote a Future of Peace
and Security in the Middle East."
The name change, however, fooled no one. As a result, Vice President Mike
Pence and Secretary of State Pompeo were embarrassed by a series of
no-shows: the French, the Germans, and the European Union, among others,
flatly declined to send ministerial-level representatives, letting their
ambassadors in Warsaw stand in for them. The many Arab nations not in
thrall to Saudi Arabia similarly sent only low-level delegations. Turkey and
Russia boycotted altogether, convening a summit of their own in which
Presidents Vladimir Putin and Recep Tayyip Erdogan met with Iran's Rouhani.
Never the smoothest diplomat, Pence condemned, insulted, and vilified the
Europeans for refusing to go along with Washington's wrecking-ball approach.
He began his speech to the conference by saying: "The time has come for our
European partners to withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal." He then launched
a direct attack on Europe's efforts to preserve that accord by seeking a way
around the sanctions Washington had re-imposed: "Sadly, some of our leading
European partners. have led the effort to create mechanisms to break up our
sanctions. We call it an effort to break American sanctions against Iran's
murderous revolutionary regime."
That blast at the European allies should certainly have brought to mind
Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld's disparaging comments in early 2003 about
Germany and France, in particular, being leaders of the "old Europe." Few
allies then backed Washington's invasion plans, which, of course, didn't
prevent war. Europe's reluctance now isn't likely to prove much of a
deterrent either.
But Pence is right that the Europeans have taken steps to salvage the Iran
nuclear deal, otherwise known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action
(JCPOA). In particular, they've created a "special purpose vehicle" known as
INSTEX (Instrument for Supporting Trade Exchanges) designed "to support
legitimate trade with Iran," according to a statement from the foreign
ministers of Germany, France, and Great Britain. It's potentially a big deal
and, as Pence noted, explicitly designed to circumvent the sanctions
Washington imposed on Iran after Trump's break with the JCPOA.
INSTEX has a political purpose, too. The American withdrawal from the JCPOA
was a body blow to President Rouhani, Foreign Minister Javad Zarif, and
other centrists in Tehran who had taken credit for, and pride in, the deal
between Iran and the six world powers (the United States, France, Germany,
Britain, Russia, and China) that signed the agreement. That deal had been
welcomed in Iran in part because it seemed to ensure that country's ability
to expand its trade to the rest of the world, including its oil exports,
free of sanctions.
Pence: No diplomat. (Gage Skidmore/Flickr)
Even before Trump abandoned the deal, however, Iran was already finding U.S.
pressure overwhelming and, for the average Iranian, things hadn't improved
in any significant way. Worse yet, in the past year the economy had taken a
nosedive, the currency had plunged, inflation was running rampant, and
strikes and street demonstrations had broken out, challenging the government
and its clerical leadership. Chants of "Death to the Dictator!" - not heard
since the Green Movement's revolt against President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's
reelection in 2009 - once again resounded in street demonstrations.
At the end of February, it seemed as if Trump, Bolton, and Pompeo had scored
a dangerous victory when Zarif, Iran's well-known, Western-oriented foreign
minister, announced his resignation. Moderates who supported the JCPOA,
including Rouhani and Zarif, have been under attack from the country's
hardliners since Trump's pullout. As a result, Zarif's decision was widely
assumed to be a worrisome sign that those hardliners had claimed their first
victim.
There was even unfounded speculation that, without Zarif, who had worked
tirelessly with the Europeans to preserve what was left of the nuclear pact,
Iran itself might abandon the accord and resume its nuclear program. And
there's no question that the actions and statements of Bolton, Pompeo, and
crew have undermined Iran's moderates, while emboldening its hardliners, who
are making I-told-you-so arguments to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the country's
supreme leader.
Despite the internal pressure on Zarif, however, his resignation proved
short-lived indeed: Rouhani rejected it, and there was an upsurge of support
for him in Iran's parliament. Even General Qassem Soleimani, a major figure
in that country's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and the commander
of the Quds Force, backed him.
As it happens, the Quds Force, an arm of the IRGC, is responsible for Iran's
paramilitary and foreign intelligence operations throughout the region, but
especially in Iraq and Syria. That role has allowed Soleimani to assume
responsibility for much of Iran's foreign policy in the region, making him a
formidable rival to Zarif - a tension that undoubtedly contributed to his
brief resignation and it isn't likely to dissipate anytime soon.
According to analysts and commentators, it appears to have been a ploy by
Zarif (and perhaps Rouhani, too) to win a vote of political confidence and
it appears to have strengthened their hand for the time being.
Still, the Zarif resignation crisis threw into stark relief the deep
tensions within Iranian politics and raised a key question: As the Trump
administration accelerates its efforts to seek a confrontation, will they
find an echo among Iranian hardliners who'd like nothing more than a
face-off with the United States?
Maybe that's exactly what Bolton and Pompeo want. If so, prepare yourself:
another American war unlikely to work out the way anyone in Washington
dreams is on the horizon.
Copyright 2019 Bob Dreyfuss
