Will U.S. attack Iran?

by Gerry Foley / March 2007 issue of Socialist Action Newspaper

U.S. government officials have been huffing and puffing to deny that they have any intention of attacking Iran. In fact, most of the experts consider that such an assault would be a disastrous adventure, many times worse than the war on Iraq.

However, the war on Iraq itself was a mad adventure that led precisely to the disastrous results experts predicted, and those prospects did not stay the hand of the Bush administration. And so now U.S. and world public opinion think that it is capable of anything. Moreover, the U.S. rulers’ accusations against Iran bear a striking resemblance to the case that they built for occupying Iraq.

The British Guardian reported Feb. 23: "Much of the intelligence on Iran's nuclear facilities provided to UN inspectors by American spy agencies has turned out to be unfounded, according to diplomatic sources in Vienna. The claims, reminiscent of the intelligence fiasco surrounding the Iraq war, coincided with a sharp increase in international tension as the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) reported that Iran was defying a UN security council ultimatum to freeze its nuclear programme."

The article continued: "Most of the tip-offs about supposed secret weapons sites provided by the CIA and other US intelligence agencies have led to dead ends when investigated by IAEA inspectors, according to informed sources in Vienna.

"‘Most of it has turned out to be incorrect,’ said a diplomat at the IAEA with detailed knowledge of the agency's investigations. ‘They gave us a paper with a list of sites. [The inspectors] did some follow-up, they went to some military sites, but there was no sign of [banned nuclear] activities.’"

Moreover, some of the evidence against Iran looked fabricated: "One particularly contentious issue concerned records of plans to build a nuclear warhead, which the CIA said it found on a stolen laptop computer supplied by an informant inside Iran. In July 2005, US intelligence officials showed printed versions of the material to IAEA officials, who judged it to be sufficiently specific to confront Iran.

"Tehran rejected the material as forgeries and there are still reservations about its authenticity in the IAEA, according to officials with knowledge of the internal debate inside the agency.

"‘First of all, if you have a clandestine programme, you don't put it on laptops which can walk away,’ one official said. “The data is all in English, which may be reasonable for some of the technical matters, but at some point you'd have thought there would be at least some notes in Farsi. So there is some doubt over the provenance of the computer.’”

U.S. officials have suggested that they would consider a military strike on Iran to keep it from developing a nuclear weapon. But the other U.S. brief against Iran is that it is aiding groups in Iraq that are attacking the occupying army. Ominously, sources in the Bush administration have indicated that any major attack on U.S. forces in Iraq in which the Iranian authorities are accused of complicity could be justification for an attack on Iran.

The BBC website reported Feb. 19: "US contingency plans for air strikes on Iran extend beyond nuclear sites and include most of the country's military infrastructure, the BBC has learned.

"It is understood that any such attack—if ordered—would target Iranian air bases, naval bases, missile facilities, and command-and-control centres." The article went on to point out: "BBC security correspondent Frank Gardner says the trigger for such an attack reportedly includes any confirmation that Iran was developing a nuclear weapon—which it denies.

"Alternatively, our correspondent adds, a high-casualty attack on US forces in neighbouring Iraq could also trigger a bombing campaign if it were traced directly back to Tehran."

On the Pacifica radio commentary show "Democracy Now," on Feb. 21, a retired U.S. Air Force colonel, Sam Gardiner, commented on the BBC’s revelations: "Actually, I find the BBC article to be completely credible. Let me take the two points that they make and explain why I think they are. The first thing is they talk about the trigger of a high casualty event in Iraq. That is totally consistent with the plans that were drawn up before the invasion of Iraq.

"We now know from the released plans, which at that time were classified ‘Top Secret, Polo Step,’ that there was a series of triggers, that if they were to be pulled, the United States would go ahead of its plan in the invasion of Iraq.

"The second thing about identifying a nuclear program is even more concerning and probably the one we ought to worry about. We have to remember that the president has said Iran can't be allowed to have a nuclear weapon. But he has always—or not always, mostly—adds a phrase beyond that, which says, ‘or the knowledge to produce nuclear weapons.’ That's a very important follow-on statement, consistent with what Israel has said.

"The way that is generally interpreted is that if Iran can put together 3000 centrifuges for enrichment, they then will have the capability or the knowledge to produce a nuclear weapon.

That event, according to the head of the IAEA yesterday, could occur within the next six months, so that if you take the president at his word, and if you take the estimate from the International Atomic Energy Agency, we will cross the U.S. red line within the next six months, and presumably we can't stand that. And when we say that, that means we conduct a military operation against the Iranians."

It is unlikely that a U.S. assault on Iran would take the same form as the invasion and occupation of Iraq. It is a much larger country with more difficult terrain. It would be extremely difficult to subdue, but much easier to cripple.

Iran’s economy is almost totally dependent on oil exports from a vulnerable depot on the Persian Gulf. Its population centers are scattered, and heavy aerial bombing could isolate them.

There are a number of ethnic groups that are alienated from the regime. But with exception of a relatively small Arab population in the oil-producing Gulf area, they are peripheral to the Persian heartland and the centers of the economy. The largest are the Kurds, who have practically no economic weight.

There have been convincing reports of the U.S. sending covert teams into Iran. And there have been terrorist attacks in the Arab area and recently in the Baluchi area, which Tehran has never effectively controlled, in the name of Arab nationalism and Sunni sectarianism (the Baluchis are Sunnis). The Iranian regime is dominated by the Shiite clergy and a basically Shiite religious ideology.

There are, moreover, increasing reports that the U.S. is manipulating the traditional antagonisms between Shiite and Sunni in order to divide the opposition to imperialism in the region, and that it is giving more and more support to Sunni Islamist groups, even some linked to al-Qaida.

The New York Times reported Feb. 19: "Iran has accused the United States and Britain of provoking the Sunni insurgents. The authorities have said that the efforts are part of the plot to sow discord among Sunnis and Shiites in the country. Gen. Mohammad Ghaffari, a commander of security forces in the province, told the Fars news agency that a film that was confiscated from the suspects proved that the group was ‘affiliated to intelligence agencies of some of the foreign countries, such as the U.S. and Britain.’"

The article continued: "The news agency [Fars] also quoted what it called informed sources as saying that the explosives used in the bombings were American.

"Iran blamed the United States and Britain for a series of bombings in the southern city of Ahwaz in Khuzestan Province in 2006. Those bombings were also carried out by Iranian Sunnis. The government hanged 12 men after accusing them of carrying out the attacks, which killed eight people."

The Washington Post reported Feb. 15 that a "sense of Western manipulation is often voiced by Shiite clerics and activists, who say the United States incites sectarianism as a way of blunting Iran's influence. In recent years, some of the most provocative comments have come from America's allies in the region: Egypt's president questioned Shiites' loyalty to their countries, Jordan's king warned of a coming Shiite crescent from Iran to Lebanon, and last month King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia denounced what he called Shiite proselytizing."

On Pacifica radio’s "Democracy Now," on Feb. 28, prize-winning journalist Symour Hersh offered fairly detailed information (based on his recent article in the New Yorker magazine) about the U.S. contacting Sunni sectarian groups, even some linked to al-Qaida, through its client Lebanese government, with the aim of countering Shiite groups.

In Iraq, the U.S. forces have been making attacks on Iranian representatives and Shiite clerics with links to Iran that seem to be almost calculated provocations. U.S. spokespersons also claim that the anti-occupation Shiite leader, Muqtada al-Sadr, has taken refuge in Iran, although his organization denies it.

Recently, U.S. military officers arrested and manhandled Amar al-Hakim, the son of the most influential Shiite political leader in the country, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, who has been one of Washington’s main allies in Iraq and who has appeared on U.S. TV with Bush himself. In fact, the U.S. rulers have seemed to have been looking to him as a means of edging Muqtada al-Sadr’s supporters out of the predominately Shiite government.

Amar al-Hakim was arrested while returning from Iran. The New York Times on Feb. 23 quoted advisers to al-Hakim as saying American forces had beaten several of his guards after stopping the convoy. The U.S. officials claimed that members of the convoy had been detained because al-Hakim was carrying an expired passport and because some in his party were carrying guns.

An AP dispatch quoted the younger al-Hakim as saying: "They arrested me and my guards in an unsuitable way, and they bound my hands and blindfolded me. They took our phones, bags, money, documents and the guards’ weapons, and sent us to an American base."

The New York Times website on Feb. 24 reported that after his release, al-Hakim displayed to reporters a passport with a valid expiration date. "They claim the reason for the arrest was because my passport had expired," he said, "but as you can see my passport expires on the 17th of September." U.S. officials later apologized.

The U.S. rulers may simply think that they can bully the Iranians into collaborating if they throw their weight around. In fact, there have been reports indicating that the Iranians were prepared to go a long way toward collaboration at the time of the U.S. conquest of Iraq. The Tehran regime, after all, is a capitalist government that has neither the means nor the will for a consistent struggle against imperialism.

At the end of February the Bush administration took an unexpected turn toward negotiating with Iran and its ally, Syria. But whatever the U.S. rulers’ intentions, it is evident that they are and have been playing a very complicated and dangerous game, both in trying to intimidate the Iranians and in manipulating the Sunni-Shiite antagonisms.

Such maneuvers have been building up an almost universal distrust of the U.S. rulers in the Middle East.