By Martin Woolalacott (THE GUARDIAN, 10/07/08):
If you wanted to draft a scenario for the end of the relatively orderly and prosperous world we live in, you might well begin it with an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities. After the battering that the experts say would be necessary to suppress Iran’s nuclear programme, oil at $200 a barrel would soon be a distant dream as Iran’s reserves were compromised and other Middle Eastern oilfields disrupted by Iranian retaliation.
Trade would shrivel, economies would cease to function, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Lebanon would slip back into chaos, Pakistan would be rocked, Iran would be broken, and extremism would flourish in the vacuum. Floundering amid the wreckage like lost boys would be the US army, much of its navy, and the best military units of many other western countries. Relations between America and the world’s other big powers - China, Russia, Europe, India - would crash. America’s own economy and political standing would be damaged irreparably, and Israel’s isolation would be both complete and permanent.
Ali Shirazi, a naval aide to the Iranian supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was not far wrong this week when he said that America’s “vital interests in the world would be set on fire”. Not only America’s. Saying that a prospect like this should be “on the table”, as Bush and Cheney do, is like saying that a bucket of cyanide should be on the table. So why do they keep doing it, and why has Israel joined in so vehemently, staging an exercise clearly designed to mimic a long-distance attack on Iran? And why does Iran play into this game by acts like this week’s missile tests?
The obvious answer is that Iran is aiming at achieving nuclear weapons capability, and the United States and Israel are trying to terrify Tehran into abandoning that aim. It is true that every few months more centrifuges come on stream, more evidence emerges of work on missiles and warheads, and a fresh, prevaricating answer is delivered to the weary negotiators trying to do a deal with Tehran. And yet action and reaction are tied together here in a vicious circle. Each threat of military measures against Iran makes it less and less likely that Tehran might choose a different path.
This dangerous game is in a particularly frenetic and delicate phase at the moment because of the uncertainties of American, Iranian and Israeli politics. An angry and unrepentant Bush administration, wanting to make the mark on history that it missed in Iraq, might conceivably contemplate an attack. Whether it could prevail over the opposition of the Pentagon and senior officers, particularly in the army and the marines, is another matter. In Israel, contenders for power in a weak and divided government have used the Iran issue in their struggles with one another. They are well on the way, unfortunately, to reducing Israel’s complex security problems to the single, simplistic issue of what to do about Iran.
In Iran, policy twists and turns as Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his enemies fight it out. It is typical that the remarks of Shirazi, a fairly obscure official connected to the Revolutionary Guard, one of Ahmadinejad’s power bases, should have been preceded a week or so ago by an interview with Ali Akbar Velayati, Khameini’s foreign policy adviser, in which he took a studiously moderate line.
The underlying strategy of the group of conservatives who seem to be gaining the upper hand in Iran is to wait until there is a new president in Washington, and possibly a new one in Tehran. With Ahmadinejad out of the way and Barack Obama, as they hope, in place, the chances of cutting a deal with the US would improve. This view is likely to prove correct. Starting a war in the “window before Obama” remains, thank goodness, on the far side of improbable. So there will be a new start with a new president, even if it is John McCain. But there should be no illusions that the Iranians will entertain a deal that cuts them off from the possibility of nuclear weapons. If they were ever to agree to that, it would only be after a long and reassuring period, free from the threats that have helped create the present crisis.
If you wanted to draft a scenario for the end of the relatively orderly and prosperous world we live in, you might well begin it with an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities. After the battering that the experts say would be necessary to suppress Iran’s nuclear programme, oil at $200 a barrel would soon be a distant dream as Iran’s reserves were compromised and other Middle Eastern oilfields disrupted by Iranian retaliation.
Trade would shrivel, economies would cease to function, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Lebanon would slip back into chaos, Pakistan would be rocked, Iran would be broken, and extremism would flourish in the vacuum. Floundering amid the wreckage like lost boys would be the US army, much of its navy, and the best military units of many other western countries. Relations between America and the world’s other big powers - China, Russia, Europe, India - would crash. America’s own economy and political standing would be damaged irreparably, and Israel’s isolation would be both complete and permanent.
Ali Shirazi, a naval aide to the Iranian supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was not far wrong this week when he said that America’s “vital interests in the world would be set on fire”. Not only America’s. Saying that a prospect like this should be “on the table”, as Bush and Cheney do, is like saying that a bucket of cyanide should be on the table. So why do they keep doing it, and why has Israel joined in so vehemently, staging an exercise clearly designed to mimic a long-distance attack on Iran? And why does Iran play into this game by acts like this week’s missile tests?
The obvious answer is that Iran is aiming at achieving nuclear weapons capability, and the United States and Israel are trying to terrify Tehran into abandoning that aim. It is true that every few months more centrifuges come on stream, more evidence emerges of work on missiles and warheads, and a fresh, prevaricating answer is delivered to the weary negotiators trying to do a deal with Tehran. And yet action and reaction are tied together here in a vicious circle. Each threat of military measures against Iran makes it less and less likely that Tehran might choose a different path.
This dangerous game is in a particularly frenetic and delicate phase at the moment because of the uncertainties of American, Iranian and Israeli politics. An angry and unrepentant Bush administration, wanting to make the mark on history that it missed in Iraq, might conceivably contemplate an attack. Whether it could prevail over the opposition of the Pentagon and senior officers, particularly in the army and the marines, is another matter. In Israel, contenders for power in a weak and divided government have used the Iran issue in their struggles with one another. They are well on the way, unfortunately, to reducing Israel’s complex security problems to the single, simplistic issue of what to do about Iran.
In Iran, policy twists and turns as Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his enemies fight it out. It is typical that the remarks of Shirazi, a fairly obscure official connected to the Revolutionary Guard, one of Ahmadinejad’s power bases, should have been preceded a week or so ago by an interview with Ali Akbar Velayati, Khameini’s foreign policy adviser, in which he took a studiously moderate line.
The underlying strategy of the group of conservatives who seem to be gaining the upper hand in Iran is to wait until there is a new president in Washington, and possibly a new one in Tehran. With Ahmadinejad out of the way and Barack Obama, as they hope, in place, the chances of cutting a deal with the US would improve. This view is likely to prove correct. Starting a war in the “window before Obama” remains, thank goodness, on the far side of improbable. So there will be a new start with a new president, even if it is John McCain. But there should be no illusions that the Iranians will entertain a deal that cuts them off from the possibility of nuclear weapons. If they were ever to agree to that, it would only be after a long and reassuring period, free from the threats that have helped create the present crisis.
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