Informed Comment

Some colleagues on an email list got me thinking about the worst case scenario of an Israeli air strike on Iran’s nuclear enrichment facilities, so here is what I came up with. I think each of these scenarios is plausible in its own right, and that all could well ensue.

1. Iran is now threatening to strike at any third country in the region that aided Israel in an airstrike on Iran. The aftermath is therefore likely to be further conflict in the region.

2. Oil prices will spike. I imagine you could easily see $150 a barrel or maybe even more. This development could throw the US and Europe back into deep recession.

3. Hizbullah would likely launch rockets, causing at least severe inconvenience to some 1/4 of the Israeli public, which might well have to move house again, and possibly much worse if Hizbullah is able, as they claim, to target toxic gas storage in Haifa or even reactor at Dimona with modified Chinese silkworms. It is not clear that the Israeli public would appreciate all that trouble; they didn’t, in former PM Ehud Olmert’s case (his 2006 Lebanon war was extremely unpopular and his party is no longer in power). A Hizbullah official said on Sunday that Hizbullah would be willing to go to war with Israel if Syria were attacked, so it seems likely the same thing would hold true with regard to Iran.

4. Israel would destroy Lebanon infrastructure in revenge for Hizbullah rocket attacks.

5. The Syria uprising would be over with. It would be impossible for the Syrian National Council to continue to oppose the government and risk being tagged as genuinely Israeli agents. The Baath would be consolidated in Syria.

6. An Iran-Baghdad-Damascus-Beirut axis would be strengthened, allowing for resupply of Hizbullah capabilities. Beirut would be pushed into arms of the new axis. Gulf oil states and Iraq and Iran would quickly rebuild Lebanon.

7. Iraq would be radicalized. PM Nouri al-Maliki in Iraq would have to support Hizbullah and Lebanon or risk losing face inside al-Da’wa and losing backing in parliament of Sadr, al-Hakim and other Shiite religious forces. Al-Maliki has already given, as a reason for supporting al-Assad, the danger that Israel will take advantage of turmoil in the Fertile Crescent. Iraq would likely use its oil wealth to help rebuild Lebanon and al-Maliki’s Islamic Mission Party (al-Da’wa al-Islamiya), which helped create Hizbullah, would strengthen relations with it. You could see cleric Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army supply men and arms to Hizbullah in Lebanon, as well.

8. The European left and liberals would be horrified and unlike in the past could well take action. Remember that the scenario is that Israel, having gone rogue and poisoned Isfahan and maybe other populations with toxic chemicals and radioactivity, went on to destroy Lebanon’s airport, harbor, electricity plants, oil refineries, roads, bridges, etc. Ireland, Norway, and possibly some other European governments, plus large numbers of European civil society organizations and unions might well slap economic boycotts and sanctions on Israel (50% of Israel’s trade is with Europe). Significant negative measures by EU not impossible, including in area of scientific and technological exchange. In my view, the BDS movement in Europe would become a wave and once that happens, it could have a long term impact on the Israeli economy.

9. The region’s diplomatic dynamics could be changed. The possibility exists of a rupture between Israel and Turkey. It is also possible that Egypt will terminate the Camp David peace accords. The Egyptian military won’t care about the strike on Iran, but the Egyptian public would be horrified by that and by the likely third Lebanon war. The Muslim Brotherhood, now dominant in the Egyptian parliament, would have to react strongly or risk losing credibility in the eyes of the Egyptian public.

10. Over succeeding years, significant Israeli out-migration could occur by Israelis with sufficient education and training to find jobs elsewhere, who became convinced that the Middle East will just never settle down and be a pleasant environment for them. This development would strengthen the internal position of the Palestinian-Israelis and possibly of the Haredim (who are probably more committed to staying and toughing it out), and weaken the Ashkenazi secular elite. Ironically, Barak has admitted that some of the impetus for preventing a nuclear Iran is to forestall this out-migration scenario, but he doesn’t seem to realize that a strike on Iran could actually have a similar demographic outcome if the region doesn’t take it lying down.

It seems obvious to me that if all these developments actually occurred,they would be much worse for Israel than if Iran actually did start a weapons program and Iran and Israel replicated on a regional scale the MAD US-Soviet standoff of an earlier era.

Posted in Iran, Israel/ Palestine | 76 Comments

It has leaked that US chairman of the joint chiefs of staff Gen. Martin Dempsey warned the Israelis that if they launched a strike on Iran that spiralled into a war, they would be on their own.

Gareth Porter’s report, based on conversations with former officers in the administration of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who claim knowledge of Dempsey’s emphases, comes on the heels of controversial assertions by US Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta that Israel may strike Iran’s nuclear enrichment facilities this spring or summer. The press, and Panetta, keep reporting that Iran will ‘have enough enriched uranium to make a bomb’ in a year or two. But this assertion is so misleading as to be a lie. What Iran would have enough of is uranium enriched to 3.5% for reactor fuel. Only by embarking on an active program to turn this ‘seed stock’ into highly enriched uranium of 95% could they get material to make a bomb. Since UN inspectors are still visiting the enrichment sites (they were there this week), and since they specify that no civilian nuclear material has been diverted to military uses, we know that Iran is not taking this step. In order to take it, they’d have to kick out the inspectors and go for broke. We’ll know if they decide to do that. If they don’t do it, they just have LEU or low enriched uranium, which can be used to boil water but not for much else, and certainly not for a bomb.

Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli Right wing, and their American backers in the Israel lobbies desperately want the US to go to war with Iran. Iran poses no real threat to Israel, but it does limit Israeli adventurism in Lebanon and elsewhere, and the Likud Party is all about no limits on its ambitions. Netanyahu and his American acolytes, such as the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a think tank of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, keep rattling sabers, not because they likely intend that Israel will go to war with Iran, but to put pressure on Washington to do it for them. If you have never heard of WINEP, just take it from me; your representatives in Congress care what AIPAC organs think far more than they care what you think. WINEP poobah Dennis Ross put out a rumor that Obama was ready to strike Iran. This disinformation 1) put pressure on Iran; 2) put pressure on Obama and 3) legitimized before the fact any aggressive Israeli action.

But the Obama administration is taking no chances that Netanyahu is bluffing. Hence Dempsey’s strict warning.

Obama wants to get the US out of fruitless Middle East wars, not plunge the US into new ones.

Moreover, campaign manager David Axelrod would have a cow at the thought of a war being launched in the midst of a presidential campaign season. Bombings can easily beget wars. Wars are unpredictable, and could spin out of control. You never want to do anything in a campaign season that you can’t control. Search on the Web for ‘Carter and Tabas” or “Operation Eagle Claw” if you want an example of why not.

High Israeli retired officers, including a former chief of staff are also warning against a strike on Iran. Being high officers, they have a realistic assessment of the disaster that could well ensue. Another former chief of staff, Lt. Gen (ret.) Dan Halutz, has just cautioned that Iran is a ‘serious’ but not an ‘existential’ threat to Israel. He is clearly disturbed that tossing around the phrase ‘existential threat’ about a country distant from Israel with very limited military capabilities sets the stage for more self-defeating adventurism.

What is striking to me is the glibness with which the Right wing speaks of an attack on Iran. The UN Security Council has not authorized the use of force against Iran, and Tehran has not attacked any other country. A strike on Iran is therefore a war crime, more especially since it would release radiactive toxins on the people of Isfahan and of the Middle East more generally.

Besides, proponents never say how they would pay for such a war. Iran is three times as populous and geographically much larger than Iraq. So multiply everything in that war by three to get the cost.

Immediate cost: $3 trillion
Long term cost, including veteran care: $9 trillion
US troops killed: 15,000
US troops fairly seriously wounded: 100,000

Iranian dead: 1 – 3 million
Iranian displaced: 12 million

Anyone who advocates such a thing is a sort of monster, in my view.

Posted in Iran | 92 Comments

Courtesy Courtesy crudeoilpeak.info

Europe doesn’t loom that large already. And, Asia and other global South areas would take up the slack.

Posted in Iran | 11 Comments

Tomgram: Engelhardt, Iran Through the Looking Glass
Posted by Tom Engelhardt at 5:57pm, January 29, 2012.
Tom Englehardt writes at The Nation Institute‘s Tomdispatch.com:

“Iranian Aircraft Carriers in the Gulf of Mexico
It Can’t Happen Here
By Tom Engelhardt

Exclusive: New Iranian Commando Team Operating Near U.S.

(Tehran, FNA) The Fars News Agency has confirmed with the Republican Guard’s North American Operations Command that a new elite Iranian commando team is operating in the U.S.-Mexican border region. The primary day-to-day mission of the team, known as the Joint Special Operations Gulf of Mexico Task Force, or JSOG-MTF, is to mentor Mexican military units in the border areas in their war with the deadly drug cartels. The task force provides “highly trained personnel that excel in uncertain environments,” Maj. Amir Arastoo, a spokesman for Republican Guard special operations forces in North America, tells Fars, and “seeks to confront irregular threats…”

The unit began its existence in mid-2009 — around the time that Washington rejected the Iranian leadership’s wish for a new diplomatic dialogue. But whatever the task force does about the United States — or might do in the future — is a sensitive subject with the Republican Guard. “It would be inappropriate to discuss operational plans regarding any particular nation,” Arastoo says about the U.S.

Okay, so I made that up. Sue me. But first admit that, a line or two in, you knew it was fiction. After all, despite the talk about American decline, we are still on a one-way imperial planet. Yes, there is a new U.S. special operations team known as Joint Special Operations Task Force-Gulf Cooperation Council, or JSOTF-GCC, at work near Iran and, according to Wired magazine’s Danger Room blog, we really don’t quite know what it’s tasked with doing (other than helping train the forces of such allies as Bahrain and Saudi Arabia).

And yes, the quotes are perfectly real, just out of the mouth of a U.S. “spokesman for special-operations forces in the Mideast,” not a representative of Iran’s Republican Guard. And yes, most Americans, if they were to read about the existence of the new special ops team, wouldn’t think it strange that U.S. forces were edging up to (if not across) the Iranian border, not when our “safety” was at stake.

Keep reading Tomgram: Engelhardt, Iran Through the Looking Glass

Posted in Iran, Uncategorized | Comments Off

World military spending in 2010. Note that Iran’s is not a big enough proportion of world arms spending to show up on this graph, which doesn’t show countries that are lower than 2% of the global total.

Courtesy Democratic Underground.

Posted in Iran | 27 Comments