Friends,
The article
below is just one powder keg as to why we must challenge Mike Pompeo. Let me
know if you would be interested in delivering a letter to Mike Pompeo, probably
on April 1st.
Kagiso,
Max
Monday, March 11, 2019
Is a War With Iran on the
Horizon?
The Trump administration is reckless enough to turn the Cold War
with Iran into a hot one
commondreams.org
White
House National Security Advisor John Bolton, U.S. Secretary of State Mike
Pompeo and Vice President Mike Pence talk before the start of a joint news
conference with President Donald Trump and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe
in the Rose Garden at the White House June 7, 2018 in Washington, D.C. (Photo:
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
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.”
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
re-imposing 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.
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 made
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.
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 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.
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.
© 2019
TomDispatch.com
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