President
Donald Trump and his neocon advisors have been trying to provoke a war with
Iran and Syria for many months.
The
neocons are echoing Cato the Elder’s cry, ‘delenda est Carthago!’. Iran
must be destroyed.
So
far, Tehran and its ally Damascus have refused to respond to US naval and air
incursions or Israel’s growing air attacks in Syria. But the war of words
between the US and Iran has now reached a critical phase.
Last
week, Trump, who evaded military service during the Vietnam War, made his
loudest threats yet against Iran, bringing the danger of war to the boiling
point. On 21 May, the hard-line US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo
delivered a thunderous ultimatum to Iran during an address to the US Heritage
Foundation, a rich, influential arm of America’s Israel lobby.
Pompeo made 12 totally
unacceptable demands on Iran that were clearly designed to be rejected by
Tehran. Not since Austria-Hungary’s ultimatum against Serbia in 1914 have
we seen such a clear effort to bring about war. Tehran quickly dismissed Pompeo
as ‘a gangster.’
We
are by now used to blood and thunder rhetoric between Washington and
Tehran. But this time White House policy is clearly being directed by
pro-Israel American neocons who want the US military to crush Iran as it did
Iraq.
Crushing
Iran will leave Israel with unfettered control of the Mideast and its oil –
unless Russia or Turkey intervene against Israel, which is most unlikely.
Some think Russia and Israel – and the US – have already made a deal to divvy
up the central Mideast.
‘Let
the Americans come,’ one Iranian militant told me, ‘they will break their teeth
on Iran.’ Very colorful but hardly accurate. The US and Israel will
surely avoid a massive, costly land campaign again Iran, a vast, mountainous
nation that was willing to suffer a million battle casualties in its eight-year
war with Iraq that started in 1980 . This gruesome war was instigated by the US,
Britain, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia to overthrow Iran’s new popular Islamic
government.
The
Pentagon has planned a high-intensity air war against Iran that Israel and the
Saudis might very well join. The plan calls for over 2,300 air strikes
against Iranian strategic targets: airfields and naval bases, arms and
petroleum, oil and lubricant depots, telecommunication nodes, radar, factories,
military headquarters, ports, water works, airports, missile bases and units of
the Revolutionary Guards.
Iran’s air defenses range
from feeble to non-existent. Decades of US-led military and commercial
embargos against Iran have left it as decrepit and enfeebled as was Iraq when
the US invaded in 2003. The gun barrels of Iran’s 70’s vintage tanks are
warped and can’t shoot straight, its old British and Soviet AA missiles are
mostly unusable, and its ancient MiG and Chinese fighters ready for the museum,
notably its antique US-built F-14 Tomcats, Chinese copies of obsolete MiG-21’s,
and a handful of barely working F-4 Phantoms of Vietnam War vintage.
Air
combat command is no better. Everything electronic that Iran has will be
fried or blown up in the first hours of a US attack. Iran’s little navy
will be sunk in the opening attacks. Its oil industry may be destroyed or
partially preserved depending on US post-war plans for Iran.
The
only way Tehran can riposte is by staging isolated commando attacks on US
installations in the Mideast of no decisive value, and, of course, blocking the
narrow Strait of Hormuz that carries two thirds of Mideast oil exports.
The US Navy, based nearby in Bahrain, has been practicing for decades to combat
this threat.
China
vows to keep buying Iranian oil in spite of the US blockade to be imposed this
fall. This could put the US and China on a collision course.
While Iran may be able to
interdict some oil exports from the Arab states, and cause maritime insurance
rates to skyrocket, it’s unlikely to be able to block the bulk of oil exports
unless it attacks the main oil terminals in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf with
ground troops. During the Iran-Iraq war, neither side was able to fully
interdict the other’s oil exports.
Direct
western intervention in a major ground campaign seems unlikely. But the
US and Israeli war plan would aim to totally destroy Iran’s infrastructure,
communications and transport (including oil) crippling this important nation of
80 million and taking it back to the pre-revolutionary era. That was the
plan for Iraq, the Arab world’s most industrialized nation. Today Iraq still
lies in ruins.
One
recalls the words of the great Roman historian, Tacitus: ‘they make a desert
and call it peace.’
Eric
Margolis [send him
mail] is the author of War at the Top of the World and the new
book, American Raj: Liberation or Domination?: Resolving the
Conflict Between the West and the Muslim World. See his website.
Copyright © 2018 Eric Margolis