By: Sharmine Narwani
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March 16, 2017 "Information
Clearing House" - After weeks of saber-rattling over Iran as
the “number one terrorist state” in the world, the Trump administration appears
to have quietly dialed down the rhetoric a notch.
Here in the Middle East, however, where every peep and
creak out of Washington is scrutinized to death, interested parties haven’t
stopped speculating about a U.S. confrontation with Iran. Fifty days into his
term, Trump’s foreign-policy course remains an enigma. He swears “all options”
remain on the table with Iran—but do they?
There are already some early actions that hint at
Trump’s policy directions—and limitations—in the Middle East. In three key
military theaters where U.S. forces are currently engaged, some important
corners have been turned:
- In
northern Syria, America’s Kurdish allies just voluntarily relinquished
territory to the Syrian army and Russian forces in order to avoid a direct
confrontation with another U.S. ally and NATO member, Turkey. Washington
has rejected a Turkish role in the liberation of Raqqa, knowing that
Ankara will not tolerate the ISIS capital falling into Kurdish hands
either. It’s becoming increasingly likely that the winning formula will
see the city and its environs ceded to an authority friendly to the
Syrian government, under a Russian umbrella.
- In
northern Iraq, the fight to regain Mosul has accelerated, with Iraqi
forces liberating half of western Mosul in just twenty days. Under command
of the central Baghdad government, these fighters consist heavily of Shia
militias, many of whom have received training and equipment from Iranian
forces.
- In Yemen, where alarming western headlines warn of U.S. military blunders and overkill, the media is missing a bigger story. The U.S. bombing blitz is actually—not hypothetically, as once was the case—hitting Al Qaeda terrorists, working alongside UAE forces to target Islamist militias who everybody knows are de facto Saudi allies on the ground. Just last week, the UAE reportedly upped the ante by demanding the Saudis abandon their puppet president Abdrabbuh Mansour Hadi—ostensibly the “legitimate” Yemeni authority the western-backed Saudi coalition was fighting to reinstate.
In a few short weeks, Trump has taken an axe to
Obama-style dawdling in Mideast hotspots—whether by taking direct action or by no
longer impeding the actions of others.
What’s notable is that all of these developments, at
face value, serve Iran’s interests in the region and undermine those of U.S.
allies Turkey and Saudi Arabia.
But don’t be fooled. This is merely Trump’s opening
salvo. He has larger, unknown ambitions, and these recent moves do not
necessarily remove Iran from his sights.
The Islamic Republic, its allies, and its detractors
will remain part of Trump’s larger geopolitical game. He can use them to engage
or punish more vital targets like Russia and China, two major powers that have
carved out strategic relationships with Tehran. Iran will also be a useful tool
to provoke or cajole traditional U.S. allies like Israel, Turkey, and various
Arab monarchies into taking positions favored by Trump.
Already, several threatening U.S. stances have been
employed—their ultimate aims unknown—with Iran at their center. There are
whispers of a Saudi-led “Arab NATO” that could partner with Israel to
target Iran. And calls for Damascus and Moscow to eject Iran from Syria are being heard from
various western and western-allied Mideast capitals.
The Waterways: An “Accidental” Confrontation
Despite the Iran-as-bogeyman narrative, it is unlikely
that Trump will launch any direct military attacks against Iran. This is a
president who has voiced contempt for the $6 trillion wasted on Mideast wars
and interventions. More confrontation in the region will be costly, and is
likely to draw him into clashes with major powers with which he’d prefer to do
business.
Although he insists “all options” remain on the table
with Iran, Trump’s choices are actually fairly limited. Sanctions never worked
and the Iran nuclear deal has ensured that other global players needn’t
participate in future ones. Under pressure from allies, he has backtracked on
his threats to scuttle the nuclear agreement, which he now seems to understand
would needlessly isolate the U.S., not Iran. Subversive activities—such as
color revolution plots, propaganda, or cyberwarfare—have proven futile given
Iran’s historic vigilance on and within its borders. Conventional war would
require a substantial Iranian provocation and isn’t likely to be sanctioned by
the UN Security Council.
But there is one theater in which a U.S.-Iran
confrontation could easily spark: the various waterways around the
Islamic Republic and its neighborhood.
Both countries have plenty of naval and shipping vessels
in close daily proximity to each other. Tensions are high, rhetoric remains inflamed,
and Iran’s foes in the Persian Gulf and Washington are in a great position to
trigger an event, then fan its flames.
Defense Secretary James Mattis, a committed Iran hawk,
almost did so several weeks ago when he considered letting U.S. forces board an
Iranian ship in Arabian Sea international waters, according to a passing
mention of the incident in the New York Times. But the
Intercept understood the import of the close encounter and led with the headline: “Trump’s ‘moderate’ defense
secretary has already brought us to the brink of war.”
War is indeed a distinct possibility if the U.S. makes
an aggressive move. Iran is no banana republic. It has endured an eight-year
war with Iraq, which was encouraged, financed, and armed by great powers and
regional states alike. The Islamic Republic performed a remarkable claw-back
from the assault and went on to amass
conventional and asymmetrical capabilities to deter future attacks.
So when Trump saw fit to slap sanctions on Iran after a
January 29 ballistic missile test, Iranians made sure to fire off more, just a day after sanctions were
announced. And the Iranian responses keep coming, a reminder that any military
confrontation with Iran will be highly unpredictable. The Islamic Republic
makes sure to remind us of its overt and hidden
capabilities through regular public missile tests, advanced air defense demonstrations and war game exercises,
such as the just-concluded Velayat 95 drills in the Strait of Hormuz, Sea
of Oman, and Indian Ocean.
As tensions between the U.S. and Iran have increased,
so have the number of gulfs, straits, seas and oceans in which the two nations’
navies and commercial vessels now operate. The Pentagon insists its naval
presence in so many far-flung west Asian waterways is vital to thwart terrorism
and piracy. But this is Iran’s backyard, and the Islamic Republic needs little
justification to police regional waterways against these very same kinds of
threats—and to protect its own territorial and maritime borders.
During a November visit to Tehran, I asked Dr. Sadollah
Zarei, director of the think tank the Andisheh Sazan Noor Institute and a MENA
expert close to the IRGC, about this. “U.S. actions give us a behavior
precedent in our naval reach,” he said. The U.S. naval presence in Iran’s
neighboring waters “gives us even more right to be active in the Persian Gulf,
in the Gulf of Aden, and other waters.” As a result, Zarei explained, “we are
now in the Gulf of Bengal and the Indian Ocean.”
Is Zarei worried about an adversary state brandishing
its vast military firepower within spitting distance? He cracks a smile and
explains calmly: “When the U.S. is there, Iran’s focus and discipline is
better. They’re useful that way. It brings us together, creates support for our
security forces, our army, our borders.”
On the other side of the fence, Washington continues to
feed this Iranian discipline and cohesion by elevating recent “incidents” in
the waterways—mostly unrelated to Iran—into national media hysterics about
Iran.
Investigative reporter Gareth Porter has worked to
untangle fact from fiction over U.S. accusations that Iran is shipping arms to
Yemen’s Houthi rebels through some of these waterways.
In short, Porter has shown that most of the Pentagon’s claims appear to
be demonstrably false. And because of Wikileaks’ 2010 State Department cables cache,
we now know that—in private at least—U.S. officials are also skeptical of their
own public charges.
The Unpredictability of a Waterways War
In January 2016, two U.S. navy command boats entered Iranian
territorial waters—it’s unclear if knowingly or unwittingly—and were
apprehended by Iranian Revolutionary Guards. Americans watched as Iranian
television broadcasted the capture of 10 U.S. navy sailors on bended knees,
hands behind their heads. The Islamic Republic followed maritime regulations
and international law in their actions, and released the officers shortly
thereafter. But the incident brought home, in technicolor, the unpredictability
of waterways operations against this wily U.S. adversary.
For decades, the Pentagon has run war games against
Iran to test its assumptions and hone its responses. But an acquaintance who
has participated in such CENTCOM exercises told me last year that “the U.S.
military rarely beats Iran in asymmetrical war games unless it cheats or rigs
it.”
Shocked, I was prompted to dig deeper and discovered
the “Millennium Challenge,” a 2002 U.S. armed forces war game in the Persian
Gulf between the U.S. (blue team) and an unnamed Mideast adversary (red team),
believed to be Iran.
According to retired Marine Corps Lt. Gen. Paul Van
Riper, who led the Red’s asymmetrical response—and resigned because rules were
changed mid-play to constrict his team’s maneuvers—Reds bypassed Blue’s
sophisticated electronic surveillance system using motorcycle messengers sent
to the frontline and World War II-style signaling methods, and then destroyed
16 U.S. warships and a significant chunk of its naval fleet—all on the second
day of the three-week exercise.
In an article entitled “War Games Rigged?” published on
the Navy, Marine and Army Times websites (which appears to
have been removed and is reposted here), Van Riper slammed the $250 million war
game: “It was in actuality an exercise that was almost entirely scripted to
ensure a Blue ‘win.’”
Van Riper explains: “We were directed… to move air
defenses so that the army and marine units could successfully land. We were
simply directed to turn [air defense systems] off or move them… So it was
scripted to be whatever the control group wanted it to be.”
Rather than learning from the exercise, the U.S.
military seemed more interested in confirming existing doctrine and maintaining
the facade of invincibility. These are dangerous attitudes that, in real-life
combat scenarios, can lead commanders to misjudge capabilities and make
foolhardy advances. And Iran knows this well.
The Cost of Primacy
Why are U.S. armed forces in the Persian Gulf anyway?
Princeton University’s Roger Stern calculates that between 1976 and 2010,
Washington has spent an eye-popping $8 trillion protecting the oil flow in the
Persian Gulf. As of 2010, the U.S. only received 10 percent of those oil
shipments. The largest recipients were Japan (20 percent),
followed by China, India, and South Korea.
Trump should take note: if access to oil was the real
goal of U.S. presence in the Gulf, Washington could have achieved it at a
fraction of the cost by building pipelines to bypass that waterway.
Instead, mission creep has overtaken U.S. policy in the
Persian Gulf, establishing a policy trajectory few American presidents have
dared to challenge. Of the eight littoral states of the Persian Gulf, Iran has
the longest coast on the waterway, almost double the length of its other seven
neighbors combined.
As Washington hawks continue to insist that Iran cannot
be allowed to challenge U.S. hegemony in the Persian Gulf, they should first
ponder the potential consequences of another avoidable war—before a catastrophe
humbles them into silence.
Sharmine Narwani is a commentator and analyst of
Mideast geopolitics, based in Beirut.
