By Bob Dreyfuss
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).
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 reimposing 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 make 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 Mike 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.
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Copyright 2019 Bob Dreyfuss
Bob Dreyfuss, an investigative journalist and
TomDispatch regular, is the founder of TheDreyfussReport.com. He is a contributing
editor at The Nation, and he has written for Rolling Stone, Mother Jones, The
American Prospect, The New Republic, and many other magazines. He is the author
of Devil’s Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam.
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