The imminent escalation of the war with Iran

An analysis of the evolving conflict between the United States and Iran leads me to draw the conclusion that an escalation in this conflict is imminent, and this development is inevitable and will take place sometime in the immediate future.

An historical review of the War with Iran

One of the first points to make note of here is that Iran and the United States have been at war for several years now, and this fact has gone unrecognized by many people because of the unusual asymmetric nature of the conflict.

The war began several years when during a State of the Union address, George Bush issued America’s declaration of war against Iran (for the declaration that Iran was part of the ‘Axis of Evil’ echoed the language used by Churchill in the Second World War to describe Nazi Germany and its axis allies, and this sort of language can only be interpreted in Iran as a declaration of war).

The battle against Iran then commenced on a number of different fronts, and since there was no obvious military engagement, most people failed to recognize that the two countries were at war. It has been said that hindsight is 100 percent foresight, and so it was that this state of war would only become more apparent with the passage of time.

After the United States invaded Iraq, Iran responded by outmaneuvering Washington, and was able to accomplish this because the majority population of Iraq is Shiite. Washington was embroiled in a Sunni insurrection, and as the price of peace with the Shiites Washington was compelled to hold elections in Iraq which then resulted in the inevitable domination of the government by the majority Shiite faction with close ties to Iran. The Iranian propaganda machine then kicked into high gear and trumpeted these elections in Iraq and the result of the elections as a defeat for Washington and a great victory for Iran, for it was said that Washington was only compelled to hold elections and transfer power to the Shiites under duress.

The end result was the Iraq was moved into the camp of Iran as Iranian influence in the nation was increased following the over throw of Saddam and the downfall of the small Sunni majority that had previously held power of the rest of the population of Iraq. What this meant was that over the long term the real winner of the American war in Iraq would be Iran, and this was not a result which was acceptable to Washington.

It would then appear that the war against Iran intensified through the use of proxies. The Shiites soon became embroiled in conflict with the Sunnis after a Shiite mosque, the holiest site in Iraq, was car bombed, which then led to civil war. One interesting side note on this story, that seems to have gone down the memory hole and has been forgotten, is the incident around that time when British secret service agents were arrested driving a car bomb full of explosives while they were disguised as Arabs. The British were also forced to attack a Shiite controlled prison to free certain prisoners of interest to Britain. Iranian propaganda made much of these incidents to make the case that Washington was displeased with the way Iraq was now coming under Iranian influence and thus according to Iran Washington decided to escalate the conflict through the use of proxies. The Sunnis would now be turned against the Shiites and the Shiites turned against the Sunnis, and this new development, which is now referred to as sectarian violence and a civil war in Iraq was actually a proxy war between Washington and Iran, and represented just one more escalation of the conflict.

This was then followed by another proxy war, and another escalation in the conflict, when Israel, Washington’s proxy, launched a war against Hezbollah, Iran’s proxy in Lebanon. When Hezbollah withstood Israeli air power and inflicted a humiliating defeat upon Israel and forced a withdrawal from the conflict, Iranian propaganda once again trumpeted this a victory. Hezbollah was armed with Iranian made technology including Iranian missiles and the proxy war gave the Iranians a chance to access the capabilities of their armaments on the battlefield. Since this victory Iranian propaganda has become more confident and much more assertive, since the conclusion drawn from this conflict by the Iranian government is that Iran can withstand American air power while inflicting a punishing defeat upon America. Lebanon was intended to be a lesson taught to Iran, as well as a means of eliminating an Iranian proxy along the Israeli border, but as the Iranians saw it, in the end it was a lesson to the Americans and to the Israelis concerning the dangerous folly involved in escalating the conflict with Iran any further.

A further escalation in the conflict involved the arrival of the American fleet which is now parked off the coast of Iran. American Patriot missiles have also been distributed to American allied nations in the Middle East. It is incorrectly assumed by many people that the United States is maxed out in Iraq, and hasn’t a soldier to spare. This is false, since no military force is ever found to be without reserves, even during times of war, since the concept of reserve forces is part of standard military doctrine. Parked off the coast of Iran are naval divisions of Marines who specialize in storming the beaches of Normandy, and they have brought with them all their amphibious landing equipment.

Further escalation in the conflict has involved penetrations of Iranian territory by American commandos and elite special services forces which are now operating on Iranian soil. Iran is an ethnically diverse nation, with Persians composing somewhere between 50 and 60 percent of the population (the exact percentage being dependant upon how one defines the meaning of the term ‘Persian’). The remainder of the population consists of ethnic minorities. The European imperialists carved up the region in such a way as to create unstable states (the tactic of divide and conquer) and for this reason Iran has problems with hostile ethnic separatist movements. One of the better known examples is that of the Kurds who were cut to pieces, with one piece in Iraq, one in Iran, one in Turkey, and the other ethnic groups received similar treatment, not only in the Middle East, but also in Africa, where no nation was allowed to consist of a single cohesive group.

For this reason Washington has been able to fight another proxy war, this time within the borders of Iran, by providing ammunition and training to separatist guerillas. It is these guerillas who have been hitting such targets as formations of the Revolutionary Guard with car bombs. According to what we are now hearing from Washington, Iran has responded in kind, and is now equipping guerilla forces in Iraq with Iranian explosive devices which are being used to target American troops in Iraq. Now given that the source of this information is Washington, and given how little credibility Washington has these days after trumpeting weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, only to be discredited, Washington has become like the little boy who cried wolf, when there was no wolf, so that now even if there was a wolf, no one listens to the little boy given his bad reputation for fooling people by crying wolf one to many times in the past. However given the escalations taking place in this simmering war between Washington and Iran it would not be surprising if Iran has responded in a tit for tat manner, and as Washington’s proxies are setting off car bombs in Iran, blowing up Iranian Revolutionary Guards, Iran is setting off car bombs in Iraq and killing American troops. As is the custom in this unusual war, both sides routinely issue denials, since it has been their custom to deny that they are at war, since apparently they feel that it is required that they pretend that they are not at war for purely political reasons.

Just recently another proxy war was fought in this region when an Islamic Republic was formed in Somalia, and established its rule based upon Sharia law, only to be toppled by Washington immediately. In this case Washington worked with Ethiopia as the proxy nation, although Washington also provided the air support required by the Ethiopians, which is remarkable since normally it is required that a certain process be followed before Washington goes to war, and this war was fought without any public debate, and indeed many people probably do not even know that Washington went to war in Somalia to topple the Islamic Republic, just as most people are probably unaware that Washington has been at war with the Islamic Republic of Iran since the time of the declaration of war in the State of the Union address several years ago. What we now know is that Washington will not tolerate an Islamic Republic, whether that be the Islamic Republic of Somalia, or the emerging Islamic Republic of Iraq, or the Islamic Republic of Iran which has been under a regime of sanctions and isolation for almost three decades. One of the curious outcomes of this long period of economic blockade is that Iran, the world’s fourth largest oil exporter with the world’s second largest reserves of natural gas has an infrastructure in such dilapidated condition that the nation is forced to import expensive gasoline, and is projected to be unable to export oil in the future due to the total collapse of the outdated and eroding infrastructure in the oil fields.

Further escalation occurred early this spring when the Revolutionary Guard poured into the Persian Gulf to conduct provocative military games in the presence of the large American Armada. The Americans have also conducted similar provocative war games in the Gulf this spring.

The waning influence of the diplomats

The Iranian political system is not monolithic and homogenous. There are rival factions and political differences to be found in the Iranian government, and these differences can often be seen exhibited in the contradictions found in Iranian propaganda. One faction clearly favors diplomacy while the faction around the President is militaristic. There are similar differences to be found in Washington, with the clique associated with such figures as Condaleeza Rice appearing to favor diplomacy in dealing with Iran, while a more aggressive clique usually associated with Dick Cheney favoring a military solution. It is also clear that George Bush is most naturally inclined towards the faction normally associated with Cheney, since there has been escalating conflict and very little in the way of diplomacy.

It is not surprising that the influence of the diplomatic corps and figures such as Rice is in decline, since it is quite apparent that there is not and nor can there ever be a diplomatic solution that would end this war. What is required from Iran is declaration of surrender. This would then be followed by demands for elections in Iran, and once the mullahs can no longer control who runs in the elections, the immensely unpopular Islamic regime would be crushed under a landslide and swept from the pages of history the first chance the Iranians had to actually go to the polls and vote out the mullahs. The Iranian people are not Islamists, and the regime in power is widely hated, especially among the young Iranians, who due to the unusual demographic make up of the population comprise the majority of the citizens of Iran. The Islamic regime of ruling mullahs only holds on to power in Iran due to the existence of the Revolutionary Guard. In this way the situation in Iran is similar to that which existed in Iraq, where a small Sunni elite ruled a hostile majority population with their rule based upon the supremacy of the Republican Guard.

Since the only outcome to this conflict would involve the toppling of the mullah regime, either by military force or by the force of popular democracy, the regime in Iran is determined to cling to power by fighting to finish, and no amount of diplomacy will ever be effective in resolving this conflict. For this reason the American diplomatic corps is in decline and losing influence since they are proposing to do the impossible, for it is the task of people like Condaleeza Rice to find some way to get the mullahs to agree to sign what would be a document of surrender which would lead to the inevitable collapse of the Islamic regime, and that is something they will never, ever do. For this reason the cause of American diplomacy is hopeless, and the only real game in town in Washington is now, as it has always been, the military option.

The political situation is highly favorable for the Bush Administration

It is often said that Washington cannot further escalate the war with Iran due to the fact that Washington is in a very poor political position. How people can say such a thing is incomprehensible to me and so for that reason I thought I would spell out just how favorable the political climate is for the Bush Administration, for it is this highly advantageous situation that now exists which makes the military option highly likely in the immediate future.

The unusual form of asymmetric warfare we have seen has proven to be to the advantage of Iran, allowing Iran to score many victories over Washington and purchase more time with each victory, Iran is at a serious disadvantage once the conflict escalates until it becomes a conventional military conflict involving the clash of armies, which would be the type of conflict which is greatly to the advantage of Washington.

Since 2003, and the invasion of Iraq, there have been technological breakthroughs which have greatly increased American Air power. What once used to take a squadron of planes to accomplish can now be accomplished by one single aircraft. This sudden improvement in American air power has been combined with the large increases in military spending characteristic of the Bush administration to create a military force unlike anything the world has ever seen before. It has now become possible for air power alone to win a conventional war, something that theorists predicted early in the previous century, but was never possible until the present time. The Bush administration has the ability to completely destroy the Iranian military in very short order, and with the Revolutionary Guard destroyed the Islamic regime is destroyed, for the regime cannot survive without this military force for it is to widely hated by the population of Iran.

It is obvious that Iran is in a race against the clock and is rushing to construct the nuclear bomb. It is also obvious why the Islamic Regime is so determined to acquire this capability for it does not possess the means to defeat Washington in a classic military confrontation. Just this week it was reported by nuclear inspectors that Iran has made rapid progress and has now overcome all the technical hurdles and has arrived at the stage where it is ready to begin industrial scale production of nuclear fuel.

It is also apparent that Iran has the blueprints for the nuclear bomb. It is quite likely, that like North Korea, Iran purchased this highly prized information from the black market operation being run out of Pakistan. It was for this reason that Iran secretly constructed the Natanz underground nuclear facility, for it had the plans, and now all the regime needed to assure its future survival was the fuel. These plans went awry when the regime was outed by a dissident group which revealed the secret location of Iran’s top secret nuclear site.

Since that time Iran has been forced to comply with the terms of the non-proliferation treaty. Indeed, Iran is now one of the most vocal supporters of this treaty, invoking the treaty at every opportunity, and always eager to point out its rigorous and undeniable compliance with the terms of the non-proliferation treaty. Now it is ironic that the most important strategy to be followed by any nation that wishes to acquire nuclear weapons is to sign the non-proliferation treaty for it turns out that the fastest way to proliferate nuclear weapons is by means of this non-proliferation treaty. Most people might not be aware of how this process works, and so I will explain.

First you sign the non-proliferation treaty and from that time forward you are scrupulous in obeying the terms of the treat. You begin to spin uranium in centrifuges, never going over five percent enrichment, so that when spot checks are made there is nothing to be found by fuel for reactors. Meanwhile you secretly build the components for the nuclear bomb, in a facility which is not under the supervision of the inspectors. When the time is right, and you have spun up the required fuel, you provoke a crisis and then pull out of the non-proliferation treaty. You then take the uranium fuel and give it a short spin to bring it up to weapons grade, place it upon the bomb, announce that you are a nuclear power and explode a bomb to prove to the world that you are not bull shitting. It is exactly this strategy that was employed by Kim Il Sung, and so we can call it the North Korean Strategy, and now that we see how that is done we can declare that the nuclear non-proliferation treaty is now dead in the water and is no longer worth the paper it is written upon.

Therefore it is obvious that if the world is serious about non-proliferation a new approach is required. There are two ways that could be employed to stop proliferation of nuclear weapons. The first would be to ban all nuclear power. The second would be to establish a central world wide facility, perhaps in Geneva, where all the spinning of uranium would be done. All the countries of the world that wanted nuclear fuel would not be allowed to spin their own fuel, thus preventing them from pulling that same crafty stunt pulled by North Korea. Only light water reactors would be allowed, since other reactors produce plutonium which could also be placed on a bomb.

Iran refuses to agree to these terms and has categorically rejected the option of importing nuclear fuel and instead insists on spinning its own uranium for the simple reason that Iran is going full throttle for the nuclear bomb and for obvious reasons. Iran’s pious pronouncements concerning its adherence to the terms of the non-proliferation treaty are hollow and quite meaningless, for it turns out that the dish prepared by Kim Il Sung is like a specially prepared casserole that is only good when its fresh, and it just doesn’t keep and isn’t very good when served up a second time as a plate of leftovers. Now Iran attempted to prepare that special surprise casserole by keeping the element of surprise only to be betrayed by the dissident factions determined to bring about the downfall of that mullah regime. It is no longer possible for Iran to prepare a surprise casserole, for it turns out that Kim Il Sung already served the world that dish and the first time was the last time, for it is no longer possible to prepare that surprise casserole without that special surprising sauce which gave that dish its very special flavor. For this reason it is essential that since Iran can no longer surprise the world at the dinner table Iran must use diplomacy and every trick in the book to prolong the asymmetrical phase of the war in order to gain the time to spin up enough uranium to allow them to then opt out of the treaty do a little more spinning and then top off that bomb that they no doubt already have constructed and hidden somewhere in the country.

The hopeless task facing Condaleeza Rice will be to get those mullahs to stop it. There are two points of view concerning a nuclear Iran. One is the European option, which is to just accept the new reality and acknowledge that Iran is now a nuclear power and learn to live the idea, since there really isn’t much that can be done about it now. There is that really hopeless diplomatic approach which will never work. And then there is the Bush option.

Now there are those who say that the Bush option is hopeless, and therefore only the European option is available, since it is obvious that diplomacy is never going to work since it leads in the end to the downfall of the mullah regime in Iran.

It will be said that Bush cannot do a thing, because of the oil markets. It will be a disaster. The Strategic Petroleum Reserves currently offer two months of protection from oil shocks, but given that any disruption of supplies would not result in the total cut off of imports the reserves would actually suffice to keep the supply of oil stable on the market for longer than two months. As well the Marines are parked off the shores of Iran and are ready to storm the beaches of Normandy, and Washington has already armed some ethnic minorities inside Iran who, like the majority of the population, are very hostile to the regime in Tehran. The oil supplies of Iran are not distributed widely over the entire country but are concentrated in a thin band along the coast of the Persian Gulf, which is convenient when you consider that Marines who specialize in storming the beaches of Normandy and holding onto coastal areas are currently parked and in waiting mode, playing cards no doubt and killing time, off shore of the oil and gas fields of Iran. Therefore, given all the careful planning that has gone into this project over the years, we can expect minimal disruption of the world’s oil supplies.

It is quite likely that there are pragmatic generals in the Iranian army and pragmatic political operatives in the government of Iran who understand that the end has come for that Islamic Regime in Iran, and who have been in contact with Washington over the years, and are thus ready, once Washington completely destroys the Revolutionary Guard, thus preventing the possibility of civil war in Iran, to launch a coup d’etat and topple the mullah regime.

If you are a leftist or a liberal type you should also be aware of the very real possibility of being crushed underneath the weight of a giant propaganda steamroller, for it is quite likely that after the coup d’etat and the fall of the mullahs that the American television screens will be saturated with images of widely jubilant Iranian youths dancing in the streets and celebrating their glorious liberation from those deeply detested mullahs. This is quite likely to happen for these are youths who greatly admire America because the mullahs tell them not to thus meaning that they should, for what the mullahs love they hate and therefore what the mullahs hate must be lovable. The Bush administration is sinking like a stone, and badly needs some feel good propaganda, and that mullah regime in Iran is fatally weak, and so we can see that once the political climate is highly favorable for Washington and very unfavorable for the regime in Iran. The problem is compounded as the regime in Iran attempts to consolidate its political base among the religious right of Islamists because of the current crisis, and therefore has returned the religious police to the streets in recent months where they are once again found harassing women and forcing them back under the veil, and busting up parties and just generally reminding everyone in the country why they hate that Islamic regime so very much. Violent strikes have been roiling the country, as workers have gone unpaid sometimes for as long as a year, and even those wages that are paid are to low to support a family, and the regime has responded with gunfire in the streets, something not reported widely in the west. The President was elected upon a populist platform of sharing the oil wealth with the people, but this promise has been betrayed, and now there is no longer a cork in the bottle, and wide spread strikes and civil unrest is building up in Iran, thus causing the regime to turn to the religious right and Revolutionary Guard to maintain order in the country.

The Pentagon has recently perfected a missile defense shield and the system is now operational. It is incapable of shooting down intercontinental missiles but is able to shoot down the sorts of medium range missiles and short range missiles possessed by Iran.

There is on more critically important factor that must be considered and that is that George Bush is running out of time. The moderate Republicans have given Bush an ultimatum. Things change in the next two months, or he loses their votes, which means he loses his veto power. The Republican party is worried that it might be cast out into the political wilderness for a decade or two because of George Bush, and so they are turning on him. It is for this reason that we see for the first time Washington agreeing to meet with Iran for talks, not because those talks will accomplish a damn thing, for they will not, but rather because this is the very last chance for those diplomatic types to pull a rabbit out of a hat if they are ever going to do so. They will not, and then it will be time for that Bush option.

Now it has been said that history should not be told as the story of Kings but rather as the story of social forces, and this is true, but at the same time it is wrong to discount the importance of a personality in the unfolding of historical events. George Bush is not Bill Clinton. He doesn’t practice cruise missile diplomacy. He doesn’t stand off at a distance and try firing cruise missiles as a warning shot.

In the future the question could be asked, ‘who lost Iran’, just as in the past there were recriminations over who lost the war in Vietnam, or who lost China and gave it to Mao. Similarly we can imagine people asking who was responsible for that Islamic Republic of Iraq, and the answer would come back that it was that notoriously incompetent George Bush who bumbled and fumbled his way into Iraq only to hand the whole place over on a platter to Iran. As you know the President of Iran has been calling on Bush to now please depart and leave Iraq for the nations around Iraq will take over and are quite able to manage the situation, thank you very much. This tells me that being the Mayor of Tehran is inadequate schooling as preparation for the world of high stakes diplomacy, for apparently that President of Iran actually believes that George Bush, of all people, will be handing over that creation of his, the Islamic Republic of Iraq to Iran. Bush has been defeated, the President of Iran confidently declares, and it is now impossible for him to do anything at all. Apparently he doesn’t know George Bush nor does he understand a thing, but he will understand it all with crystal clarity in the very near future. As for his regime, it will be finished, because he might have the Revolutionary Guard today, but not for very much longer.

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