Foreign Policy in Focus (on-line)
published this piece by Conn Hallinan (7/13/12), called "Iran
Sanctions: War by Other Means."
Now that the talks with Iran on its
nuclear program appear to be on the ropes, are we on the road to war?
The Israelis threaten it almost weekly, and the Obama administration
has reportedly drawn up an attack plan. But in a sense, we are
already at war with Iran.
Carl von Clausewitz, the great
theoretician of modern warfare, defined war as the continuation of
politics by other means. In the case of Iran, international politics
has become a de-facto state of war.
According to reports, the annual
inflation rate in Iran is 22.2 percent, although many economists
estimate it at double that. In the last week of June, the price of
chicken rose 30 percent, grains were up 55.8 percent, fruits up 66.6
percent, and vegetables up 99.5 percent. Iran’s Central
Bank estimates unemployment among the young is 22.5 percent, although
the Financial Timessays “the official figures are vastly
underestimated.” The production sector is working at half its
capacity.
The value of the Iranian rial has
fallen 40 percent since last year, and there is a wave of business
closings and bankruptcies due to rising energy costs and imports made
expensive by the sanctions.
Oil exports, Iran’s major source of
income, have fallen 40 percent in 2012, according to the
International Energy Agency, costing the country nearly $32 billion
over the past year. The 27-member European Union (EU) ban on buying
Iranian oil will further depress sales, and an EU withdrawal of
shipping insurance will make it difficult for Tehran to ship oil and
gas to its diminishing number of customers. Loss of insurance
coverage could reduce Iran’s oil exports by 200,000 barrels a day,
or $4.5 billion a month. Energy accounts for about 80 percent of
Iran’s public revenues.
Whipsawed by energy sanctions, the
worst may be yet to come. The United States has already made it
difficult for countries to deal with Iran’s Central Bank, and the
U.S. Congress is considering legislation that would declare the
Iranian energy sector a “zone of proliferation concern,” which
would strangle Tehran’s ability to collect payments for its oil
exports. Other proposals would essentially make it impossible to do
business with Iran’s other banks. Any country that dared to do so
would find itself unable to conduct virtually any kind of
international banking.
If the blizzard of legislation does
pass, “This would be a significant ratcheting-up of the economic
war against Iran,” Mark Dubowitz told the Financial Times. Dubowitz
is executive director of the neoconservative Foundation for the
Defense of Democracies, which has lobbied for a series of economic
assaults against the Palestinians, China, and Hezbollah.
But the “war” has already gone far
beyond the economic sphere.
In the past two years, five Iranian
nuclear scientists have been assassinated. The hits have been widely
attributed to the Israeli intelligence service, Mossad, and the
People’s Mujahedin of Iran (MEK), an organization the U.S. State
Department designates as “terrorist.”
Last year a massive explosion rocked
the Bid Ganeh military base near Tehran, killing 17 people, including
the founder of Iran’s missile program, Gen. Hassan Tehrani
Moghaddam. According to Israeli media, the camp was sabotaged by the
MEK working with Mossad. Deadly attacks directed at Iran’s
Revolutionary Guard have been tied to Jundallah, a Sunni group with
ties to U.S. and Israeli intelligence.
It is no secret—indeed, President
Obama openly admitted it—that under the codename “Olympic Games,”
the United States has been waging cyber war against Iran. The Stuxnet
virus shut down a considerable portion of Iran’s nuclear program,
although it also infected infrastructure systems, including power
plants, oil rigs, and water supplies. The virus was designed to
attack systems made by the German company Siemens and has apparently
spread to China, Pakistan, and Indonesia.
The United States is also suspected of
being behind the Flame virus, a spyware program able to record
keystrokes, eavesdrop on conversations near an infected computer, and
tap into screen images. Besides Iran, Flame has been found in
computers in the Palestinian West Bank, Lebanon, Hungary, Austria,
Russia, Hong Kong, and the United Arab Emirates. Because
“malware” seeks out undefended computers no matter where they
are, it has a habit of spreading beyond its initial target.
Most of the media is focused on whether
the failure of the talks will lead to an Israeli or American attack
on Iran’s nuclear facilities, and there is certainly considerable
smoke out there.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak have been threatening to
attack Iran for the past two years. According to Gideon Rachman, a
leading columnist for the Financial Times, some Israeli officials
have told him Tel Aviv will attack sometime this summer or early
fall. One source told him “Israel will wait until September or
October because the weather is better and it’s closer to the U.S.
elections.”
But the Independent’s (UK) Patrick
Cockburn, one of the more reliable analysts on the Middle East,
thinks the Israeli threats are “the bluff of the century.”
Cockburn argues that there is simply no reason for Tel Aviv to go to
war, since the Iranian economy is being effectively strangled by the
sanctions. But the saber rattling is useful because it scares the EU
into toughing up the siege of Tehran, while also shifting the
Palestinian issue to a back burner.
There are serious divisions within
Israel on whether to go to war, with the Israeli intelligence and
military generally opposed. The latter’s reasons are simple:
militarily Tel Aviv couldn’t pull it off, and politically an attack
would garner worldwide sympathy for Iran. Recent statements
downgrading the threat of Iran by Israeli Deputy Prime Minister Shaul
Mofaz suggest the Netanyahu government is finally feeling the
pressure from divisions within its own ranks and may be backing off
from a military confrontation.
And the United States?
According to Paul Rogers, a Department
of Peace Studies professor at Bradford University and OpenDemocracy’s
international security editor, the Pentagon has drawn up plans for a
concentrated attack on Iran’s nuclear industry, using a combination
of bombers and cruise missiles. The United States recently beefed up
its military footprint in the region.
But while the possibility of such an
attack is real—especially if congressional hawks get their way—the
Pentagon and the U.S. intelligence establishment are hardly
enthusiastic about it. And in any case, the United States is
carpet-bombing Iran’s economy without firing a shot or sending air
crews into harm’s way.
Although Iran is generally depicted as
the recalcitrant party in the current nuclear talks, it has already
compromised extensively, even agreeing to ship some of its enriched
uranium out of the country and to guarantee the International Atomic
Energy Agency (IAEA) access to all nuclear facilities. Tehran has
also converted one-third of its 20-percent enriched uranium into
plates, making it almost impossible to use the fuel for nuclear
weapons. Weapons-grade uranium is enriched to 90 percent.
In return, Tehran is demanding the
right to enrich to 3.5 percent—the level needed to power a civilian
reactor—and an end to sanctions.
The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty
does not ban enriching uranium—indeed, it is guaranteed by Articles
III and IV—as long as the fuel is not weaponized. “Iran is
raising eyebrows,” says Yousaf M. Butt of the American Federation
of Scientists, “but what it is doing is a concern—not illegal.”
However, the P5+1—the permanent UN
Security Council members, Britain, France, the US, Russia, China,
plus Germany —is demanding an end to all enrichment, an Iranian
commitment to ship the enriched fuel out of the country, and closure
of the enrichment plant at Fordo: “stop, shut, and ship.” In
return, Iran would get enriched fuel for medical use and some spare
parts for its civilian airlines. The sanctions would remain in place,
however, although it would open the subject up for discussion. The
problem is that many of the more onerous sanctions are those
independently applied by the United States and the EU. Russia and
China have expressed opposition to the independent sanctions, but so
far have not shown a willingness to openly flaunt them.
It will be hard for Tehran to make
further concessions, particularly if there is no light at the end of
the sanction tunnel. Indeed, some of the demands seem almost crafted
to derail a diplomatic solution, raising the suspicion that the
dispute is less about Iran’s nuclear program than a concerted drive
to marginalize a country that has resisted European and U.S.
interests in the Middle East. Isolate Iran enough, the thinking goes,
and it might bring about regime change. Moscow and Beijing don’t
support such an outcome, but they have little influence over what
Washington and Brussels do independently.
There is still no evidence that Iran is
trying to build nuclear weapons. Indeed, the body of evidence
suggests the opposite, including the 2007 US National Intelligence
Estimate that Tehran mothballed its program in 2003. But evidence is
irrelevant when the enormous economic power of the United States and
the EU can cow the rest of the world, and force a country to its
knees without resorting to open hostilities.
In short, war by other means.
[Note: We should not fail to recall
that there are a number of other actions that may constitute acts of
war, alleged to have been committed by both sides:
Killings: the deaths of nuclear
scientists in Iran have been laid at the feet of Israeli and/or U.S.
operatives; a bus bombing in Tehran was attributed to an ethnic group
reputedly funded by the CIA, Iran has been accused of helping to
devise or distribute IED's in Iraq and Afghanistan, and of supplying
weapons to anti-Israel forces.
Cyber-war: the uxnet virus was
apparently a US-Israeli project to damage centrifuges (part of Iran's
nuclear enrichment program); other internet attacks occur at lower
levels constantly.
Surveillance and Espionage: an
American drone was downed in Iran; human intelligence sources operate
within Iran, the United States, Israel, countries of Euope and
elsewhere day in and day out.
Military Operations: There have been a
series of provocations, near-misses and maneuvers in the Persian Gulf
and the Strait of Hormuz; U.S. and Iranian forces are constantly
within sight of one another.
Captures: Iranian officials were
abducted and held in Iraq; Tehran has imprisoned civilians on flimsy
grounds.
All of these are preferable to an
all-out, shooting war, but are also points of tension, where a spark
can ignite a wider conflict, just as the relatively inconsequential
assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Serbia is usually pegged
as the start of World War I.]
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