America itching to bomb Iran

This time there will be no excuses. Plans for British support for an American assault on Iran, revealed in the Guardian on November 3, are appalling. They would risk what even the "wars of September 11" did not bring, a Christian-Muslim armageddon engulfing the region. This time no one should say they were not warned, that minds were elsewhere, that we were told it would be swift and surgical. Nobody should say that.

To western strategists, Iran today is exactly where Iraq was in 2002. The country posed no threat to the West. Yet "weapons of mass destruction" were said to be primed and had to be urgently eliminated. The offending regime could be subjugated by air power or, if not, by regime change. The cause was noble, and the outcome sure.

There any comparison ends. Iran is not a one-man, two-bit dictatorship, but a nation of 70 million people, an ancient and proud civilisation with a developed civil society and a modicum of pluralist democracy. Certainly its President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad wants a weapons-ready nuclear enrichment programme, as the United Nations report by the International Atomic Energy Authority is expected to repeat. But he leads a country which, like Pakistan, Britain or Israel, craves status, prestige and the vague security that these unusable weapons seem to convey.

The planned attack on Iran is familiar in form. It is declared exclusively aerial, with missiles and unmanned drones deployed against nuclear and military targets. The airmen will promise, as they did in Belgrade, Baghdad and Benghazi, that bombing can do the job unaided. The enemy then digs in and fights back, the tempo of attack has to mount, and ground forces are sucked in.

Logic of war

We read that there are, as yet, no plans for a ground attack on Iran, though "a small number of special forces" may be required, as was required eventually in Iraq, Libya and Afghanistan. The mission will creep from wrecking Iran's nuclear capability to ensuring it cannot be rebuilt, and then to securing regime change and ‘freedom'. We have been there so often before. The logic of war tends towards totality, without which no victory can be declared. Total war on Iran would be a catastrophe.

Stopping Iran from developing a nuclear capability is and always was a lost cause. It appears to be three years from deliverable warheads and is besieged by foreign agents launching cyber-attacks, selling fake components and assassinating scientists. But Iran would be no easy target, like Libya or Iraq. The more isolated and threatened Iran is by the West, the more nuclear assertiveness attracts its leadership, and the more allies would rally to its cause.

Every expert report on Iran warns that bombing is the one thing likely to bond the unpopular Ahmadinejad to his people. The idea that they would rise up against him after the Pentagon's reported ‘shock and awe' three-day blitz of 1,200 targets is demented.

The wars of choice that followed September 11 have acquired a rhythm of their own. They have yielded 10 years of rolling thunder across the Muslim world, variously proclaiming retaliation, humanity, regime change and democracy. There have been pluses, the toppling of Saddam Hussain, Muammar Gaddafi and (temporarily) the Taliban. But the minuses have been tens of thousands killed, millions displaced, societies upheaved, billions of dollars of destruction and a region destabilised. The wars have been a gigantic, historic tragedy. They have not advanced western security one jot.

If ever there were a country that was once ripe for soft-power diplomacy, it was modern Iran. Yet the west misread Ahmadinejad and then misread such dissenters as Mohammad Khatami and parliament's speaker, Mahdi Karroubi. It defied pleas from moderates not to impose sanctions, rejecting the argument that Iran needed a strengthened professional, commercial and academic class as counterweight to the military and the mullahs. As with the sanctions imposed on Saddam's Iraq, Gaddafi's Libya and Mugabe's Zimbabwe, they have driven Iran's rulers into a siege economy. Sanctions weaken the forces of pluralism and opposition. They are plainly counterproductive.

Western bombs cannot conquer Tehran. America and Britain might be able to invade in sufficient strength to knock out nuclear bunkers, but they could not stop rebuilding, especially after a war that would radicalise the nation and make it far more antagonistic. The outcome might make Israel feel temporarily a little safer, but it would render both Israel and the west more vulnerable to terrorist and other retaliation.

A virus seems to be running through the upper echelons of Washington and London, that of a moral duty to wage war against perceived evil wherever it offers a bombing target. Anyone watching last month's Republican primary debate in Las Vegas will have been shocked at the belligerence shown by the six candidates towards the outside world.

It was a display of what the historian Robert D. Kaplan called "the warrior politics ... of an imperial reality that dominates our foreign policy", a fidgety search for reasons to go brawling round the globe, at any cost in resulting anarchy. The spectacle was frightening and depressing.

— Guardian News & Media Ltd