Interesting article from a guy who teaches political science at Tehran University. But, the fact remains that Iran is pursuing WMD and we are in Iraq for the duration. Iran is playing terrorist supporter and even recruiter. I personally think that "W" is trying hard to keep Iran on the radar scope but his advisors realize that we can't handle another front. NK is on-hold as they are isolated from Russia, China, and SK/US. Iran is now the front-runner for supporting terrorism. Syria is a close second. Both are in the region. The US is working hard to improve logistics and supply routes for the region. Does two and two equal four??? No, I can't see the US invading Iran as we just don't have the manpower and the losses will be to great. But, will there be an attack??? Possible.
FM
http://208.39.143.167
How Iran will fight back
By Kaveh L Afrasiabi
16 December 2004
TEHRAN - The United States and Israel may be contemplating military
operations against Iran, as per recent media reports, yet Iran is not
wasting any time in preparing its own counter-operations in the event an
attack materializes.
A week-long combined air and ground maneuver has just concluded in five
of the southern and western provinces of Iran, mesmerizing foreign
observers, who have described as "spectacular" the massive display of
high-tech, mobile operations, including rapid-deployment forces relying
on squadrons of helicopters, air lifts, missiles, as well as hundreds of
tanks and tens of thousands of well-coordinated personnel using live
munition. Simultaneously, some 25,000 volunteers have so far signed up
at newly established draft centers for "suicide attacks" against any
potential intruders in what is commonly termed "asymmetrical warfare".
Behind the strategy vis-a-vis a hypothetical US invasion, Iran is likely
to recycle the Iraq war's scenario of overwhelming force, particularly
by the US Air Force, aimed at quick victory over and against a much
weaker power. Learning from both the 2003 Iraq war and Iran's own
precious experiences of the 1980-88 war with Iraq and the 1987-88
confrontation with US forces in the Persian Gulf, Iranians have focused
on the merits of a fluid and complex defensive strategy that seeks to
take advantage of certain weaknesses in the US military superpower while
maximizing the precious few areas where they may have the upper hand,
eg, numerical superiority in ground forces, guerrilla tactics, terrain, etc.
According to a much-publicized article on the "Iran war game" in the
US-based Atlantic Monthly, the estimated cost of an assault on Iran is a
paltry few tens of millions of dollars. This figure is based on a
one-time "surgical strike" combining missile attacks, air-to-surface
bombardments, and covert operations, without bothering to factor in
Iran's strategy, which aims precisely to "extend the theater of
operations" in order to exact heavier and heavier costs on the invading
enemy, including by targeting America's military command structure in
the Persian Gulf.
After this Iranian version of "follow-on" counter-strategy, the US
intention of localized warfare seeking to cripple Iran's command system
as a prelude to a systematic assault on key military targets would be
thwarted by "taking the war to them", in the words of an Iranian
military strategist who emphasized America's soft command structure in
the southern tips of the Persian Gulf. (Over the past few months, US jet
fighters have repeatedly violated Iran's air space over Khuzestan
province, testing Iran's air defense system, according to Iranian
military officials.)
Iran's proliferation of a highly sophisticated and mobile
ballistic-missile system plays a crucial role in its strategy, again
relying on lessons learned from the Iraq wars of 1991 and 2003: in the
earlier war over Kuwait, Iraq's missiles played an important role in
extending the warfare to Israel, notwithstanding the failure of
America's Patriot missiles to deflect most of Iraq's incoming missiles
raining in on Israel and, to a lesser extent, on the US forces in Saudi
Arabia. Also, per the admission of the top US commander in the Kuwait
conflict, General Norman Schwarzkopf, the hunt for Iraq's mobile Scud
missiles consumed a bulk of the coalition's air strategy and was as
difficult as searching for "needles in a haystack".
Today, in the evolution of Iran's military doctrine, the country relies
on increasingly precise long-range missiles, eg, Shahab-3 and Fateh-110,
that can "hit targets in Tel Aviv", to echo Iranian Foreign Minister
Kemal Kharrazi.
Chronologically speaking, Iran produced the 50-kilometer-range Oghab
artillery rocket in 1985, and developed the 120km- and 160km-range
Mushak artillery rockets in 1986-87 and 1988 respectively. Iran began
assembling Scud-Bs in 1988, and North Korean technical advisers in Iran
converted a missile maintenance facility for missile manufacture in
1991. It does not seem, however, that Iran has embarked on Scud
production. Instead, Iran has sought to build Shahab-3 and Shahab-4,
having ranges of 1,300km with a 1,600-pound warhead, and 200km with a
220-pound warhead, respectively; the Shahab-3 was test-launched in July
1998 and may soon be upgraded to more than 2,000km, thus capable of
reaching the middle of Europe.
Thanks to excess revenue from high oil prices, which constitute more
than 80% of the government's annual budget, Iran is not experiencing the
budget constraints of the early and mid-1990s, when its military
expenditure was outdone nearly one to 10 by its Arab neighbors in the
Persian Gulf who are members of the Gulf Cooperation Council; almost all
the Arab states possess one or another kind of advanced missile system,
eg, Saudi Arabia's CSS-2/DF, Yemen's SS-21, Scud-B, Iraq's Frog-7.
There are several advantages to a ballistic arsenal as far as Iran is
concerned: first, it is relatively cheap and manufactured domestically
without much external dependency and the related pressure of "missile
export control" exerted by the US. Second, the missiles are mobile and
can be concealed from the enemy, and third, there are advantages to
fighter jets requiring fixed air bases. Fourth, missiles are presumed
effective weapons that can be launched without much advance notice by
the recipient targets, particularly the "solid fuel" Fatah-110 missiles
that require only a few short minutes for installation prior to being
fired. Fifth, missiles are weapons of confusion and a unique strike
capability that can torpedo the best military plans, recalling how the
Iraqi missile attacks in March 2003 at the US military formations
assembled at the Iraq-Kuwait border forced a change of plan on the
United States' part, thereby forfeiting the initial plan of sustained
aerial strikes before engaging the ground forces, as was the case in the
Kuwait war, when the latter entered the theater after some 21 days of
heavy air strikes inside Iraq as well as Kuwait.
Henceforth, any US attack on Iran will likely be met first and foremost
by missile counter-attacks engulfing the southern Persian Gulf states
playing host to US forces, as well as any other country, eg, Azerbaijan,
Iraq or Turkey, allowing their territory or airspace to be used against
Iran. The rationale for this strategy is precisely to pre-warn Iran's
neighbors of the dire consequences, with potential debilitating impacts
on their economies for a long time, should they become accomplices of
foreign invaders of Iran.
Another key element of Iran's strategy is to "increase the arch of
crisis" in places such as Afghanistan and Iraq, where it has
considerable influence, to undermine the United States' foothold in the
region, hoping to create a counter-domino effect wherein instead of
gaining inside Iran, the US would actually lose territory partly as a
result of thinning its forces and military "overstretch".
Still another component of Iran's strategy is psychological warfare, an
area of considerable attention by the country's military planners
nowadays, focusing on the "lessons from Iraq" and how the pre-invasion
psychological warfare by the US succeeded in causing a major rift
between the top echelons of the Ba'athist army as well as between the
regime and the people. The United States' psychological warfare in Iraq
also had a political dimension, seeing how the US rallied the United
Nations Security Council members and others behind the anti-Iraq
measures in the guise of countering Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass
destruction.
Iran's counter-psychological warfare, on the other hand, seeks to take
advantage of the "death-fearing" American soldiers who typically lack a
strong motivation to fight wars not necessarily in defense of the
homeland. A war with Iran would definitely require establishing the
draft in the US, without which it could not possibly protect its flanks
in Afghanistan and Iraq; imposing the draft would mean enlisting many
dissatisfied young soldiers amenable to be influenced by Iran's own
psychological warfare focusing on the lack of motivation and "cognitive
dissonance" of soldiers ill-doctrinated to President George W Bush's
"doctrine of preemption", not to mention a proxy war for the sake of Israel.
This aside, already, Iranians today consider themselves subjected to the
machinations of similar psychological warfare, whereby, to give an
example, the US cleverly seeks to capitalize on the discontent of the
(unemployed) youth by officially shedding crocodile tears, as discerned
from a recent interview of the outgoing Secretary of State Colin Powell.
Systematic disinformation typically plays a key role in psychological
warfare, and the US has now tripled its radio programs beamed to Iran
and, per recent reports from the US Congress, substantially increased
its financial support of the various anti-regime TV and Internet
programs, this while openly trumpeting the cause of "human intelligence"
in a future scenario of conflict with Iran based in part on covert
operations.
Consequently, there is a sense of a national-security siege in Iran
these days, in light of a tightening "security belt" by the US
benefiting from military bases in Iraq, Turkey, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan,
Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, as well as Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain,
Oman and the island-turned-garrison of Diego Garcia. From Iran's vantage
point, the US, having won the Cold War, has turned into a "leviathan
unhinged" capable of manipulating and subverting the rules of
international law and the United Nations with impunity, thus requiring a
sophisticated Iranian strategy of deterrence that, in the words of
certain Iranian media pundits, would even include the use of nuclear
weapons.
But such voices are definitely in a minority in Iran today, and by and
large there is an elite consensus against the manufacturing of nuclear
weapons, partly out of the conviction that short of creating a
"second-strike capability" there would be no nuclear deterrence against
an overwhelming US power possessing thousands of "tactical nuclear
weapons". Still, looking at nuclear asymmetry between India and
Pakistan, the latter's first-strike capability has proved a deterrence
against the much superior nuclear India, a precious lesson not lost on Iran.
Consequently, while Iran has fully submitted its nuclear program to
international inspection and suspended its uranium-enrichment program
per a recent Iran-European Union agreement inked in Paris in November,
there is nonetheless a nagging concern that Iran may have undermined its
deterrence strategy vis-a-vis the US, which has not endorsed the Paris
Agreement, reserving the right to dispatch Iran's nuclear issue to the
Security Council while occasionally resorting to tough saber-rattling
against Tehran.
At times, notwithstanding a media campaign in the US, particularly by
the New York Times, through news articles carrying such provocative
titles as "US versus a nuclear Iran", the US continues its hard-power
pre-campaign against Iran unabated, in turn fueling the national
security concern of those groups of Iranians contemplating "nuclear
deterrence" as a national survival strategy.
Concerning the latter, there is a growing sentiment in Iran that no
matter how compliant Iran is with the demands of the UN's International
Atomic Energy Agency , much like Iraq in 2002-03, the US, which has
lumped Iran into a self-declared "axis of evil", is cleverly sowing the
seeds of its next Middle East war, in part by leveling old accusations
of terrorism and Iran's complicity in the 1996 Ghobar bombing in Saudi
Arabia, irrespective of the Saudi officials' rejection of such
allegations totally overlooked in a recent book on Iran, The Persian
Puzzle by Kenneth M Pollack (see Asia Times Online, The Persian puzzle,
or the CIA's?, December 3.)
Thus there is an emerging "proto-nuclear deterrence" according to which
Iran's mastery of the nuclear fuel cycle would make it "nuclear weapon
capable" in a relatively short time, as a sort of pre-weapon "threshold
capability" that must be taken into account by Iran's enemies
contemplating attacks on its nuclear installations. Such attacks would
be met by stiff resistance, born of Iran's historic sense of nationalism
and patriotism, as well as by a counter-weaponization based on quick
conversation of the nuclear technology. Hence the longer the US, and
Israel, keep up the military threat, the more powerful and appealing the
Iranian yearning for a "proto-nuclear deterrence" will grow.
In fact, the military threat against Iran has proved poison for the
Iranian economy, chasing away foreign investment and causing
considerable capital flight, an intolerable situation prompting some
Iranian economists even to call for filing complaints against the US in
international tribunals seeking financial remedies. This is a little
far-fetched, no doubt, and the Iranians would have to set a new legal
precedent to win their cause in the eyes of international law. Iran
cannot possibly allow the poor investment climate caused by the military
threats to continue indefinitely, and reciprocating with an extended
deterrence strategy that raises the risk value of US allies in the
region is meant to offset this rather unhappy situation.
Ironically, to open a parenthesis here, some friends of Israel in the
US, such as Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, an avid supporter of
"torturing the terrorists", has recently inked a column on a pro-Israel
website calling for the revision of international law allowing an
Israeli, and US, military assault against Iran. Dershowitz has clearly
taken flight of the rule of law, making a mockery of the esteemed
institution that is considered a beacon on the hill in the United
States; the same Ivy League university is home to the hate discourse of
"clashing civilizations", another ornament for its cherished history.
Even Harvard's Kennedy School dean, Joseph Nye, a relative dove, has
replicated the US obsession with power by churning out books and
articles on "soft power" that reifies every facet of American life,
including its neutral culture or entertainment industry, into an
appendage or "complement" of US "hard power", as if power reification of
what Jurgen Habermas calls "lifeworld" (Lebenswelt) is the conditio sine
qua non of Pax Americana.
The ruse of power, however, is that it is often blind to the opposite
momentum that it generates, as has been the case of the Cuban people's
half a century of heroics vis-a-vis a ruthless regime of economic
blockade, Algerian nationalists fighting against French colonialism in
the 1950s and 1960s, and, at present, the Iranian people finding
themselves in the unenviable situation of contemplating how to survive
against the coming avalanche of a US power led entirely by hawkish
politicians donning the costumes of multilateralism on Iran's nuclear
program. Yet few inside Iran actually believe that this is more than
pseudo-multilateralism geared to satisfy the United States'
unilateralist militarism down the road. One hopes that the road will not
wind down any time soon, but just in case, the "Third World" Iranians
are doing what they can to prepare for the nightmare scenario.
The whole situation calls for prudent crisis management and security
confidence-building by both sides, and, hopefully, the ugly experience
of repeated warfare in the oil-rich region can itself act as a deterrent.
Kaveh L Afrasiabi, PhD, is the author of After Khomeini: New Directions
in Iran's Foreign Policy (Westview Press) and "Iran's Foreign Policy
Since 9/11", Brown's Journal of World Affairs, co-authored with former
deputy foreign minister Abbas Maleki, No 2, 2003. He teaches political
science at Tehran University.