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How to Make Iraq Look
Like Whipped Cream
So What About Iran?
By URI AVNERY
CounterPunch.com
Weekend Edition
September 29 / 30, 2007
A respected American
paper posted a scoop this week: Vice-President Dick Cheney, the
King of Hawks, has thought up a Machiavellian scheme for an
attack on Iran. Its main point: Israel will start by bombing an
Iranian nuclear installation, Iran will respond by launching
missiles at Israel, and this will serve as a pretext for an
American attack on Iran.
Far-fetched? Not really. It is rather like
what happened in 1956. Then France, Israel and Britain secretly
planned to attack Egypt in order to topple Gamal Abd-al-Nasser
("regime change" in today's lingo.) It was agreed that Israeli
paratroops would be dropped near the Suez Canal, and that the
resulting conflict would serve as a pretext for the French and
British to occupy the canal area in order to "secure" the
waterway. This plan was implemented (and failed miserably).
What would happen to us if we agreed to
Cheney's plan? Our pilots would risk their lives to bomb the
heavily defended Iranian installations. Then, Iranian missiles
would rain down on our cities. Hundreds, perhaps thousands would
be killed. All this in order to supply the Americans with a
pretext to go to war.
Would the pretext have stood up? In other
words, is the US obliged to enter a war on our side, even when
that war is caused by us? In theory, the answer is yes. The
current agreements between the US and Israel say that America
has to come to Israel's aid in any war - whoever started it.
Is there any substance to this leak? Hard to
know. But it strengthens the suspicion that an attack on Iran is
more imminent than people imagine.
* * *
Do Bush, Cheney & Co. indeed intend to attack
Iran?
I don't know, but my suspicion that they
might is getting stronger.
Why? Because George Bush is nearing the end
of his term of office. If it ends the way things look now, he
will be remembered as a very bad - if not the worst - president
in the annals of the republic. His term started with the Twin
Towers catastrophe, which reflected no great credit on the
intelligence agencies, and would come to a close with the
grievous Iraq fiasco.
There is only one year left to do something
impressive and save his name in the history books. In such
situations, leaders tend to look for military adventures. Taking
into account the man's demonstrated character traits, the war
option suddenly seems quite frightening.
True, the American army is pinned down in
Iraq and Afghanistan. Even people like Bush and Cheney could not
dream, at this time, of invading a country four times larger
than Iraq, with three times the population.
But, quite possibly the war-mongers are
whispering in Bush's ear: What are you worrying about? No need
for an invasion. Enough to bomb Iran, as we bombed Serbia and
Afghanistan. We shall use the smartest bombs and the most
sophisticated missiles against the two thousand or so targets,
in order to destroy not only the Iranian nuclear sites but also
their military installations and government offices. "We shall
bomb them back into the stone age," as an American general once
said about Vietnam, or "turn their clock back 20 years," as the
Israeli Air Force general Dan Halutz said about Lebanon.
That's a tempting idea. The US will only use
its mighty Air Force, missiles of all kinds and the powerful
aircraft-carriers, which are already deployed in the
Persian/Arabian Gulf. All these can be sent into action at any
time on short notice. For a failed president approaching the end
of his term, the idea of an easy, short war must have an immense
attraction. And this president has already shown how hard it is
for him to resist temptations of this kind.
* * *
Would this indeed be such an easy operation,
a "piece of cake" in American parlance?
I doubt it.
Even "smart" bombs kill people. The Iranians
are a proud, resolute and highly motivated people. They point
out that for two thousand years they have never attacked another
country, but during the eight years of the Iran-Iraq war they
have amply proved their determination to defend their own when
attacked.
Their first reaction to an American attack
would be to close the Straits of Hormuz, the entrance to the
Gulf. That would choke off a large part of the world's oil
supply and cause an unprecedented world-wide economic crisis. To
open the straits (if this is at all possible), the US army would
have to capture and hold large areas of Iranian territory.
The short and easy war would turn into a long
and hard war. What does that mean for us in Israel?
There can be little doubt that if attacked,
Iran will respond as it has promised: by bombarding us with the
rockets it is preparing for this precise purpose. That will not
endanger Israel's existence, but it will not be pleasant either.
If the American attack turns into a long war
of attrition, and if the American public comes to see it as a
disaster (as is happening right now with the Iraqi adventure),
some will surely put the blame on Israel. It is no secret that
the Pro-Israel lobby and its allies - the (mostly Jewish)
neo-cons and the Christian Zionists - are pushing America into
this war, just as they pushed it into Iraq. For Israeli policy,
the hoped-for gains of this war may turn into giant losses - not
only for Israel, but also for the American Jewish community.
* * *
If Mahmoud Ahmadinejad did not exist, the
Israeli government would have had to invent him.
He has got almost everything one could wish
for in an enemy. He has a big mouth. He is a braggart. He enjoys
causing scandals. He is a Holocaust denier. He prophesies that
Israel will "vanish from the map" (though he did not say, as
falsely reported, the he would wipe Israel off the map.)
This week, the pro-Israel lobby organized big
demonstrations against his visit to New York. They were a huge
success - for Ahmadinejad. He has realized his dream of becoming
the center of world attention. He has been given the opportunity
to voice his arguments against Israel -- some outrageous, some
valid - before a world-wide audience.
But Ahmadinejad is not Iran. True, he has won
popular elections, but Iran is like the orthodox parties in
Israel: it is not their politicians who count, but their rabbis.
The Shiite religious leadership makes the decisions and commands
the armed forces, and this body is neither boastful nor
vociferous not scandal-mongering. It exercises a lot of caution.
If Iran was really so eager to obtain a
nuclear bomb, it would have acted in utmost silence and kept as
low a profile as possible (as Israel did). The swaggering of
Ahmadinejad would hurt this effort more than any enemy of Iran
could.
It is highly unpleasant to think about a
nuclear bomb in Iranian hands (and, indeed, in any hands.) I
hope it can be avoided by offering inducements and/or imposing
sanctions. But even if this does not succeed, it would not be
the end of the world, nor the end of Israel. In this area, more
than in any other, Israel's deterrent power is immense. Even
Ahmadinejad will not risk an exchange of queens - the
destruction of Iran for the destruction of Israel.
* * *
Napoleon said that to understand a country's
policy, one has only to look at the map.
If we do this, we shall see that there is no
objective reason for war between Israel and Iran. On the
contrary, for a long time it was believed in Jerusalem that the
two countries were natural allies.
David Ben-Gurion advocated an "alliance of
the periphery". He was convinced that the entire Arab world is
the natural enemy of Israel, and that, therefore, allies should
be sought on the fringes of the Arab world - Turkey, Iran,
Ethiopia, Chad etc. (He also looked for allies inside the Arab
world - communities that are not Sunni-Arab, such as the
Maronites, the Copts, the Kurds, the Shiites and others.)
At the time of the Shah, very close
connections existed between Iran and Israel, some positive, some
negative, some outright sinister. The Shah helped to build a
pipeline from Eilat to Askelon, in order to transport Iranian
oil to the Mediterranean, bypassing the Suez Canal. The Israel
internal secret service (Shabak) trained its notorious Iranian
counterpart (Savak). Israelis and Iranians acted together in
Iraqi Kurdistan, helping the Kurds against their Sunni-Arab
oppressors.
The Khomeini revolution did not, in the
beginning, put an end to this alliance, it only drove it
underground. During the Iran-Iraq war, Israel supplied Iran with
arms, on the assumption that anyone fighting Arabs is our
friend. At the same time, the Americans supplied arms to Saddam
Hussein - one of the rare instances of a clear divergence
between Washington and Jerusalem. This was bridged in the
Iran-Contra Affair, when the Americans helped Israel to sell
arms to the Ayatollahs.
Today, an ideological struggle is raging
between the two countries, but it is mainly fought out on the
rhetorical and demagogical level. I dare to say that Ahmadinejad
doesn't give a fig for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, he only
uses it to make friends in the Arab world. If I were a
Palestinian, I would not rely on it. Sooner or later, geography
will tell and Israeli-Iranian relations will return to what they
were - hopefully on a far more positive basis.
* * *
One thing I am ready to predict with
confidence: whoever pushes for war against Iran will come to
regret it.
Some adventures are easy to get into but hard
to get out of.
The last one to find this out was Saddam
Hussein. He thought that it would be a cakewalk - after all,
Khomeini had killed off most of the officers, and especially the
pilots, of the Shah's military. He believed that one quick Iraqi
blow would be enough to bring about the collapse of Iran. He had
eight long years of war to regret it.
Both the Americans and we may soon be feeling
that the Iraqi mud is like whipped cream compared to the Iranian
quagmire.
Uri Avnery is an
Israeli writer and peace activist with Gush Shalom. He is o a
contributor to CounterPunch's book
The Politics of Anti-Semitism.
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