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War has a way of turning up at the least convenient moment. One minute you’re lobbying your government for an extra $50bn to fund the next generation of fighting vehicles, the next, your driver is outside honking his horn, reminding you that you are booked on a flight to somewhere in Arabia, mission: “Destroy Iran”.
The gulf – literally, in this case – between what America’s generals, and allies, think is feasible and reasonable in respect of Iran and the wilder fantasies of Donald Trump and his advisers is both broad and deep. The President looks at Iran and sees a rogue state that dares to interfere in a region of the world that, against all geographical logic, he regards as America’s backyard.
A year ago, Trump pulled out of the deal, agreed by the Obama Administration in concert with its European allies, including the UK, under which Tehran undertook to suspend its enrichment of uranium in return for a lifting of western sanctions. Since then, amid fears that Iran’s nuclear centrifuges have been switched back on, a diplomatic stalemate has persisted, with neither side prepared to give ground and Europe stuck in the middle.
But then, for reasons that are not clear but have the fingerprints of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman of Saudi Arabia all over them, Trump decided to up the ante.
“If Iran wants to fight, that will be the official end of Iran,” he tweeted. “Never threaten the United States again!”
What the precise threat is was not disclosed. Four Saudi tankers were damaged by limpet mines in the Persian Gulf last week. Nobody can say for sure who was responsible, but even if Iran looks to be the most likely culprit, is that sufficient to justify the country’s “official end”? Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Director of the CIA from 2017 to 2018, rushed to Baghdad to warn the Iraqi government that it needed to distance itself from Iranian warmongering. At sea, a carrier group, headed by the USS Abraham Lincoln, was dispatched post-haste to the Gulf either to deter an Iranian attack (on what?) or else, one assumes, to prepare for hostilities.
In the event, the President rowed back, observing that the threat level had reduced and that sanctions and diplomacy were once more the way forward.
But whose diplomacy? Israel and Saudi Arabia – the strangest of strange bedfellows – are both determined to deal with Iran once and for all. Each feels threatened existentially by Shiite islamism, neither has much time for a softly-softly approach. Netanyahu tweeted earlier this year that the purpose of a summit hosted by the right-wing government of Poland on the subject of Middle East instability was “to advance the common interest of war with Iran”. His tweet was quickly deleted, but the message was clear.
It is safe to say that what the world needs least at the present time is a war between Iran and the United States. The Islamic Republic would be no pushover. It has a population of 81 million and a large, battle-hardened army equipped with a variety of state-of-the-art short and medium-range missiles. But America would no doubt prevail. The obvious twin risks are that the aftermath would be yet another quagmire, lasting years, even decades, or – who knows? – the possibility that Russia might choose to intervene, with sophisticated weapons and covertly-obtained intelligence, if not actual troops.
Might negotiations – the carrot as well as the stick – not be the better course of action? Europe certainly thinks so, and so does the UK. So, even, does Russia.
Trump, who rarely plans beyond his next tweet, is not the President the West would wish to have in charge in such circumstances. Nor would it place much reliance on the unfinished business mindset of National Security Adviser John Bolton. Instead, America’s allies will be hoping that the joint chiefs will step forward, warning the White House and the nation of the harmful consequences of an ill-thought-out and unnecessary invasion.
Sabre-rattling is one thing. Actually removing America’s sword from its scabbard and ordering the charge is something else.
It is probably no exaggeration to say that the current commander-in-chief of U.S. forces and de facto Leader of the Free World hasn’t the least understanding of war. It is likely that he imagines it to be no more complicated than pressing Send on his Twitter feed. The fiascos of the last 18 years – Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria – have simply passed him by. Whatever went wrong then was Obama’s fault, or George Bush’s fault. With him in charge, things will be different.
Fortunately, the generals take a different view. They have seen what happens when the politicians fail to plan any further than the next salvo of cruise missiles. And they know who will be left to pick up the pieces.
America’s top brass are a bit like Basil Fawlty, who once admitted it would be a sight easier to run his hotel if it wasn’t for the guests. They regard war as a crude interruption of their budget negotiations with the Pentagon. They are not (most of them) frustrated, wannabe George Pattons. They are like company executives, more at home in the boardroom – in their case the Situation Room – than the battlefield.
It’s not that they don’t know how to “destroy” a country. They’d just rather not.
Sadly, Trump’s 1914-style gung-hoedness is echoed by the Hell-for-Leather, shoot-em-up approach of John Bolton, who may look like a 1950s insurance salesman but in reality sees regime change as the answer to almost any long-running feud with a foreign power.
It almost goes without saying that Bolton never took up the opportunity to go to war himself. Like Trump, he went to considerable lengths to avoid conscription into the military during the Vietnam War, preferring to sit out the conflict as a trainee in the National Guard.
Later, as a lawyer and “diplomat,” he rose and rose, becoming assistant Attorney-General under Ronald Reagan, Under-Secretary-of-State and US ambassador to the UN in the George W Bush Administration, and now Trump’s National Security Adviser. It was Bolton, along with Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz, who convinced Bush that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction that he was ready to use at a moment’s notice. The fact that no such weapons were ever found did not deter Bolton from coming up with much the same advice each time a crisis arises. Over the years, he has advocated toppling the governments not only of Iran, but of Syria, Libya, Venezuela, Cuba, Yemen and North Korea – though not, so far, Russia, whose President, one suspects, he both fears and admires.
It is, of course, undeniable that Iran’s influence in the Middle East is somewhat less than benign. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the country’s 80-year-old Supreme Leader, gives the impression of being more moderate and persuadable than his near namesake, the late Ayatollah Khomeini, who established the Islamic Republic back in 1979. The truth is, he has said repeatedly that those Muslim nations that compromise with Israel and America – most obviously Saudi Arabia – are acting against the injunction of the Koran to be “stern” with unbelievers. He presides over a regime bent on acquiring the Islamic Bomb while in the meantime providing extensive backing to terrorist movements across the Middle East. At home, he likes nothing more than a good public hanging, usually of gay men, uppity women or political opponents arguing for the separation of church and state
Arguably, if the potential outcomes were not so grim, it could be said that Trump and Khamenei deserve each other, rather like Trump and Kim Jong Un, Trump and Nicolas Maduro, Trump and Recep Erdogan, or Trump and Vladimir Putin.
The good news is that it may not yet be time to book your place in the nearest nuclear bunker. In an interview with Fox News that appeared a day after his tweet, Trump appeared somewhat less bellicose.
“I just don’t want them to have nuclear weapons,” he said. “And they can’t be threatening us. And with all of everything that’s going on, and I’m not one that believes … you know, I’m not somebody that wants to go into war, because war hurts economies, war kills people most importantly … by far most importantly … I don’t want to fight … but you do have situations like Iran, you can’t let them have nuclear weapons … you just can’t let that happen.”
So that’s clear, then. A little later, Acting Defence Secretary Patrick Shanahan announced that the Iranian threat level had declined and that the U.S. posture was once more “deterrence rather than war”. The generals must have been relieved. But will the two sides get back round the table any time soon? Nobody knows. Maybe somebody should ask Bibi.
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Iain Martin and the team make sense of the news, providing commentary and analysis on the stories that matter in politics, geopolitics, economics and culture.