Trump Middle East strategy unravels over Iran nuclear dispute
In another place and another time, the contest between Israel and the US against Iran would be called a war. It’s not a full-on clash of large armies, true, but there has been plenty of violence, and real and virtual force deployed with aggression by both sides.
In a space of eight days at the beginning of this month, seven major incidents, fires and explosions were recorded at defence installations in Iran. Three happened in and around Tehran, the capital, at laboratories and underground facilities.
Other explosions were witnessed at several nuclear facilities and the missile base at Parchin.
The most significant, and symbolic, strike was an explosion and fire at a building identified as housing the new IR-2 centrifuges at Iran’s principal nuclear complex at Natanz. Iran was believed to be cranking up production of weapons grade material at the Natanz, following America’s withdrawal from the 2105 Iran nuclear agreement.
The explosion took place in the early hours of July 2. Within hours the New York Times was reporting, based on a single intelligence source, that the destruction of almost the entire building was caused by an “Israeli bomb.” How the explosive device was moved into such a sensitive nuclear facility was not explained. But within two days the New York Times was mentioning two unnamed intelligence sources, implying one was in the US and the other in the Gulf region, suggesting that the explosions in Iran had come after Israeli intelligence and a range of agencies including the CIA and the UK’s MI6 had exposed “illegal enrichment” of nuclear fuel at Natanz.
Inspection teams from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), have been denied inspection access to Natanz – despite being empowered to do so by the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) international agreement.
The key Israeli outfit in these events appears to be Unit 8200, possibly the most effective offensive and defensive cyber force in the world. Boris Johnson’s consigliere Dominic Cummings is interested in building a British cyber force on similar lines. In the past few days a group of Unit 8200 operatives have been decorated for “distinguished service in the field,” meaning Iran and the Gulf.
The various fires and explosions, including those at the missile development base at Parchin, underground laboratories in Tehran and workshops at Ahvaz and Shiraz, were deemed to have set back Iran’s nuclear weapons programme by two years. Again this comes from unnamed intelligence sources in Israel and the USA, according to the New York Times and Haaretz, the Israeli national paper most clued up on defence.
Donald Trump set out to destroy the JCPOA nuclear deal from the first. It was one of his “worst deals in the world” – because it was agreed to by Barack Obama, and because the Israelis wanted it off the table.
Quite what he wanted to do next, has never been fully clear. Some hawks like John Bolton in his day, had argued for all-out attack. The military chiefs said this would not be possible without an invasion and occupation. There was no guarantee a sustained bombing campaign would strike effectively crucial facilities like those dug deep into the mountains at Fodor, north of Tehran. It’s now feared that the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps will dig in their new nuclear weapons plants even deeper, making them even harder to detect by aerial and satellite surveillance.
The use of asymmetric tactics, espionage and targeted assassination as well as cyber strikes, has been going on for at least a decade now. It started well before the 2015 nuclear deal. Though, since he trashed the deal and threatens sanctions on any trading with Iran, it is plain that Trump aims for regime change in Tehran. He aims to get it by a combination of disruption and starvation.
“It’s as if we have been hit by two viruses now,” the urbane Iranian foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif told a small webinar seminar last week, “they are Covid-19, and cruel effect of these sadistic sanctions.” He was speaking for the ISPI Med conference, a Davos for diplomats which was made socially-distant and digital for the age of Covid-19.
The cards aren’t all stacked on Trump’s side, he suggested. The lack of guile, ingenuity and stamina that has become the hallmark of Trump diplomacy could be about to serve him very badly, and lead to strategic defeat.
Since 2011 when malware such as the Stuxnet worm, again a product developed by the CIA and Unit 8200, devastated the software for the centrifuges and Natanz, Iran has improved its capability at this kind of warfare. This year it nearly disrupted the entire water supply from Jerusalem to the West Bank.
Earlier this year Iranian shore batteries shot down a US Global Hawk, one of the most sophisticated drones in its armoury, just off the Straits of Hormuz. Last September a drone and cruise missile strike knocked out two of Saudi Arabia’s principal oil field control centres at Abqaiq and Khurais. This year, in May, Israel has replied with a cyber-attack which caused chaos for days at the main container port of Shahid Rajaee outside Bandar Abbas.
Shortage of money, mainly dollars, has severely hampered Iran’s management of its proxied and allies in Syria, Iraq and Lebanon. In January the Iranian cause lost two leading commanders when a US missile strike outside Baghdad airport killed Major General Qassem Suleimani of the Revolutionary Guards Quds Force and his key offsider Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis. A veteran guerrilla of the Dawa party, especially when it was underground in the Saddam Hussein era, al-Muhandis was the coordinator of the Popular Mobilisation Forces – the Hashed al-Shaabi, the Shia militias serving in both Iraq and Syria. He was also the commander of Kata’ib Hezbollah, most powerful of the Iran-backed Shia militias in central Iraq.
On July 6th in the midafternoon in Baghdad, gunmen believed to be from the Iranian backed Kata’ib Hezbollah shot one of Iraq’s leading terrorist analysts, Hisham al-Hashami, as he was driving his children home from school. He was adviser to both the pro-western prime minister, Mustafa al-Kadhami, and the US forces fighting ISIS and the Shia militias in the region.
It was to avenge al-Muhandis, as much as the killing of Suleimani, that Kata’ib Hezbollah murdered al-Hashimi in front of his children at a Baghdad road crossing last week.
Talking to our small seminar last week, Mohammad Javad Zarif with his astonishing fluency showed all the skills of a high class diplomat knowing how to play some very low cards – to deceptive effect. The same might go for much of his country with its dire predicament, of sanctions, starvation, external threat and internal unrest.
In the hour-long discussion his omissions and elisions – what he left out – were as interesting as what he said. He didn’t mention the explosions and the Natanz and Tehran facilities at all. He said he would not accept that the nuclear agreement, the JCPOA, is dead. “It was a great achievement of diplomacy. Iran doesn’t want to build nuclear weapons. This can be saved by the Europeans (the EU led by Germany and France). Trump walked away from the agreement. They didn’t and they should stay with it.”
On Syria, he was also looking for help by international cooperation and diplomacy. Iran would work with Russia and Turkey through the talks convened at Astana in Kazakhstan, but these should now link up with the UN talks working from Geneva: “In August we should endorse the new constitution, which should open the way to elections.”
Not once did he mention his nominal ally, Bashar al-Assad. Iran is running out of funds and patience for its allies in Syria, and its favourite son, Lebanese Hezbollah, wants to go home. Asked about the return of refugees, he gave an indirect but very firm rebuke to Assad and his policies of social engineering and cleansing against the Sunni Arabs: “The refugees should be allowed to go home, and I mean go back to their original homes, and not be redistributed.”
He declared himself an avowed diplomat and this would be his legacy when he stepped down for good from public life next year after 30 years: “War is a minus-zero sum game, as everybody loses in the end. With diplomacy everybody should win.”
Brave words, since the day he spoke them to us, the new parliament or Majlis, even more hardline conservative than its predecessor, shouted him down as “a traitor and liar,” who had betrayed the hero Qasem Soleimani.
Diplomacy was about to triumph for Iran, he explained finally, in “the comprehensive 25-year strategic agreement we have drawn up with China.” The deal would allow Iran to sell most of its oil output to China – it hopes to up production to 8.5 billion barrels a day, with Chinese refurbishment of the energy infrastructure. In return China would invest in Iranian banks and finance, transportation and utilities. Iran, along with Pakistan, would be the most important strategic Western Asian partners in the Belt and Road Initiative, the new Silk Road for the 21st century.
Not the least part of the deal, and this brought the cat calls from clerics in the Majlis last week, is a defence pact in which China would re-equip the armed forces and the Revolutionary Guards Corps of the Islamic Republic.
By trashing the JCPOA, and driving Iran towards starvation and bankruptcy, Donald Trump may just have created a new strategic partner and proxy for China in the Middle East. The alliance would be based on nuclear forces.
Now that is a less than strategic move, Mr President.