Rumblings of new war in the Middle East

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Rumblings of new war in the Middle East
20 April 2010

Recent days have seen a spate of developments that point to the danger of a new
military conflagration in the Middle East.

Israel has warned Syria that it will face an Israeli attack if Hezbollah, the
Shiite-based Lebanese militia, fires Scud missiles at Israel, the London Times
reported Sunday. The newspaper cites an unnamed Israeli cabinet minister as
saying, “We’ll return Syria to the Stone Age by crippling its power stations,
ports, fuel storage and every bit of strategic infrastructure if Hezbollah dare
to launch ballistic missiles against us.”

Israel has accused Syria of supplying Hezbollah with medium-range Russian-made
Scud missiles. Damascus has vigorously denied the charge, accusing Israel’s
hard-line government of using the Scud-missile claim as a pretext for military
action.

The Times article closely followed press reports that the Jordanian king,
Abdullah II, had warned US Congressional leaders in a closed door-meeting last
Thursday that a Middle East war is imminent.

While Abdullah may have been the first Arab head of state to bring such warnings
to Washington, there have been rumors and rumblings of a new Israeli war for
months. Despite destroying the infrastructure of the southern half of Lebanon in
2006, killing more than a thousand civilians, Israel’s month-long invasion
failed in achieving its key objective—the destruction of Hezbollah as a serious
military force.

Israel’s anxiety and belligerence has been intensified by Washington’s failure
to limit and rollback Iran’s growing influence in the region. In response to the
American government’s decades-long campaign to subvert and overthrow the Islamic
Republic, Tehran has developed extensive ties to the Syrian regime and provides
critical political and material support to Hezbollah and Hamas.

Senior figures in the Obama administration and Pentagon have responded to a New
York Times report on a secret January memo from Defence Secretary Robert Gates
by insisting that Washington is actively considering a full-range of actions
against Iran, including war.

According to the Times, Gates’s secret three-page memo warned that the
administration didn’t have a long-term policy to deal with Iran in the event
that Tehran continues to defy the US demand that it forego its rights under the
Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty to a full-cycle civilian nuclear energy program.

“The fact,” said Obama’s National Security Advisor General James Jones, “that we
don’t announce publicly our entire strategy for the world to see doesn’t mean we
don’t have a strategy that anticipates the full range of contingencies—we do.”

Gates and the White House have downplayed the significance of the January
memo—the Defence Secretary claims that the Times misconstrued “its purpose and
content”—and have denied the suggestion that the Obama administration is, or has
been divided, over its Iran policy.

But there has been no denial of the Times’s contention that Gates’s memo was
part of “an intensifying effort inside the Pentagon, the White House and the
intelligence agencies to develop new options”, including “a set of military
alternatives…should diplomacy and sanctions fail to force Iran” to heel.

The Times report indicates that the Obama administration has accepted one of the
key points Gates is said to have argued in his memo: the need for Washington to
establish a bar or trigger for military action against Iran well short of Tehran
actually developing a nuclear weapon. It cites a “senior administration
official” as saying that the US would “ensure that Iran would not ‘acquire a
nuclear capability’.”

Speaking at Columbia University Sunday, US Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike
Mullen, declared that the Pentagon was continuously planning for a military
strike against Iran and stands ready to strike if that is the president’s
“call.” But he warned, “striking” can “generate unintended consequences that are
difficult to predict.” Later Mullen added, “If there was an easy answer, we
would’ve picked it off the shelf.”

Mullen’s remarks speak to the strategic dilemma facing US imperialism.

Washington views the current Iranian regime as an intolerable obstacle to its
strategic dominance of the Middle East, its drive to gain access to and control
over oil-rich Central Asia, and its plans to strengthen its world position by
shaping global energy flows.

During the past decade, Washington has ratcheted up its pressure against
Iran—through the invasions and occupations of the neighboring states of Iraq and
Afghanistan, through a program of economic sanctions, and by lending support to
opposition groups, from Balochi nationalist terrorists to the bourgeois
opposition Green movement.

In the final years of the Bush administration, the US political and
military-security establishment engaged in an acrimonious debate as to whether
to attack Iran.

What has thus far stayed the hand of the Obama administration—which has
continued the war in Iraq, dramatically expanded the “AfPak” War, and that in
its recent nuclear-weapons strategy statement refused to exclude using nuclear
weapons against a non-nuclear Iran—is the recognition that there can be no
successful “surgical strike” against Iran.

The Iranian regime—given the country’s size, strategic location, and its
international allies—has the potential to seriously damage the US and its client
regimes and disrupt Persian Gulf oil exports, thereby delivering a body blow to
the world economy.

Virtually nothing is said of this publicly. But the strategists of US
imperialism recognize a war with Iran could ignite a military-political
firestorm that would engulf the entire region, from Afghanistan and Iraq to
Israel-Palestine—a conflict that in its size and scope could be the largest
since at least the Korean War.

To limit this potential, a US “strike” against Iran would from the outset have
to take the form of a “shock and awe” campaign aiming at destroy Iran’s
infrastructure and ability to function as a modern state.

Washington’s launch of such a war would invariably have an explosive impact on
world geo-politics, on the relations of the US with all the other great powers,
and on class relations in the US. Russia and China, in particular, would in all
likelihood see such a war, directed as it would be in ensuring US control over
the world’s principal oil exporting region and projecting US power into Eurasia,
as constituting a fundamental threat to their strategic interests.

By the same token, however, the US cannot retreat from the drive to assert its
domination over the Middle East. If this was imperative in the decades after
World War II when the position of American capitalism was unchallenged, it is
all the more so now that its world position has been so demonstrably undermined.

Thus the White House and Pentagon continue to prepare for “all contingencies”
and invoke these war plans to strong-arm the other great powers into supporting
yet another round of punishing sanctions against Tehran.

Whatever its particular form, a new Middle East war would have catastrophic
consequences for the people of the Middle East—Iranian, Arab, and Jewish—and
potentially the world.

Keith Jones

http://wsws.org/articles/2010/apr2010/pers-a20.shtml

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