Is a US attack on Iran imminent?

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Is a US attack on Iran imminent?
30 March 2010

In recent weeks there have been a series of press reports as well as
statements by military experts that strongly indicate that either the
Obama administration or the Israeli government, or both, may be moving
toward an attack on Iran.

Some of the press reports have been so detailed and provocative that
it is difficult to determine whether they are describing actual plans
for military action of whether they are “merely” intended to ratchet
up pressure on the clerical regime in Tehran. Even if the United
States and Israel are primarily engaged at this point in a war of
nerves, the political and military logic of their actions lead
inexorably to war.

Yesterday the World Socialist Web Site reported on the Brookings
Institution’s simulated war games in which Iran is the target (see:
“Washington ratchets up war threats against Iran”). Teams of US
officials—“playing” the US, Israel, Iran, and other regional
powers—tried to determine the outcome of an Israeli attack on Iran’s
nuclear plants. The war game tried to present the conflict as
initially remaining limited to exchanges of targeted strikes between
Israel and Iran.

US policymakers let it be known, however, that they envisaged
ultimately mounting a massive assault on Iran. The war game was halted
a week into the war—which, by then, had spread to Iranian or
pro-Iranian groups in Lebanon, Israel, the Occupied Territories, the
Arabian Peninsula, and the Persian Gulf—with the US preparing strikes
to annihilate large sections of the Iranian military.

This was the most prominent of a series of provocative announcements
against Iran in the US press. Last week saw reports that the US is
stocking bunker-busting bombs at airfields on Diego Garcia, to destroy
Iran’s suspected nuclear facilities, and reports of Israeli plans to
drop nuclear bombs on these same facilities.

There is an obvious connection between the intensification of
preparations for military action and the apparent failure of the
US-backed “Green Revolution” to gain the political momentum and social
support necessary to topple the Teheran government.

The Green Revolution movement, which never developed support outside a
limited middle-class base, became ever weaker in the final months of
2009. At the same time, Washington increased its pressure on Iran in
negotiations over its nuclear program, calling for sanctions to be
agreed upon by the UN Security Council. In December 2009 the New York
Times carried an article, describing the rising power of broadly
pro-Ahmadinejad factions of the Iranian military, titled “Hard-Line
Rise Alters View of Iranian Nuclear Program.”

It is significant that the current press accounts of preparations for
war emerged after the acknowledgment by top US personnel that the
Green Revolution was a failure. Contradicting months of US-media
propaganda, Richard Haass, president of the US Council on Foreign
Relations, told CNN on February 14 that the US had no facts to back up
claims by Green Revolution spokesmen that its candidate, Mir Hossein
Mousavi, had won last June’s election. Asked about a US poll showing a
57 percent Ahmadinejad vote versus 27 percent for Mousavi immediately
before the elections, Haass replied, “I don’t know if the opposition
is 25 percent, 50 percent, or more.”

For the time being, Washington’s Green Revolution proxies have been
marginalized. The United States has reacted to this setback by leaking
information to the press that suggests that a military operation is in
the works.

One of the purposes of these threatening reports may well be to goad
Teheran into some sort of defensive action that might be portrayed by
the US government and the media as a hostile military act. This would
provide the US with a casus belli that would be invoked to justify an
attack on Iran. Another possibility is that the US (and Israel)
expects that the escalation of pressure on Iran will produce new
fractures within Teheran’s political elite. In one way or another,
Washington is determined to restore the political and economic control
over Iran that it enjoyed before the 1979 Revolution, back in the
heady days when the Shah functioned as the CIA’s principal agent in
Tehran.

The Iranian crisis illustrates the fundamental continuity of US
imperialist policy, against claims that Obama would pursue policies
fundamentally different from those of Bush. In fact, in a sinister
throwback to Bush’s campaign of lies on Iraq’s alleged “weapons of
mass destruction,” US officials are escalating threats even though
they admit they have no “solid clues” suggesting the existence of an
Iranian nuclear weapon.

A US and/or Israeli attack on Iran would be a monstrous act of
imperialist criminality. Countless thousands of Iranians would be
killed in the first hours of a war. Moreover, a war against Iran would
have incalculable international repercussions, and would bring the
entire world closer to the day of a global nuclear conflagration.

Alex Lantier

http://wsws.org/articles/2010/mar2010/pers-m30.shtml

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