There is no situation in the Middle East so dire, that we cannot get a white guy in to make it worse. Next on the agenda: let’s bomb Iran. Yeah. That’ll work.
The gentleman who commissions these columns from me once described their leitmotiv as the phrase “I’m surrounded by idiots”. He has a point. The word stupid was employed to deride eight opinions/government objectives/patterns of behaviour in society in the past year. And I wanted 2006 to be different, really I did. But, sorry, here we go again.
War with Iran is an idea so spectacularly flawed that even many of those daft enough to believe that the occupation of Iraq could be resolved successfully are against it. War with Iran is such a potential wildfire that Israeli Intelligence privately considers it a dumb move. The consequences of war with Iran are so far-reaching that even to place it on the agenda is to have exceeded the bounds of logical thought.
The sweetener is that old chestnut, the limited war. The West could fight a limited war in Iran to curb the nuclear programme, and then withdraw. Just like it could remove the Taleban in Afghanistan, get rid of Saddam Hussein and still be home for tea. Yet, as 3,300 British troops decamp to inhospitable Helmand, and the death toll of allies in Iraq rises to 2,440, what is abundantly clear is that war in the Middle East has no limit.
War of any type rarely does. Fritz Fischer in his history Griff nach der Weltmacht: Die Kriegzielpolitik des kaiserlichen Deutschland 1914-18 — loosely translated as Bid for World Power: Germany’s Aims in the First World War (or alternatively Oops, We Did It Again) — unearthed documents written by the German Chancellor, Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg. Fischer revealed that to distract from domestic crises and further Germany’s territorial ambition, Bethmann-Hollweg was prepared to fight a limited war in Europe. Except four years, 8.5 million dead and 21.2 million casualties later it turned out not to have been so limited after all. Fischer’s next volume better describes the current mood for conflict on Iranian soil. Krieg der Illusionen, it was called. War of Illusions.
The biggest illusion being that military action would solve anything. Kenneth Pollack, an expert on Iran at the Brookings Institution, an American think-tank, estimated preventive strikes would merely put Iran’s nuclear programme back two to four years. What can more easily be pinpointed is the downside of such an attack. A hardening of jihadi attitudes against the West with an increased threat of terrorism, civilian and allied military casualties, a growth in insurgency in Iraq and Afghanistan, the risk to shipments in the Strait of Hormuz (one third of the world’s oil travels that route) and oil prices so great it would make your head spin. The patchy nature of allied intelligence means we could never be sure that the bombs alone destroyed all nuclear capabilities, with the need then to engage on the ground, exposing the lie of limited commitment. Ridding Iran of nuclear weapons means opening a third front in the war on terror. Leaving all moral issues aside, strategically, that is a bust.
This does not equate to ignoring the danger. It is exceedingly optimistic to believe the claims of President Ahmadinejad that the nuclear enrichment programme is for civilian purposes only. The West has offered technical support to achieve that aim in return for an end to the work undertaken in secret, and has been as good as told to take a running jump. This is disturbing.
Clearly, the Iranian regime represents much that is abhorrent, including Holocaust denial, repression of civil liberties and messianic religious madness. In a list of people fit to be trusted with apocalyptic weaponry, its leaders would figure about one place north of Osama himself. Use it on Israel, loan it to al-Qaeda, anything is believed possible, which fuels our fear. Certainly, those who used to talk glibly of a nuclear deterrent have changed horses now a cabal of nutters have their eyes on the prize.
They have not learnt, however, from the catastrophe of Iraq, the country we invaded because sanctions had failed to stop the construction of weapons of mass destruction. Except when we got in, there were none — so perhaps sanctions had.
It would be so easy, so convenient if a smart bomb or two could answer the Iranian nuclear question. “We cannot allow the world’s most dangerous nations to possess the world’s most dangerous weapons,” said George Bush, and Iran’s nuclear programme ticks all those boxes. Yet there is a better way.
On Thursday, the International Atomic Energy Agency will convene in Vienna, with a proposal to refer Iran to the UN Security Council. It is not true that economic sanctions would not work without the support of Russia and China. Yes, it would be preferable to have everybody on board, but not critical. If Iran continued selling oil to Russia, China and India, the impact on the remaining oil market caused by sanctions would not be so great, nor the resulting price rise.
A nuclear programme needs money, and Western companies are where the money is right now. They have the technology that Iran needs. Sanctions would slow the Iranian economy and mire the nuclear schedule. Sanctions would hurt an unpopular regime in Tehran, whereas an air strike would unite the people behind it. There would be no guarantee of success; but North Korea has nuclear weapons and sanctions have left it destitute and insignificant, an irrelevance to the rest of the world.
The alternative is to take a difficult situation and turn it into an impossible one. To exchange the fear of something terrible happening to a guarantee that something terrible will. To look at the bloody chaos of Iraq, shrug our shoulders and plough ahead on the road to an even greater disaster. And that would be so, so . . . oh, all right then, one more for old times’ sake. Stupid.
Martin Samuel The Times