Tomahawks over Tehran? - Is the West already committed to war with Iran?
Iran enjoys the attention of Western media despite, or perhaps because of, its reclusive and disengaged nature. It seems that in the last couple of months Iran has made headlines on an almost weekly basis. At the end of November, William Hague joined foreign ministers at the European Union to discuss new sanctions on Iran following the attack on the British Embassy in Tehran. The protesters, amongst them students and the feared Basij militia, broke into the diplomatic compound on November 29th, setting fire to theUnion Jack and causing serious damage to the building and amenities. Speaking to reporters after a COBR meeting with David Cameron, Hague said Iran is responsible for “a grave breach” of the Vienna convention, which sets the ground rules for courteous diplomatic relations between countries worldwide.
In response, the UK government closed the embassy and expelled the Iranian diplomatic mission in London, prompting an unprecedented crisis in British-Iranian relationships. Iranian relations with the West seem to have reached a new low, with Iran also accused by the US government of conspiring to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to Washington, Adel al-Jubeir, in early October. US attorney-general Eric Holder said two men, Iranian-American Manssor Arbabsiar and Gholam Shakuri, had already been charged.
These allegations were met with fierce criticism by intelligence experts as such actions are atypical of the Quds Force (a special unit of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards) who are believed to have commissioned the attack. A former CIA agent, Robert Baer told The Guardian that “The Quds Force are very good. They don’t sit down with people they don’t know and make a plot”. In addition, he called the Quds professional and openly questioned the conspiracy as an order by Iran.
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian president, responded by calling the accusations false and denying any involvement. In an interview with Al-Jazeera, he compared the plot to the situation in Iraq before the war, when the US administration brought evidence to the UN Security Council to certify the presence of weapons of mass destruction. “Did they find any weapon of mass destruction in Iraq? They fabricated a bunch of papers. Is that a difficult thing to do?” he said.
The question of Iranian WMD is an old issue for the US government, but the tense situation following months of accusation and reactions from both sides have led to new concerns over the extent of its uranium enrichment programme. In November, the International Atomic Energy Agency released a report that further increased Israeli and American anxiety over Iran’s capacity to develop and deploy WMD. The report used independent sources as well as information from ten countries and showed that Iran was working on several projects and had carried out tests. It says Iran has shown “strong indicators of possible weapon development”, but fails to name labs, plants or show any evidence of weapons of mass destruction.
These allegations have also given rise to worries that a war with Iran is imminent. Sceptics however, demand more evidence lest the US commit the same mistakes as it did in Iraq. In contrast a 2007 report of National Intelligence Estimates in the US revealed that “Tehran had not restarted its nuclear weapons program as of mid-2007, but we do not know whether it currently intends to develop nuclear weapons”. According to the New Yorker, its two most recent evaluations have shown similar results.
However, fears of a new war might already be a matter of history. In December, the Revolutionary Guard said it had downed a US drone as it was conducting a covert intelligence mission in Iranian airspace. Later that day, pictures were released showing the captured drone in good condition. As a result, the US admitted to carrying out intelligence gathering missions on Iran’s nuclear facilities, prompting newspapers around to world to speculate that a de facto war was already in progress. The speculations do not seem far-fetched.
In the last couple of years, Iran has seen its nuclear programme debilitated by a series of attacks widely believed to have been coordinated by the US government and Israeli forces. In 2010, 1,000 centrifuges at Natanz plant were destroyed by the Stuxnet computer worm, putting a halt to Iran’s uranium enrichment programme. About a dozen Iranian scientists linked to the programme have been killed in mysterious circumstances, either at gunpoint or in car explosions. The Revolutionary Guard has explained the murders as the work of Mossad, the notorious Israeli secret service. More recently, on November 30th this year, Iranian news agencies reported that a nuclear plant near Isfahan had been damaged by a blast but failed to provide any details as to the nature of the explosions. This event renewed the fears that a silent war had already begun.
Iran has been quick to respond by conducting a series of navy exercises and missile testing around the Strait of Hormuz in the Gulf Area, where a large part of the global oil trade is carried out. As a result, Israeli and American officials have arranged for their own military drills in the area for fear that Ahmadinejad could close off the strait in response to the oil embargo that the IAEA is planning at the end of this month. This could potentially lead to a stand-off between the two military forces in February when the Iranian navy has scheduled another set of military and missile drills in the strait.
On a diplomatic level and in view of the sanctions the EU has agreed to impose, Ahmadinejad is seeking other allegiances. With elections coming in March and lacking the support of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Ahmadinejad needs to find a solution to the dire economic prospects at home if he is to remain in power. As such, he has begun a Latin American tour this week, beginning in Venezuela where he has met Hugo Chavez, and will continue on to Nicaragua, Cuba and Ecuador. These visits will probably further strengthen the decade-long relationships between Iran and Latin America to the detriment Western ambitions to isolate Iran economically from the rest of the world.
The only solution to a somewhat inevitable confrontation would be a return to the negotiating table but it seems that for the time being, neither Iran nor America is interested in compromising. Just yesterday, Iran sentenced to death a man believed to have acted as a spy for the CIA, opening a new front for hostilities. With 2012 marking elections in both countries and retaliation increasing in force on both sides, this could indeed end up being a decisive year for Iranian-American relationships. While a war with Iran would not sit well with American voters, a bolder approach in relation to both Israel and America would increase Ahmadinejad’s faltering popularity amongst Khamenei’s entourage. In the event of a change of leaders, it is highly unlikely that the animosity between the two countries will diminish.
