Iran and the US: from words to war

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2012/jan/31/iran-us-intelligence-war

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Judging by recent rhetoric, and implied threats, from Washington, predictably echoed in London, anyone would think they wanted any excuse for a military conflict with Iran.

Philip Hammond, the defence secretary, dispatched the frigate HMS Argyll to joined the US-led convoy of warships led by the carrier Abraham Lincoln. HMS Daring, the navy's newest destroyer, is on the way to the Indian Ocean, and the frigate Westminster is on standby.

(And we are constantly told the navy is desperately short of ships.)

Now, the US director of national intelligence James Clapper has told Congress that an alleged Iranian plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador in Washington uncovered last year suggested that shows that some Iranian officials had "changed their calculus ... in response to real or perceived US actions that threaten the regime".

The Iranians have accused the US (and Israel) for the assassination of Iranian scientists (four have been killed in the past two years) connected to the country's nuclear and missile programmes. The bomb plot and the assassinations (whoever was responsible for them; the US strongly denied any involvement) increase the tension that is already dangerously high.

There are many in Whitehall, not least top diplomats and defence chiefs, who fear the US and British governments are contributing to a very dangerous game. "The danger is accidental war," said one very experienced, and worried, Whitehall observer of what was going on in the Gulf, and what could happen in the Strait of Hormuz. He suggested that a small provocative act by a local Iranian navy commander, for example, could easily spark off an aggressive response, from a trigger-happy US captain perhaps.

That observer was quietly voicing his concerns before an event arranged by the London-based Global Strategy Forum last week. The subject was 'Iran and the West: Is War Inevitable?' Sir Malcolm Rifkind, former Conservative foreign secretary and now chairman of the parliamentary intelligence and security committee, said the "most dangerous and damaging consequence" of Iran becoming a "nuclear weapons state" was "unprecedented [nuclear] proliferation throughout the Middle East as a whole ". That would lead to a state of "permanent and infinitely greater chaos in the Middle East" than such "short term" problems such as an oil crisis and any tension around the Strait of Hormuz that would follow air strikes on Iran.

Arshin Adib-Moghaddam, of London University's School of Oriental and African Studies replied that military action against Iran would lead to a "sustained period of asymmetric warfare" involving Palestine, the Gulf, Saudi Arabia, and plunge the world economy into further depression.

He referred to recent polls in Israel suggesting that less than half of Israelis support a strike on Iran. According to a November poll, only 43% of Israeli Jews support a military strike – even though 90% of them think that Iran will eventually acquire nuclear weapons.

Asked whether it would be better for both Israel and Iran to have the bomb, or for neither to have it, 65% of Israeli Jews said neither. And 64% supported the idea of a nuclear-free zone, even though that would mean Israel giving up its nuclear weapons.

60% of respondents favoured "a system of full international inspections" of all nuclear facilities, including Israel's and Iran's, as a step toward regional disarmament.

The polls are described in an illuminating article in the New York Times.

It is not too late to calm the rhetoric and prevent a conflict whose consequences not even the most aggressive hawks in Tehran, Jerusalem, or Washington, could forsee.

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