Showing posts with label War. Show all posts
Showing posts with label War. Show all posts

Russia prepares for a US-Israeli military strike against Iran

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And what if Russia comes to Iran's aid with full-on, military intervention in Iran's behalf?!?I really have to wonder if those in the bowels of power in DC and Tel Aviv have actually thought this scenario through to its ultimate conclusion, which may well be a global thermonuclear war over an alleged Iranian weapons program which cannot, to date, be proven to exist!!


Russia has undertaken intensive preparations during the past few months for a possible military strike by Israel and the United States on Iran. According to recent reports, the Russian General Staff expects a war against Iran this summer, with enormous repercussions for not only the Middle East but also the Caucasus.
Russian troops in the Caucasus have been technically upgraded, and a missile division situated on the Caspian Sea has been placed in readiness. The missile cruisers of the Caspian flotilla are now anchored off the coast of Dagestan. The only Russian military base in the South Caucasus, located in Armenia, is also on alert for military intervention. Last autumn, Russia sent its aircraft carrier Kuznetsov to the Syrian port Tartous following the escalation of the conflict in Syria. Experts believe that Russia would support Tehran in the event of war, at least on a military-technical level.
In a commentary in April, General Leonid Ivashov, president of the Academy of Geopolitical Science, wrote that “a war against Iran would be a war against Russia” and he called for a “political-diplomatic alliance” with China and India. Operations were being undertaken throughout the Middle East in order to destabilise the region and proceed against China, Russia and Europe. The war against Iran, Ivashov wrote, would “end up at our borders, destabilise the situation in the North Caucasus and weaken our position in the Caspian region.”
Of central concern for Moscow are the consequences for the South Caucasus in the event of a war against Iran. Armenia is the only ally of the Kremlin in the region and has close economic links with Iran, while neighbouring Georgia and Azerbaijan maintain military and economic ties with the United States and Israel.
The Kremlin fears above all that Azerbaijan could participate in a military alliance alongside Israel and the United States against Iran. Azerbaijan borders Iran, Russia, Armenia and the Caspian Sea, and since the mid-1990s has been an important military and economic ally of the US in the South Caucasus, housing several American military bases.
Relations between Iran and Azerbaijan are already very tense. Tehran has repeatedly accused Baku of participating in terrorist attacks and acts of sabotage, most probably in collaboration with the Israeli and American intelligence agencies. In recent years, Azerbaijan has doubled its military spending and in February completed a weapons deal with Israel worth US$1.6 billion involving the supply of drones and missile defence systems.
Citing senior sources in the Obama administration, Mark Perry told the American journal Foreign Policy in late March that Baku had allowed Israel access to several air bases on the border to northern Iran that could be used for an air strike on Tehran. The magazine quotes a senior government official saying, “The Israelis have bought an airport and this airport is Azerbaijan.” Perry warned, “Military strategists must now take into account a war scenario, which includes not only the Persian Gulf, but also the Caucasus.”
The Baku government immediately denied the report, but the editor of the Azerbaijani newspaper Neue Zeit, Shakir Gablikogly, warned that Azerbaijan could be drawn into a war against Iran.
Even if Azerbaijan should not prove to be the starting point for an Israeli attack on Iran, there is the danger that war will lead to a military escalation of other territorial conflicts such as the dispute between Armenia and Azerbaijan over Nagorno-Karabakh. The region has been independent since the end of the civil war in 1994, but the government in Baku, the US and the European Council insist it be regarded as part of Azerbaijan. There have been repeated border conflicts between Armenia and Azerbaijan in the past two years, and commentators have warned that the dispute could escalate into a war involving Russia, the United States and Iran.
In a recent interview with Russia’s Komsomolskaya Pravda, military expert Mikhail Barabanov said that conflicts in the post-Soviet region could lead to military intervention in Russia. Any intervention in the region by the US or other NATO power would bring with it “the inevitable risk of the use of nuclear weapons.” Russia has the second largest nuclear arsenal in the world after the US.
Due to its geostrategic importance, Eurasia has become the epicentre for economic and political rivalries and military conflicts between the US and Russia following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Azerbaijan, Georgia and Armenia form a bridge between resource-rich Central Asia and the Caspian Sea on one side, and Europe and the Black Sea on the other.
The US has sought to win influence in the region via economic alliances since the 1990s. In 1998, the future US vice president Richard Cheney, then CEO of the oil services giant Halliburton, declared, “I can not remember a time when a region so suddenly gained such huge strategic importance as the Caspian.”
In his book The Grand Chessboard (1998), Zbigniew Brzezinski, former national security adviser to US president Jimmy Carter, wrote: “A power that dominates Eurasia would control two thirds of the most advanced and economically productive regions of the world. In Eurasia, there are about three-quarters of the known energy resources in the world.”
The central importance of the region is its role as a transit area for energy supplies to Europe from Asia, which bypasses Russia. By supporting alternative pipeline projects, Washington has sought to weaken Russian links to Europe, which depends heavily on Russian oil and gas.
So far, Georgia is the key country for the transit of gas and oil supplies and has been at the heart of conflicts in the region. Georgia’s “Rose Revolution” in 2003 was instigated by Washington to push Mikhail Saakashvili into power as president in order to safeguard US economic and strategic interests in the region. It led to an intensification of tensions with Moscow for geostrategic supremacy. The war between Georgia and Russia in the summer of 2008 represented a further ratcheting up of the rivalry between the two countries with the potential to expand into a Russian-American war. Relations between Russia and Georgia remain very tense.
US influence in the Caucasus and Central Asia has declined significantly in recent years. In addition to Russia, China has emerged as a major force in the area, establishing significant economic and military ties with Central Asian states such as Kazakhstan. Although Russia and China remain rivals, they have struck a strategic alliance in their competition with the United States. For the US, war against Iran represents a further stage in its growing confrontation with China and Russia for control of the energy resources of Central Asia and the Middle East.
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Attacking or Threatenting Iran Makes No Sense (Key Points)

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VT

ED NOTE: FOX news is now reporting an actual timeline for the up coming attack on Iran by Israel. America is backing it.

AMERICAN FOREIGN POLICY PROJECT

No one disputes that the United States must “keep force on the table” with Iran.

The issue is whether the United States should make force or make threats of force a prominent part of U.S. diplomacy at this point.

The answer is no, for at least seven good reasons, which apply with equal weight to an attack by Israel. An Israeli attack would have very similar consequences in Iran as a U.S. attack. And any attack by Israel would be attributed to the United States: everyone knows where Israel’s bombs and money come from.

It is also widely known that Israel sought clearance from Secretary of Defense Gates to bomb Iran in July 2008 and were turned away. Any future attack by Israel will clearly suggest U.S. permission, whether it is given in fact or not. David E. Sanger, “U.S. Rejected Aid for Israeli Raid on Iranian Nuclear Site,” The New York Times, January 11, 2009.

Seven good reasons not to bomb Iran, or threaten Iran with bombing at this stage:

(1) Bombing Iran‘s openly declared and safeguarded facilities won’t stop Iran’s nuclear program. It will simply drive the program underground while creating or hardening Iran’s resolve to pursue nuclear weapons in secret.

A military attack will only buy us time and send the [Iranian nuclear] program deeper and more covert.

– Sec. of Defense Robert Gates (May 2009)

Even those who favor the military option admit that a ground invasion is out of the question.1 But bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities without a subsequent invasion would merely trigger rage in Iran, and solidify their intention to pursue nuclear weapons in secret.

Nuclear capacity lies mostly in knowledge. Facilities can be hidden. If hit and destroyed they can be re-built. As Secretary of Defense Gates put it: “Even a military attack will only buy us time and send the program deeper and more covert.” 2

Israel’s bombing of Saddam Hussein’s Osirak reactor in 1981 is widely cited as a favorable precedent for bombing Iran. It should not be. We now know that Israel’s bombing of the Osirak reactor did not stop Saddam Hussein’s nuclear weapons program. On the contrary, it so enraged Saddam Hussein that he covertly expanded that program by more an order of magnitude, according to the later, independent reports of two Iraqi nuclear scientists.3 It took Operation Desert Storm and the inspections regime that followed it to bring the program to a halt. We should expect no different results from any bombing of Iran.

(2) Bombing an open and declared facility that is enriching uranium to low levels under full IAEA safeguards would constitute a lawless act of agression that would isolate the United States and Israel, not Iran.

International law on the use of force is crystal clear: nations may use unilateral force only to defend themselves against attack or imminent threat of attack. more

In this case, even Israel’s Mossad doesn’t claim that Iran will be able to produce a bomb before 2014. 4 U.S. intelligence agencies believe it will take until at least 2013.5 So there is not even a figleaf argument that attacking Iran could be justified by self-defense.

While Reagan was President the UN Security Council condemned the Israeli bombing of the Osirak reactor in 1981 as “clear violation of the Charter of the United Nations and the norms of international conduct.”7 The relevant UN Security Council resolutions on Iran reinforce this point by explicitly resting their authority on Article 41 of the UN Charter, which allows economic sanctions but precludes use of force.

Bombing Iran under such circumstances would trample existing law, while perversely reinforcing the discredited doctrine of “preventive war” that President Bush invoked in justifying the war in Iraq: that notion that one country may attack another whenever the first country feels threatened by the second. This is not a prescription for peace and security. It is a formula for perpetual war. more

(3) Bombing Iran would cause massive civilian casualties, fortify the current regime in power and rally the Iranian people around the flag — against the United States.

Bombing Iran would create generations of jihadists, and our grandchildren will be battling our enemies here in America.

– Sec. of Defense Robert Gates (2007)

Iran’s nuclear facilities involve much more than a single reactor. There are dozens of nuclear facilities scattered in population centers around the country. Bombing these facilities would kill large numbers of Iranian civilians, with disastrous consequences not only for the victims and their loved ones, but for the United States.

Despite a long history of conflict at the official level, the Iranian people are more pro-American than any population outside Israel. They held candle-light vigils for America in the streets of Tehran after 9/11. Bombing Iran would change all that. A population that is now largely pro-American and angry with their own government would be enraged against the United States, and would rally round the flag against a foreign enemy (just as we would in their shoes). It is hard to imagine a better way to play into the hands of hardliners in Iran.

(4) Bombing Iran would unleash chaos throughout the region, putting our troops’ lives at risk and undermine the war on terror.

As part of its deterrent to a feared U.S./Israeli attack, Iran has assiduously developed close relationships with Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Iran, militias in Iraq and warlord clans in Afghanistan. These groups are not puppets of Iran. They have their own agendas. Nonetheless, experts find it quite likely that some or all of these groups would retaliate against U.S. forces as a gesture of solidarity with Iran, particularly if they perceived Iran to have been attacked without just cause. Our troops’ lives would be put at risk by any rash decision to attack Iran.

Terrorists thrive on hate. They find their refuge and recruits in hostile populations. With Pakistan, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan and Egypt already hotbeds of anti-American feeling and terrorist recruiting, America cannot afford to be turning yet another large Muslim population against the United States.8

(5) Bombing Iran would undermine the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).

Bombing declared facilites operating under under International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspection would send a terrible signal about the costs of cooperating with the IAEA. It could well undermine the NPT and IAEA safeguards regime around the globe.

(6) Bombing Iran would be premature, to put it mildly.

Iran is years away from having a nuclear weapon, if it is pursuing one at all. Meanwhile, the United States has squandered six years refusing to talk to Iran until it suspended enrichment. We owe it to ourselves and the world to give diplomacy a chance before resorting to violence or draconian sanctions that could well lead to violence.

(7) Threatening force while lacking a credible scenario for using it would be self-defeating.

The Iranian leadership is fully aware of all the factors just cited, and has publicly dismissed the threat of force as incredible. So any bluff in this area is highly likely to be called.

Moreover, threats of force poison the waters of diplomacy. They isolate the United States in world opinion. And they entrench hard liners in Tehran who already are predicting – hopefully – that President Obama will turn out to be no different from President Bush.

Source: http://americanforeignpolicy.org/military-option-iran/attacking-iran

Footnotes

  1. See, e.g., Bipartisan Policy Center, Meeting the challenge: U.S. policy toward Iranian nuclear development: Report of an Independent Task Force Sponsored by the Bipartisan Policy Center (Sept. 2008), p. 72 (“A ground invasion of Iran is widely discounted among experts. The size and complexity of the operation are daunting, the Iranian population would resist, and U.S. forces are already overstretched”). [back]
  2. David Blair, “Robert Gates: bombing Iran would not stop nuclear threat,” Daily Telegraph (May 1, 2009. [back]
  3. See Imad Khadduri, Iraq’s Nuclear Mirage, Memoirs and Delusions (Toronto: Springhead Publishers, 2003), p. 82. Khadduri’s account is independently corroborated by another Iraqi nuclear scientist, Khidir Hamza, who would become a leading supporter of the Iraqi invasion and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. He reports that the Israeli raid on Osirak had the effect of transforming what had been a relatively modest operation involving 400 scientists funded at $700 million a year — with a capability for generating enough plutonium for less than one bomb a year — into a large, covert enterprise involving over 7,000 scientists and technicians with a $10 billion investment dedicated to developing the underground capacity to enrich enough uranium for six nuclear bombs a year. {footnote}See “Crossfire transcript,”CNN , February 7, 2003, [back]
  4. Amos Harel and Natash Mozgovaya, “U.S. intel: No chance for Iran bomb before 2013 – Haaretz – Israel News,” Haaretz.com, August 10, 2009. [back]
  5. Id. See also, Dennis Blair, “FEBRUARY 2009: INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY ANNUAL THREAT ASSESSMENT; Statement for the Record,” February 12, 2009. [back]
  6. For an excellent and concise analysis of the relevant law on the use of force, see Sir Richard Dalton, “Iran: Breaking the Nuclear Deadlock” (Chatham House, Dec. 2008), pp. 36-37. [back]
  7. UN Sec. Resolution 487 (1981), cited in Sir Richard Dalton, “Iran: Breaking the Nuclear Deadlock,” (Chatham House 2008), p. 37. [back]
  8. As Paul Rogers of the Oxford Research Group observed in a 2006 report, “any attack on such a significant Islamic republic would inevitably increase the anti-American mood in the region and beyond, giving greater impetus to a [terrorist] movement that is already a global phenomenon.” [back]
Editing: Debbie Menon

The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of this Blog!
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