Crawling from the Wreckage (19 page)

The sixteen U.S. intelligence agencies (sixteen!) that produce the National Intelligence Estimate (
NIE
) didn’t expect to shake Bush’s determination to go after Iran. That’s why they insisted that the new
NIE
be declassified and published so quickly. It was a pre-emptive strike against the White House, to make it more difficult politically for Bush to press ahead despite the evidence.

Like the U.S. armed forces, the intelligence services are in a state of near-mutiny as they watch President Bush drag the country towards another unnecessary and unwinnable war. But how come the same intelligence agencies were telling us two years ago with “high confidence” that Iran was developing nuclear weapons?

I have been saying all along (with moderate confidence) that Iran probably has no immediate intention of developing nuclear weapons. Others have been saying this too, of course, and if they come forward I’ll gladly join them in a bid to take over the provision of strategic intelligence to the U.S. government.

We’d do it for half the current budget, give back a billion dollars every time we got it wrong, and still end up rolling in wealth. Whereas the intelligence agencies have a huge and cumbersome array of electronic and human “assets” that feed them a torrent of mostly irrelevant or misleading information in little bits and bites, we outsiders would just apply common sense and a little local knowledge to the process.

Common sense is no help at all when you are trying to figure out radio frequencies, missile ranges, and all the other technical details that the military want to know about the armed forces of a potential opponent. For that, you need electronic intelligence-gathering and/or spies.
Strategic
intelligence is a quite different matter, however, and here all the clutter of electronic and human data must be subordinated to a political analysis of the other country’s interests and intentions. This rarely happens in practice.

Take the comment in the latest
NIE
report that the suspension of Iran’s nuclear weapons program in 2003, in response to international pressure, showed that Tehran’s decisions “are guided by a cost-benefit approach rather than a rush to a weapon irrespective of the political, economic and military costs.” Gosh, what a revelation! And here we all thought that the Iranian regime were a bunch of mad mullahs who desired nothing more than nuclear martyrdom.

Well, not all of us thought that, but I suspect that the political analysis of the Tehran regime’s goals and strategies inside the U.S. government did not rise far above that level. Obviously, if you just assume that the people running Iran are rational human beings and put yourself in their shoes, you can pretty easily figure out what their strategic concerns and priorities will be.

They wouldn’t dream of attacking Israel with nuclear weapons even if they had them because that would unleash a nuclear Armaged don on their own country. Israel has hundreds of nuclear weapons, and the only imaginable use for a few Iranian ones would be to deter Israel from a first strike because of the risk of Iranian retaliation. And why would Iran suddenly want such a deterrent now, when it has been a target for Israeli nuclear weapons for at least thirty years?

We know that Ayatollah Khomeini cancelled the Shah’s nuclear-weapons program after the revolution in 1979 because it was “un-Islamic.” We know that Tehran started the program up again in the mid-eighties during the Iran-Iraq War, when it became clear that Saddam Hussein was working on nuclear weapons, and that it stopped again after international inspectors declared Iraq nuclear-free in 1994. We think that it was restarted once more in 1999 or 2000, and now we are told that it stopped again in 2003. What was that about?

Pakistan tested nuclear weapons in 1998 and then had a military coup, which must have worried the Iranians a lot. Then, after 9/11, the United States began claiming that Iraq was working on nuclear weapons again, which must have frightened them even more. So Tehran started working on nuclear weapons yet again—and then stopped in 2003, after Saddam
Hussein was overthrown by the U.S. and Pakistan turned out to be relatively stable after all.

That was also the year when it became known that Iran was working towards a full nuclear fuel cycle for its civil nuclear power program. That’s quite legal, but as it also gives the possessor the potential ability to enrich uranium to weapons grade, Iran came under international pressure to stop—so it suspended the enrichment program for three years and stopped the weapons program.

It all makes sense, and you don’t need a single spy to figure it out. In fact, given the motives of most spies, you’re probably better off without them entirely.

A properly trained and disciplined military will go along with an unnecessary war because they do not presume to second-guess the judgment of their political superiors, but they will often resist an unwinnable war. It’s they who would have to die in it, after all. So when it came to Iran, the U.S. intelligence services had a powerful although silent ally in the Pentagon
.

Despite the huge disparity in military power between the United States and Iran the latter would win any military confrontation in the Gulf. Overcommitted in Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. could not come up with the huge number of extra troops that would be needed to invade and occupy a mountainous country of seventy-five million people. It could bomb Iran to its heart’s content, hitting nuclear, military and port facilities, but then it would run out of options
.

Iran’s options, on the other hand, are very broad. It could just stop exporting oil. Pulling only Iran’s
3.5
million barrels per day off the market, in its present state, would send oil prices into the stratosphere. Or it could get tough and close down all oil-tanker traffic that comes within range of its missiles—which would mean little or no oil being exported from Iraq, Saudi Arabia and the smaller Gulf states. That would mean global oil rationing and industrial shutdowns
.

“Our coast-to-sea missile systems can now reach the length and breadth of the Gulf and the Sea of Oman,” boasted Major-General Yahya Rahim Safavi, commander-in-chief of the Revolutionary Guards, in mid-2007, “and no warships can pass in the Gulf without being in range of our coast-to-sea missiles.” The latest generation of Iranian sea-skimming missiles have mobile, easily concealed launchers, and the missiles would
come in fast and low from anywhere along almost two thousand kilometres of Iran’s Gulf coast
.

Iran could close the whole of the Gulf and its approaches to oil-tanker traffic: sink the first half-dozen tankers, and insurance rates for voyages to the Gulf would become prohibitive, even if you could find owners willing to risk their tankers. It’s very unlikely that U.S. air strikes could find and destroy all the missile launchers, so Iran wins
.

After a few months the other great powers would find some way for the United States to back away from the confrontation and let the oil start flowing again, but the U.S. would suffer a greater humiliation than it did in Vietnam, while Iran would emerge as the undisputed arbiter of the region. This is the war that the Pentagon did not want to fight, and it was quite right. By mid-2008, the likelihood of a U.S. attack on Iran was sinking fast
.

The Iranians have clearly concluded that all the American and Israeli threats to attack them are mere bluff. This explains the bravado of Iran’s little propaganda show on July 9, when it test-launched a number of ballistic missiles, including one that has the ability to carry a nuclear weapon and the range to strike Israel. This elicited the usual veiled threats of an attack on Iran from both Washington and Jerusalem, but the Iranians don’t believe them anymore.

The main purpose of the tests was to strengthen the position of hardliners in domestic Iranian politics. They want to keep the confrontation with the United States and its allies alive, because they fear that other elements in the regime might bargain away Iran’s right to enrich nuclear fuel for civilian use.

If neither the United States or Israel intends to attack Iran, this is a cost-free strategy: you win the domestic political struggle and nothing bad happens to you internationally. If you miscalculate, however, you get a war out of it. What are the odds that the Iranians are miscalculating?

Many institutions try to analyze this question, and some of them will charge you quite a lot for an answer. However, all of them are essentially guessing what goes on in the minds of the U.S. president and/or the
Israeli prime minister, both of whom are men in a hurry. Bush leaves office in January, and Ehud Olmert may be gone by September as the result of a corruption scandal.

Prime Minister Olmert’s coalition government might collapse if he chose to attack Iran alone, and the Israeli military are clearly divided on the feasibility of such an attack. Besides, Israel could not do such a thing without Washington’s approval—Israeli aircraft would have to fly through Iraqi airspace, which is under U.S. control—so it all comes back to what Bush decides.

He probably doesn’t know himself yet, and his main concern must be that senior soldiers and spies in Washington would go public to oppose such an adventure. In circumstances like these, I generally consult the International Institute for Discussing Current Affairs Over Dinner, whose advice can be had for the price of a good meal.

Membership is limited to myself, my wife and my many talented children. Like me, they are experts in everything, and one of our most effective analytical tools is an exercise called Setting the Odds. A quorum of the Institute’s membership is currently on holiday in southern Morocco, and we deployed this technique at dinner last night.

I offered my colleagues two-to-one odds that neither the United States nor Israel would attack Iran this year, and they laughed in my face. Their response was the same at odds of four-to-one. At six-to-one, one showed a mild interest, but still declined the offer. From which I deduce that for all the huffing and puffing in Washington and Jerusalem, an actual attack on Iran this year is extremely unlikely.

You may object that this technique lacks scientific rigour. I would reply that so does everybody else’s, and at least you get a nice meal out of this one. Moreover, we have a good track record, mainly because we assume that, while individual leaders may lose the plot, large institutions like governments and armed forces are generally more rational in their choices.

There are occasions when whole countries are so traumatized by some shock that truly bizarre decisions become possible—the United States after 9/11 was like that for a while—but this is not one of those times. The U.S. military has been war-gaming possible attacks on Iran since the 1990s, and it has never managed to find a scenario that resulted in a credible U.S. victory.

Some people in the White House have convinced themselves that the Iranian people will rise up and overthrow their government as soon as the first American bombs fall, but the professional soldiers in the Pentagon don’t believe in fairy tales. Six-to-one says that there will be no U.S. or Israeli attack on Iran this year.

Then, finally, in 2009, the spotlight switched back to Iran’s domestic politics. Ahmadinejad rigged the presidential elections with the full support of the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, and the outraged crowds came out on the streets. At first I expected a replay of the 1978-79 experience, but I was wrong
.

Young Iranians were back out on the streets in Tehran on Monday night, after almost a month’s hiatus. They were there again on Tuesday, despite the fact that there were many arrests. Their numbers will probably grow in the next week, for we are now nearing forty days since the regime’s Basij thugs brutally crushed the first round of demonstrations.

In Iran’s Shia Muslim culture, forty days of mourning for the dead are usually followed by public demonstrations of grief. During the revolution against the Shah in 1978–79, that was when the crowds came out on the streets again, to be mown down once more by the Shah’s army. The cycle continued until the army, sick of killing unarmed fellow-countrymen, began to refuse the Shah’s orders.

At least twenty young demonstrators, and possibly many more, were killed by the current regime’s paramilitary forces in late June. Will that old cycle of protest, killing, mourning and more protest repeat itself and lead to the overthrow of the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and the president whose disputed re-election he so firmly defends, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad? Probably not, but they could still lose.

There will be no rerun of 1978 because today’s young Iranians are strikingly different from their parents’ generation thirty years ago. Those crowds had little to lose except their lives, and they were driven by a fatalistic courage that accepted death almost without demur. If you are
fifteen or twenty-five or even thirty-five in Tehran today, you have lots to lose, and you do not want to die.

Like some general expecting the next war to be just like the last, I didn’t understand this difference at first. But then the terrifying video clip of twenty-six-year-old Neda Agah-Soltan, shot down by a Basij sniper and dying in the street on June 21, got several million views inside Iran in twenty-four hours. After that, you could practically hear millions of young Iranians saying: “That could be me.” They didn’t want it to be, and the streets emptied.

So, don’t expect escalating street protests to make Ali Khamenei and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad retreat. However, it’s possible that cautious, limited, recurrent protests could be part of a more complex strategy that ultimately accomplishes the same goal, for the ruling elite itself is deeply split. That has not happened before.

The three “reformers” who now lead the opposition to Khamenei and Ahmadinejad are the three people who made most of the day-to-day decisions in the country from the time of the revolution until only four years ago. Mir-Hossein Mousavi, who ran against Ahmadinejad in this year’s presidential election (and may really have won it), was the prime minister of Iran from 1981 to 1989; Ali Akbar Rafsanjani was president from 1989 to 1997; and Mohammad Khatami was president from 1997 to 2005.