WarSclerotic

FT.com / Iran – Threat of war across region is unspoken realisation.

By David Blair in London

Published: May 19 2010 18:14 | Last updated: May 19 2010 18:14

What if it all goes wrong? The US and its allies have spent months painstakingly assembling a coalition behind imposing tougher sanctions on Iran to contain its nuclear ambitions.

Concessions have been offered along the way: last year, the US tried to secure Russia’s support by going so far as to tear up its plans for missile defence in Europe.

Yet the scale of the undertaking also reveals the depth of the fear. Behind today’s wrangles at the United Nations lies one harsh and usually unspoken realisation: if everything fails and the US or Israel feels compelled to launch military strikes to destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities, the consequences would be profound.

Officials stress war is far from imminent and there is plenty of time for diplomacy to work. But if a conflict were to break out in the years ahead, it could escalate beyond Iran’s borders to embroil the region and beyond.

This is partly because of Iran’s position at the junction of the Middle East and south Asia and beside crucial oil supply routes. More important, Iran’s leaders have sought to guarantee their survival by amassing numerous options for retaliation and so maximising the risks of an attack. Today, Tehran’s rulers have so many ways of hitting back that a strike on their nuclear plants could set off a chain reaction, triggering a war that would involve every country in an arc from Lebanon to Afghanistan.

Iran’s first response to any US or Israeli attack would probably be to activate the proxy forces it has spent many years building up across the Middle East. The most prominent is Hizbollah, the radical Shia movement in southern Lebanon which possesses thousands of Iranian-supplied missiles, all targeted on Israel. In the event of war, Hizbollah would probably launch its arsenal – and experience suggests Israel’s response to any bombardment would include the invasion of Lebanon.

The last time this happened, in 2006, Israel refrained from attacking the supply lines for Hizbollah’s missiles, which run through Syria. Israeli officials say this was a mistake they would avoid if events were to be repeated. Next time, the Israeli blow could land on Syria as well as Lebanon.

The Hamas movement in Gaza also benefits from Iranian weapons and its rockets could be used to open another front against Israel in the south. Thus a conflagration that begins in Iran could soon spread, taking in Israel, Lebanon and Syria and moving eastwards to the next country in this new crescent of conflict, Iraq.

Iran has armed and funded Shia militia inside its neighbour since Saddam Hussein’s downfall in 2003, rendering Iraq vulnerable to subversion. In the event of war, Iran’s allies would probably be used to attack US forces in the country.

Iran may try to spread the arc of turmoil even farther by using the same tactic in Afghanistan. The Sunni Taliban fighters have always been bitter rivals of Iran’s Shia regime, but there is evidence that they may have been thrust together by the remorseless logic of “my enemy’s enemy is my friend”.

Western officials say convoys carrying weapons for the Taliban have crossed Iran’s frontier with Afghanistan. Whether this happened because of a high level decision in Tehran – or because local smugglers paid off border guards – is unclear. But one official in the region said that Iran could use this channel as another means of retaliation. “That is a tap they would turn up pretty dramatically if we were to launch a military strike,” he said.

Iran could also try to turn geography to its advantage, probably by attacking shipping in the Strait of Hormuz at the entrance to the Gulf. Every day, tankers carrying about 17 million barrels of oil, or 40 per cent of the world’s seaborne shipments, pass through this vital waterway, only 33 miles wide at its most vulnerable point.

Finally, Iran could try to fire its Shahab 3 ballistic missiles at an array of regional targets, including Israel, the US Fifth fleet base in Bahrain and the US Central Command presence in Qatar.

As US diplomats engage in yet more weeks of costly bargaining at the UN, this is the scenario they are striving to avoid.

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This entry was posted on May 19, 2010 at 7:31 PM and is filed under Iran / Israel War. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site.