WarSclerotic

Fuel Fix » Israel-Iran: Reaching Critical Mass?.

By Michael J. Economides and Peter Glover

A report by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) due on November 8 could well prove the decisive factor in triggering an Israeli strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities – no matter whether the Obama administration gives its backing.

According to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, Prime Minister Netanyahu and former PM Ehud Barak have in recent weeks been seeking Cabinet support for a military strike on Iran. At present, there is a slight Cabinet majority opposed to a strike. But with some members still undecided, that majority could easily shift in favor of military action depending on the new evidence contained in the upcoming IAEA report. A poll in Haaretz shows public support in Israel for an attack running at 41 percent for, 39 percent again, and 20 percent undecided. On Wednesday, according to Israel Radio, a ballistic missile was test-fired from central Israel.

Clearly next week’s critical IAEA report looks set to refocus the world’s attention on Iran and whether its nuclear capability has reached critical mass.

The big question is, if the IAEA’s new evidence reveals Iran’s nuclear enrichment is at a highly advanced stage, what would President Obama be prepared to sanction? The last thing Obama will want on the run up to election year is a new U.S. military commitment. However, the president’s rhetoric has always been aimed at stopping Iranian nuclear aspirations and, if sanctions aren’t working to that end (and they are not), the military option is still on the table. And Netanyahu has always made it clear to President Obama: stop Iran – or I will.

Whatever our view of the threat to Israel and/or the need to prevent a fiercely ideological, terrorist-sponsoring, Iranian regime from acquiring a nuclear weapons capability, our consideration here looks at the potential impact a strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities would mean for the region and beyond. And it is not at all the apocalyptic vision often expressed in the media by some Western academics.

First, while numerous Western ‘experts’ persist in using the alarmist rhetoric of an attack initiating a “conflagration across the Middle East” (and vilifying Israel for threatening it) they could not be more wrong.

As we have constantly stated, not only would sanctions fail to deter an ideologically-committed regime like Teheran’s, Shia Iran actually has few real friends among its regional neighbors. As the Wiki-leaks emails on the subject confirmed in 2010, Iran’s Arab Sunni neighbors not only fear Iran’s nuclear ambitions as much as Israel, they have already urged the United States to act militarily against Iran. While there will be much political rhetoric and sabre-rattling in the streets if Iran were to be ‘de-nuked’, the truth is there would be, as we have said, “a collective sigh of relief from Riyadh to Amman to Cairo”.

Here again is a reminder of what the Wiki-leaks emails confirmed Iran’s neighbors have privately been urging on the United States (with thanks to The Israel Project website for collating these examples as published in The New York Times, The Guardian and Der Spiegel in 2010):

• Saudi King Abdullah repeatedly urged the United States to destroy the Iranian program. “He told you [Americans] to ‘cut off the head of the snake,’” the Saudi ambassador to Washington, Adel al-Jubeir, said, according to a report on Abdullah’s meeting with the U.S. general David Petraeus in April 2008. Abdullah told a US diplomat: “The bottom line is that they [the Iranians] cannot be trusted.” (al-Jubeir is the man linked with an allegedly Iranian backed assassination attempt.)
• Officials from Jordan also called for the Iranian program to be stopped by any means necessary, while leaders of the United Arab Emirates and Egypt referred to Iran as “evil” and an “existential threat.”

As former U.S. Ambassador the U.N. Jon Bolton has observed over an attack on Iran’s nuclear sites: “There’ll be public denunciations but no action”.

Second, more immediate consequences would be experienced by the global energy markets. If an Israeli or U.S. strike on Iran is undertaken, we should, of course, expect an immediate spike in oil prices. Not only would Iranian oil and gas exports be hit, but the Straits of Hormuz off the Iranian coastline, through which 35 percent of the world’s oil is exported, would quickly become threatened.

It would take perhaps two weeks or more to disable Iran’s nuclear facilities even using bunker-busting extreme-intensity bombs. During that time, we should expect Iran to move to close the Straits as it attempted to do exactly during the Iraq-Iran War of the 1980s. It was prevented from doing so by the U.S. navy. In the event of an attack on Iranian nuclear facilities, Western warships would have to be mobilized to keep the energy choke point of the Straits of Hormuz open.

In addition, moving to blockading Iran’s ports would also cut off the country’s own critical gasoline supplies. Amazingly, for its enormous energy resources, Iran’s lack of refining capacity forces it to import a large proportion of its transportation fuel. The country would quickly grind to a halt, a consequence of which could well lead to the current regime being brought down.

We have long predicted that sanctions would not work against Iran and that an Israeli or U.S. attack on Iran, far from inviting an apocalypse across the Middle East, would be welcomed by Iran’s neighbors. Further, in Spying Iran’s End Game (September 2011), we noted that a key Iranian Revolutionary Guard website appeared to be readying the country’s population for a massive attack by the regime on an unspecified enemy.

Whatever transpires in the wake of the publication of the IAEA’s report on November 8, if military action does ensue, two things become paramount. First, the ‘de-nuking’ of Iran would not lead to an apocalypse across the Middle East and would indeed be widely (if privately) welcomed in most Arab capitals. Second, politicians must utilize Western warships to keep open the energy choke point of the Straits of Hormuz.

Michael Economides is Editor-in-Chief of the Energy Tribune

This entry was posted on November 3, 2011 at 7:59 PM and is filed under Uncategorized. 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.