Building up to a war with Iran

Robert Tracinski:

For more than a year now, I have been arguing that war with Iran is inevitable, that our only choice is how long we wait to fight it, and that the only question is what cost we will suffer for putting off the necessary confrontation with the Islamic Republic.

Now, finally, there is evidence that some of our leaders are beginning to recognize the necessity of this war and are preparing to fight it. And so for past few weeks, as I have been documenting in TIA Daily, the newspapers have been filled with rumors and speculation about an American air war against Iran.

There was some chatter about US planning for air strikes on Iran back in the spring of 2006--but that summer President Bush put the whole idea on hold while he gave his backing to Condoleezza Rice's foolish plan to convince the Europeans and the UN Security Council to impose sanctions on Iran. By this summer, however, those negotiations had clearly failed--giving the upper hand, in internal White House debates, to the advocates of military force.

The first sign of this shift of momentum was the proposal, floated a month ago, to designate the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps--a kind of Iranian SS, composed of the regime's most committed fanatics--as an international terrorist organization. But the IRGC is pretty much coextensive with the Iranian state, especially now that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has placed its members in key positions of power. If the Revolutionary Guard is a terrorist organization, in the same category as al Qaeda and Hezbollah, than so is the entire government of Iran. This obviously establishes the legal groundwork for war on Iran.

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A few weeks ago, the Bush administration followed this up with a more substantive threat against Iran. The London Times reported on Pentagon planning for a massive three-day air attack on Iran. "US military planners were not preparing for 'pinprick strikes' against Iran's nuclear facilities," the Times wrote, quoting a source who declared that the plans are "about taking out the entire Iranian military." A second report in London's Telegraph described a "war game" conducted to practice for the economic effects of war with Iran, especially if Iran attempts to cut off oil shipments through the Straits of Hormuz in the Persian Gulf. The participants reportedly concluded that "The policy recommendations eliminated virtually all of the negative outcomes" from an attack.

The fact that these stories were leaked to the international press suggests that their intended audience was, once again, the European diplomatists and the establishment in Tehran. This was an attempt to show them the big stick Uncle Sam is holding behind his back, ready to use if the Europeans and Iranians can't come up with their promised "diplomatic solution."

In that context, we can see the significance of last week's report that a diplomatic solution has now been definitively killed--and killed by the Germans, who had most loudly championed diplomacy. According to Fox News, Germany has "notified its allies...that the government of Chancellor Angela Merkel refuses to support the imposition of any further sanctions against Iran that could be imposed by the UN Security Council." The reason: "the damaging effects any further sanctions on Iran would have on the German economy." But "according to diplomats from other countries, [the Germans] gave the distinct impression that they would privately welcome, while publicly protesting, an American bombing campaign against Iran's nuclear facilities."

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There is much more in this long article that appears to be focused more on the diplomatic run up to a war with Iran. What is missing is a comparable military build up. The kind of strike needed to knock Iran out of its retaliatory capability and not just its nuke program will take for more assts than what we have in the region.

While the B-2's usually launch from Missouri, most of the other planes need to be in the theater, including the new F-22 squadrons and the older stealth "fighters" which are based in the US. We would also have more than two carriers in the area as well as other war ships to protect them. This type of build up takes several weeks to months to put in place. As that is going on, you will also see a diplomatic dance at the UN.

My conclusion is that unless you see a dramatic ramping up in the next few weeks, you probably will not see any attacks before 2008 at the earliest. That is if you see it at all. Iran could do something to trigger such events, but so far they have tried to keep their war against the US on a low tempo in order to avoid such a response. What the US could and probably should do is work more with the forces in Iran who want to depose this regime.