[R-P] (Fwd) How Iran will fight back
Nestor Gorojovsky
nestorgoro en fibertel.com.ar
Vie Dic 24 14:31:37 MST 2004
Gente seria estos iraníes. ¿Lo traducirías?
------- Forwarded message follows -------
From: "Bob Weiss" <bobweiss en cantv.net>
To: "*FV1" <saturno7 en cantv.net>
Copies to: "RMAR" <rmermet en yahoo.com.ar>, "nestorgoro" <nestorgoro en fibertel.com.ar>,
"MUSACA" <nelmarin en cantv.net>, "MAS Bolivia" <ipsp en masbolivia.org>,
"MARZHA NAVARRO" <ollanes en pla.net.py>, "CEM" <cemunoz en cantv.net>,
"*WMVZ" <walter en dossieronline.com>, "*WIVZ" <izarraw en cantv.net>,
"*VICRON" <vicmoron en cantv.net>, "*VDVZ" <vdavies en el-nacional.com>,
"*Saljota" <tintoreto en cantv.net>,
"*RHMVZ" <robertohernandez en celarg.org.ve>,
"*JVGVZ" <jvgfotografo en cantv.net>, "*German" <maryva en cantv.net>,
"*DP" <econ-ca en cantv.net>,
"*CMPZ" <webmaster en clasemediaenpositivozulia.org>,
"**JFB" <fernandezbaraibar en yahoo.com.ar>,
"**FERBOSAR" <organizacion en congresobolivariano.org>,
"***RMVZ" <Robertomalaver en cantv.net>,
"***MSG Garcia" <mario en aporrea.org>, "***KOVZ" <koeyu en cantv.net;>,
"*LC" <luiscorrea en disip.gov.ve>, "**ANUSA" <aneville en dcontinuum.com>
Subject: How Iran will fight back
Date sent: Fri, 24 Dec 2004 15:46:51 -0400
Asia Times - Asia's most trusted news source for the Middle East
Search Asia Times
Advanced Search
Middle East
How Iran will fight back
By Kaveh L Afrasiabi
TEHRAN - The United States and Israel may be
contemplating military operations against
Iran, as per recent media reports, yet Iran
is
not wasting any time in preparing its own
counter-operations in the event an attack
materializes.
A week-long combined air and ground maneuver
has just concluded in five of the southern
and
western provinces of Iran, mesmerizing
foreign
observers, who have described as
"spectacular"
the massive display of high-tech, mobile
operations, including rapid-deployment forces
relying on squadrons of helicopters, air
lifts, missiles, as well as hundreds of tanks
and tens of thousands of well-coordinated
personnel using live munition.
Simultaneously,
some 25,000 volunteers have so far signed up
at newly established draft centers for
"suicide attacks" against any potential
intruders in what is commonly termed
"asymmetrical warfare".
Behind the strategy vis-a-vis a hypothetical
US invasion, Iran is likely to recycle the
Iraq war's scenario of overwhelming force,
particularly by the US Air Force, aimed at
quick victory over and against a much weaker
power. Learning from both the 2003 Iraq war
and Iran's own precious experiences of the
1980-88 war with Iraq and the 1987-88
confrontation with US forces in the Persian
Gulf, Iranians have focused on the merits of
a
fluid and complex defensive strategy that
seeks to take advantage of certain weaknesses
in the US military superpower while
maximizing
the precious few areas where they may have
the
upper hand, eg, numerical superiority in
ground forces, guerrilla tactics, terrain,
etc.
According to a much-publicized article on the
"Iran war game" in the US-based Atlantic
Monthly, the estimated cost of an assault on
Iran is a paltry few tens of millions of
dollars. This figure is based on a one-time
"surgical strike" combining missile attacks,
air-to-surface bombardments, and covert
operations, without bothering to factor in
Iran's strategy, which aims precisely to
"extend the theater of operations" in order
to
exact heavier and heavier costs on the
invading enemy, including by targeting
America's military command structure in the
Persian Gulf.
After this Iranian version of "follow-on"
counter-strategy, the US intention of
localized warfare seeking to cripple Iran's
command system as a prelude to a systematic
assault on key military targets would be
thwarted by "taking the war to them", in the
words of an Iranian military strategist who
emphasized America's soft command structure
in
the southern tips of the Persian Gulf. (Over
the past few months, US jet fighters have
repeatedly violated Iran's air space over
Khuzestan province, testing Iran's air
defense
system, according to Iranian military
officials.)
Iran's proliferation of a highly
sophisticated
and mobile ballistic-missile system plays a
crucial role in its strategy, again relying
on
lessons learned from the Iraq wars of 1991
and
2003: in the earlier war over Kuwait, Iraq's
missiles played an important role in
extending
the warfare to Israel, notwithstanding the
failure of America's Patriot missiles to
deflect most of Iraq's incoming missiles
raining in on Israel and, to a lesser extent,
on the US forces in Saudi Arabia. Also, per
the admission of the top US commander in the
Kuwait conflict, General Norman Schwarzkopf,
the hunt for Iraq's mobile Scud missiles
consumed a bulk of the coalition's air
strategy and was as difficult as searching
for
"needles in a haystack".
Today, in the evolution of Iran's military
doctrine, the country relies on increasingly
precise long-range missiles, eg, Shahab-3 and
Fateh-110, that can "hit targets in Tel
Aviv",
to echo Iranian Foreign Minister Kemal
Kharrazi.
Chronologically speaking, Iran produced the
50-kilometer-range Oghab artillery rocket in
1985, and developed the 120km- and 160km-
range
Mushak artillery rockets in 1986-87 and 1988
respectively. Iran began assembling Scud-Bs
in
1988, and North Korean technical advisers in
Iran converted a missile maintenance facility
for missile manufacture in 1991. It does not
seem, however, that Iran has embarked on Scud
production. Instead, Iran has sought to build
Shahab-3 and Shahab-4, having ranges of
1,300km with a 1,600-pound warhead, and 200km
with a 220-pound warhead, respectively; the
Shahab-3 was test-launched in July 1998 and
may soon be upgraded to more than 2,000km,
thus capable of reaching the middle of
Europe.
Thanks to excess revenue from high oil
prices,
which constitute more than 80% of the
government's annual budget, Iran is not
experiencing the budget constraints of the
early and mid-1990s, when its military
expenditure was outdone nearly one to 10 by
its Arab neighbors in the Persian Gulf who
are
members of the Gulf Cooperation Council;
almost all the Arab states possess one or
another kind of advanced missile system, eg,
Saudi Arabia's CSS-2/DF, Yemen's SS-21,
Scud-B, Iraq's Frog-7.
There are several advantages to a ballistic
arsenal as far as Iran is concerned: first,
it
is relatively cheap and manufactured
domestically without much external dependency
and the related pressure of "missile export
control" exerted by the US. Second, the
missiles are mobile and can be concealed from
the enemy, and third, there are advantages to
fighter jets requiring fixed air bases.
Fourth, missiles are presumed effective
weapons that can be launched without much
advance notice by the recipient targets,
particularly the "solid fuel" Fatah-110
missiles that require only a few short
minutes
for installation prior to being fired. Fifth,
missiles are weapons of confusion and a
unique
strike capability that can torpedo the best
military plans, recalling how the Iraqi
missile attacks in March 2003 at the US
military formations assembled at the
Iraq-Kuwait border forced a change of plan on
the United States' part, thereby forfeiting
the initial plan of sustained aerial strikes
before engaging the ground forces, as was the
case in the Kuwait war, when the latter
entered the theater after some 21 days of
heavy air strikes inside Iraq as well as
Kuwait.
Henceforth, any US attack on Iran will likely
be met first and foremost by missile
counter-attacks engulfing the southern
Persian
Gulf states playing host to US forces, as
well
as any other country, eg, Azerbaijan, Iraq or
Turkey, allowing their territory or airspace
to be used against Iran. The rationale for
this strategy is precisely to pre-warn Iran's
neighbors of the dire consequences, with
potential debilitating impacts on their
economies for a long time, should they become
accomplices of foreign invaders of Iran.
Another key element of Iran's strategy is to
"increase the arch of crisis" in places such
as Afghanistan and Iraq, where it has
considerable influence, to undermine the
United States' foothold in the region, hoping
to create a counter-domino effect wherein
instead of gaining inside Iran, the US would
actually lose territory partly as a result of
thinning its forces and military
"overstretch".
Still another component of Iran's strategy is
psychological warfare, an area of
considerable
attention by the country's military planners
nowadays, focusing on the "lessons from Iraq"
and how the pre-invasion psychological
warfare
by the US succeeded in causing a major rift
between the top echelons of the Ba'athist
army
as well as between the regime and the people.
The United States' psychological warfare in
Iraq also had a political dimension, seeing
how the US rallied the United Nations
Security
Council members and others behind the
anti-Iraq measures in the guise of countering
Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction.
Iran's counter-psychological warfare, on the
other hand, seeks to take advantage of the
"death-fearing" American soldiers who
typically lack a strong motivation to fight
wars not necessarily in defense of the
homeland. A war with Iran would definitely
require establishing the draft in the US,
without which it could not possibly protect
its flanks in Afghanistan and Iraq; imposing
the draft would mean enlisting many
dissatisfied young soldiers amenable to be
influenced by Iran's own psychological
warfare
focusing on the lack of motivation and
"cognitive dissonance" of soldiers
ill-doctrinated to President George W Bush's
"doctrine of preemption", not to mention a
proxy war for the sake of Israel.
This aside, already, Iranians today consider
themselves subjected to the machinations of
similar psychological warfare, whereby, to
give an example, the US cleverly seeks to
capitalize on the discontent of the
(unemployed) youth by officially shedding
crocodile tears, as discerned from a recent
interview of the outgoing Secretary of State
Colin Powell. Systematic disinformation
typically plays a key role in psychological
warfare, and the US has now tripled its radio
programs beamed to Iran and, per recent
reports from the US Congress, substantially
increased its financial support of the
various
anti-regime TV and Internet programs, this
while openly trumpeting the cause of "human
intelligence" in a future scenario of
conflict
with Iran based in part on covert operations.
Consequently, there is a sense of a
national-security siege in Iran these days,
in
light of a tightening "security belt" by the
US benefiting from military bases in Iraq,
Turkey, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan,
Kyrgyzstan, as well as Kuwait, Saudi Arabia,
Qatar, Bahrain, Oman and the
island-turned-garrison of Diego Garcia. From
Iran's vantage point, the US, having won the
Cold War, has turned into a "leviathan
unhinged" capable of manipulating and
subverting the rules of international law and
the United Nations with impunity, thus
requiring a sophisticated Iranian strategy of
deterrence that, in the words of certain
Iranian media pundits, would even include the
use of nuclear weapons.
But such voices are definitely in a minority
in Iran today, and by and large there is an
elite consensus against the manufacturing of
nuclear weapons, partly out of the conviction
that short of creating a "second-strike
capability" there would be no nuclear
deterrence against an overwhelming US power
possessing thousands of "tactical nuclear
weapons". Still, looking at nuclear asymmetry
between India and Pakistan, the latter's
first-strike capability has proved a
deterrence against the much superior nuclear
India, a precious lesson not lost on Iran.
Consequently, while Iran has fully submitted
its nuclear program to international
inspection and suspended its
uranium-enrichment program per a recent
Iran-European Union agreement inked in Paris
in November, there is nonetheless a nagging
concern that Iran may have undermined its
deterrence strategy vis-a-vis the US, which
has not endorsed the Paris Agreement,
reserving the right to dispatch Iran's
nuclear
issue to the Security Council while
occasionally resorting to tough saber-
rattling
against Tehran.
At times, notwithstanding a media campaign in
the US, particularly by the New York Times,
through news articles carrying such
provocative titles as "US versus a nuclear
Iran", the US continues its hard-power
pre-campaign against Iran unabated, in turn
fueling the national security concern of
those
groups of Iranians contemplating "nuclear
deterrence" as a national survival strategy.
Concerning the latter, there is a growing
sentiment in Iran that no matter how
compliant
Iran is with the demands of the UN's
International Atomic Energy Agency , much
like
Iraq in 2002-03, the US, which has lumped
Iran
into a self-declared "axis of evil", is
cleverly sowing the seeds of its next Middle
East war, in part by leveling old accusations
of terrorism and Iran's complicity in the
1996
Ghobar bombing in Saudi Arabia, irrespective
of the Saudi officials' rejection of such
allegations totally overlooked in a recent
book on Iran, The Persian Puzzle by Kenneth M
Pollack (see Asia Times Online, The Persian
puzzle, or the CIA's?, December 3.)
Thus there is an emerging "proto-nuclear
deterrence" according to which Iran's mastery
of the nuclear fuel cycle would make it
"nuclear weapon capable" in a relatively
short
time, as a sort of pre-weapon "threshold
capability" that must be taken into account
by
Iran's enemies contemplating attacks on its
nuclear installations. Such attacks would be
met by stiff resistance, born of Iran's
historic sense of nationalism and patriotism,
as well as by a counter-weaponization based
on
quick conversation of the nuclear technology.
Hence the longer the US, and Israel, keep up
the military threat, the more powerful and
appealing the Iranian yearning for a
"proto-nuclear deterrence" will grow.
In fact, the military threat against Iran has
proved poison for the Iranian economy,
chasing
away foreign investment and causing
considerable capital flight, an intolerable
situation prompting some Iranian economists
even to call for filing complaints against
the
US in international tribunals seeking
financial remedies. This is a little
far-fetched, no doubt, and the Iranians would
have to set a new legal precedent to win
their
cause in the eyes of international law. Iran
cannot possibly allow the poor investment
climate caused by the military threats to
continue indefinitely, and reciprocating with
an extended deterrence strategy that raises
the risk value of US allies in the region is
meant to offset this rather unhappy
situation.
Ironically, to open a parenthesis here, some
friends of Israel in the US, such as Harvard
law professor Alan Dershowitz, an avid
supporter of "torturing the terrorists", has
recently inked a column on a pro-Israel
website calling for the revision of
international law allowing an Israeli, and
US,
military assault against Iran. Dershowitz has
clearly taken flight of the rule of law,
making a mockery of the esteemed institution
that is considered a beacon on the hill in
the
United States; the same Ivy League university
is home to the hate discourse of "clashing
civilizations", another ornament for its
cherished history. Even Harvard's Kennedy
School dean, Joseph Nye, a relative dove, has
replicated the US obsession with power by
churning out books and articles on "soft
power" that reifies every facet of American
life, including its neutral culture or
entertainment industry, into an appendage or
"complement" of US "hard power", as if power
reification of what Jurgen Habermas calls
"lifeworld" (Lebenswelt) is the conditio sine
qua non of Pax Americana.
The ruse of power, however, is that it is
often blind to the opposite momentum that it
generates, as has been the case of the Cuban
people's half a century of heroics vis-a-vis
a
ruthless regime of economic blockade,
Algerian
nationalists fighting against French
colonialism in the 1950s and 1960s, and, at
present, the Iranian people finding
themselves
in the unenviable situation of contemplating
how to survive against the coming avalanche
of
a US power led entirely by hawkish
politicians
donning the costumes of multilateralism on
Iran's nuclear program. Yet few inside Iran
actually believe that this is more than
pseudo-multilateralism geared to satisfy the
United States' unilateralist militarism down
the road. One hopes that the road will not
wind down any time soon, but just in case,
the
"Third World" Iranians are doing what they
can
to prepare for the nightmare scenario.
The whole situation calls for prudent crisis
management and security confidence-building
by
both sides, and, hopefully, the ugly
experience of repeated warfare in the oil-
rich
region can itself act as a deterrent.
Kaveh L Afrasiabi, PhD, is the author of
After
Khomeini: New Directions in Iran's Foreign
Policy (Westview Press) and "Iran's Foreign
Policy Since 9/11", Brown's Journal of World
Affairs, co-authored with former deputy
foreign minister Abbas Maleki, No 2, 2003. He
teaches political science at Tehran
University.
Dec 16, 2004
------- End of forwarded message -------
Néstor Miguel Gorojovsky
nestorgoro en fibertel.com.ar
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
"Sí, una sola debe ser la patria de los sudamericanos".
Simón Bolívar al gobierno secesionista y disgregador de
Buenos Aires, 1822
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
Más información sobre la lista de distribución Reconquista-Popular