The United States finds itself yet again on the ledge of engaging in conflict in the Middle East. Following a period of constructive discussions between the U.S. administration under Trump and the Iranian government for a fresh nuclear accord, this progress was thwarted by an unanticipated Israeli airstrike on June 13, the previous Friday. The targets of the airstrikes included residences and office buildings of high-ranking officials of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corp (IRGC), nuclear physicists, and diplomats who were in talks with the U.S. The strikes didn’t stop there but also hit Iranian nuclear sites and a host of military locations that would have been crucial for Iran to put a defense and retaliation in place against Israel’s strike.
The Israeli government hasn’t offered any evidence these strikes were reacting to an imminent threat of an Iranian attack on Israel, although they are presenting them as ‘preemptive’. Instead, what these attacks did halt was the next round of the U.S.-Iranian talks, which were due to kick off on the following Sunday. The declared intention of Israel’s campaign is to dismantle Iran’s civilian nuclear program to avert any chances of the country developing a nuclear weapon. However, the choice of targets, as well as rhetoric from Israeli representatives, suggest that a change in regime might be the actual long-term objective.
The code name of the operation, ‘Rising Lion’, could, in fact, be a nod to the pre-revolution Iranian flag, before the present regime assumed power during the revolution of 1979. The extent to which Israelis hope to push this current altercation with Iran is not obvious, but it is abundantly clear that they require the U.S. to execute this operation. Even if their targets henceforth would solely be nuclear infrastructure, the deep-seated nature of these facilities could only be penetrated by U.S. bunker-buster ammunition.
There has been a broad-based effort to persuade the American public that US government increased involvement in this war could be beneficial. Some advocates are going so far as to claim that, if unchecked, Iran has plans to target locations within the United States. This situation is being painted in a strikingly similar light to the circumstances with Iraq over two decades ago; where a Middle Eastern regime deemed uniquely malevolent is rushing to procure and deploy weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) and the global community needs to intervene to prevent it.
Furthermore, we are being told that the regime is despised by a majority of its citizens – mirroring the situation with Saddam Hussein – therefore it will be easy to topple and replace with a stable, pro-Western government. However, this argument doesn’t hold water. As we’ve seen with previous regime change campaigns in the Middle East since 9/11 attempts made by Washington and its allies, a full-scale war with Iran will be anything but straightforward. Iran is larger, better populated, and more technologically advanced than Iraq or Afghanistan.
The topographically diverse and rugged terrain surrounding most strategically critical cities in Iran would pose far greater challenges for an invasion than the comparatively even desert terrain American forces encountered in Iraq. Even if the US were to not deploy ground forces, keeping the operations confined to air and naval theaters, the task would remain dauntingly complex and financially draining. We’ve see this recently with the campaign against Yemen’s Houthis – a significantly less potent, populous, and technically sophisticated group than the Iranians – that ended after a few months due to lack of substantial progress, rapid depletion of weaponry, and a spiralling cost to the military budget.
Iran has significantly greater capabilities to target and inflict harm on US troops, not just on surrounding vessels but also at a multitude of US bases lining Iran’s borders. Even without deploying ground troops on Iranian soil, a war conducted solely in the air and at sea could potentially lead to a substantial number of American casualties. Economically, the American people have been compelled to fork out more than $2 trillion to finance two decades of Middle Eastern conflicts.
While these wars have lined the pockets of a few well-connected corporations, for the majority of American people, they have aggravated the existing national economic crisis. A conflict with Iran runs the risk of being far costlier than any of the previous campaigns against terrorism, akin to accelerating as we approach the border of our fiscal precipice. There are serious doubts surrounding the potential benefits of a joint US-Israeli effort to dethrone the current regime in Tehran.
The entire premise of this endeavour has been that Israel, the United States, and the broader world cannot afford to allow Iran to develop a nuclear weapon. But the question to be asked is – why not? Advocates of this conflict have propagated the narrative that once Iran manages to develop nuclear weapons, they will waste no time in launching them towards Israel, even though such an act would inevitably lead to Israel retaliating with their arsenal of approximately a hundred nuclear warheads, leading to the destruction of Iran.
In the face of such assured destruction, it would be unlikely for the leaders of Iran to risk the lives of their families, and most Iranians, along with the destruction of culturally and historically significant sites in their country. They would have behaved differently had they been actively striving to destroy Israel. While the current regime in Iran is undoubtedly authoritarian and immoral (as power always is), they view Israel as an enemy but not in the form of an ancient blood feud as many would have us believe.
As Trita Parsi elaborates in his book ‘Treacherous Alliance’, Iran and Israel have often cooperated and supported each other whenever such alliances suited the geopolitical dynamics of the Middle East, even after the 1979 revolution. What appears to be a religious war is in actuality a geopolitical struggle to claim dominance in the region. This pierces to the heart of why Israel and its allies in Washington are resistant to the idea of a nuclear-armed Iran: it would be more challenging to influence and would secure Iran’s position, thereby preventing Israel from establishing unilateral power within the Middle East.
For American politicians and media figures who are obsessed with maintaining a global empire regardless of the domestic repercussions, a war with Iran might look like a good idea. On the other hand, for Americans economically hard-pressed, who would be forced to spend trillions more and risk losing their children, siblings, and parents in this potential conflict, a new war to uphold Israel’s nuclear monopoly in the region is clearly not worth it.
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