It turns out that Iran did have a nuclear option after all, although it has nothing to do with enriched uranium or nuclear weapons. Instead, the Iranian weapon of mass destruction is its devastatingly effective strategy of closing the Strait of Hormuz and attacking the crucial – but fragile – energy infrastructure of the Gulf oil states.
Donald Trump has paused his threatened destruction of Iranian power plants for 10 days until 6 April, claiming that detailed and productive negotiations with Iran are under way. This is categorically denied by Tehran, and the price of Brent crude oil rose to $110 a barrel on Friday morning in a sign that the markets do not believe Trump’s assertion about US-Iran talks and suspect that Iran has the upper hand in the conflict so far.
Trump must now decide his next move in this deadly game of double or quits. It may lead him to escalate attacks on Iran’s civilian infrastructure, and land US troops on the Iranian side of the Gulf to seize their chief oil export terminal at Kharg Island and try to reopen the Strait of Hormuz for international shipping.
Iran’s strategy has proved so successful that a month into the war, it is in a stronger political position than before the US-Israeli attack on 28 February, having proved that it has the power to cripple the world economy. Israel has achieved operational successes – such as killing the head of the Iranian navy this week – but these assassinations stubbornly refuse to deliver decisive victory.
Trump keeps announcing that he has already won and Iranian leaders are “begging for a deal”, and bizarrely claiming that they allowed 10 tankers to exit the Strait of Hormuz as a sign of goodwill towards him. “We’re crushing their missiles and drone stockpiles,” he said, “destroying their defence industrial base. We’ve wiped out their navy completely. Their air force completely.”
Yet this list of supposed US and Israeli successes shows that Trump and his inner coterie have failed to understand a critical change in the nature of warfare. Until about 20 years ago, the US had a near monopoly on high precision munitions used in air strikes. This was on display in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen. But the monopoly did not last. Iran swiftly developed as a drone superpower, dramatically demonstrating its capability in a surprise attack on Saudi oil facilities at Abqaiq and Khrais in September 2019 which briefly cut the Kingdom’s oil output in half.
Everything that Iran has done militarily in the Gulf in the last four weeks is a mirror image of what happened then. Probably, the Pentagon had a well-informed premonition of this in the weeks before the war when it was vigorously leaking to the US media its professional caution about a war with Iran, reservations which were ignored by the White House.
Paradoxically, for all its inability to defend itself against US-Israeli airstrikes, Iran’s power as a geopolitical player has risen significantly in four weeks of war. Before the conflict, Iran controlled a mere 4 to 5 per cent of the world’s crude oil exports; its own output, in other words. Today, by blockading the Strait of Hormuz, it controls 20 per cent of world oil and liquefied natural gas exports. Hedge fund managers in New York, insurance brokers in Lloyds of London and motorised rickshaw drivers in Dacca in Bangladesh, find their lives all radically affected by decisions taken in Tehran.
Iran is unlikely to abandon its new found leverage in pursuit of a cobbled-together ceasefire agreed with a notoriously untrustworthy president. Tehran’s strong hand of political and military cards comes in part from catching the rest of the world by surprise, and if there is a pause in hostilities now, it may never be so lucky again.
Where does this leave Trump? His cunning, unpredictability and keen political instincts – coupled with megalomania, mendacity, ignorance and incompetence – should never be underestimated. But the Israeli expert on Iran Danny Citrinowicz believes that his range of options vary only “between bad and worse”.
Trump’s “Independence Day” raising of US tariffs and his threat to invade Greenland could be dialled back, but a real shooting war is different. Iran may not have been consulted about the start of the war, but it will certainly have a decisive say in if and how it finishes. Moreover, the Iranian leadership is unlikely to be in a compromising mood, believing that the regime has survived the worst that the US and Israel can throw at it without disintegrating, splitting or facing renewed popular protests.
Trump may be discovering the truth of a saying of the Duke of Wellington: “Great powers do not have small wars.” The same might be said of supposedly all-powerful leaders. Both depend on the perception that they are inevitable winners. Failure against an enemy written off as “obliterated” and “begging for a ceasefire” cannot be easily walked back and dressed up as a splendid victory. Wellington had witnessed what had happened to Napoleon’s armies in Spain and knew what he was talking about.
But Trump did not start the war against Iran alone. In his resignation letter last week the former director of the National Counterterrorism Centre, Joe Kent, wrote that “Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation, and it is clear that we started this war because of pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby.” This begs the question: if Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu got Trump into this war, can he stop him getting out of it? What if Israel went on bombing Iran on its own?
Here a retreat by Trump may be a little easier than it appears. Despite the Israeli tail frequently wagging the Washington dog, their relationship depends on Israel persuading American politicians that their personal, political and national-self interest lies in full support for Israel. Wars fought by Israel since the Hamas attack on 7 October 2023 differed, and were far more successful than in the past, because Israel received full military, political and diplomatic support from the US. As a result of this US-Israel alliance, the Palestinians are being crushed in Gaza and the West Bank and Israel has forced over one million Lebanese out of southern Lebanon. Beirut is being heavily bombed and there are strikes on Baghdad.
Israel got what it wanted. Netanyahu says that for 40 years he dreamed of a full US-Israel military alliance against Iran. Israel’s aim is to degrade Iran as a modern society – what critics call “Gaza-ification”, pulverising Tehran, Isfahan and other Iranian cities – so that it will not be a rival power to Israel in the region for decades to come, regardless of what regime is in charge. The downside of this for Israel is that, having become a regional superpower with essential US support, it cannot act independently of the US. If Trump tells Netanyahu to end the war in Iran and Lebanon, Israel must comply, however unwillingly.
Trump will make the most crucial decision of his presidency in the next few days – but all his options are bad.
Further Thoughts
I can claim more experience than most people when it comes to the outbreak of deadly diseases. I caught polio in Cork in Ireland in 1956 in one of the last polio epidemics in Western Europe, just as the recently discovered polio vaccine was being deployed successfully for the first time to stop a polio epidemic in Chicago. I was severely disabled at the time, but later recovered – aside from a serious limp and permanently weakened legs.
Like everybody else in the world, I went through the Covid-19 epidemic, but I did not know anybody who died of it. I wrote much about the “Kent variant” of the coronavirus, the first case of this new and more virulent strain of Covid-19 diagnosed between Canterbury – where I live – and Margate on the northeast Kent coast in late 2020.
The Kent variant was to swept the world, infecting and killing great numbers, but the authorities in Kent lobbied successfully for a change in its name, fearful that the county might be besmirched as a plague hot spot. People cited as an example to be avoided the devastating “Spanish flu” of 1918-19 that was unfairly linked to Spain, though first identified in military training camps in the US. It was later renamed the Alpha variant.
The third outbreak of a killer illness with which I have been in close proximity is that of meningitis B in Canterbury over the last two weeks. Though far smaller in numbers affected and geographic confines than the two epidemics, it attracted intense national attention in the UK, reawakening as it did fearful memories of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Nevertheless, when I talked to students queuing up to get antibiotics in the first couple days of the outbreak, they struck me as worried, but not panicky. There are 30,000 students in Canterbury, mostly at the University of Kent at Canterbury (UKC) and Canterbury Christ Church University (CCCU). At the time of writing, there are only 20 confirmed and two suspected MenB cases. Parents were from the first the most alarmed, driving down to the UKC campus to pick up their children in the middle of the night as soon as they heard the news of the outbreak. The illness was concentrated almost exclusively among those who attended events at Club Chemistry nightclub between 5–15 March.
Health experts faced a difficult balancing act as they tried to sound reassuring without appearing cavalier and over-confident, emphasising that it is far more difficult to catch MenB than measles or Covid-19. But in the aftermath of the pandemic, nobody wanted to take a chance. When a teenager, either as a joke or through a genuine mistake, falsely claimed online that he had MenB, parents of children at his school rushed to get their families vaccinated. A photo online claiming to show Canterbury High Street deserted was rapidly unmasked as a fake because it showed a bus – though the High Street was pedestrianised 30 years ago.
A few thoughts on the Canterbury outbreak: alarm spread in proportion to the number of TV cameras as well as to the number of MenB cases. Every news organisation in the country had a correspondent in Canterbury, naturally focusing on those most directly affected because they had caught the illness, or knew somebody who had, or were café owners or shopkeepers lamenting lost business.
Journalists did not necessarily over-hype the story, but inevitably concentrated on the small number of victims and the distraught families of the two who died. Reports on television and radio news night after night vastly increased anxiety in Canterbury. The anxiety may have appeared to be a response to direct personal experience, but in fact it was – as in the rest of the country – a response to saturation news coverage. Of course I knew all this, but it was difficult to keep a sense of proportion.
Tourists have understandably given Canterbury a wide berth. When the incoming Archbishop of Canterbury, Sarah Mullally, who had just completed a pilgrimage from London to Canterbury, arrived in the Cathedral on Sunday prior to her enthronement on Wednesday, many of the seats were empty.
Beneath the Radar
A classic example of Iran’s proficiency in drone warfare came in 2019 when, as mentioned above, they were used – though Iran denied responsibility – against Saudi oil facilities with the greatest accuracy.
“The devastating attack on Saudi oil facilities by drones and missiles,” I wrote at the time, “not only transforms the balance of military power in the Middle East, but marks a change in the nature of warfare globally.
“On the morning of 14 September, 18 drones and seven cruise missiles – all cheap and unsophisticated compared to modern military aircraft – disabled half of Saudi Arabia ’s crude oil production and raised the world price of oil by 20 per cent.
“This happened despite the Saudis spending $67.6bn (£54bn) on their defence budget last year, much of it on vastly expensive aircraft and air defence systems, which notably failed to stop the attack.
“Debate is ongoing about whether it was the Iranians or the Houthis who carried out the attack, the likely answer being a combination of the two, but perhaps with Iran orchestrating the operation and supplying the equipment. But over-focus on responsibility diverts attention from a much more important development: a middle ranking power like Iran, under sanctions and with limited resources and expertise, acting alone or through allies, has inflicted crippling damage on theoretically much better-armed Saudi Arabia which is supposedly defended by the US, the world’s greatest military super-power.
“If the US and Saudi Arabia are particularly hesitant to retaliate against Iran it is because they know now, contrary to what they might have believed a year ago, that a counter-attack will not be a cost-free exercise. What happened before can happen again: not for nothing has Iran been called a ‘drone superpower’. Oil production facilities and the desalination plants providing much of the fresh water in Saudi Arabia are conveniently concentrated targets for drones and small missiles.
“In other words, the military playing field will be a lot more level in future in a conflict between a country with a sophisticated air force and air defence system and one without. The trump card for the US, Nato powers and Israel has long been their overwhelming superiority in air power over any likely enemy. Suddenly this calculus has been undermined because almost anybody can be a player on the cheap when it comes to airpower.
“Anthony Cordesman, a military expert at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, succinctly sums up the importance of this change, writing that ‘the strikes on Saudi Arabia provide a clear strategic warning that the US era of air supremacy in the Gulf, and the near US monopoly on precision strike capability, is rapidly fading’.”
Six years later, Cordesman’s insight is being shown to be wholly accurate.
Cockburn’s Picks
Why did Trump decide to attack Iran as co-combatant with Israel on 28 February? This was probably one of the most important decisions of our era, and unlike many turning points in history, we have a high-level eyewitness to the decision immediately available to explain how the crucial – and disastrous – decision was made.
As mentioned, the director of the National Counter-terrorism Center, Joe Kent, who resigned in protest against the Iran war on 17 March, blamed “pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby”. His interview with Tucker Carlson from the following day is essential viewing to understand what really happened.
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