What IF Iran Is Behind the Burgeoning Regional War?

by emptywheel

Via hilzoy via Glenn Greenwald, I found this description of Mubarak's attempts to broker peace between Hamas and Israel.

"Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak yesterday told the Cairo daily Al Ahram that he had drafted an agreement for the release of abducted Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, but that it had been scuttled by outside pressure on Hamas.

"I would not be revealing any secrets by saying I had written portions of a dignified resolution to the soldier crisis," Mubarak said in the interview.

According to the Egyptian leader, Israel promised to release numerous Palestinian prisoners, and Hamas leader Khaled Meshal and Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas had both been told. However, the agreement was not implemented due to pressure on Hamas.

"Then Hamas was pressured and entities I do not want to name intervened in the mediation. This blocked the impending agreement," Mubarak said."

To my mind, it's the most concrete evidence I've seen that Iran or Syria is stage-managing the growing chaos in the Middle East.

So what if Iran is behind the burgeoning regional war in the Middle East? My buddy Michael Ledeen calls this a Neville Chamberlain moment (making it, by my calculation, Neville Chamberlain moment #21,645 for Ledeen).

And finally, if we dither through this one, the next one will be worse. Maybe much worse. It's not going away. Stability is a mirage. Chamberlain had a choice between dishonor and war. He chose dishonor and got war anyway. You too, Mr. President. It's the way it works.

Now, as a student of Czech history, I get rather impatient with the inexactitude with which folks like Ledeen call Chamberlain moments. After all, Chamberlain's appeasement was important because it misread Hitler's intentions, but more importantly, because in ceding Czechoslovakia, he ceded a country that was much easier to defend militarily than Poland, and he ceded the considerable munitions manufacturing capabilities of Czechoslovakia, which proved to be a critical component of Hitler's war machine. In other words, Chamberlain made the wrong moral decision. But he also made ceded a critical strategic advantage.

Oh, and Chamberlain? He had some allies, allies that he might have used to effectively counter Hitler's advance.

As I watch these events unfold, I can't help but go back to a Thomas Hammes quote from that James Fallow war-gaming article that I used in my Harm and Pain post.

"What if they try to pre-empt us? What if we threaten them, and the next day we find mines in Baltimore Harbor and the Golden Gate, with a warning that there will be more? Do we want to start this game?" Such a failure of imagination—which Hammes said is common in military-run war games—has a profound effect, because it leads to war plans like the ones from Gardiner's CentCom, or from Tommy Franks, which in turn lull Presidents into false confidence. "There is no such thing as a quick, clean war," he said. "War will always take you in directions different from what you intended. The only guy in recent history who started a war and got what he intended was Bismarck," who achieved the unification of Germany after several European wars.

What if we threaten Iran, and it decides to pre-empt us? What if we assume we're going to be able to conduct some nice surgical strikes on Iran's nuclear capabilities and they decide to pre-empt us? What if we assume falsely that we'll be able to take out Iran while maintaining the stability of the Middle East? What if Iran manages to isolate us from the allies we might have brought along with us on the bombing runs--using Bush's utterly predictable unwavering support for Israel--at precisely the moment it chooses to engage us?

This is not a Neville Chamberlain moment because we have already ceded all strategic advantage. We have already given Iran the opportunity to dictate the terms of the battle with our little adventure in Iraq. Worse, we not only ceded advantage to Iran, but we gave it every incentive to use that advantage.

And it's not a Neville Chamberlain moment because, rather than taking the support we enjoyed after 9/11 to foster a more stable Islamic world, we squandered it. We don't have the options that England did in 1938.

We never had great options in Iran. And I strongly believe our best options were never military. But right now, we have no good options, largely because of the mess we've made in Iraq, because our government is a failure diplomatically, and because we've made this into a crusade that others don't want to join. But the solutions being offered by the Neocons and their allies--to engage in a full-scale Middle Eastern war--would be futile without first addressing the past mistakes of the Bush Administration.

Update: Here's part of an informative Steve Soto post (the conclusions of which I disagree with) which addresses some of the comments below.

In the most promising sign, Hezbollah’s sponsor Iran signaled that a prisoner swap and cease-fire were now possible as well. This comes as Hezbollah has shot down its first Israeli aircraft. Tony Blair and UN Secretary Kofi Annan supported international forces being inserted into southern Lebanon to reestablish a safe zone and ensure no further attacks from Hezbollah.

Both Syria and Iran now are supportive of a cease-fire and a prisoner swap to end this, but that will not change the fact that both countries supported the hostage takings in the first place, and both countries have been damaged as a result of this mistake. I stand by what I said yesterday, that Iran should be sanctioned and isolated as a result of this.

Also note however how the Israelis tipped their hands today. Olmert doesn’t want international peacekeepers to take over in southern Lebanon and get rid of Hezbollah militias. Instead, he wants Lebanon’s military to do it, which he knows full well is not capable of doing it. It calls into question whether Olmert wants Hezbollah expelled and the area made a safe zone, or whether he wants the ongoing pretext for invading and taking over southern Lebanon.

And here was the response I made in his comments:

This feels like more dumb posturing on both sides, and reinforces my belief that Israel and Iran are both trying to hasten a larger conflict. But I strongly disagree that Iran has miscalculated--at all--in this affair.

As you point out, Israel so far won't consider the logical thing, to bring in independent troops to establish a border zone. Therefore, their negotiations are only going to look like another attempt to use the vacuum of power they've created in Gaza and Lebanon as an excuse to maintain their own military presence. Which almost guarantees that Israel will remain engaged here.

But what Iran has done, in the last week, is manage to make the impending US attack on them into an Israeli-US attack. Which is going to have a radically different reception in the ME and the world as a whole. Whereas before the inordinate response in Lebanon, Putin was entertaining a grand bargain, now he's backing away from our "holy war." The more Iran can portray any military strike at it as a holy war, the less successful that strike will be.

Furthermore, I honestly think your suggestion that Bush "show the evidence" in your last post laughable. South Korea won't even trust our claims against North Korea, after our clear invention of intelligence to justify Iraq. You think the Islamic world is going to trust our claims against Iran (at least some of which have been overblown), and many of which depend on Iran's arming of Hezbollah, which looks really blinkered given our own arming of Israel.

Meanwhile, Iran now looks like a mediator. Israel can negotiate with Iran/Syria/Hezbollah/Hamas together. Or it can look like the aggressor (which, to some degree, it does in its extensive civilian attacks). But any further violence will look exactly like a US-Isreali attack on Islam (as the Neocons would like it to look). Which adds whole new levels of instability into any attempt to respond to Iran. It basically turns the entire Middle East into Iraq.

If you look at this from the perspective of Iranian mullahs having decided a US attack was inevitable, they've played this brilliantly.

Update: Here's Steve Clemons expressing justifiable concern at the notion of the US sending a giant target to the Mediterranean to escalate the war evacuate Americans.

Now comes the news that the U.S. is going to evacuate Americans caught in the crossfire in Lebanon by cruise ship on Tuesday.

I don't believe that the neocons would ever try to sabotage our rescue of Americans via a cruise liner. That would be too cynical of me -- and they are ideas people, not military practitioners.

But there are players on all sides of this conflict that may find a floating, slow, and poorly defended elephant of a ship too tempting of a target. Real or contrived, any potential attack would look like a Hezbollah attack.

I guess I'm more cynical than Steve. While it is a thoroughly boneheaded strategic decision, it is a brilliant decision if you 1) want to launch a war in the Middle East or 2) win the mid-terms. Either Hezbollah goes completely dark until the cruise ship disappears, to prevent getting blamed for another hit on the USS Liberty anything that happens. Or Hezbollah (which almost sank an Israeli warship already in the last week) gets greedy and we have, literally, Armageddon. So, from a strategic position, stupid stupid stupid. But from a 4G warfare perspective, in which perceptions of moral standing are everything? Smarter than anything the US has done so far.

Comments

[Mimikatz]

Billmon has had some of the best analysis of the current situation, in which Israel seems to have painted itself into a corner, and Hezbullah with the backing of Iran seems bent on demonstrating that the consequences of an attack on Iran might be more serious than people have been thinking.

He also quotes from Ha'aretz this am, demonstrating that even faced with falling rockets the Israeli press and intellectuals have much more moral courage than folks do here:

We could have withdrawn from Gaza through negotiations and coordination, while strengthening the existing Palestinian leadership, but we refused to do so. And now, we complain about "a lack of leadership?" We did everything we could to undermine their society and leadership, making sure as much as possible that the disengagement would not be a new chapter in our relationship with the neighboring nation, and now we are amazed by the violence and hatred that we sowed with our own hands.
Gideon Levy
Who Started? (Ha'aretz)
July 15, 2006

[emptywheel]

Thanks Mimikatz, I haven't made it over to Billmon yet. But yes, he's been smack on on this.

[4jkb4ia]

Billmon's latest post is cogent. If you have been overconfident about your military superiority you might do what the IDF is doing, because they seem to be all over the place. However international reaction is more of a brake on the IDF than it was on our troops during Vietnam, and the public wants the rockets to stop more than to bomb Lebanon into the stone age.

I read the entire story about Hezbollah's links to Syria and Iran in the NYT yesterday and was skeptical because of your post, emptywheel! There was little new information in the story.

[4jkb4ia]

I would also say that the IDF knows full well that there are two peoples claiming the same place. But the Arabs have a history of not wanting to share the place any more than the Jews do. Even if there was a secular state encompassing the two peoples, Hamas stands for a religious state for one people. Radical Islam would continue to pose a danger to that state.

[sgiff]

I can no longer find the story but it claimed that the Iranian foriegn minister in Syria said that a cease fire should happen and a prisoner exchange. Isn't this similar to the Egyptian plan?

[4jkb4ia]

But about Hezbollah showing unseen military capacities he is 100% right. There is no flame war on Kos! I stumble around searching for meaning in life.

[4jkb4ia]

Brilliant editorial
I will take a stab at what sgiff wrote. A proposal acceptable to both sides would probably include a prisoner exchange, but what types of prisoners and how many Israel will release would be a difference between proposals.

[jonnybutter]

Ledeen needs a movie made about him. He is just unbelieveable. He's the kind of person you'd say would need to be invented if he didn't exsist; but I suspect that he really doesn't exsist except in his own fevered imagination. I can't quite believe he takes himself completely seriously (although he would certainly have us do). There's always something ineffably bogus about him. It is so canny of you to focus on him, EW.

Thanks for the good post, as always.

[4jkb4ia]

Haaretz has currently got a story that the Iranian foreign minister is having talks with the Syrian government. No results were published.

[emptywheel]

jonnybutter

I keep waiting for them to discover something with Ledeen's name in it in the dossiers they've found in Italy, in the SISMI journalist's apartment. It would make for a good deal of amusement, in any case.

[Redshift]

I was skeptical of claims of Iranian involvement, just because the neocons and the Israelis are always looking for an excuse for the US to attack Iran. But I heard a report this weekend from the BBC correspondent in Beirut, discussing the regional press, who said that the Lebanese newspapers generally assume that Hezbollah is being directed by Iran and Syria. That doesn't make it true, of course, but it makes me less skeptical.

[sgiff]

Thanks for the answer 4jkb4ia. This is the story I saw. http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/C3E26D64-180D-4D68-9EB4-8375D9E981BF.htm

[4jkb4ia]

Now the JPost has got it...
"Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki said Monday that a cease-fire and an exchange of prisoners would be acceptable and fair in the Israeli-Lebanese conflict...On Sunday, Lebanese officials said that Israel had sent the terms of a possible cease-fire through Italian mediators. The terms were the release of two captured Israeli soldiers, and a Hezbollah pullback to roughly 30 kilometers (20 miles) from the Israeli-Lebanese border."

[kim]

Interesting that, as far as I've seen in brief surfing, only Syria and Iran are defending Hezbollah. I suppose it's too much to hope to see a concerted effort by ME countries to oppose Iran's plotting.

[emptywheel]

Well, Saudi Arabia has come out against Iran, but it would, since if Iran's stunt succeeds, Iran may replace Saudi Arabia as both the regional powerhouse and (because it would gain nominal control of the souther Iraqi oilfields), the swing oil producer in the world.

And places like Bahrain, which has a big Shiite population, oppose it because a regional war led by Iran might seriously destabilize its country.

And Iraq is going to oppose it. Nominally at least. Because it is still home to a hundred thousand American troops.

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