- WASHINGTON (IPS) - President
George W. Bush's address on Iraq Wednesday night was less about Iraq than
about its eastern neighbour, Iran. There was little new about the U.S.'s
strategy in Iraq, but on Iran, the president spelled out a plan that appears
to be aimed at goading Iran into war with the U.S.
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- While Washington speculated whether the president would
accept or reject the Iraq Study Group's recommendations, few predicted
that he would do the opposite of what James Baker and Lee Hamilton advised.
Rather than withdrawing troops from Iraq, Bush ordered an augmentation
of troop levels. Rather than talking to Iran and Syria, Bush virtually
declared war on these states. And rather than pressuring Israel to resolve
the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the administration is fuelling the factional
war in Gaza by arming and training Fatah against Hamas.
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- Several recent developments and statements indicate that
the administration is ever more seriously eyeing war with Iran. On Wednesday,
Bush made the starkest accusations yet against the rulers in Tehran, alleging
that the clerics were "providing material support for attacks on American
troops."
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- While promising to "disrupt the attacks on our forces"
and "seek out and destroy the networks providing advanced weaponry
and training to our enemies in Iraq," he made no mention of the flow
of arms and funds to Sunni insurgents and al Qaeda from Jordan and Saudi
Arabia.
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- Instead, he revealed the deployment of an additional
carrier strike group to the Persian Gulf and of the Patriot anti-missile
defence system to Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states to protect U.S.
allies. The usefulness of this step for resolving the violence in Iraq
remains a mystery. Neither the Sunni insurgents nor the Shia militias possess
ballistic missiles. And if they did, nothing indicates that they would
target the GCC states -- Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and
the United Arab Emirates.
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- The deployment of the Patriot missiles can be explained,
however, in light of a U.S. plan to attack Iran. Last year, Tehran signalled
the GCC states in unusually blunt language that it would retaliate against
the Arab sheikhdoms if the U.S. attacked Iran using bases in the GCC countries.
Mindful of the weakness of Iran's air force, Tehran's most likely weapon
would be ballistic missiles -- the very same weapon that the Patriots are
designed to provide a shield against. A first step towards going to war
with Iran would be to provide the GCC states with protection against potential
Iranian retaliation.
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- Perhaps the starkest indication of an impending war with
Iran is Washington's recent arrest of Iranian diplomats in Iraq. Around
the time of President Bush's speech, U.S. Special Forces -- in blatant
violation of diplomatic regulations reminiscent of the hostage taking of
U.S. diplomats in Tehran by Iranian students in 1979 -- stormed the Iranian
consulate in Erbil in northern Iraq, arresting five diplomats. Later that
day, U.S. forces almost clashed with Kurdish peshmerga militia forces when
seeking to arrest more Iranians at Arbil's airport.
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- These operations incensed the Iraqi government, including
its Kurdish components that otherwise are staunchly pro-Washington. "What
happened... was very annoying because there has been an Iranian liaison
office there for years and it provides services to the citizens,"
Iraq's Minister of Foreign Affairs Hoshiyar Zebari, who is himself a Kurd,
told Al-Arabiya television.
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- The Bush administration has justified the raids -- including
the arrests of several Iranian officials in December last year -- on the
grounds that evidence is collected on Iranian involvement in destabilising
Iraq. But if the purpose is intelligence gathering, it would make more
sense to launch a simultaneous mass raid of Iranian offices rather than
the current incremental approach that provides the Iranians forewarning
and an opportunity to destroy whatever evidence they may or may not have
in their possession.
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- The incremental raids and arrests may instead be aimed
at provoking the Iranians to respond, which in turn would escalate the
situation and provide the Bush administration with the casus belli it needs
to win Congressional support for war with Iran. Rather than making the
case for a pre-emptive war with Iran over weapons of mass destruction --
a strategy the U.S. pursued with Iraq that is unlikely to succeed with
Iran -- the sequence of events in the provocation and escalation strategy
would make it appear as if war was forced on the U.S.
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- Prominent Republican and Democratic Senators seem to
have picked up on the president's war strategy. At Thursday's hearing in
the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska
drew parallels with the Richard Nixon administration's strategy of lying
to the U.S. people and expanding the Vietnam war into Cambodia. "[W]hen
you set in motion the kind of policy that the president is talking about
here," he warned Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, "it's very,
very dangerous."
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- Senator Joseph Biden of Delaware added that war with
Iran would require congressional authority. Still, Congress is yet to pose
a major challenge to Bush's war plan beyond holding hearings with heated
exchanges between frustrated Senators and defensive administration officials.
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- The next move may be Iran's. Tehran has likely sniffed
the trap and will sit idly by for now and deprive the Bush administration
of a pretext for escalation. But continued provocations from the U.S. through
additional raids of Iranian consulates and offices will likely lead to
an intentional or unintentional response, after which escalation and war
may become reality. Iran has at times failed to exhibit the discipline
necessary to refrain from responding to aggressions.
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- While the administration's calculation may be that lethal
pressure on Iran will force Tehran to compromise, faith in Iran that offering
concessions will prompt a change in the U.S.'s Iran-policy is next to nonexistent
due to the Bush administration's past rejections of Iranian offers.
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- But Tehran may be able to change the political climate
and escape Bush's war trap by reinitiating talks with the European Union
to address regional matters as well as the nuclear impasse. Europe's patience
and faith in Iran has largely been depleted due to Tehran's failure to
fully appreciate efforts by Javier Solana, high representative for the
European Union's Common Foreign and Security Policy, to negotiate an agreement
on enrichment suspension last fall.
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- Still, the EU understands that the tidal waves of a regional
war in the Middle East will reach Europe much sooner than they reach U.S.
shores. Whether Europe will stand up for its own values and security and
against Bush's war plans, however, remains to be seen. Here, Tehran's offers
are likely not inconsequential.
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- *Dr. Trita Parsi is the author of "Treacherous Triangle
-- The Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran and the United States" (Yale
University Press, 2007).
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