Iran strike? Part 1

This week’s New Yorker magazine carries a 6,000-word epic, ‘Preparing the Battlefield’ by veteran investigative journalist Seymour Hersh.  The article suggests that the United States is closer to war with Iran than previously believed, which helped spook global oil markets. But there is more smoke than fire in Hersh's piece.

Hersh’s billboard claim is that in late 2007, Congress agreed to a request from President George Bush to fund a major escalation of covert operations against Iran. These operations, for which Bush wanted $400 million, were outlined in a Presidential Finding inked by Bush, and seemingly designed to destabilise the Iranian regime. The covert activities involve support of the country’s minority Ahwazi Arab and Baluchi groups and other dissident organisations, as well as intelligence gathering about Iran’s suspected nuclear weapons programme. Revelations of clandestine operations against Iran are hardly surprising, yet there are serious questions about their nature.

Divided Democrats

The alleged high-level response to the Presidential Finding may come under scrutiny. Current use of the directive has its roots in the so-called Hughes-Ryan amendment to the Foreign Assistance Act of 1974, which prohibited the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) spending funds on intelligence activities, unless the president felt such operations were vital to the to the national security of the United States -- and kept Congress abreast of such activities. Members of the Democratic leadership -- Congress has been under Democratic party control since January 2007 -- were seemingly willing to go along with the administration in expanding covert activities directed at Iran. This is at odds with the party’s presumptive candidate for president, Barack Obama, who has said he favours direct talks and diplomacy.

Cross-border ops

Hersh claims the CIA and the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) have been conducting cross-border operations from southern Iraq, with Presidential authorisation, since last year. These have included:

• Seizing members of Al Quds, the elite arm of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), and dragging them to Iraq for interrogation. Washington alleges the Quds force has provided Shia militants in Iraq with powerful shaped charges for use against US troops.
• Head-hunting other ringleaders in the war on terror, who may be captured or killed.

The US ambassador in Iraq, Ryan Crocker, denied the allegations of cross-border operations in an interview from Baghdad last week.

Undermining Iran

Of most concern are Hersh’s claims that Washington is covertly supporting minority groups such as the Baluchis and fomenting ethnic tension within Iran. Rather than weakening Iran’s religious government, a strategy that plays upon ethnic fragilities may generate support for the regime, not least because working with minorities is likely to alienate the majority of the population.

• Overestimating tension: None of the various movements is large enough to pose a significant challenge to Tehran. The Iranian government will continue to face pressure from groups based within Iran, often motivated by perceived government maltreatment of ethnic and sectarian minorities, as well as organisations operating from exile that seek to overthrow and replace the Islamic Republic. Yet this opposition is likely to remain fragmented and weak, owing to the localised nature of the grievances among the former and the lack of popular support for the latter.
• Backing the wrong horse? Iran's Baluch population is centred in the lawless southeast of the country, an area bordering Afghanistan and Pakistan. Most Baluchis are Sunni Muslims, leading to sectarian tensions with the explicitly Shia central government. An entrepot for smuggling and crime, particularly drug-trafficking, violence in the province has in recent years focused around a group called Jundallah (Soldiers of God). Yet among groups inside Iran benefiting from US support is the Jundallah, former CIA officer Robert Baer tells Hersh.
• Tehran tactics: The government has often resorted to blaming foreign interference -- in particular from the United Kingdom, the United States, Israel, and more recently, the CIA -- for disturbances and unrest. The CIA was involved in a coup in Iran in 1953, and Tehran’s mullahs have long made political capital out of the agency’s support for Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, who was deposed in 1979.

Nuclear weapons

Hersh has written previously about alleged administration plans to go to war to stop Tehran from obtaining nuclear weapons, including an April 2006 article in the New Yorker that suggested regime change in Iran, whether by diplomatic or military means, was Bush's ultimate goal. He points out that the request for funding came hot on the heels of a National Intelligence Estimate, released in December, which concluded that Iran had halted its work on nuclear weapons in 2003.

However, the fact remains that realpolitik makes a US strike on Iran unfeasible. The costs of two wars in the Middle East would be enormous; Washington’s decade of experience against Iraq in the 1990s also suggests the limited utility of air strikes to shift national policy in target states. Demonstrated US shortcomings in the occupation of Iraq have also caused regional allies to question US strength, competence and judgment, driving all of them to seek limited accommodation with Iran. Finally, the administration's shift towards focusing on malign Iranian activities suggests that its limited diplomatic engagement with Tehran has been largely fruitless. Hersh claims that the US Joint Chiefs of Staff are resisting White House pressure to undertake a military strike against Iran.