Is The US Being Drawn Into A War With Iran?

It would be twice as bad as Afghanistan.

Nov 07, 2023

A recent Wall Street Journal headline warned that “Escalating Militia Attacks on U.S. Troops Risk Washington-Tehran Confrontation”.

It turns out that someone found a drone in the upper floor of a US barracks in Iraq.

It was a “suspected” militia-launched weapon; its explosives “failed to detonate”.

This might remind us of the “weapons of mass destruction” accusation against Iraq that launched a totally useless war. Those of us who did not believe Bush’s story were sidelined by a stampeding majority who wanted to rush to war — a war that only benefited Iraq’s enemies Israel and Saudi Arabia.

To put the latest media drum-beats about the drone ‘attack’ in context, it brings to four the number of reported drone attacks on US facilities in Iraq; there have been no casualties.

One of the suspected militia groups is the Hezbollah Brigades, which had demanded that U.S. forces leave Iraq, “otherwise they will taste the fires of hell.”

The hell-fires are not very accurate…It has been reported that US troops just brought down a drone “near” a US Air Base, but the Pentagon said it could not confirm that such an attack took place.

Iran is bordered by 2,500 US troops in Iraq, and 900 more further West in neighbouring Syria. Their mission is to advise and assist local forces in combating Islamic State. Evidently 21 US personnel sustained injuries, with 19 troops diagnosed with Traumatic Brain Injury, or TBI, though all have returned to work.

The militia groups are rumored to have been aligned with Iran.

**Iranians demonstrate in favor of Palestine and Gaza.**

Iran appears to be encouraging the groups rather than explicitly directing them, according to CNN. It acknowledged that Tehran does not always exert perfect command and control over these groups and that information on the groups is a “persistent intelligence gap.”

There is no question but that Iran is very concerned about the Gaza conflict. Iran’s Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian said that the Middle East is like a “powder keg…Any miscalculation in continuing genocide and forced displacement can have serious and bitter consequences, both in the region and for the warmongers.”

He warned the US and Israel that “if crimes against humanity do not stop immediately, there is the possibility at any moment that the region will go out of control.”

Controlling groups that have drones is not easy. Drones are not new to the area; under President Obama, America sent drones against Yemen, Somalia, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. An air campaign targeting Yemen went especially askew: instead of targeting al Qaeda they hit a tribe with cluster munitions, killing 55 people. Twenty-one were children — 10 of them under five. Twelve were women, five of them pregnant.

U.S. military personnel at the American embassy in Israel are already providing the Israelis with advice and intelligence to plan hostage rescue missions, and new American forces being sent to the region are in preparation for escalation of the conflict. U.S. Air Force F-15, F-16s and A-10s were being sent to its theater of operations. A-10 Warthogs with the 354th Fighter Squadron arrived in the CENTCOM theater on Oct. 12. On Tuesday, F-16 fighters with the 119th Expeditionary Fighter Squadron also arrived in the region. The aircraft carrier USS Dwight D. Eisenhower and its strike group have also been ordered to deploy, and the aircraft carrier USS Gerald R. Ford and its strike group along with the 26th Marine Expeditionary Unit embarked on its Amphibious Ready Group are operating in the Eastern Mediterranean Sea.

A nuclear submarine is also cruising in the area. I am confused by its strategic value; it can’t torpedo Iran.

The US has launched strikes on two bases in eastern Syria that it believed were used by Iranian groups.

This signals an American commitment to get directly involved in the Gaza war.

Funnily enough, those U.S. strikes — which the Pentagon said hit a weapons and an ammunition storage facility in Abu Kamal, Syria, near the border with Iraq — don’t appear to have deterred groups from launching attacks.

The Biden administration has said it wants to avoid escalation with Iran.

All the military build-ups are designed to deter aggression.

And the first shot in any war is fired in retaliation.

The danger of a larger conflict is also a growing concern for the American public. In fact, it may play out poorly for Biden’s presidential bid.

The American voters are no doubt recalling that recent wars have not been kind to America. The United States did not achieve victory in Korea (though it saved a democratic South), Vietnam, Iraq or Afghanistan.

That the wars had no value to America is shown by the fact that today, American aircraft carriers are docking in Vietnam — at the invitation of that government. If America had spent the funds from that war on helping Vietnam, it would have a solid and prosperous partner in the region…one that shares America’s concern with the regional growth of China.

The wars also wounded the legacies of presidents Truman, Johnson, Bush and Obama.

The danger for America in direct conflict in Iran is that the country is simply too big and strong to be toppled. Also, there is no strong opposition capable of uniting with America from within the country to overthrow the regime.

By way of comparison, it cost America $2-trillion to lose a 20-year war in Afghanistan. That’s $300-million PER DAY. How much education could that have bought in America, over twenty years?

The scary thing is that Afghanistan is peanuts compared to Iran. Afghanistan’s population is 40-million; Iran’s is 88-million — more than double.

It could cost America $600-million per day over 20 years to lose a war in Iran.

The only thing American war against it would do, would be to unite the people even more against America.

The only party consistently urging action against Iran, is Netanyahu’s right-wing Zionist party. They tried to push Trump into war and have spent the past three decades sounding the alarm about Iran’s nuclear programme and threatening to attack the country on countless occasions.

This is about personal gain for Netanyahu. As noted in Al Jazeera: “Netanyahu has both a political and a personal stake in all this. A drawn-out regional conflict would block or at least postpone any official accountability for his utter failure to prevent Hamas’s attack from happening in the first place and could also put his multiple indictments on corruption charges on an indefinite hold. Overnight, he transformed from a failed and embattled prime minister to a wartime leader, with opposition parties clamouring to join him in a national unity government.”

Mind you, Trump did not require much pushing. He offered Israeli right-wing nationalists full control over Jerusalem and large parts of the West Bank and Jordan Valley while shattering hopes of a viable Palestinian state. It was a gift that convinced many Palestinians — including Hamas — that peaceful dialogue was useless.

It was at also at Netanyahu’s advice that Trump ignored the Palestinians. He went instead after ‘normalisation’ between Arab states and Israel. He did not know that any relationship they had with Israel would be subject, in the last analysis, to their people’s approval of its support for Palestine. We have seen the recent draw-back of ‘normalization’, as populations across the Arab world protest against the cruelty of the Israeli state.

The 2018 decision by Trump, egged on by Israel, to unilaterally renege on the west’s UN-backed nuclear counter-proliferation accord with Iran was the biggest American foreign policy blunder in the Middle East. He followed it with additional US economic sanctions that fatally weakened the moderately reformist presidency of Hassan Rouhani.

Iran played right back to Trump’s confrontational posture — and to Israel’s delight shifted sharply to an anti-western stance. Hardliner Ebrahim Raisi became president of Iran in 2021 and brutally suppresses dissent, especially of women’s rights.

if the Barack Obama-Biden policy of engagement had been maintained by Trump, things might be very different today, inside and outside Iran.

Instead, Biden today faces an angry Iran. And thanks to Trump (and Netanyahu), Iran may be closer than ever to acquiring nuclear weapons capability, because if Obama’s formula had been followed, Iran would have gone down a peaceful road to atomic energy, not atomic destruction.

Leaving aside the nuclear issue, Iran is still a toxically dangerous enemy in a shooting war.

**Iran has the largest army in the Middle East and the 17th most powerful military in the world.**

And in addition to its power in a shooting war, Iran has ample means — with anti-ship missiles, mines and torpedoes — to disrupt oil shipments in the region. With Russian supplies already at an end, this could be catastrophic for the West, especially Europe.

Could the US count on allies in a war with Iran? At best, it could obtain the support of four countries: the United Kingdom, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Israel. Even Saudi and the UAE are debatable, given how sensitive their rulers are to their people’s passionate embrace of the Hamas side. So it would likely be just the US and Israel. Israel has its hands full, so the war against Iran that Netanyahu has been agitating for will likely be fought only by US soldiers. And the cost will be born by their families.

This kind of unilateral trap would hand Russia and China a big victory. An America embroiled in a war against Iran would be of no use to Ukraine, so it would likely fall to Russia. With this victory, Russia would turn its sites on other European nations, as it has vowed to do.

The good news is that it may not be easy to draw Biden into a direct war in Iran, given his previous commitment to end “the forever wars.” He was punished repeated for the humiliating withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021 — set up by Trump by executed by Biden. While the situation in 2023 is much more challenging than the invasion of Iraq in 2003, Biden is also (I trust) much more capable than Bush, is able to avoid driving off the cliff.

He just has to get through the media build-up and the pressure from other interests, and America can still end up being a valued regional partner — not punisher — in this dangerous region.

But there is still huge danger for America in being hustled into a war that is not helpful to its cause or its values. Watch this space, and view the alarmist headlines about Iran’s ‘aggression’ with skepticism.