If you want to understand the policy of a country, look at the map, as Napoleon recommended. Anyone who wants to guess whether Israel and/or the United States are going to attack Iran should look at the map of the Strait of Hormuz between Iran and the Arabian Peninsula.
Through this narrow waterway, only 34 km wide, pass the ships that carry between a fifth and a third of the world’s oil, including that from Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar and Bahrain.
Most of the commentators who talk about the inevitable American and Israeli attack on Iran do not take account of this map. There is talk about a “sterile”, a “surgical” air strike. The mighty air fleet of the United States will take off from the aircraft carriers already stationed in the Gulf and the American air bases dispersed throughout the region and bomb all the nuclear sites of Iran — and on this happy occasion also bomb government institutions, army installations, industrial centers and anything else they might fancy. They will use bombs that can penetrate deep into the ground.
Simple, quick and elegant — one blow and bye-bye Iran, bye-bye ayatollahs, bye-bye Ahmadinejad.
If Israel attacks alone, the blow will be more modest. The most the attackers can hope for is the destruction of the main nuclear sites and a safe return. I have a modest request: Before you start, please look at the map once more, at the Strait named (probably) after the god of Zarathustra.
The inevitable reaction to the bombing of Iran will be the blocking of this strait. Iran dominates the whole length of the strait. They can seal it hermetically with their missiles and artillery, both land based and naval. If that happens, the price of oil will skyrocket — far beyond the $200 per-barrel that pessimists dread now. That will cause a chain reaction: A worldwide depression, the collapse of whole industries and a catastrophic rise in unemployment in America, Europe and Japan.
In order to avert this danger, the Americans would need to conquer parts of Iran — perhaps the whole of this large country. The US does not have at its disposal even a small part of the forces they would need. The mighty American Navy is menacing Iran — but the moment the strait is closed, it will itself resemble those model ships in bottles. Perhaps it is this danger that made the navy chiefs extricate the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln from the Gulf this week.
This leaves the possibility that the US will act by proxy. Israel will attack, and this will not officially involve the US, which will deny any responsibility. Indeed? Iran has already announced that it would consider an Israeli attack. That is logical. No Israeli government would ever consider the possibility of starting such an operation without the explicit and unreserved agreement of the US. So what are all these exercises, which generate such dramatic headlines in the international media?
Simple common sense tells us that whoever plans a surprise strike does not proclaim this from the rooftops.
Since King Cyrus the Great, the founder of the Persian Empire some 2500 years ago, who allowed the Israelite exiles in Babylon to return to Jerusalem and build a temple there, Israeli-Persian relations have their ups and downs. Until the Khomeini revolution, there was a close alliance between them. Israel trained the Shah’s dreaded secret police (“Savak”). The Shah was a partner in the Eilat-Ashkelon oil pipeline which was designed to bypass the Suez Canal.
The Shah helped infiltrate Israeli Army officers into the Kurdish part of Iraq, where they assisted Mustafa Barzani’s revolt against Saddam Hussein. That operation came to an end when the Shah betrayed the Iraqi Kurds and made a deal with Saddam. But Israeli-Iranian cooperation was almost restored after Saddam attacked Iran. In the course of that long and cruel war (1980-1988), Israel secretly supported the Iran of the ayatollahs. The Irangate affair was only a small part of that story.
Iran is now a regional power. It makes no sense to deny that. The irony of the matter is that for this they must thank their foremost benefactor in recent times: George W. Bush. For many generations, Iraq was the gatekeeper of the Arab region. It was the wall of the Arab world against the Persian Shiites. When President Bush invaded Iraq and destroyed it, he opened the whole region to the growing might of Iran. In future generations, historians will wonder about this action, which deserves a chapter to itself in “The March of Folly”. Today it is already clear that the real American aim was to take possession of the Caspian Sea/Gulf oil region and station a permanent American garrison at its center. This aim was indeed achieved — the Americans are now talking about their forces remaining in Iraq “for a hundred years”, and they are now busily engaged in dividing Iraq’s huge oil reserves among the four or five giant American oil companies. But this war was started without wider strategic thinking and without looking at the geopolitical map. The advantage of dominating Iraq may well be outweighed by the rise of Iran as a nuclear, military and political power that will overshadow America’s allies in the Arab world.
Where do we Israelis stand in this game? For years now, we have been bombarded by a propaganda campaign that depicts the Iranian nuclear effort as an existential threat to Israel. But I am not prey to this existential angst. On the basis of all these considerations, I dare to predict that there will be no military attack on Iran this year — not by the Americans, not by the Israelis.
President Bush is about to end his career in disgrace. The same fate is waiting impatiently for Ehud Olmert. For politicians of this kind, it is easy to be tempted by a last adventure, a last chance for a decent place in history after all.
All the same, I stick to my prognosis: It will not happen.
