By Guy Dinmore in Washington
Updated: 1:12 a.m. ET July 18, 2006
From the moment last Wednesday when Hizbollah fighters seized two Israeli soldiers, the Bush administration immediately held Iran and Syria responsible.
The White House mounted a systematic campaign on the US airwaves to get that message across while seeking to put pressure on the G8 summit to unite in confronting those two governments.
That it has become the received wisdom in the US that Iran was directing Hizbollah to deflect international pressure on Tehran's nuclear programme, is testimony to the Bush administration's ability to dominate the discourse in the mainstream media. The crisis has also demonstrated how it can rely on the support of the US foreign policy establishment – Democrat and Republican – when it comes to matters of vital national interest to the US and Israel.
Challenging these assertions, Iranian analysts and activists in the US – both those for and against the Iranian theocracy – are warning that such simplified arguments may not only be completely erroneous, but will also complicate the process of calming down the crisis while raising the chances of a direct conflict between Iran and the US.
Akbar Ganji, Iran's most prominent dissident who recently emerged from six years in prison, began a symbolic hunger strike outside the UN headquarters in New York at the weekend to press for the release of all political prisoners in Iran. But he also said his mission to the US was to prevent the spread of war.
"There are two voices in this – one is the voice of warmongers, terrorists and fundamentalists. The other is the voice of pacifists, pro-democracy activists and freedom-seekers," he told the FT.
"Unfortunately, the Christian-Jewish-Islamic fundamentalists are stirring up this situation and setting [Lebanon] ablaze," he said. "They should all be isolated."
Fatemeh Haghighatjoo, a former reformist member of the Iranian parliament who was barred from seeking re-election by hardliners in 2004, said Iran knew that direct confrontation between Hizbollah and Israel would not benefit Hizbollah.
"For this reason I don't think Iran is provoking this situation or wants it to be intensified . . . Iran has taken a pragmatic approach in its foreign policy and does not want to get into a serious confrontation with Israel," argued Ms Haghighatjoo, a visiting scholar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology...
Iran apparently has Chinese Sidewinder missiles alright, but doesn't have the capability to install them with the kind of robotic brains it takes to find a moving ship at sea 40 miles away. If it did have the capability to make a UAV-cruise missile, it might target more strategic targets. Like the Knesset, for instance.
Only one missile like this has been fired.
The official explanation currently floating is that it wasn't a drone; it was a radar-guided Sidewinder.
...The missile that hit the Hanit was a C-802, an Iranian-made variant of a stealthy, turbojet-powered, Chinese weapon. It's "considered along with the US 'Harpoon' as among the best anti-ship missiles" in the world, GlobalSecurity.org says.
"Iran began buying dozens of those sophisticated antiship missiles from the Chinese during the 1990’s," the Times notes. "Until Friday, however, Western intelligence services did not know that Iran had managed to ship C-802 missiles to Hezbollah."
Now that the Israelis know, it's influencing their choice of targets to hit. The C-802 was most likely "fired it from a truck-mounted launcher cued by a coastal radar installation," Situational Awareness says. So "Israel has stepped up its attacks against coastal radar sites, as any sort of surface-search set would be able to provide data for the initial launch.
"After launch, the missile takes care of itself with its own inertial guidance system and onboard radar seeker. Since the launchers are mobile, the trucks carrying them could scoot after firing. And we all know how notoriously difficult it can be to locate mobile units, even when you have lots of reconnaissance assets."
Even Star Wars can't catch those perfidous missile launchers.
Most likely. Still Chinese built, from Iran or Syria. At least, that's what we're told it said on the label. Everybody knows.
Still, look at the silver (golden or even uranium) lining. Everybody knows where it came from. Just ask Pravda:
"Officials in both countries are just now learning the extent to which the militant group has succeeded in getting weapons from Iran and Syria."
Everybody knows. Except, perhaps, the real weapon being used here isn't from either Iran, or Syria, or some DynCorp Special Op lifting some special ordinance from an employer and selling it to further Darth Rumsfeld's Special Plans (and to make a tidy sum on the side). The real weapon is the strategy behind this tactic for the Jihadi side. Billmon again, himself noting some of the real experts:
Military analyst William S. Lind has posted his initial take on the Israel-Hamas-Hezbollah war and its potential significance, both for the Middle East and the future of warfare...
...Lind is generally recognized as the leading U.S. theorist of non-conventional, fourth generation war, and
Lind describes this as a watershed moment in the history of war:
"For the first time, a non-state entity has gone to war with a state not by waging an insurgency against a state invader, but across an international boundary. Again we see how those who define 4GW simply as insurgency are looking at only a small part of the picture."
Given that Israel is unlikely to achieve its strategic objectives (the destruction of Hamas and Hezbollah). Lind suggests the result is likely to be an unprecedented defeat for the Jewish state, with implications that will be felt worldwide:
"A powerful state will have suffered a new kind of defeat, again, a defeat across at least one international boundary and maybe two, depending on how one defines Gaza’s border. The balance between states and 4GW forces will be altered world-wide, and not to a trivial degree."
Lind is almost certainly correct about Israel's inability to deal its antagonists a decisive blow. Already, Israeli generals are talking in terms of "degrading" Hezbollah's capabilities by this or that percentage over this or that time frame, which is usually a tip off that the high command and/or its political masters don't have a clue whether they're achieving their objective or not -- and probably didn't even have a clear objective going in...
The key question, of course, is whether Israel will then proceed to fail upwards -- turning its frustrating cat and mouse game with Hezbollah into a more satisfying, if equally indecisive, air war against Syria or Iran. Lind paints the possible results of a war with Iran in apocalyptic terms, although more for the first 50 states than for the 51st:
'If Israel does attack Iran, the “summer of 1914” analogy may play itself out, catastrophically for the United States. As I have warned many times, war with Iran (Iran has publicly stated it would regard an Israeli attack as an attack by the U.S. also) could easily cost America the army it now has deployed in Iraq. It would almost certainly send shock waves through an already fragile world economy, potentially bringing that house of cards down. A Bush administration that has sneered at “stability” could find out just how high the price of instability can be.'
It's hard to argue with that -- not when you consider that whatever Hezbollah has managed to do the Israeli Navy and the Egyptian merchant fleet is probably less than 10% of what a hostile Iran could do to the tanker fleet in the Persian Gulf.
Assuming, of course, the continued goal is American dominance, and whether or not someone's real goal is to keep the oil in the ground and the prices through the roof.
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