In recent days, this and other progressive sites on the Web have gone berserk over reports of imminent U.S. attack on Iran. We are all nattering away, all gloom and dread that it’s the Iraq War all over again. Most of us seem to believe there’s nothing we can do to stop it. In that, we are behaving exactly as expected.
We’re so busy being hysterical that we’ve forgotten the obvious. The American and British Left have been targeted by a highly coordinated disinformation program, the object of which is to inflame international tensions and lend credence to a carefully calculated strategy of escalation with Iran.
The present wave of propaganda has been timed to coincide with today’s meeting of the UN Security Council, at which the next round of possible sanctions against Iran are to be discussed.
But, if we refuse to play our role according to the script, there won’t be a war with Iran. This is why, and what we can do to prevent it.
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This is Bush-Cheney and Blair’s last stand in the Middle East, and they have a role for us in mind. They and their political parties have been ruined by the failure and expense of the War in Iraq. They see a run-up to another war as their last chance for distraction, and if their bluff works, Phoenix-like out of the ashes, possible political salvation. The actual fact of war with Iran is an entirely different matter, as their General staffs recognized years ago.
A real, protracted war with Iran would be an unmitigated disaster for all involved. There will be no quick, surgical strikes, akin to that which destroyed a single Iraqi reactor at Osirik in 1981. Instead, Iran’s nuclear program will require repeated strikes against more than 300 widely-dispersed and hardened targets. Those strikes would inevitably lead to a full-scale ground and naval engagement with Iran and its allies, a conflict which has a high chance of quick and uncontrollable escalation into a regional nuclear war.
That was the conclusion reached nearly five years ago during war-gaming at the Pentagon, and it holds doubly true today, after the potential weaknesses of American and allied military power have been demonstrated in graphic and horrifying detail. Images of $5 million M1A2 main battle tanks blackened and burned out by cheap and easily constructed roadside bombs and ubiquitous RPGs have been a stunning reminder of the hubris and folly of ground warfare in Asia, particularly of optional wars. http://www.fototime.com/...
Nearly everything we are presently being told about plans of attack on Iran, and the rationale being offered for it, are lies. In recent days, the focus has been on the movement of aircraft carriers toward, and by implication, into the Persian Gulf. But, the fact is, the real signal of the near onset of planned hostilities would be the movement OUT of the Gulf by these same large targets, which are extremely vulnerable to Iran’s numerous, modern, shore-based Anti-Ship Missile (ASM) batteries, hidden in caves and under cottage roofs along the 300-mile eastern shoreline of the lower Persian Gulf.
Here are some facts that you are otherwise not being told, facts which the Admirals and Generals on all sides are very well aware of, and have been vehement about in their objections voiced to Bush and Blair:
- The U.S. and Royal navies aren't configured for fighting in a bathtub. The geography of the Gulf is all wrong for using the fleet we have. It's all of 220 miles across at its widest, and less than 20 at the Straits. It's also quite shallow, particularly along the coast, which has miles and miles of caves and hills that offer attractive hiding places for missile batteries. Ships are visible to the naked eye for long distances. Radar guidance isn't even required - ECMs don't work against optically-guided ASMs at close range, as the Israelis learned in Lebanon.
- The architecture of modern warships is also all wrong for in-close slugging fests with cruise missiles. Major surface combatants today have powerful, accurate long-range missiles, but are lightly armed and armored. The fleets the U.S. and Britain had during World War Two would be more suitable.
- Do you want to know what would signal a real U.S. attack? The carriers and most of their escorts would leave the confines of the Gulf, and steam out 200 miles into the Gulf of Oman/Arabian Sea, out of effective range of most of Iran's ASMs, of which there are thousands.
- The carriers are showing the flag, not really all that useful in this environment. Airstrikes would be launched from Oman, Qatar, and eastern Iraq, which would be targeted by Iran's longer-range missiles.
- This isn't going to be a turkey shoot. Don't fool yourselves. The Straits will be closed for months, at least.
The essential problem with naval operations within the Gulf is the geography, which closes the waterway through which a quarter of the worlds oil shipments must flow into a narrow choke point only about 20 miles across. The fact that Iranian missile crews can literally see their targets eliminates much of the technological advantage of stand-off weapons that American and British ships steaming in open waters normally enjoy. From the shipping channels, the coast is clearly visible during daylight. http://www.evworld.com/...
Given the topography, large vessels remain within eyeshot of the western coast for at least 25-30 miles as they enter and leave the narrows, from Sirik to Bandar-e-Moghuyeh. See, http://www.willisms.com/...
An exchange of comments this morning at DKos reveals some more details about the difficulties of naval operations in the Gulf. Several posters who claim naval experience in the area commented as follows:
(T)here's cause for worry if the units should steam out of the Gulf and position themselves out of range of Iranian missiles. US armaments have longer ranges and greater precision.
But the Iranians have been spending quite a bit of their oil money on sophisticated land-to-ship and ship-to-ship missiles. http://www.dailykos.com/...
Of course, the Hormuz is narrow ... But who would maneuver with large ships there?
For that, you have lighter and more maneuverable vessels.
The Gulf itself is a large body of water, though with many shallows. It's well known and continuously charted, however, due to its strategic significance. http://www.dailykos.com/... (That poster has the teling tagline:)
"I don't do quagmires, and my boss doesn't do nuance."
Another poster at that same thread this morning raised the interesting question,
I do wonder about the Marine assault ships
If the idea is to secure the oil fields - which has been mentioned in recent accounts in the BBC and The Statesman - don't those assets have to go pretty far into the Gulf to launch strikes in much of the area at issue? They seem to me to be the most vulnerable part of this so-called "plan" to deal with Iran.
Another veteran of naval operations in the Gulf responded:
Do The Math...
...A carrier needs a minimum of 30 KTs windspeed down the flight deck catapaults in order to launch planes. This means during flight ops, it's course and speed are FIXED based on weather conditions. In a small body of water like the Gulf (which I have also been in), this leaves a very small op area for the carriers.
With three carrier groups operating here, this leaves an even smaller area for each to operate in.
From this perspective, having the LHDs (big deck amphibious ships) makes sense as they carry VTOLs / STOLs and helos, so are not so constrained during flight ops.
As far as visibility, during my cruise through this lovely bit of water, an Iranian helicopter flew right over the flight deck of the carrier were were with. With all the vaunted Aegis Radar technology we had available, the first anyone knoew of the helo was when lookouts on the carrier bridge wing saw it.
Had the helo been carrying missiles, it could easily have launched on a flight deck covered with aircraft, fuel, and bombs, getting ready for thier day's ops.
I've posted on this topic several times now - if we attempt to attack Iran with ships operating in the Gulf, it will be a turkey shoot - for the Iranians. We will lose at least several high-value ships in the process - if the Iranians choose to fight back. http://www.dailykos.com/...
Planning for assaults on Iran have been ongoing for years. Operation Millenium Challenge 2002 demonstrated the vulnerabilities and perils that entail exactly the sort of naval encounter between U.S. and Iranian forces inside the Gulf. Consider the outcome of that exercise. http://www.guardian.co.uk/...
In the first few days of the exercise, using surprise and unorthodox tactics, the wily 64-year-old Vietnam veteran sank most of the US expeditionary fleet in the Persian Gulf, bringing the US assault to a halt.
What happened next will be familiar to anyone who ever played soldiers in the playground. Faced with an abrupt and embarrassing end to the most expensive and sophisticated military exercise in US history, the Pentagon top brass simply pretended the whole thing had not happened. They ordered their dead troops back to life and "refloated" the sunken fleet. Then they instructed the enemy forces to look the other way as their marines performed amphibious landings. Eventually, Van Riper got so fed up with all this cheating that he refused to play any more. Instead, he sat on the sidelines making abrasive remarks until the three-week war game - grandiosely entitled Millennium Challenge - staggered to a star-spangled conclusion on August 15, with a US "victory".
If the Pentagon thought it could keep its mishap quiet, it underestimated Van Riper. A classic marine - straight-talking and fearless, with a purple heart from Vietnam to prove it - his retirement means he no longer has to put up with the bureaucratic niceties of the defence department. So he blew the whistle.
His driving concern, he tells the Guardian, is that when the real fighting starts, American troops will be sent into battle with a set of half-baked tactics that have not been put to the test.
"Nothing was learned from this," he says. "A culture not willing to think hard and test itself does not augur well for the future." The exercise, he says, was rigged almost from the outset.
Millennium Challenge was the biggest war game of all time. It had been planned for two years and involved integrated operations by the army, navy, air force and marines. The exercises were part real, with 13,000 troops spread across the United States, supported by actual planes and warships; and part virtual, generated by sophisticated computer models. It was the same technique used in Hollywood blockbusters such as Gladiator. The soldiers in the foreground were real, the legions behind entirely digital.
The game was theoretically set in 2007 and pitted Blue forces (the US) against a country called Red. Red was a militarily powerful Middle Eastern nation on the Persian Gulf that was home to a crazed but cunning megalomaniac (Van Riper). Arguably, when the exercises were first planned back in 2000, Red could have been Iran.
SNIP
Van Riper had at his disposal a computer-generated flotilla of small boats and planes, many of them civilian, which he kept buzzing around the virtual Persian Gulf in circles as the game was about to get under way. As the US fleet entered the Gulf, Van Riper gave a signal - not in a radio transmission that might have been intercepted, but in a coded message broadcast from the minarets of mosques at the call to prayer. The seemingly harmless pleasure craft and propeller planes suddenly turned deadly, ramming into Blue boats and airfields along the Gulf in scores of al-Qaida-style suicide attacks. Meanwhile, Chinese Silkworm-type cruise missiles fired from some of the small boats sank the US fleet's only aircraft carrier and two marine helicopter carriers. The tactics were reminiscent of the al-Qaida attack on the USS Cole in Yemen two years ago, but the Blue fleet did not seem prepared. Sixteen ships were sunk altogether, along with thousands of marines. If it had really happened, it would have been the worst naval disaster since Pearl Harbor.
It was at this point that the generals and admirals monitoring the war game called time out.
SNIP
The whole issue rapidly became a cause celebre at the Pentagon press briefing, where the defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, got the vice-chairman of the joint chiefs-of-staff, General Peter Pace, to explain why the mighty US forces had needed two lives in order to win.
"You kill me in the first day and I sit there for the next 13 days doing nothing, or you put me back to life and you get 13 more days' worth of experiment out of me. Which is a better way to do it?" General Pace asked.
Van Riper agrees with Pace in principle, but says the argument is beside the point.
"Scripting is not a problem because you're trying to learn something," he says. "The difference with this one was that it was advertised up front as free play in order to validate the concepts they were trying to test, to see if they were robust enough to put into doctrine."
It is these "concepts" that are at the core of a serious debate that underlies what would otherwise be a silly row about who was playing fair and who wasn't. The US armed forces are in the throes of what used to be called a "Revolution in Military Affairs", and is now usually referred to simply as "transformation". The general idea is to make the US military more flexible, more mobile and more imaginative. It was this transformation that Rumsfeld was obsessed with during his first nine months in office, until September 11 created other priorities.
The advocates of transformation argue that it requires a whole new mindset, from the generals down to the ordinary infantryman. So military planners, instead of drawing up new tactics, formulate more amorphous "concepts" intended to change fundamentally the American soldier's view of the battlefield.
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One contrary lesson from Millenium 2002 for Iran would be: resist the temptation to shoot-first. In the end, as Iraq has shown, the outcome of a war is determined in political terms, as well as military. Because it was so obviously begun on fraudulent and unjust terms most of the rest of the world could simply not accept, the occupation of Iraq was a disastrous failure for the American and British Administrations who initiated it.
Another lesson is the failure of the concept that America can win wars on the cheap merely because of apparent technological advantage. Rumsfeld’s Revolution in Military Affairs, as Iraq showed, turned out to be far less potent in the real world than it might have once seemed. Reality seems to have been lost somewhere between the 1999 "Desert Crossing" war game -- http://www.gwu.edu/... -- that showed that even with an invasion force of 400,000 soldiers, occupying Iraq would be a mess, and "Polo Step" (2002), the last of the major projections before the invasion, which assumed that a mere 5,000 American troops would be left in Iraq by 2006. See, http://www.gwu.edu/... ; National Security Archives, http://www.gwu.edu/...
In the face of the near certainty of large losses attendant to conventional naval action inside the Gulf, Pentagon gaming then turned to the first-use of tactical nuclear weapons, a threat that was then broadcast. Writing in The Guardian last April, Julian Borger described a joint US-UK wargame performed in 2004 at Ft. Belvior, Virginia. Dubbed "Hotspur 2004", Borger wrote: http://www.guardian.co.uk/...
Hotspur took place at a time of accelerated US planning after the fall of Baghdad for a possible conflict with Iran. That planning is being carried out by US Central Command, responsible for the Middle East and central Asia area of operations, and by Strategic Command, which carries out long-range bombing and nuclear operations.
William Arkin, a former army intelligence officer who first reported on the contingency planning for a possible nuclear strike against Iran in his military column for the Washington Post online, said: "The United States military is really, really getting ready, building war plans and options, studying maps, shifting its thinking."
One of the main problems with plans for the first-use of nuclear weapons is that even the Joint Chiefs of Staff oppose it. As I pointed out in my last diary on the subject, http://www.dailykos.com/... , orders to launch such weapons in a preemptive attack on Iran are more likely to end in the removal of the President than in an actual nuclear first-strike.
The Bush-Cheney and Blair regimes, as we see, actually have very few workable options with Iran other than bluster and bluff. We should expect to continue to hear more of this, until they can be gotten rid of by political means, an event that might hopefully be followed by regime change of the equally obnoxious leader of Iran.
By swallowing the line of the day, we are playing into the hands of the White House and those who want to create a permanent new Cold War with Islam the enemy. Don’t reward their threats, but see them for what they are. Disinformation -- the last gasp of the fatally wounded doctrine of neoconservatism.
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- Mark G. Levey