Setting a trap: Iran's Revolutionary Guard wants a U.S. attack

The degree of alarm and war propaganda generated in the United States and elsewhere by the Iranian nuclear program reflects a variety of ideological, political, and industrial interests that have little or nothing to do with the actual risks a potentially nuclear Iran poses to anyone. What most of those involved in the current debate fail to appreciate, or do not know, is that an important part of Iran's Revolutionary Guard leadership actually wants the United States to attack Iran, and is attempting to provoke it to do so.

Iran's ability to manufacture a militarily useable nuclear weapon is by general professional and intelligence consensus (even in the United States), a decade away. With such a weapon, Iran would be subject to American, Israeli, and other nuclear deterrents, and potentially to obliterating retaliation. ("Iran is not a suicide nation," General John Abizaid, former head of U.S. Central Command, remarked recently.) The nuclear weapon's utility to Iran for any purpose other than deterrence of attack against Iran would be slight to zero.

Sources inside Iran opposed to the present mullahs' government but loyal to the Islamic republic have described to me why leading figures in the Revolutionary Guard believe that an attack on their country by the United States or Israel (or France--since the new Sarkozy government seems open to extreme measures against Iran) would actually produce, in political but also military terms, a great victory for Iran and the Islamic cause. They believe an attack would serve the Revolutionary Guard's own organizational and political interests.

These Revolutionary Guards see Bush-administration hawks, Washington's neoconservatives, and Israel's lobbyists for an attack on Iran, as objectively their allies in promoting a defeat for the United States and a decisive blow to the international standing and strategy of the United States. They believe they can apply to U.S. Navy forces measures of asymmetric warfare, using advanced technology, just as Lebanon's Hezbollah did last year in resisting Israel's ground intervention in Lebanon and destroying Israeli armor. Similar methods, applied by the insurgents in Iraq, have taken a severe toll in American vehicles, armor, and troops.

These Iranian officers think they can successfully attack American naval and air bases with rockets and commando interventions, and sink American warships with attacks by swarming fleets of speedboats and civilian vessels armed with anti-ship and armor-piercing weapons. They think they could blind, overload, or crash ships' radar defenses and countermeasures by the sheer mass of such attacks.

They also believe that after their successful eight-year war with Iraq, they have become masters of entrenchment, subterranean defensive measures, dissimulation and camouflage, military dispersal, misdirection and misinformation, so that even the two thousand U.S. air and missile attacks spoken of in some Washington reports would not be able to find and destroy the essential components of Iran's nuclear research and manufacturing capabilities. U.S. and Israeli attacks could destroy buildings and national infrastructure, causing mainly civilian casualties, but this would strengthen the Iranian people's support for their radical leaders and win for the country international sympathy, with politically devastating effect on U.S. standing in the non-Western world and among U.S. allies. If the United States were to break the world's six-decade-old nuclear truce since Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and use nuclear weapons against Iranian defenses, as Vice President Dick Cheney reportedly wants to do, these Iranians believe America would become an international pariah.

A U.S. attack on Iran would also be welcomed by these Revolutionary Guard officials because the crisis would vault them into leading places in Iran's leadership. These are relatively young men, from poor or modest backgrounds, radicalized by war service in the Revolutionary Guard during the war with Iraq, and by underground and political work since 1980. They are now advanced in their careers, and want power.

They also want material rewards. War is profitable. The Iran-Iraq war was deliberately prolonged by Iran after a 1988 UN cease-fire because during wars civilian economies become black-market economies, and military leaders and military institutions are those best placed to profit.

It may be that the calculations of these Revolutionary Guard officers concerning war with the United States are wrong. But they suggest that starting a war against Iran today carries risks less easily predicted than the present discussion complacently assumes.

[c] 2007 Tribune Media Services International

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