If Moscow and Beijing were interested in creating a new multi-polar world, this would be the chance to do so: they just need to offer Tehran mutual defense treaties. If Tokyo and Brussels were interested in creating such a new order, all they would need to do would be to inform Washington that they would not sign onto any economic sanction on Iran. But no power in a position to remake the world order appears interested in doing any such thing, so the multinational empire slouches toward a confrontation with Iran.
The working class in the USA, the EU, and Japan are neither interested in nor capable of stopping Washington.
That basically leaves the Iranian people -- minus richer Iranians in urban areas** -- to defend their own country. (They can count on no one else, with possible exceptions of Hizballah, the Mahdi Army, and Damascus.***)
At least, Iran's political and military leaders appear very smart, judged by their war games:
<blockquote>. . . Iran's strategic planners are acutely aware that a military confrontation with the technologically more advanced US Army would be as rapid and multi-fronted as the Iran-Iraq War was static and slow-paced. Quite simply, there would not be a single front.
Neither the US nor Israel has ruled out taking military action against nuclear-related targets in Iran if ongoing diplomatic efforts to freeze Tehran's nuclear program do not prove successful.
Accordingly, Iran has been quietly restructuring its military, while carrying out a series of military exercises testing its new military dogma. In December, more than 15,000 members of the regular armed forces participated in war games in northwestern Iran's strategically sensitive East Azerbaijan and West Azerbaijan border provinces that focused on irregular warfare carried out by highly mobile and speedy army units.
In another telling development, a second exercise was launched in the majority-Arab province of Khuzestan, reportedly aimed at quelling insurgencies in areas subject to ethnic unrest and prone to foreign influence. Involving 100,000 troops, the exercise provided a taste of how the Islamic Republic would respond to further disturbances in the strategic, oil-rich province.
The exercise came on the heels of news that the irregular Basij forces that led Iran's offensives against Iraq were being bolstered by so-called Ashura battalions with riot-control training.
It is all part of a fundamental transition that Iran's Revolutionary Guard (RG) is undergoing as it moves away from focusing on waging its defense of the country on the borders - unrealistic in view of the vast territory that requires securing and the gulf separating Iranian and US military capabilities - and toward drawing the enemy into the heartland and defeating it with asymmetrical tactics.
At the same time, the RG is moving away from a joint command with the ordinary army and taking a more prominent role in controlling Iran's often porous borders, even as it makes each of Iran's border provinces autonomous in the event of war. Iranian military planners know that the first step taken by an invading force would be to occupy oil-rich Khuzestan province, secure the sensitive Strait of Hormuz and cut off the Iranian military's oil supply, forcing it to depend on its limited stocks.
Foreign diplomats who monitor Iran's army make it clear that Iran's leadership has acknowledged it stands little chance of defeating the US Army with conventional military doctrine. The shift in focus to guerrilla warfare against an occupying army in the aftermath of a successful invasion mirrors developments in Iraq, where a triumphant US campaign has been followed by three years of slow hemorrhaging at the hands of insurgents.
Tehran argues that it is at a high level of preparedness and points to a number of war games carried out in recent months along its coastal zones, from Bandar Abbas and the Strait of Hormuz in January to the Persian Gulf theater in April and the Khorramshahr naval base and the northwestern parts of the Persian Gulf as of Sunday.
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Iran's new asymmetrical-warfare plan appears to be aimed at neutralizing possible US-led offensives across the Mandali-Ilam (central Iraq-central Iran) axis. The Iranian Zagros mountain range offers a natural first line of defense. It has been reported that the RG is constructing new bases at Khorramabad, Pessyan, Borujerd, Zagheh and Malayer in the province of Lorestan, which would assure the logistics of a quarter of a million troops and provide temporary shelter for half a million refugees from the border. These bases are supposedly complementing older ones further west at Sahneh and Kangavar.
"We know for a fact that no two Western wars are similar," said Hossein, a member of the RG, "and we know there are at least three possible scenarios of attacking these [nuclear] sites, including using their submarines in the Persian Gulf, commandos from the sea, or Mujahideen-e-Khalq trained in Israel and Azerbaijan to destroy the Bushehr nuclear power plant from the inside."
Even while Iran's military is choosing to go low-tech, the country's leadership is continuing to apply advanced technology to military uses. Tehran is continuing with development of its long-range missiles and is forging ahead on its indigenous satellite program that centers on Russian-supplied technology.
In addition, Tehran's aging air-defense system will be boosted by Russian-supplied land-to-air rockets. Also, Iran has aging Chinese missiles that it upgraded and could deploy on coastal batteries, fast attack boats or even warplanes. Finally, were Iran to possess the fearsome Russian-made 3M-82 Moskit anti-ship missiles, it could turn the Persian Gulf into a death trap for the US fleet.
"While Iranian air power is somewhat limited, it has much in terms of land-to-air weaponry and has improvised much as well," Abdurrahman Shayyal, a Saudi Middle East and North Africa analyst, told Asia Times Online. "Furthermore, Iran has proved rather hard to infiltrate, and its military installations and bases are very well protected." (Iason Athanasiadis, "Iran Deploys Its War Machine," 24 May 2006 <http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/HE24Ak05.html></blockquote>
* Gareth Porter, "Bush Ensured Iran Offer Would Be Rejected," 22 August 2006, <http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=34425>. ** With any economic sanctions that have any bite, e.g., sanctions that stop gasoline export to Iran, university students, workers backed by the Solidarity Center, etc. will be up in arms. *** Hugo Chavez talks the talk, but his country's economy, ironically, is among the most dependent on the US economy, so he won't be able to walk the walk on this one: Simon Romero, "For Venezuela, as Distaste for U.S. Grows, So Does Trade," 16 August 2006, <http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/16/world/americas/16venezuela.html>. One hopes that Moscow will continue to sell arms to Iran.
-- Yoshie <http://montages.blogspot.com/> <http://mrzine.org> <http://monthlyreview.org/>