The Nation
The administration’s escalating aggression toward Iran could be
leading to a full-blown war ahead of the November election.
By Bob Dreyfuss
August 13, 2020
Was Donald Trump’s January 3 drone assassination of Maj. Gen. Qasem
Soleimani the first step in turning the simmering cold war between the
United States and Iran into a hot war in the weeks before an American
presidential election? Of course, there’s no way to know, but behind
by double digits in most national polls and flanked by ultra-hawkish
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Trump is a notoriously impetuous and
erratic figure. In recent weeks, for instance, he didn’t hesitate to
dispatch federal paramilitary forces to American cities run by
Democratic mayors and his administration also seems to have launched a
series of covert actions against Tehran that look increasingly overt
and have Iran watchers concerned about whether an October surprise
could be in the cards.
Much of that concern arises from the fact that, across Iran, things
have been blowing up or catching fire in ways that have seemed both
mysterious and threatening. Early last month, for instance, a
suspicious explosion at an Iranian nuclear research facility at
Natanz, which is also the site of its centrifuge production, briefly
grabbed the headlines. Whether the site was severely damaged by a bomb
smuggled into the building or some kind of airstrike remains unknown.
“A Middle Eastern intelligence official said Israel planted a bomb in
a building where advanced centrifuges were being developed,” reported
The New York Times. Similar fiery events have been plaguing the
country for weeks. On June 26, for instance, there was “a huge
explosion in the area of a major Iranian military and weapons
development base east of Tehran.” On July 15, seven ships caught fire
at an Iranian shipyard. Other mysterious fires and explosions have hit
industrial facilities, a power plant, a missile production factory, a
medical complex, a petrochemical plant, and other sites as well.
“Some officials say that a joint American-Israeli strategy is
evolving—some might argue regressing—to a series of short-of-war
clandestine strikes,” concluded another report in the Times.
Some of this sabotage has been conducted against the backdrop of a
two-year-old “very aggressive” CIA action plan to engage in offensive
cyber attacks against that country. As a Yahoo! News investigative
report put it: “The Central Intelligence Agency has conducted a series
of covert cyber operations against Iran and other targets since
winning a secret victory in 2018 when President Trump signed what
amounts to a sweeping authorization for such activities, according to
former US officials with direct knowledge of the matter… The finding
has made it easier for the CIA to damage adversaries’ critical
infrastructure, such as petrochemical plants.”
Meanwhile, on July 23, two US fighter jets buzzed an Iranian civilian
airliner in Syrian airspace, causing its pilot to swerve and drop
altitude suddenly, injuring a number of the plane’s passengers.
For many in Iran, the drone assassination of Soleimani—and the
campaign of sabotage that followed—has amounted to a virtual
declaration of war. The equivalent to the Iranian major general’s
presidentially ordered murder, according to some analysts, would have
been Iran assassinating Secretary of State Pompeo or Chairman of the
Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley, although such analogies actually
understate Soleimani’s stature in the Iranian firmament.
In its aftermath, Iran largely held its fire, its only response being
a limited, telegraphed strike at a pair of American military bases in
Iraq. If Soleimani’s murder was intended to draw Iran into a
tit-for-tat military escalation in an election year, it failed. So
perhaps the United States and Israel designed the drumbeat of attacks
against critical Iranian targets this summer as escalating
provocations meant to goad Iran into retaliating in ways that might
provide an excuse for a far larger US response.
Such a conflict-to-come would be unlikely to involve US ground forces
against a nation several times larger and more powerful than Iraq.
Instead, it would perhaps involve a sustained campaign of airstrikes
against dozens of Iranian air defense installations and other military
targets, along with the widespread network of facilities that the
United States has identified as being part of that country’s nuclear
research program.
The “Art” of the Deal in 2020
In addition to military pressure and fierce sanctions against the
Iranian economy, Washington has been cynically trying to take
advantage of the fact that Iran, already in a weakened state, has been
especially hard hit by the Covid-19 pandemic. Those American sanctions
have, for instance, made it far harder for that country to get the
economic support and medical and humanitarian supplies it so
desperately needs, given its soaring death count.
According to a report by the European Leadership Network,
Rather than easing the pressure during the crisis, the United
States has applied four more rounds of sanctions since February and
contributed to the derailing of Iran’s application for an IMF
[International Monetary Fund] loan. The three special financial
instruments designed to facilitate the transfer of humanitarian aid to
Iran in the face of secondary sanctions on international banking
transactions…have proven so far to have been one-shot channels,
stymied by US regulatory red tape.
To no avail did Human Rights Watch call on the United States in April
to ease its sanctions in order to facilitate Iran’s ability to grapple
with the deadly pandemic, which has officially killed nearly 17,000
people since February (or possibly, if a leaked account of the
government’s actual death figures is accurate, nearly 42,000).
Iran has every reason to feel aggrieved. At great political risk,
President Hassan Rouhani and Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei agreed in
2015 to a deal with the United States and five other world powers over
Iran’s nuclear research program. That accord, the Joint Comprehensive
Plan of Action (JCPOA), accomplished exactly what it was supposed to
do: It led Iran to make significant concessions, cutting back both on
its nuclear research and its uranium enrichment program in exchange
for an easing of economic sanctions by the United States and other
trade partners.
Though the JCPOA worked well, in 2018 President Trump unilaterally
withdrew from it, reimposed far tougher sanctions on Iran, began what
the administration called a campaign of “maximum pressure” against
Tehran, and since assassinating Soleimani has apparently launched
military actions just short of actual war. Inside Iran, Trump’s
confrontational stance has helped tilt politics to the right,
undermining Rouhani, a relative moderate, and eviscerating the
reformist movement there. In elections for parliament in February,
ultraconservatives and hardliners swept to a major victory.
But the Iranian leadership can read a calendar, too. Like voters in
the United States, they know that the Trump administration is probably
going to be voted out of office in three months. And they know that,
in the event of war, it’s more likely than not that many
Americans—including, sadly, some hawkish Democrats in Congress, and
influential analysts at middle-of-the-road Washington think tanks—will
rally to the White House. So unless the campaign of covert warfare
against targets in Iran were to intensify dramatically, the Iranian
leadership isn’t likely to give Trump, Pompeo, and crew the excuse
they’re looking for.
As evidence that Iran’s leadership is paying close attention to the
president’s electoral difficulties, Khamenei only recently rejected in
the most explicit terms possible what most observers believe is yet
another cynical ploy by the American president, when he suddenly asked
Iran to reengage in direct leader-to-leader talks. In a July 31
speech, the Iranian leader replied that Iran is well aware Trump is
seeking only sham talks to help him in November. (In June, Trump
tweeted Iran: “Don’t wait until after the U.S. Election to make the
Big deal! I’m going to win!”) Indeed, proving that Washington has no
intention of negotiating with Iran in good faith, after wrecking the
JCPOA and ratcheting up sanctions, the Trump administration announced
an onerous list of 12 conditions that would have to precede the start
of such talks. In sum, they amounted to a demand for a wholesale,
humiliating Iranian surrender. So much for the art of the deal in
2020.
October Surprises, Then and Now
Meanwhile, the United States isn’t getting much support from the rest
of the world for its thinly disguised effort to create chaos, a
possible uprising, and the conditions to force regime change on Iran
before November 3. At the United Nations, when Secretary of State
Pompeo called on the Security Council to extend an onerous arms
embargo on Iran, not only did Russia and China promise to veto any
such resolution but America’s European allies opposed it, too. They
were particularly offended by Pompeo’s threat to impose “snapback”
economic sanctions on Iran as laid out in the JCPOA if the arms
embargo wasn’t endorsed by the council. Not lost on the participants
was the fact that, in justifying his demand for such new UN sanctions,
the American secretary of state was invoking the very agreement that
Washington had unilaterally abandoned. “Having quit the JCPOA, the
U.S. is no longer a participant and has no right to trigger a snapback
at the U.N.,” was the way China’s UN ambassador put it.
That other emerging great power has, in fact, become a major spoiler
and Iranian ally against the Trump administration’s regime-change
strategy, even as its own relations with Washington grow grimmer by
the week. Last month, the The New York Times reported that Iran and
China had inked “a sweeping economic and security partnership that
would clear the way for billions of dollars of Chinese investments in
energy and other sectors, undercutting the Trump administration’s
efforts to isolate the Iranian government.” The 18-page document
reportedly calls for closer military cooperation and a $400 billion
Chinese investment and trade accord that, among other things, takes
direct aim at the Trump-Pompeo effort to cripple Iran’s economy and
its oil exports.
According to Shireen Hunter, a veteran Middle Eastern analyst at
Georgetown University, that accord should be considered a
world-changing one, as it potentially gives China “a permanent
foothold in Iran” and undermines “U.S. strategic supremacy in the
[Persian] Gulf.” It is, she noted with some alarm, a direct result of
Trump’s anti-Iranian obsession and Europe’s reluctance to confront
Washington’s harsh sanctions policy.
On June 20, in a scathing editorial, The Washington Post agreed,
ridiculing the administration’s “maximum pressure” strategy against
Iran. Not only had the president failed to bring down Iran’s
government or compelled it to change its behavior in conflicts in
places like Syria and Yemen, but now, in a powerful blow to US
interests, “an Iranian partnership with China…could rescue Iran’s
economy while giving Beijing a powerful new place in the region.”
If, however, the traditional Washington foreign policy establishment
believes that Trump’s policy toward Iran is backfiring and so working
against US hegemony in the Persian Gulf, his administration seems not
to care. As evidence mounts that its approach to Iran isn’t having the
intended effect, the White House continues apace: squeezing that
country economically, undermining its effort to fight Covid-19,
threatening it militarily, appointing an extra-hard-liner as its
“special envoy” for Iran, and apparently (along with Israel) carrying
out a covert campaign of terrorism inside the country.
Over the past four decades, “October surprise” has evolved into a
catch-all phrase meaning any unexpected action by a presidential
campaign just before an election designed to give one of the
candidates a surprise advantage. Ironically, its origins lay in Iran.
In 1980, during the contest between President Jimmy Carter and former
California governor Ronald Reagan, rumors surfaced that Carter might
stage a raid to rescue scores of American diplomats then held captive
in Tehran. (He didn’t.) According to other reports, the Reagan
campaign had made clandestine contact with Tehran aimed at persuading
that country not to release its American hostages until after the
election. (Two books, October Surprise by Gary Sick, a senior national
security adviser to Carter, and Trick or Treason by investigative
journalist Bob Parry delved into the possibility that candidate
Reagan, former CIA director Bill Casey, and others had engaged in a
conspiracy with Iran to win that election.)
Consider it beyond irony if, this October, the latest election
“surprise” were to take us back to the very origins of the term in the
form of some kind of armed conflict that could only end terribly for
everyone involved. It’s a formula for disaster and like so many other
things, when it comes to Donald J. Trump, it can’t be ruled out.
Bob DreyfussBob Dreyfuss, a Nation contributing editor, is an
independent investigative journalist who specializes in politics and
national security.