Is War Coming to Iran?

Kurt

Junior Member
Sorry for the long read, but it's an excellent introduction to the thought process of a sea power. Not everything is related to diplomacy, but it creates a framework that helps to understand the issue. There's perhaps a better modern work, but Corbett is pretty much the traditional introduction (and not as hyped as Mahan).

If you want to understand the policy and objectives of the US and her allies, it boils down to: they are the leading sea powers and none is capable of challenging that. They want the situation to stay like this and they do exploit the specific advantages deriving from that status. It's a game of interests and if you have one undoubtable advantage, you make it count as much as you can in order to win all games and try to strengthen it in order to ensure continued supremacy for pushing your interests against your would-be competitors.

The whole world is dependent on free sea lines of communication and there's only one system of alliances that has control and shows much good will by not pressing their capabilities too much. The book highlights the Napoleonic era very well and how someone in control of Europe and the largest part of the human population had a major problem with a tiny island nation sea power that showed utmost capability.
 

delft

Brigadier
To understand US and NATO & GCC policy, it helps to read
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by Julian Corbett, a classic like Mahan, A.T., The Influence of Sea Power upon History. The powers currently involved all play their games just fine.
Thank you for reminding me of that book. In order to ease future house movings my wife and I are getting rid of as many books as possible, and getting many older books in electronic form, mostly from Gutenberg. I already am reading, slowly, Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, that among other things says you can't make a profit on the house you live in. That's just what estate agents and the banks they serve sold to people - get rich, buy a house. The book is more than a thousand pages, in fact several volumes when I thought of buying it, but downloading it costs now only a few minutes.
 

AssassinsMace

Lieutenant General
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Watch the video and all the finger-pointing only at China just shows they were never serious about sanctions on Iran. The NYTimes reported that one UK bank is doing $250 billion of business with Iran. That like China's entire business dealings in Iran. And now after the US made a big whoopdi-do about what countries were going to be punished for doing business with Iran with South Korea being one of the first to fall in line with the US's wishes, now South Korea has announced they are going to start importing more Iranian oil.
 

SampanViking

The Capitalist
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One little snippet I keep hearing is that Iran has very little refining capacity on its territory and so mainly exports raw crude. This has apparently given them an advantage against sanctions, as it means that its customers have to refine the stuff themselves and this means having the refineries calibrated to processing Iranian crude.

Recalibrating to be able to process other crudes is an expensive business and having to close refineries on account of buying refined products is a political no-no.

That being said, those calling in earnest for the bombing of Iran are a rapidly shrinking and increasingly shrill set of voices off right, most of whom lack any serious credibility internationally.
 

Kurt

Junior Member
This lack of refinery also means that Iran does not earn money by employing people in a productive process for a more valuable export item.
Bombing Iran does not seem an option now, but I have serious doubts that it's off the table and limited to the borders of shrill insanity.

Any kind of pressure against the economic connections of Iran is going to drive up their costs and marginalize their profits from global economic interaction. The follow on decreasing buying power on the international market means less monetary value available for spending and keeping the same level of military capability would eat an ever increasing share of the disposeable income redistribution. In the end, Iran might be blocked, not bombed, into a sorry state of defensive capability and be a brilliant example of ideas subsummized under noopolitik, smart power and soft power exercised for opposed achievement of one's will. Finalizing military action will be more about the wolf attacking the little pig in the straw hut than in the brick or wooden one.
 

delft

Brigadier
Asia Times on line publishes an article by Peter Jenkins, former UK ambassador to the IAEA, about the lack of respect for international law from the warmongering countries:
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Will Iran be US's Melos?
By Peter Jenkins

One of the most depressing aspects of all the talk about Israel or the United States destroying Iran's nuclear facilities (and much else besides, no doubt) is the near absence of any reference to international law. Even so distinguished an expert as Anthony Cordesman seems to take it for granted that there will be no legal impediment to the US attacking Iran if a credible threat of an attack fails to intimidate Iran into making the concessions required to pacify Israel.

In my country, Britain, on February 20, 2012, members of the House of Commons spent five hours debating whether the use of force against Iran would be "productive" without dwelling more than cursorily on the legal aspects of the question.

How is one to account for this blind spot? Are ignorance and oversight to blame, or has respect for international law gone out of fashion?

It's hard to believe that anyone who has policy-making responsibilities that involve other states, or who takes a professional interest in such policy-making, can be unaware of what the bed-rock of the post-1945 international system has to say about war-making. The United Nations Charter was drafted to be understood by a much wider readership than international law-focused lawyers. Paragraphs 3 and 4 of Article 2 of the Charter could hardly be clearer:

3. All Members shall settle their international disputes by peaceful means in such a manner that international peace and security and justice are not endangered.

4. All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any other state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations.
Read in conjunction with Article 1, which spells out the Purposes of the UN, and Articles 39 to 50, which detail how the Security Council should react to "Threats to the Peace, Breaches of the Peace and Acts of Aggression", these paragraphs suggest that the use of force by one state against another state is only lawful if the Security Council authorizes it.

An exception to this rule can be found in Article 51 of the Charter: the right of self-defense if an armed attack occurs against a member. But this is irrelevant to the Iranian nuclear dispute at the present juncture, for reasons set out most recently by Dan Joyner.

These points are so easily understood, and so clearly central to any proposal to attack Iran for its nuclear activities, that ignorance and oversight can hardly explain their widespread absence from the public debate, or the conspicuous failure of Western politicians to inject a reminder of the legal dimension into that debate.

My sense is that one must look elsewhere for an explanation: foreign policy communities in the US, Israel and the United Kingdom have lost sight of the importance of upholding international law to preserve the post-1945 international system, which underpins Western security and prosperity. They have reverted to the belief in Realpolitik of an earlier age: state military power is a legitimate instrument for resolving disputes.

I am reminded of one of the most striking episodes in Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War: the Athenian extinction of Melos - the men massacred, the women and children sold into slavery - because the people of Melos refused to submit to Athenian demands. (At one point the Athenian delegates say: "You know as well as we do that justice is only at issue between equals in power; the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must".)

Thucydides saw this cruel, disproportionate act as the moment at which 5th-century BC Athens succumbed to hubris. Drawing on an idea familiar to the Classical tragedians, Thucydides implies that it was this act that triggered the misfortunes that reduced Athens to a has-been within 12 years.

Well, I must not press the analogy, which is only potential at this stage. The point I really want to make is that the West has much to gain by harnessing its military power to respect for the UN Charter and other universal legal instruments - and quite a lot to lose by showing disregard for international law.

I have heard it said (but cannot verify) that at some point president Bill Clinton observed that the US had 20 years to create a global order in which Americans could feel secure when the US no longer had a quasi-monopoly of military strength. If this is true, it suggests that president Clinton understood how much even the greatest of powers has to gain from fostering the rule of law at the international level, and from resisting the impulse to use force for selfish, non-collective ends. No power has stayed on top forever.

Nearly 300 years ago, Montesquieu, a thinker much admired by the founders of the Union, wrote: "Political strength resides in renouncing self-interest, hard though that is." Good leaders have long known that selfishness corrodes the loyalty and obedience of the led, as do injustice and putting the interests of a few ahead of the interest of the whole.

I am conscious how quaint these words will seem to some readers. So much of the contemporary foreign policy debate seems to take place in a moral vacuum, with little or no reference to justice and the rule of law in international affairs. I am almost embarrassed to be using such words.

Yet it seems to me rational to suggest that the post-1945 international system is the best yet devised, that it has brought great benefits to the West, that its preservation requires commitment from the leading power of the age, and that the leading power has to marry justice to strength to retain the loyalty of other participants. If I'm right, treating Iran unlawfully is a bad option.

Peter Jenkins is a former United Kingdom ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Association (IAEA). The opinions expressed are his own.

(Copyright 2012 Peter Jenkins)

Used with permission lobelog.com, Jim Lobe's blog on foreign policy.

Here is one response to this article:
Masood Mortazavi · Farhad
Melos was a helpless tiny Island in the claws of Athens.

Remember Cuba, still standing, and by any rational estimate and keen observation of what has been going on, Iran is much more likely to be judged US' Syracuse not its Melos.
 

i.e.

Senior Member
Asia Times on line publishes an article by Peter Jenkins, former UK ambassador to the IAEA, about the lack of respect for international law from the warmongering countries:
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Here is one response to this article:

I am heartened by the fact that there are still rational and fair minded people that reads and values history in this world, although their number is shrinking in the establishment.

There will be many Melos,
The question is, Who will be Sparta.
 
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solarz

Brigadier
I am heartened by the fact that there are still rational and fair minded people that reads and values history in this world, although their number is shrinking in the establishment.

There will be many Melos,
The question is, Who will be Sparta.

Laws are only effective if they can be enforced. Who is going to enforce international laws upon the USA? Is it a wonder then, that some countries do not even consider international laws in their decision making?
 

i.e.

Senior Member
Laws are only effective if they can be enforced. Who is going to enforce international laws upon the USA? Is it a wonder then, that some countries do not even consider international laws in their decision making?

There were never a higehr authority to enforce international law,

international law is enforce by the mutual understanding that following the rule of intternational law it benefits everyone in the system. Only when nations are isolated from the consequences of violating international law, domestically that they cease to view International law worthy to respect. the nations that are isolated are either what one common;y called phariah states, or those who are so rich and powerful that they can spend a tiny amount of comparity GDP to destroy another state yet there is very little noticable affect to themselves.
 

Finn McCool

Captain
Registered Member
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Pretty good article from Wired discussing the possible composition and target list for an American attack on Iran's nuclear and missile sites. I think they greatly underestimate the role that TLACMs and EW would play. Those would be the first wave of strikes/SEAD, not fighters and bombers
 
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