Iran — How To Start A War
By Gwynne Dyer
03/30/07 "Jordan
Times" -- - -“I don’t want to second-guess the
British after the fact,” said US Navy Lieutenant-Commander Erik
Horner, “but our rules of engagement allow a little more
latitude. Our boarding team’s training is a little bit more
towards self-preservation.”
Does that mean that one of his American boarding teams would
have opened fire if it had been them in the two inflatable boats
that were surrounded by Iranian Revolutionary Guard fast patrol
boats off the coast of Iraq last Friday?
“Agreed. Yes.”
Just as well that it was a British boarding team, then. The 15
British sailors and Marines who were captured and taken to
Tehran for “questioning” last week are undoubtedly having an
unpleasant time, but they are alive, and Britain is only
involved in two wars, in Iraq and Afghanistan. If it had been
one of Eriik Horner’s boarding teams, they would all be dead,
and the United States and Iran would now be at war.
Horner is the executive officer of the USS Underwood, the
American frigate that works together with HMS Cornwall, the
British ship that the captive boarding party came from.
Interviewed after the incident by Terri Judd of The Independent,
the only British print journalist on HMS Cornwall, he was
obviously struggling to be polite about the gutless Brits, but
he wasn’t having much success.
“The US navy rules of engagement say we have not only a right to
self-defence but also an obligation to self-defence,” Horner
explained. “(The British) had every right in my mind and every
justification to defend themselves rather than allow themselves
to be taken. Our reaction was, Why didn’t your guys defend
themselves?”
So there they are, eight sailors and seven Marines in two rubber
boats, with personal weapons and no protection whatever, sitting
about 30cm above the water, surrounded by six or seven Iranian
attack boats with mounted machineguns. “Defend yourself” by
opening fire, and after a single long burst from half a dozen
heavy machineguns there will be 14 dead young men and one dead
young woman in two rapidly sinking inflatables, and your country
will be at war. Seems a bit pointless, really.
It’s a cultural thing, at bottom. Britain has a long history of
fighting wars and taking casualties, but the combat doctrines
are less hairy chested. British rules of engagement “are very
much de-escalatory, because we don’t want wars starting”,
explained Admiral Sir Alan West, former First Sea Lord.
“Rather than roaring into action and sinking everything in sight
we try to step back, and that, of course, is why our chaps
were... able to be captured and taken away.”
That emollient British approach is probably why the Iranian
Revolutionary Guard chose to grab British troops rather than
Americans. It was obviously a snatch operation: the Iranians
would not normally have half-a-dozen attack boats ready to go
even if some “coalition” boat checking Iraq-bound ships for
contraband did stray across the invisible dividing line into
Iranian waters (which the British insist they didn’t).
But it was not necessarily an operation ordered from the top of
Iran’s government. In fact, there is no single source of
authority in Iran’s curious system of “multiple governments”, as
one observer labelled the impenetrably complex division of
responsibilities and powers between elected civilians and
unelected mullahs. The Revolutionary Guards (who are quite
different from the regular armed forces) enjoy considerable
autonomy within this system.
According to the US authorities in Iraq, the five Iranian
diplomats arrested by US troops in a raid in Erbil in Iraqi
Kurdistan last January were actually Revolutionary Guards, and
it would seem that their colleagues want them back. Kidnapping
American troops as hostages for an exchange could cause a war,
so they decided to grab some Brits instead. And it will probably
work, after a certain delay.
In this episode, the American reputation for belligerence served
US troops well, diverting Iranian attention to the British
instead. In the larger scheme of things, it is a bit more
problematic.
A quite similar snatch operation against the equally belligerent
Israelis last July led to a monthlong Israeli aerial bombardment
of Lebanon and a retaliatory hail of Hizbollah rockets on
northern Israeli cities. Well over a thousand people were dead
by the end, although nothing was settled.
Any day now, a minor clash along Iraq’s land or sea frontier
with Iran could kill some American troops and give President
Bush an excuse to attack Iran, if he wants one — and he
certainly seems to. If the Revolutionary Guards had got it wrong
last Friday and attacked an American boarding party by mistake,
he would have his excuse now, and bombs might already be falling
on Iran. All the pieces are in place, and the war could start at
any time.
The writer is a London-based independent journalist whose
articles are published in 45 countries.Click here
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