Global Thoughts: The next forever war

By Gwynne Dyer

He didn’t take two weeks to make up his mind whether or not to bomb Iran; only two days. Donald Trump is not a patient man. But he has just started another American ‘forever war’ in the Middle East, so he will have plenty of time to work on his self-control.

Assume for a moment that Iran was really working to build nuclear weapons, allegedly to destroy Israel. Did the US bombing of the Fordow, Natanz and Esfahan nuclear enrichment sites really blast down through 90 metres of rock and permanently eliminate any skulduggery the Iranians were up to there?

Wrong question. If there really was a large stock of highly enriched uranium stored under all that rock, the Iranians have had a week to divide it up into dozens or hundreds of packets and hide it at safe sites all over the country. What would you do if you knew somebody was coming to bomb you in a few days?

Then there’s this business about how highly enriched Iran’s uranium is. 90% is ‘weapons-grade’, and Iran had already enriched a lot of uranium to 60%, so the American B-2s have to start bombing right now. No time to lose. No time even to think.

Nonsense. The ‘gun-type’ atomic bomb just fires one chunk of enriched uranium at another chunk, and so long as the two chunks add up to a ‘critical mass’ the bomb explodes. That critical mass can be quite small if the uranium is highly enriched, but it will still work at 60% although the package will be heavier and bulkier. There was no deadline.

How was Iran going to deliver these hypothetical nuclear weapons? A ballistic missile, presumably, because drones and cruise missiles can’t handle the weight or the range, but very few of Iran’s ballistic missiles get through Israel’s missile defences.

However, just for the sake of argument imagine that one of Iran’s putative nine or ten nuclear missiles does make it through and destroys an Israeli town or city. We are piling improbable on top of implausible here, but what would Israel do then?

Israel would probably respond by leveling Iran, which it is more than capable of doing. It has at least 100 nukes but potentially up to 400. Israel can sterilise the whole of Iran if it chooses (although the fallout and the climatic effects would be a major inconvenience for everybody).

None of these stories we are told makes much sense, so let’s try a different approach. What did the eighteen US intelligence agencies tell the Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, about Iran’s nuclear weapons last March?

They told her that Iran was not building nuclear weapons. Indeed, they explained that Tehran only created a nuclear weapons programme (which never got very far) after Saddam Hussein’s Iraq invaded Iran with US help in the 1980s.

After Saddam was overthrown in 2003 it became clear that there had never been any Iraqi nuclear weapons: it was all a bluff. Thereupon Iran closed its own nuclear weapons programme down, and has never resumed it since.

It’s all just history now. Trump has fallen for Israel’s Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu just as hard as he fell for Russia’s President Vladimir Putin (both strong men with criminal tendencies), and the die is cast. It is likely to be a long, ugly war, conducted mostly by aircraft and missiles at first, but there will be ‘boots on the ground’ if it goes on long enough.

An anti-clerical revolution in Iran could take the country down another road, but if the regime survives the war could last for many years. ‘Persia’ was the rival superpower in Roman times, and a thousand years later it was the other superpower in Ottoman times.

It’s not a superpower any more, but then neither is the United States.