While effect of sanctions for sanctioning countries is one thing, keep in mind oil customers continuing to deal with Iran are demanding lower prices per barrel (incl China) i.e. Iran is getting less money for the remaining trade.
Iran and Related Geopolitical Defense Issues
- Thread starter LogisticsGuy
- Start date
You might want to list North Korea, Yugoslavia, Sudan, and Myanmar/Burma, to name a few, as examples. It is always the same. Those at the top control the guns, so they just take more from those at the bottom to make up the difference
It is pretty well documented that the reason that the Iraq sanctions had “tragic consequences for thousands of kids, but had absolutely no effect on the leadership and Saddam's inner circle” was that Saddam and his people embezzled most of it. It is also speculated that Saddam may have taken steps to make the situation worse in hopes that pressure generated by press reports would result in the sanctions being lifted. It should also be noted that in the northern Iraq where the purchase and distribution of goods under the various sanction regimes were managed separately through the UN instead of through the Iraqi government that child mortality dropped in the same period, something that is conveniently ignored by groups decrying the effects of the sanctions.
There is significant circumstantial evidence that the UN bureaucracy was aware of the fact but failed to bring it to the attention of the Security Council. The UN internal investigations were stonewalled at every turn by the bureaucracy. There are also indications of wide scale bribery, including of the heads of the various sanctions program at the UN and the UN Secretary General.
So in answer to your question – Yes, the sanctions will hurt the Iranian public but have little effect on the upper leadership. The lower leadership, and in particular the Army of the Guardians of the Islamic Revolution (IRGC), will be hit harder, but the politically unconnected will suffer the brunt of the pain.
New wargames and new threats. It seems to be that Iran is looking to show off and antagonize the US. See this article
The John C. Stennis is still in the region so is the threat aimed at the possibility of carrier group being re-tasked to the Straits? And do the Iranians really think this kind of military showmanship will actually work?
The John C. Stennis is still in the region so is the threat aimed at the possibility of carrier group being re-tasked to the Straits? And do the Iranians really think this kind of military showmanship will actually work?
gazzzwp
Member
That's one question; the other has to be "where will all of this enriched uranium finally end up"? They have only one working reactor and it only requires so much fuel. How long before it ends up in the hands of Hezbollah or Hamaz, or the Taliban? Every nation on the planet should be extremely concerned.
As I understand it, the new US Defense Strategy recently outlined by the President pretty much writes off any sort of stabilization ops or nation building by the US armed forces - which is something the US military never wanted to have anything to do with in the first place. So that means the focus of the US military goes back to killing people and breaking thier stuff. The United States biggest problem in both Iraq and Afghanistan were not the "killing people and breaking thier stuff" phases - those were compartively easy. It was/is the stabilzation "being nice to people and puting thier stuff back together" phases that were proving to be the greatest difficulty (and cost in terms of blood/tresaure/support).
So I suspect any potential military clashes with Iran will NOT include any sort of invasion or occupation by ground troops. The US will primarily use a combiation of Air, Naval and Special Operations Forces to stop the Iranians from doing whatever it is we're mad about (blockading the straits, etc.) and punish them badly enough that they don't try it again for a while. There maybe some hope (how realistic I have no idea) that if we punish them badly enough through sanctions and military action, the Iranian people will line the Ayatollahs up against the wall and start over.
The bottom line is that IF the Iranians are dumb enough to close the straights and challenge the USN militarily their WILL be shooting. Maybe not a full on war, but someone will be getting bombed. If the Iranians somehow manage to sink a US warship or pull some equally provocative shennanigans, then it'll be game on. The US is not going to pull a ROK "we know you sank our ship and we're mad, but we won't do anything about it". Both sides are backing themselves into corners they will find it hard to talk themselves out of. If Iran decides to widen the conflict by attacking Isreal or Kuwait or Saudi Arabia or by using terrorist proxies to attack the US or the West, the US is going to utterly wreck Iran, reprecussions be damned, becuase as a nation doing anything else would be politically inconcievable. No great power could allow itself to be openly attacked like that without retaliation.
When we discuss what is rational or not rational for nations we cannot forget that for 50 years the USA and USSR were perfectly willinging to anhiliate each other with nuclear armageddon unde the right cicumstances.
And God forbid if Iran actually builds a bomb (and give it to someone).
If a terrorist organization ever does get a nuke and use it on the US, Isreal or Europe, I wouldn't want to live anywhere in or around the Middle East.
Adrian
So I suspect any potential military clashes with Iran will NOT include any sort of invasion or occupation by ground troops. The US will primarily use a combiation of Air, Naval and Special Operations Forces to stop the Iranians from doing whatever it is we're mad about (blockading the straits, etc.) and punish them badly enough that they don't try it again for a while. There maybe some hope (how realistic I have no idea) that if we punish them badly enough through sanctions and military action, the Iranian people will line the Ayatollahs up against the wall and start over.
The bottom line is that IF the Iranians are dumb enough to close the straights and challenge the USN militarily their WILL be shooting. Maybe not a full on war, but someone will be getting bombed. If the Iranians somehow manage to sink a US warship or pull some equally provocative shennanigans, then it'll be game on. The US is not going to pull a ROK "we know you sank our ship and we're mad, but we won't do anything about it". Both sides are backing themselves into corners they will find it hard to talk themselves out of. If Iran decides to widen the conflict by attacking Isreal or Kuwait or Saudi Arabia or by using terrorist proxies to attack the US or the West, the US is going to utterly wreck Iran, reprecussions be damned, becuase as a nation doing anything else would be politically inconcievable. No great power could allow itself to be openly attacked like that without retaliation.
When we discuss what is rational or not rational for nations we cannot forget that for 50 years the USA and USSR were perfectly willinging to anhiliate each other with nuclear armageddon unde the right cicumstances.
And God forbid if Iran actually builds a bomb (and give it to someone).
If a terrorist organization ever does get a nuke and use it on the US, Isreal or Europe, I wouldn't want to live anywhere in or around the Middle East.
Adrian
I think your difficulty in understanding the elegance of my plain is that you do not understand the amount of over whelming fire power that now be brought to bear on the modern battlefield. It is understandable I guess, because there have been so few opportunities to employ that firepower because of the political considerations caused by civilian deaths. We have all seen the vids of fuel air explosives and showers of contracted cluster bombs falling over large areas leaving nothing untouched but how seldom are they used. Not very often.
Think what these weapons can do and all of the things like them, we have not yet discussed can do, when used from a prepared defensive position, against lightly arms and weak forces, when there are not any restrictions in these weapons use.
With complete air power control in both fixed wing and helicopters, plus drones, remote sensors, land and sea mines, and all the rest, massing large forces to attack an air base only makes them easier to find and cheaper to kill. Destroy everything on the island that could help them survive. Though over time they could gather together enough people to attack a few times at great cost but they would not be able to run very far after they make themselves known before they too were killed. To be followed by retaliation raids against targets on the mainland to discourage additional attempts. There has to be a limit the martyrs they chose to sacrifice for a failed policy?
Rocket or artillery attacks from the mainland would not be very effective and there is always counter batter fire. Modern systems are very fast and effective. The first returning round would be in the air before their first ones landed.
But if things do go hot in the gulf, I doubt that the current American administration would act as boldly as I have propose but that doesn't mean it wouldn’t work just fine. Let us hope it doesn’t go hot.
As far as I know and have learnt, the US & USSR had the capability to, the readiness to but did not thave the willingness to use nuclear weapons against each other. The Cuban misle crisis being an example of nations deciding that pointless waste of millions of lives over an issue that can be diplomatically solved is irrational.
Iran does threaten the middle east, Israel, USA & it's allies in many ways, but consider this : Will they actively look for an excuse to start a war with USA which may or may not drag Israel & SA into it, and which may or may not go nuclear, resulting in utter devastation of the region & the deaths of millions ?
Even the most hardline right-wingers balk at the prospect of annhilation at such a large scale. In my honest opinion it's precisely the reason ROK did not retaliate in force against DPRK, why India has been patient with Pakistan since the Kargil war etc.
If war breaks out in the strait, it seems to me that it will either be fought exclusively in the strait of Hormuz, or at this point of time will be fought conventionally. But still there's no doubt that things are going to get quite exciting indeed.It will get ugly, but IMHO military action is required to prevent Iran from getting its hands on a nuclear weapon.
It was not all due to the Ba'ath leadership. A lot of items, including pencils and drugs, which had dual purposes [not sure how!] were on the ban list. In the 1990's an uncle of mine went with a UN fact finding mission to visit hospitals. The hospitals were short of almost everything and kids were dying from stuff that was easily preventable!. Granted, Saddam had a big hand in this, and there may have been corruption at various levels in the UN, but the fact remains the sanctions were devastating for ordinary Iraqis.
And how exactly does Iran ''threaten'' the Middle East? Has it invaded anyone recently, does it have troops on foreign soil in various countries in the region, does its navy dominate the waters of the Gulf? As I've mentioned before on a number of occasions, if Iran does indeed have a nuclear arms programme running, it is intended sole fore regime survival, to ensure that Western troops, with Sunni Arab allies in tow, don't enter Tehran........ It is not intended to wipe Israel of the map, threaten Western interests or world peace.........
Agreed, I honestly cannot see Iran wanting a nuclear weapon for anything other than a deterrent. In some ways it's understandable, they have an unofficially-yet-almost-certainly nuclear Israel nearby that they're not good mates with, are not exactly friendly with some major powers which have a recent trend of invading countries, and live in a pretty unstable region generally.
The problem is not firepower, it is identifying legitimate targets. Have you got a new sensor that can identify the intensions of an individual? All the firepower in the world will not do you a bit of good if you cannot find your targets.
Destroy everything on the island that could help them to survive? Do you intend to start by massacring the indigenous population, or just tossing them in a concentration camp?
What makes you think that there will be mass attacks? More like 1 sniper, a guy with a MANPAD below the flight path for outbound jets, or 5 men and a mortar. A big attack will be a squad of sappers slipping through the wire with demo charges, assault rifles, grenades, and suicide vests, once they are in close to your people all of your heavy firepower is useless and you are going gun-to-gun with them.
Retaliation raids against what targets on the mainland? Are you going to be targeting civilians? Because all the military targets will be disbursed among them.
Couple guys get out of a truck and set up a launch trough for Katyusha rocket, set the timer to launch in 2 minutes to 2 days, and drive off. If it is 2 minutes the launcher is next to the elementary school and the press bus arrives in 10 minutes, too far out to see the rocket launch but just in time to document you killing and maiming a whole bunch of little kids. If it is set for 2 days the launcher is out in the boonies and you just killed an acre of sand. I suspect you will manage to kill some of the bad guys, they are going to be laughing themselves sick at the stupid Americans.
Something to keep in mind – The Tet Offense was an American victory, but it won the war for North Vietnam.
:daz
Traditionally, anytime anyone in the world has drawn a line through international waters and laid claim to it, the US has rolled in and sunk or shot down anything enforcing it. It's a tradition I feel needs upholding.
Oh, I understand very well what massed & well-targeted firepower can do. But it's obvious that you don't understand that so do the Iranians, & they also know ways to counter it. The pointlessness of counter-battery fire against harassing rocketry has already been described to you. Now imagine that constantly going on, targeted on your air bases. It's sheer stupidity to put air bases, as you propose, within range of such weapons.
Iran has huge stocks of artillery rockets, & can manufacture one-off disposable launchers by the million, if need be. Their cost is trivial. Aiming them accurately enough is easy. Launch sites can be pre-surveyed, & marked up. A truck turns up, plants its load on the marks on the ground, & drives off. Unless you have constant surveillance of a large area of the mainland, & shoot up anything that looks as if it might be a rocket team, you will get hit. And often.
You assume that the enemy will co-operate. That is foolish.
What you describe here is the NEW method of warfare where propaganda and world opinion have become the weapon of choice. For this to be successful you have to convince the world that your civilians are worth saving, and the attacking country has to care about world opinion. Israel is currently in a middle ground on these types of propaganda attacks. Israel doesn't seem to particularly want to care about the world opinion, but the pressure against them is mounting and the tactics have begun to work.
In a fight with Iran, it will again depend on world opinion and you can expect to see the heart felt stories of injured children and wailing women to help turn your support for the peace loving Iranian underdog against the war mongering United States and her allies. This is one reason why it is important to the U.S. that Iran fire first, if an engagement does occur. It is Iran's actions leading up to that war shot that will determine the level of sympathy many will have for them.
If the world becomes angry enough at Iran, then support will be harder to sway when the inevitable images of civilian casualties start showing up on CNN and Al Jazeera. No weapon is accurate enough to hit targets buried next to hospitals and schools without causing civilians deaths. I would not put it past the fanatical Iranian to intentionally stand near such targets at an attempt at martyrdom so their death CAN become a political weapon in the media.
Still, I feel the chance of engagement can be avoided even still. Iran needs to abandon enrichment and accept the offer of reactor fuel from a friendly state, like Russia or China. I do not believe the west is worried about nuclear power plants in Iran, just the enriched uranium that can be easily moved, easily not recorded, and easily "lost". The average Iranian civilian needs to realize though that uranium has a specific footprint and if used as a weapon anywhere, it WILL be traced back to them and the consequences will be tragic as they will have lost all credibility for the future justification of their nuclear program.
Sure, it's not fair that several countries already have nuclear enrichment programs and nuclear weapons. However, for the world to ever get rid of these weapons, we must restrict proliferation, not expand it. The United States and the Russian Federation have been reducing their stock piles significantly, though they still have a ways to go. France announced they will reduce the number of air delivered warheads by a third, and the UK is reducing their nuclear armory by about 40 warheads. How can these countries justify their reductions if the threat of nuclear attack is going up, not down?
While I think you are probably correct, there is still the problem that what may seem perfectly reasonable to the US or a European country may seem very different to the Ayatollahs that run Iran. We think in terms of the secular. Of economics, of politics, of what other "rational" actors would do based on what we think we would do in a given scenario. When religion gets in the mix, a lot of "rational" can go right out the window.
If Iran really only wants nuclear arms for its own security and to ensure regime survival, and it has no agressive intentions towards the outside world, then it should start acting that way. Stop supporting terrorists (Hezbollah). Stop threatening to destroy Isreal., etc. and maybe the US and the West would be a lot less worried. Look at Saudi Arabia - they hardly share "western" values, and they clearly don't "like" the west, but they play nice, so instead of sanctions, they get F-15s and M1A2s. The west would love to have Iran as an ally. In many ways, they would make a better ally than Saudi Arabia. Iran is more westernized & more secular than Saudi Arabia, and has at least the framework of a democratic system in place. Take the Ayatollahs out of the picture and Iran starts to look more like a Turkey.
Adrian
I wish that you had read my post more carefully. I stipulated that after the island is taken, that all of the civilians be transferred to the Iranian mainland so they would be out of the line of fire, to put an additional burden upon the Iranian government’s resources, and to spread discontent within Iran population, with no civilians to worry about you do not have to identify individuals. That is the entire point. If it moves shoot it. Which you can get away with just because it is an island.
As for the lone gunman battle plain that you propose, if the perimeter is large enough, and the land mines and other traps numerous enough, it will only be an occasional inconvenience to operations not attrition warfare, far easier that the operations that go on every day in Afghanistan.
To begin with Katyusha rockets and all like weapons are so inaccurate that they are only useful, to the extent that they are useful at all is to attack large population areas. They are only weapons to frightening civilians unless you can fire hundreds at a time.
This is exactly what I meant when I said that Iran "threatens" Israel, US etc.
Stop the anti-US rhetoric, the support of the Taliban & terrorist organizations in the region, stop repeatedly saying that you want to wipe Israel out of the map, stop the inflammatory religious propaganda and then we can say that yes, Iran dosen't threaten another nation.
Openly claiming that you want to wipe another country off the map, then aggressively attempting to obtain nuclear weapons is quite a valid threat, in my opinion.
So strike the factories producing the launchers, and the powerplants running those factories? Sure Iran will be able to produce them in small workshops, but you can destroy their airbases, their major factories, major troop formations. Sure they can continue small level rocket attacks similar to what Hezbollah and Hamas do to Israel, but you can't maintain any sort of modern warn machine. And without their speedboats, subs, F-5 clones, and domestic MBTs, by the time the US is done with a thorough air campaign, Iran won't be a regional power.
While a rational evaluation may reach the above, when dealing with a theocracy you also have to consider the religious angle. The Shia prophesies for the return of the 12th Iman and the Day of Judgment include the following signs:
- The vast majority of people who profess to be Muslim will be so only in name (i.e. all non-Shia Muslims) despite their practice of Islamic rites and it will be they who make war with the Mahdi. (i.e. Shia Muslims)
- Before his coming will come the red death and the white death, killing two thirds of the world's population. The red death signifies violence and the white death is plague. One third of the world's population will die from the red death and the other third from the white death. (basically WWIII)
- Several figures will appear: the one-eyed Antichrist (Masih ad-Dajjal), the Sufyani and the Yamani.
- There will be a great conflict in the land of Syria, until it is destroyed. (guess what is happening now)
- Death and fear will afflict the people of Baghdad and Iraq. A fire will appear in the sky and a redness will cover them. (Sounds like a nuke to me)
- The Arabs will throw off the reins of the foreigners and take possession of their land, overthrowing those rulers that are foreign agents. Then they will massacre and annihilate the Jewish nation with great cruelty so that the nation is forever destroyed. Shortly after, they will address "our Shia" as "Jews" as well and fall upon them with equal cruelty and it it will be during this that the Mahdi will return and crush the oppressors.
:daz
Indeed - but that is war on a completely different scale from what was proposed. That's a conventional strategic bombing campaign.
What rip proposed was seizing an island just off the Iranian coast, in the Strait of Hormuz, to use as a base to keep the Iranians from interfering with shipping. The all-out war you suggest would render that completely irrelevant. It's utterly disproportionate in both scope & cost, & cost-ineffective. It's like spending a million dollars hunting down every potential car thief in town to protect an old Lada.
Good grief! Have you no conception of the difference in resources between the Taliban & the Iranian state?
Nobody is talking about a lone gunman, but thousands of them (just not all at once), so there are almost always a few out there somewhere. I've told you, more than once, that the entire island is in range of artillery rockets fired from the mainland, so clearing the civilian population from it won't put you out of range, it'll just give Iran a lot of recruits, who know the island intimately.. You don't have to fire hundreds at a time, but if you fire thousands, some will hit. They're accurate enough to make your air bases vulnerable. They won't necessarily all be unguided. Some may scatter mines across your runways. BTW, have you thought of how you're going to build your proposed airbases, within range of that sort of firepower?
You've fallen into a couple of traps. One is the disproportionality trap, & the other one is that you've become protective of your idea. You're concentrating on ways to justify your idea, rather than considering it objectively, & you've not asked yourself whether the game is worth the candle. The realistic parts of the objective you originally stated can be achieved much more easily, & cheaply, without this ridiculous idea of occupying Qeshm, & it won't achieve some of the aims you set out for it.
Remember the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon in 1982? It cost them more, in money & lives, than all the cross-border rockets & raids in the previous 30 years - and it replaced a fairly ineffective enemy with the far more dangerous Hezbollah. Your plan is similar.
Bases in Afghanistan are able to patrol outside their perimeters, & get intelligence from local inhabitants. You can't patrol the mainland, & intend to remove all sources of possible local intelligence.