CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

Escalation of this War Could Shatter Iran into Ethnic Enclaves

Antiwar rally in Olympia, Washington in 2020, with mock headstones representing Middle East interventions since 1953. Photo: Zoltán Grossman.

As a political-cultural geographer who has long been an antiwar organizer and studied the history of U.S. military interventions, it’s clear that the war on Iran could set into motion a regional conflagration, the violent break-up of Iran into ethnic enclaves, and a toll that would make the Iraq War look like a warm-up exercise.

The U.S. role in the Mideast began with the 1953 CIA coup that toppled a democratically elected government that had nationalized the oil industry for the benefit of its people, replacing him with the dictatorial monarch Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, whom the U.S. backed with both weapons and nuclear technology. It’s in Iran that the U.S. regional domination began, and where it might confront the hardest obstacles, at home and abroad.

Most Americans concur with the country singer Alan Jackson, who sang in 2002, “I’m not a real political man… I’m not sure I can tell you the difference in Iraq and Iran.” But Iran has always been more geographically pivotal than Iraq, in land area, population, and economics. It was one of the few countries that retained independence through the colonial era, and one of the only Third World societies to keep control of its own resources.

Ever since the 1979 Iranian Revolution and seizure of hostages in the U.S. Embassy, Washington has sought to topple the Shi’a revolutionary government in Tehran. That moment was when the demonization of Muslims replaced anti-Communism as the main selling point for military interventions. I remember seeing U.S. sailors in the Philippines 40 years ago sporting t-shirts that read “I Got My Tan off the Coast of Iran,” and a string of U.S. bases with 40,000 troops has encircled Iran since then, now in Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, UAE, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Jordan, Syria, Turkey, and Oman (all but the last two are now under Iranian missile retaliation).

The U.S. has already been at war with Iran during the Iran-Iraq War. In 1987-88, the U.S. Navy actively sided with Saddam Hussein in his war with Iran, by escorting tankers carrying Iraqi oil, attacking Iranian boats and oil rigs, and “accidentally” shooting down an Iranian civilian jetliner. This war with Iran is a continuation of a long-simmering conflict.

U.S. and Israeli threats have also encouraged a siege mentality among Iranian leaders, who repeatedly used them as a rationale for cracking down on internal dissent. The hardliners in Washington, Jerusalem, and Tehran have always reinforced and fed off of each other, and to create fear to build their own internal power and legitimacy.

Trump and Netanyahu may have thought the Sunni Gulf States, which have long been at odds with Iran, and the Iranian people would side with their current drive toward regime change. But it has had the exact opposite effect, causing stronger Muslim solidarity and rallying Iranians around the flag, even many who had protested and been imprisoned by the ayatollahs but don’t want a new Shah or other foreign puppet ruler. Much the same happened in Germany in World War II, when Allied fire-bombings that targeted civilian neighborhoods may have prevented internal dissent from growing.

Escalation beyond air war

Both the Iraq and Iran wars were justified with lies about weapons of mass destruction, lies told by the nuclear-armed states of the U.S. and Israel. But attacking Iran is far more disastrous than attacking Iraq. It will scuttle any chance of political reforms in Iran or regional agreement around Palestine. Iranian forces could block global oil lanes in the narrow Strait of Hormuz shipping chokepoint, clash with U.S. naval forces in the Gulf, or melt into an insurgency far deeper and longer than........

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