Iran’s Revolutionary Guards commanders, Tehran, Iran, 2019. Photo: khamenei.ir
Araz Barwari | Exclusive to Ekurd.net
The tension between the US and Iran in the Middle East is rising over the killing of an Iranian military general by US forces last week. It might lead to a full scale war between the two countries. However, and historically speaking, US does not start wars with the countries that have a strong military and can strike back. Unfortunately for US, winning a war with Iran in a short time and at a cheap price is not going to be easy.
Many experts think that US cannot win a war against Iran by any measure because it would bring its own demise by attacking Iran through a major military defeat and it would lose financial control of the world banking system as a result. In fact, there are many obstacles on the way of US to win a war with Iran easily. Naming some of them, Iran controls the most important passageway for oil exports in the world: some 30% of all oil production of the world has to go through Iranian waters and Iran has already declared that they will close the strait.
Not only that but also they have long range missiles that can reach all of the major US military bases around the country as well as biggest Saudi and UAE oil and gas fields. It also has a number of domestically produced air defense systems that are based on Russian Buk and S-300 systems so without an air force they can bleed US air-force at an unacceptable rate. That means unlike Iraq, Iran can strike back.
Allegedly, Iran has most of its critical military infrastructure buried in very well built underground bunkers. The US and Israel have known this for ages and have not only planed for it but have allegedly built devices to handle it. We are talking small nukes on bunker busters. In addition to this, given Iran’s toys and US and Israelis threat assessment, it may be that US and Israel have to illuminate various surface facilities very rapidly, and this may require small nukes or possibly biological weapons. Given Iran’s mentality, they are likely to pack a lot of people around these facilities to cause a big stink, but if Israel verifies they are being attracted with nukes and or biological weapons, these people will be collateral.So the option for US and Israel is most likely would be to fight a conventional war with Iran rather than a nuclear war.
US can permanently win the war with Iran by using a tactical nuclear strike against Iran which would be pretty unthinkable. because the immediate aftermath would be, tens of millions of people die,most of them are Iranian of course. However, invariably, a lot of foreign citizens and workers will also be killed including a lot of European citizens who work in Iran and Iraq. A small handful of Americans would also die. The World would reacts with shock and horror at the staggering loss of life. I can’t see any way a strike kills less than 40 million people, which would beat any other mass killing in history up until this point by a wide margin.
Furthermore, such a strike would mean millions of innocent Iranian civilians would die instantly, men, women and children. Millions more would die slower, agonizing deaths. And millions more would suffer terribly without dying.It would also mean a dangerous level of fallout. The prevailing winds across Iran are north-easterly. Look at a map to see what countries would deal with possibly lethal levels of radioactivity: Iraq, Turkey,Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan Afghanistan, and the Xinjiang province in China.However, tens of millions will survive. They will immediately become stateless refugees. The world would have an ample supply of angry desperate men from which to breed terrorists for the next 40 years or so in the middle east.
Iran itself would almost certainly collapse as a nation. It would have no functioning infrastructure, government or economy. In time, millions more would starve to death or die from exposure.US will become an international pariah. There could be no question of it continuing to remain on the UN Security Council, which probably means the dissolution of the UN. Unlikely that the nuclear non-proliferation treaty could survive either.Probably, in the medium term, the US rebuilds Iran – largely at its own expense. There is a lot of precedent for that in history, and I suspect that the collective guilt would start to weigh very heavily on the nation as the aftermath becomes clearer and clearer. Military generals are one thing. Civilian women and children are another.
In a conventional war,Iran cannot hit back at continental US, but it can certainly hurt the US with missiles against US warships in the Gulf. Iranian speedboats would launch attacks on shipping in the Gulf and lay mines in shipping lanes. The US would take larger aircraft losses than it took over Iraq and Kuwait in 1991. Shipping in the Gulf would collapse. American strikes would wreck much of Iran’s infrastructure, but US would find it hard to mount a serious ground invasion, since neither Turkey nor Iraq would be available as a staging area, and while the Saudis might support an attack on Iran, Saudi Arabia is too far away to be a proper invasion base. The rest of the world Europe, Russia, China would oppose a US war on Iran. Any war would be deeply unpopular in US, especially if there were heavy initial losses.
Also, American forces still in Iraq would probably come under attack from Iranian proxies or Iraqi Shi’a groups. Simply put, it would be a mess, with long and pernicious economic, diplomatic, and political consequences for the US. Through its dependency on oil prices; perhaps US would lose the war too to the point that it might lose control of its finances by making oil prices skyrocketing. Some experts estimate a price in the range of 200-500 USD per barrel. Then, the US economy will tank along with the rest of the world. Iran will lose the war too, but so will the US. That is why US has not attacked Iran yet and unlikely to ever do in a full scale.
The US sending a nuke to Iran is one of those things in war that you just really don’t want to do for morale reasons and for self preservation. For one, Iran can’t defend itself against a nuclear war, they just aren’t that equipped so they will have many dead and their government will be severely crippled. Secondly, many countries will view us differently and some may not forgive or forget such an act of unremorseful destruction. Sending a nuke should be a very last resort for any country. I wouldn’t wish nuclear destruction on any of our enemies. Nukes are city destroyers and a whole city can’t be all enemies.Iran would be hurt – people would be killed.
So, I believe if US goes to a war with Iran, it would be conventional and asymmetric, meaning the US would take out Iranian air defenses and attack various targets by air. Iran would counter with mining the strait, launching missiles against shipping and otherwise trying to shut down oil traffic. That would cause a spike in the price of oil. Iran would also launch cyber attacks and other non-traditional attacks.
Iran is a much larger and more geographically difficult country to invade. It’s doubtful the US would even attempt it. The real issue would be military action inside Iraq and the popular reaction in Iraq as we saw how the US killed the top Iranian commander recently. The Iranian people would become firmly in the hands of the Mullahs for another couple of generations. The only way that the US would be able to prevent that from happening would be by occupying Iran. US forces occupying Iran would suffer very high casualty levels – more like Vietnam than Iraq. And the Iranian government in exile would still acquire nuclear weapons
Araz Barwari is a law student at the University of Nawroz in Kurdistan of Iraq.
The opinions are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent the views of Ekurd.net or its editors.
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