Alright y'all, welcome back to the show, it's anti-war radio, I'm Scott Horton.
Our next guest on the show is Paul Rogers from the Oxford Research Group.
That's oxfordresearchgroup.org.uk.
And they've got a new paper here, he's got a new paper here, called Military Action Against Iran Impact and Effects.
Welcome to the show Paul, how are you?
Very well thanks, hello.
So I've been trying to tell the people, war with Iran, you better not, but you went through here and really broke it down into bits and pieces for us, so why don't you do that, well in print you did, why don't you help us with that out loud here.
Yeah sure, I did a paper four years ago, at a time when the Bush administration seemed to be getting pretty aggressive in intent towards Iran, and that looked at what would happen if there was an American attack on Iranian nuclear facilities.
Since then, things have eased rather on the United States side, but there's been a real increase in rhetoric and I think preparation on the Israeli side, so this report basically has looked at what might happen if the Israelis decided to attack Iranian nuclear facilities.
I suppose the main points are that Israel has very steadily rearmed and upgraded its military equipment over the last four or five years, so that whereas four years ago it would not have been militarily able to attack Iran, now it can do it, it has a range of new, much longer range strike aircraft purchased from the United States, air to air refueling capacity, probably forward bases in Azerbaijan and facilities in northeast Iraq, and a lot of other weapons and kit which would enable it to do it, so the first thing is, it is possible for Iran to actually attack, Israel to attack Iran now, whereas it wasn't four or five years ago.
The report then looked at what the nature of the attack would be, if it was ever to happen, and essentially it wouldn't just be directed against the nuclear and missile plant, it will be against the sort of infrastructure which supports those capabilities, things can be rebuilt very quickly, but if you destroy the research stations, the factories making key equipment, and kill the people who may be the technicians or the researchers, then that would be much more effective, and that is the kind of thing that would happen in war, so it would be wide ranging, a lot of civilian casualties, and then the final part of the report looks at the consequences, and basically concludes that any such attack would be deeply counterproductive to Israeli and regional interests, not least because it would be the one thing which would really encourage the Iranians to try and develop nuclear weapons as quickly as they possibly could, so you would expect a withdrawal from the non-proliferation treaty, and a determined effort to acquire something which from their perspective would deter any further military action against them, so the conclusion really is that with all this talk about the possibility for war with Iran, it's extremely dangerous, and will make matters very much worse, not better.
Alright, well, so let's start under the category of they could do it now, they're in more of a position to do it now, one thing you didn't say there, but I think maybe it just goes without saying, is that we have Benjamin Netanyahu in the Prime Minister chair, Bush has been replaced by Obama, but Olmert has been replaced by Netanyahu, so that's something.
And then the other thing is that you say longer range attack aircraft, strike aircraft, are we talking about F-16s with bigger fuel tanks and the ability to refuel in the air, or are we talking about a different kind of planes that have now been given to the Israelis by the Americans?
There are particular models of both the F-15 and the F-16, they're the F-15I, and Israel has 25 of those in squadron service, and they could actually fly to Iran and back unrefueled, then there's the F-16I, and Israel has taken over 100 of those over the last four or five years, the 15Is are apparently equipped with conformal fuel tanks, so the planes would be, those would be the key ones, and as I say, they are all acquired over the last four or five years from the United States, the F-15I is roughly the equivalent of what you call in the United States the F-15E Strike Eagle, Israel has also upgraded its aerial tanker capabilities based both on the old Boeing 707, but greatly upgraded, and also the C-130, and it's also developed a large number of armed and unarmed drones, including ones with considerable range, and it's developed really very close links with Azerbaijan, which actually borders on Iran to the northwest, and has good links with the Kurdish parts of Iraq.
There are other possibilities, there's the Jericho 2 and 3 ballistic missile, and there's a possibility of sea-launched cruise missiles from the German-made Dolphin-class submarines, so in terms of purely weapons, Israel is in a very different position to four or five years ago, I take your point about the nature of the current government, where you have a much more forceful, or if you like, hawkish government in power, but one that is still quite bitter, as are the Israeli defence forces, about the problems they encountered in southern Lebanon, and they are very much concerned about the pretty comprehensive rearming of Hezbollah over the last four or five years.
What it all adds up to is a capability, and a perception among the current Israeli ruling group, the elite if you like, that Iran represents an existential threat to the state of Israel, and must not under any circumstances be allowed to develop nuclear weapons, and this is where you get the real rub, that at some stage, unless a diplomatic solution can be found, there really is a considerable risk of war breaking out.
Even though, as we just discussed with former CIA agent Philip Giroldi, everybody in the whole world knows they don't have a nuclear weapons program there, and it's really just a pretext for regime change.
I think it may well be a pretext for regime change, but the problem is, all the indications are that although the current regime of Ahmadinejad is not popular, it has serious economic problems, if there was an attack on Iran, then you would actually get a very strong degree of unity within the country.
Now, I haven't been to Iran for nearly five years, so I accept I'm a little bit out of date, but when I was last there, I talked to people I've worked with in the past, who were not in any way sympathetic to an Ahmadinejad-type leadership, and they said that you have to recognize that if there's any outside attack on Iran, by Israel, the United States, or whoever, what you will get is people running around to support whichever government is in power, no matter how much they might oppose it for its domestic policies, and that I think is something that really does have to be factored in.
Absolutely.
Well, and it ought to be really easy to understand when it's Bill Kristol who says otherwise, no, they want us to bomb them, and we know what happens when somebody bombs us, you know, the American people supported George Bush 90-something percent, and pretended like he couldn't possibly do a thing wrong for five years or something after that attack.
I don't know why anyone would think it would be different for Iran, when a lot of people didn't like George Bush at all when he, you know, his first nine months in power there, but getting bombed changes everything, kind of, doesn't it?
All right, now, another thing you said is that the Israelis have bases in northern Iraq right now?
We don't.
I wouldn't say they have bases as such, but the Israelis have worked very closely with the Kurds in northeast Iraq.
They've had military missions training the Peshmerga, the Kurdish military forces, and there is a suspicion that they would at least be allowed to use, for example, helicopters for inserting special forces, or for search-and-rescue missions.
It's probably even more likely that they would have the availability of quite serious military facilities in Azerbaijan.
Israel has diligently worked up a close relationship with Azerbaijan over a number of years, and that is a country immediately to the northwest of Iran, with quite a long common border.
So, essentially, you're looking at those, if you like, forward-based facilities, which could be developed very quickly in the run-up to a war.
I'm not saying you would have large numbers of people based there, but, for example, if you had facilities for refueling strike aircraft, they could fly to Azerbaijan and then on into Iran.
And now, what about Georgia?
A couple of years ago, there were some Israeli bases in Georgia, and Arnaud de Bourghrave said that that was one of the things the Russians did when they went ahead and beat Mikhail Saakashvili back from South Ossetia, was they took the opportunity to bomb the Israeli airstrips that had been built.
That's a possibility as well.
It's certainly possible that there would be an involvement in Georgia as well.
Because Azerbaijan is actually closer to the main targets in Iran, that would probably be the preferred place.
But the Israelis may well have facilities that could be made available in both countries.
Let's see, I guess before, we'll go out to the break and then we'll get back to the question of how wide an attack we're talking about and the consequences of it.
But what about this whole thing where Obama was asked by the Israeli press and said that he's pretty sure there's an understanding between he and Netanyahu that there's not going to be any surprises here.
What's your interpretation of that?
It's a difficult one.
Israel doesn't...
I'm sorry, the bumper music's playing, so make it a real quick one if you can.
Okay, I'm not sure.
I think the Israelis could go it alone, very bluntly.
But that's one of the things that I think we need to discuss a bit more.
All right, hold it right there.
We'll be right back.
You can watch the LRN Studio Cam and chat with other listeners anytime at cam.lrn.fm.
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All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm talking with Paul Rogers from the Oxford Research Group.
That's oxfordresearchgroup.org.uk.
He's got this new report out, Military Action Against Iran, Impact and Effects.
Well, as he outlined in the first segment there, it's basically divided in three sections.
Oh, yeah, they could and they just might.
And then how wide the attack would be and the consequences.
So I'm hoping that maybe we can just spend this segment mostly on the nature of an attack.
But before we went out to break, we were talking about Benjamin Netanyahu and whether he might go it alone there.
And I should mention, since I already mentioned Phil Giraldi in this interview, he was our previous guest.
And I know he's of the opinion that Benjamin Netanyahu might just go it alone as well.
And that's an informed opinion right there.
So did you want to elaborate on what you were going to say before we went out to break there?
I think the issue is that it would be technically possible for the Israelis to mount an attack on Iranian facilities without overflying Iraq, where the airspace is fully controlled by the United States.
It would not be easy, but it's possible.
And so technically, they could actually go it alone.
I think the reality is that the United States would probably be forewarned to some extent, and may well try to persuade the Israelis not to do it.
But in the final analysis, they could do it themselves.
Although it would be much easier for them to actually be able to overfly Iraq on the way to Iran.
There would be issues in trying to overfly Jordan, but probably not Saudi Arabia.
In fact, there was a report in one of the Israeli newspapers, Haratz, about eight or nine days ago, that Israeli military have been setting up facilities at a relatively remote Saudi airbase.
And so there may well be a connection there.
But the short answer to the question is that they could do it themselves without informing the United States, but it would add to their difficulties.
So they will probably want not American support, but at least American knowledge and non interference with what they were trying to do.
Of course, you have to look at it more from a position in Iran.
And that will be that they would simply see Israel as a surrogate of the United States, particularly because most of the equipment would be American equipment.
And so even if the Obama administration was not in favour, was even critical of what the Israelis are doing, the perception in Iran would be that it would almost be a joint operation.
Right, because he ought to be able to stop them anyway.
And as you say, we're the ones who bought all the planes.
Yeah, but I mean, I think for the United States military to actually stop an Israeli military action against Iran, I think that would really take some doing in terms of a political fallout from that domestically, in particular, and I mean, it would almost be the end of this very close relationship that the United States has with Israel.
I think it is very unlikely that the Israelis were determined to go ahead, the US would actually physically try to prevent them doing so.
One also has to remember that there is a small contingent of a full contingent of US troops now based in Israel, they actually look after a very advanced expand radar, which is linked in to the Israeli anti missile system.
So although it's not widely known, the US armed forces now have a permanent military presence within Israel and operational presence that is.
I did not know that.
Yeah.
And very recent development.
Yeah, well, and you think?
Well, this is skipping ahead to the consequences part.
But do you think Iranian intelligence knows where that is and could target it with missiles?
Well, they could target with missiles is another matter because the Iranian missiles, Iran has very few missiles currently with the range sufficient to reach Israel.
And they're relatively old technology, they're sort of super modified, Scott mark C, and the accuracy is really pretty low within about a mile if they're lucky.
So I don't think they'll be able to target anything directly.
But of course, the thing is that if there was any kind of war between Israel and Iran, people across the region would know that there was an American military presence in Israel.
And this would tend to confirm the idea that it was a joint operation, even if it wasn't, even if the Obama administration was against it.
The problem is that within the Middle East, that wouldn't frankly be believed.
Yeah, well, I guess, you know, the reason I said that was I was thinking of the American soldiers manning the anti missile missiles on the Polish border with Russia, and how dangerous that is putting the American soldiers in that kind of harm's way is a good way to get us dragged into something that we should not want to be dragged into.
But yes, no, I take your point.
Okay, so so yeah, back to what the Israelis would be bombing the Iranians with and what they would be bombing.
I talked in 2007 with Wayne White, who was from the Bureau of Intelligence and Research over at the State Department, and was a former National Security Agency guy, pardon me, National Security Council guy.
And he said he had seen war plans, the American war plans were for I think it was 1500 targets to be hit, or maybe it was 800 targets to be hit by 1500 sorties or something like that.
But it was pretty wide ranging, it wasn't just all the nuclear facilities, but it also was to include as much of their Navy, which is a bunch of speedboats, I guess, as possible as any anti aircraft defense.
And I guess what he said was the biggest problem there was from right off the bat, if you want to hit a target, you have to clear the path to the target in the military jargon, which means in a lot of cases, putting special forces guys on the ground to try to take out the anti aircraft and things like this, and all of a sudden, a little bitty war, a couple of nights worth of airstrikes turns into a really big deal over, you know, no time at all.
Well, if you were to take the possibility, which I think is very low present of an American attack on Iran, given that the Iranians could respond with all sorts of problems in the Gulf and in Iraq, then a US attack would, as your previous interviewee suggested, be a very major one, some hundreds of targets hit, because they will be going for commander control, they would be going for the facilities with which Iran could respond.
So in other words, they'd be trying to preempt any capability to the for the Iranians to respond against American facilities in the Gulf and in Iraq, the Israelis will be different, they wouldn't be interested too much in what the Iranians could do in response, because there's very little that the Iranians can do from Iran, it may be different as far as Hezbollah is concerned.
But the Israelis have lots of local forces as far as Lebanon is concerned.
So the Israelis will be focusing really on three areas.
One would be the civil nuclear program, that would be the uranium processing plant at Esfahan, the very big enrichment facilities in the Tans, the new research reactor at Arak, and a number of targets in and around Tehran, including factories that make the components.
So it'd be that element first, they would also be interested in some aspects of the Iranian developing missile capability, the Iranian missiles currently, very few of them could even reach Israel, there is a new solid fuel missile, which has now been tested, I think three times, which is a lot more advanced, and the Israelis will be trying to disrupt the further development and production of that.
But then they would also be going for, if you like, the support structures, people as well as facilities, which actually aid the development of a civil nuclear program, the possibility of a weapons program, and the missile program as well.
So that would extend, for example, to things like university departments of physics and engineering, where people are trained, research centers and the like.
Now, how many of those Israel will be able to actually attack is a moot point, and those might not be the highest priority.
But the key point here is that there would be an expectation that once the war started, that the Israelis would try, the Iranians would try...
Well, I'm sorry, Paul, we'll have to hold you right there.
We'll be right back with Paul Rodgers, y'all, right after this.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
We're talking with Paul Rodgers, and he is from the Oxford Research Group, Oxfordresearchgroup.org.uk, and they have this new report, Military Action Against Iran Impact and Effects.
And, Paul, you were saying that the Israelis don't have the capability to do the kind of full-scale war that the Bush regime had been planning on, and so, therefore, they would be targeting much more specifically the Iranian nuclear program and the infrastructure involved in it, rather than the Iranian capability to strike back, because after all, they won't really be able to reach Israel from Iran.
But they could certainly, couldn't they reach American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan and the American Navy and all the refining capability on the coast, the other coast of the Persian Gulf, and on and on like that, couldn't they?
They certainly could do that, yes.
And the real issue would be whether the Iranians actually decided to do that.
And they might not do, because obviously, if they were to retaliate against U.S. targets, then they would face the much larger armed forces of the United States with the carrier battle groups and everything else, and that would actually be a huge issue for them.
They may well decide that if they were attacked by Israel, they would essentially not retaliate against American interests.
They would sort of, in a sense, retain the upper hand in terms of politics.
But what I think you would have to expect is that the Iranians would then decide, whatever they're doing now, to actually go full tilt from nuclear weapons capability, and to do it as quick as possible, and to do it in facilities which were much more difficult to attack.
So your real problem is that if that was the reaction, and I'm sure it would be, along with much greater political unity in Iran, that would mean that once the war with Israel had started, there might be intense activity and then very little happening.
But in the months and years that followed, the Israelis would have to attack again, because what they'd done had been to stir up, if you like, within the Iranian political mindset, the need for an independent nuclear capability.
And this is where it really would be deeply counterproductive.
Well, now there's a few things there.
I mean, one is the question of, could they even destroy Natanz with anything short of hydrogen bombs?
And then also, secondly, I'm not sure, I mean, if I'm just, you know, rolling dice and guessing, I don't know that the Iranian government would be able to stop a full-scale war from breaking out in Iraq, if the Israelis launched a war against Iran, if they tried to, you know, call back their dogs or whatever.
I think it's much more likely that Muqtada al-Sadr and the former Badr Brigade that now goes by the name of the Iraqi Army would be pretty certain to start the war against America all over again.
And there's still, you know, 100,000-something Americans there.
A CIA guy told Seymour Hersh years ago that if America bombed Iran, the south of Iraq would go up like a candle, that the Iranians could take all of Iraq, well, at least all the south of Iraq, with ten imams and a sound truck.
Well, I think there's a lot in that.
On the first point, the Israeli attack would not be able to destroy the Natanz facilities, particularly the very deeply buried ones, but it could probably set back a capability to develop nuclear weapons by a year or two, probably not much more than that, depending on how successful the attacks were.
But I do take your point about the way in which even if Iran officially did not seek to respond, it may be very difficult to control elements both in Iraq.
And one has to remember there are major Shia minorities in eastern Saudi Arabia, in Bahrain, and indeed in the United Arab Emirates.
I mean, I was in Dubai not so long ago, and if you just walk around downtown Dubai, one of the things that strikes you is the number of branches of Iranian banks.
There are very close links across the Gulf, and there would be many people in the western Gulf among the Shia minorities who would be outraged at an attack on Iran.
So yes, I do take your point that while the Iranian government may actually not seek to respond very strongly, you cannot say that it would be possible to control elements in Iraq, the Sadrists, and the rest.
And that is where things would get very tricky and potentially very dangerous.
Well, now, I'm not sure why anyone, and it seems like all the war games that they've played at the Sabin Center, the Brookings Institution, I think they did a separate one at the Council on Foreign Relations, and a couple of think tanks I can't think of, and they always say, well, you know, the Iranians, they won't really fight back.
But why should we assume that?
And don't they have the ability to fight back and hurt the United States in major ways, including shoot supersonic missiles at our navy, including bomb the hell out of our guys at their bases in Iraq?
Well, certainly, if it was to develop into a conflict between Iran and the United States, that's not certain, but it's a possible outcome of Israeli intervention.
Then yes, the Iranians do have a number of capabilities.
They could make life very difficult in the western part of Afghanistan.
They have acquired from China, a whole range of really advanced anti-ship cruise missiles.
And that could be really problematic.
And I think, in a sense, what one has to do is always remember it from the point of view of the other side.
Iran is a country of about 75 million people.
It's a very youthful country, very large number of people under 25, pretty nationalistic.
It has a real sense of history, 3000 plus years of history.
And it sees itself as one of the major powers in the region, really alongside Turkey, if you like, across the region as a whole.
And if there was any kind of major attack on that country, you would get this very strong view that the country had the right to fight back.
And I think, in fact, one of the main points that this report makes is that once you start something with a major country such as Iran, very, very difficult to stop it.
And it's not predictable where it would end up.
But our conclusion is that it could be very deeply counterproductive, set in motion another war, and be hugely dangerous for the immediate region and indeed beyond.
Well said.
And I think, you know, that really is the point, is that we don't know what would happen.
I mean, maybe the Iranians would activate a plan to, over the next 10 years, we're going to use our intelligence guys to upset American activity in Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan and Pakistan, and we'll have Hamas suicide bombers blow up things and wherever.
I mean, we have no idea what they're going to do.
No, that's the difficulty.
And it's worth remembering that there is quite a bitterness still in Iran about what happened after 9-11, when the US forces went rapidly into Afghanistan to terminate the Taliban regime, using the Northern Alliance and special forces and air power.
At that stage, the Iranians could have made things very difficult for the United States with a large common border and with their interests.
They had no likings for the Taliban.
Remember, the Taliban had murdered some Iranian diplomats not many years beforehand.
So the Iranians, in fact, almost stood to one side and were in many ways quite helpful to the US efforts to terminate the Taliban.
That was essentially late October, November, early December 2001.
And what really made the Iranians very bitter was that within a month or so of the termination of the Taliban regime, you had George W. Bush making his 2002 State of the Union address late January, where all of a sudden, Iran is suddenly one of the three key members of the Axis of Evil, and it was a regime which must be terminated.
And for the Iranians at the time, that was a huge slap in the face.
And they haven't forgotten it.
And even now we're talking sort of nine years later, that still rankles with them.
And it's part of this perception that they are not taken seriously.
Now, whatever you think of the Ahmadinejad regime, I'm talking about Iran as a major country with pretty sophisticated institutions, and in many ways, a very cultured people with a very long sense of history.
And you have to factor these things in.
Right.
Well, and, you know, part of that is no matter how insulted that they were in 2003, when Bush and his regime rejected the Great Peace offer and an axis of evil speech and the rest of it, they still have had their hands up the whole time when it comes to the nuclear program.
Their books wide open and nuclear inspectors crawling all over the place.
And unlike the North Koreans who fell for the bait and withdrew from the treaty, although they safely got bombs before Bush did anything about them, the Iranians have gone with a strategy of, look, don't shoot.
We're not making nuclear bombs.
And so, as you say here in this piece, military action against Iran, impact and effects.
If we do or the Israelis do bomb their nuclear facilities, that'll be the number one thing that could possibly drive them to actually go ahead and make nuclear weapons, which is what the war party apparently doesn't want or claim that they don't.
And anyway, I'm sorry.
With that, we're all out of time.
I urge everybody to go and check out this.
It's not very long, but it is very detailed and very good.
Military action against Iran, impact and effects.
Thank you, Paul.
Thank you.
