Do you Support Military Action against ISIS ?

The Guardian has held an online opinion poll on the prospect for military intervention in Iraq and Syria against IS. 42% of those stated they supported military action against the Caliphate, 31% said only if it was 'legal and invited' and only 22 % were against it. 46 % said they supported the use of ground troops.

My own response is largely sceptical about military intervention as a substitute for politics and a regional diplomatic effort to contain the Islamic State. The British government is already using public diplomacy to prepare the people for a long and many sided struggle against this new enemy.

The reason for this and, indeed, the refusal by PM David Cameron even to use the words 'Islamic State' instead of ISIL, the name of an insurgent group rather than a self-proclaimed Caliphate State, is that Western leaders, politicians, dilomats and generals are themselves divided on how to deal with the problem.

Do you support military action against Isis? Not sure.

Military intervention would need to be the last resort if the state of Iraq where threatened with total collapse. Arms, intelligence and equipment to bolster the Kurdish peshmerga could stave off IS as well as help from special forces. Yet it is useless without a new regional political and diplomatic initiative.

That means involving Iran and changing the absurd policy of continuing to back Sunni militants as both an alternative to Assad in Damascus and IS. The reality is that is only an abstract choice based on wish thinking that is in continuity with the failed policy of backing 'moderate' Sunni rebels.

There was no indication from Obama or Cameron that cooperation and engagement with Iran or Assad. Without that, military intervention could only bolster Sunni militancy because the conflict in Syria is a proxy war between Qatar and Saudi Arabia against each other and against Iran.

Would you support the use of ground troops? No.

Apart from having special forces on the ground to assist the Kurds, putting troops into Iraq would not acheive anything apart from granting IS a propaganda victory and the chance to whip up jihad against the Infidel. It would mean loss of British lives for geopolitical goals not related to the defence of Britain.

True, the fall of Kurdish regions and Baghdad or attacks on oil producing zones would create an oil price shock and severely affect developed global economies such as Britain. But Iraqi troops could be trained and supplies by all global players interested in energy security, then there is no need for ground troops.

Have you changed your view to in favour of military action following the beheadings of James Foley and Steven Sotloff ? No.

The purpose of the executions to instill terror and the idea that there is a pyschopathological threat that stretches from Syria to Britain in continuity with the murder of the soldier Lee Rigby in Greenwich; these attacks are, then, a mere reflex consequence of Western foreign policy.

Despite the fact propaganda this agenda is amplified and echoed by Stop the War ideologues such as Lindsey German, reacting to these atrocities by blundering back into Iraq or using messianic rhetoric like PM Cameron's about a 'generational struggle' only makes for a conflict mentality to take root.

It's the idea of 'generational struggle' and a 'global war on terror' that IS would have wanted as a response to their beheadings as they too want to implant the same idea of a struggle between the 'Muslim World' and both the Hypocrites ( other states in the region ) and Infidels, i.e. the West, also by nature hypocritical .

The beheadings are propaganda of the deed. If the West attacks the Caliphate ( the purest and most unhypocritical of Muslim states in that it has only a single standard-join the jihad, be converted or be killed ) then clearly it would kill Muslims as Christians and other non-Muslims are of no consequence.

The pyschopathology behind it is one identified with many in the West who are semi-educated : the beheadings are nothing compared to the 'real' terror which is Western foreign policy, a propaganda trope pounded out uncritically by radical leftists, no less than Islamists, who contrast 'state terror' with 'individual terror'.

How successful do you think military intervention will be in combatting Isis? Somewhat.

Military intervention by the 'International community' i.e. the West could be futile because the foreign policy basis has been so disastrously based on shoddy realpolitik dressed up as humanitarian concern in Syria. Only a diplomatic solution to the conflict in Syria is possible, if at all.

The security of Britain could have been improved had the government not been prepared to back Sunni militants in Syria to get onside with Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar in their regional proxy struggle with Iran over energy pipeline routes and as means to divert internal discontent outwards.

Only towards the end of 2013 and into 2014 did the US and Britain start to put pressure on the Gulf states to clamp down on private donors when it was clear the support for Sunni jihadists was leading many to abandon the Free Syria Army to join ISIS instead: as with Afghanistan in the 1990s it is blowback.

Over the longer term, Britain needs to avert being dragged further into conflict in the Middle East by finding alternatives to importing LNG from Qatar to make up for the decline of North Sea gas reserves. That means greater energy conservation and investing in renewables energy, such as tidal power, and also in nuclear power.

Other global powers would also be needed to preserve the security of energy supplies such as China and the East Asian economies by footing the bill instead of the West. Borders such as that with Turkey need to be fortified and strengthened and risky geopolitical power games in Syria dropped.

Why Britain Wants to Arm Sunni Militants in Syria and Arms the Opposition to IS in Iraq.

"We may very well find that we are aligned against a common enemy. But that does not make us able to trust them, it does not make us able to work with them and it would poison what we are trying to achieve in separating moderate Sunni opinion from the poisonous ideology of Isil [Islamic State] if we were to align ourselves with President Assad."-Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond

The reason Hammond ruled out negotiations with Assad and stated plans to arm 'moderate' Sunni 'rebels' is that British foreign policy is dominated by energy concerns. In particular, Britain derives an important proportion of its domestic gas from Qatar which backs the Muslim Brotherhood.

Qatar has become a major supplier of liquefied natural gas to make good energy shortfalls as North Sea gas declines. Britain would have an interest in the proposed Qatar Turkey pipeline mooted in 2009 and dependent upon the Alawite Shia ruler Assad and his dynasty being removed.

One reason is that it would contain Iranian ambitions for a gas pipeline from the same South Pars gas field in the Persian Gulf that it shares with Qatar and that would extend through Iraq and Syria towards the Eastern Mediterranean. Blocking Iranian gas exports westward is apiece with the sanctions policy.

Defending Qatar's regional interests against its competitor Iran is both big business and energy geopolitics. In April 2014 Hammond was, as Defence Secretary, asserting the benefits of having a permanent military base in Qatar and explicitly mentioned energy interests as the reason,

“The West is crucially dependent on a stable energy market above all else. Our economic recovery is fragile. Anything that calls for a spike in the oil price would derail it. The mostly likely scenario to cause that up spike is a surge in tension in this region, particularly in the Strait of Hormuz.

It is very much in our interest to have a stable situation in the Gulf. That is why Western countries are prepared to invest so much in this region and supporting the Gulf states to maintain that stability,”

The reason for retaining the failed and yet desperate and risky policy of backing the Free Syria Army in Syria, while supporting the Kurds in Iraq and courting Iran to defend Baghdad, is largely about Britain's dependence on Qatari gas, especially with the conflict in Ukraine potentially affecting supplies from Russia.

The other interest is in lucrative arms deals for Britain worth QR230mn and the colossal amount of investment Qatar's sovereign wealth fund puts into London to prop up the ailing and fragile rentier economy of the United Kingdom. These are all basic geostrategic facts about Britain's foreign policy.

On the Danger of Arming the Syrian Opposition

On the possibility of the US and UK arming the Sunni insurgents in Syria fighting against President Assad's regime, Ahmad Samih Khalidi in the Guardian has written,

'The Syrian crisis is transforming the entire Arab Mashriq, encompassing Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Jordan and potentially Israel/Palestine into one vast arena for what is now a sectarian conflict between Sunni and Shia Islam. Any external intervention bears the risk of an open-ended engagement'.

True, but the problem from the British perspective is that William Hague is arguing that intervention is necessary to support 'moderate' Sunni insurgents in order to prevent them joining Al Qaida and so maintain an opposition to Assad's Shia regime. The reasons for this are twofold.

Firstly, the shoddy realpolitik in which the lynchpin of Britain's strategic interests remains Saudi Arabia, a country with a large market for Britain's arms industry that supplies the West with oil and hosts US military bases. The KSA's main Gulf rival is Iran and so Britain effectively has to back Sunni militias in Syria against Shia.

The second is ideological. Hague is a messianic neoconservative with delusions of grandeur. He regards, as do most in Cameron's government, Iran as an 'existential enemy' and portray it in neo-Cold War terms. That can be seen in Michael Gove's propaganda tract Celsius 7/7 when he declares,

'The Iranian Revolution of 1979, like the French Revolution of 1789, was a moment that grew into a model. Islamist dreams of power before 1979 had been desert mirages; after 1979 Islamism had a mountain fortress....Iran's experience stands as a template for Islamist advance'. ( page 28).

Hague, like Gove, believes that Islamism consists of 'one seamless totalitarian threat', a convenient oversimplification that provides a rationale for any form of intervention. This is true whether, fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan, invading Iraq, or 'tilting the balance' against Assad in Syria by backing 'moderate' insurgents.

Khalidi is is correct to emphasise that,

'..the west, despite its long experience in the Middle East, remains profoundly alien to the region's most deep-rooted forces of religion, sect, ethnicity, tribe and clan, and seemingly incapable of grasping their complexity.'

But ultimately, the West has a 'lethal embrace' of Saudi Arabia, a dysfunctional regime that is far more responsible for funding terrorism and Islamism that Tehran and, unlike Iran, has no semblance of a democracy or even the chance of moving towards one.

Yet Britain and the US have as their ultimate New Great Game plan the aim of 'regime change' in Iran by whatever means they can. Iran is a problem because it has had an independent foreign policy that prevents Western control over the oil and gas both of the Middle East and Central Asia.

That is precisely why the obvious diplomatic need to negotiate with Iran at the Geneva Conference is simply not on the table. Britain's government, mirroring the more extreme neoconservative view of Iran shown by the belligerent John McCain, is at one with Obama on this: Iran is the enemy to be defeated and rolled back.

The danger now is that the US and Britain will push further for arming the 'right' Sunni insurgents against Assad to check Iranian influence and Hizbollah ( referred crudely to as 'terrorists' ). They will see Al Qaida's influence as a pretext to shore up Sunni opposition, especially as the Muslim Brotherhood is in disarray in Egypt.

William Hague and his "Diplomacy".

Historian Dominic Sandbrook wrote of William Hague and his readiness to arm the Syrian insurgents,,

'Given the country's combustible religious mix, as well as its strategic location, the war-torn Arab republic now represents the most dangerous fault line on the planet. ...What Mr Hague thinks he will achieve in Syria is beyond me.

Even so, the rebels' bloodthirsty tactics and links to Islamic extremism are a long way from the democratic Middle Eastern ideal that our Foreign Secretary claims to be promoting'.

Sandbrook even thinks that Hague harbour delusions of grandeur. But it is not surprising. Hague , in reality, is engaged less in real diplomacy. Britain has only the choice to advocate a policy that may be acceptable to Washington and works within that framework.

This is known as 'public diplomacy' . It depends on trying to present before the audience-i.e. the British people and the world-reasons why intervention by the US and UK is necessary from Assad is a brutal dictator to allegations of chemical weapons. And there are no real debates in Parliament

Foreign policy under Hague is thus a pretence. Essentially he is dreaming of being William Pitt as though he were in a position to make fine speeches about committing Britain to action abroad in a time when the decision about whether Britain is to engage in the world or not is largely obsolete.

Hague was pushing for lifting the EU arms embargo in order to make it look as though he was taking the initiative-as he was-on behalf of Britain. But Hague's job is anticipate any US foreign policy line, make it seem as an independent British one and justify it. Feeling that vicarious sense of global power can lead to delusion.

Yet the problem with Sandbrook's view is it underestimates the geopolitical factors and increasingly desperate strategies to ensure energy security that are drawing the Western powers into potential catastrophe in the Middle East. Sandbrook claims a form of imperialist thinking is still prevanent at the FO,

'The truth, I fear, is that Mr Hague - presumably in thrall to his officials - has gone native. Like so many foreign secretaries before him, he has fallen victim to the temptations of his office.'

Of course, as Sandbrook indicates,  Hague has not changed that much at all. He was a fervent supporter of the Iraq War, ' liberal intervention' and the notion of reordering the Middle East as if Britain really can determine events in Syria and instigate 'regime change'.

Yet it that foreign policy has been so risky depends on far more than just the culture of the FO.Unfortunately, the bleak fact is that Britain's unstable rentier and debt fuelled finance economy increasingly depends upon extending ever greater control the oil and gas of the Gulf region over and against any potential threat to it.

The US and Britain need stable or falling oil prices to boost up the economy when faced with the slowing rates of economic growth. Yet the competition of China and India ensures that peaking oil supplies and increased demand will challenge this. China now has the financial power to challenge the West in the Middle East.

The drive to intervene in Syria is part of the fallout from the Iraq War as the crisis has spiralled into a regional one because Iraq has now a Shia majority regime under Maliki that has leaned closer to Tehran. Iranian arms have flowed through Iraq en route to Hizbollah in Syria and as have Shia recruits to support them and Assad.

As a consequence, Saudi Arabia is now faced with a potential Shia axis of power stretching from Iran across to the Mediterranean where Iran would be able to pump gas out to via a pipeline should it be able to defeat the Sunni 'rebels'. So it is pouring money into Wahhabi militias in Syria. The Taliban is also a beneficiary.

The situation is incredibly dangerous. British 'statesmen' from Blair to Hague are either too mediocre to understand precisely how dangerous the crisis is or else, it has to be said, they know the geopolitical risks and their delusions are bordering on a form of insane recklessness.

Iran is Targeted for Regime Change.

'And think what a regime change in Tehran would mean: no more threat of a nuclear-armed Iran. Instead, there would be a democratic state to oppose rather than support the Assad regime in Syria, and to give Iraq a chance to find the democracy that tens of thousands died for'

Opines Alex Carlile, Liberal Democrat peer in The Guardian, on news that the US has removed the Iranian opposition party the MEK from its status as a terrorist organisation. In accordance with Orwellian doublethink, the movement that once backed Saddam Hussein is now a beacon of freedom.

Iit is interesting that the response to the Iraq debacle,in which the deaths run into hundreds of thousands , if not a million( not tens of thousands ) , is to shift the blame for that on to Iran and to propose the same approach to Iran as was done with Iraq in the run up to war in 2003.

Sanctions are already affecting the civilian population badly. The idea will be to impoverish Iranians so that the degree of popular support the current government in Tehran has will be sapped and then a popular momentum for "regime change" can be hijacked by the US for its benefit ( enter the MEK ).

Such strategies seem doomed to backfire. One reason Iran could be developing nuclear weapons is that it fears what happened to Iraq. And yet Iran is a semi-democratic autocracy and not a dictatorship.

Potentially the situation could be very dangerous if Tehran reacts to the collapse of Assad's regime in Syria by intensifying its backing for Shia movements in countries where they form a majority whilst governed by undemocratic Sunni elites such as Saudi Arabia and Bahrain.

This is the view, moreover, of leading Iranian-Americans who think the delisting is insane and counter-productive. Presumably, they may well have more knowledge of this than the witless Lord Carlile. The National Iranian American Council (NIAC)  states it,

...deplores the decision to remove the Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK) from the U.S. list of foreign terrorist organizations. The decision opens the door to Congressional funding of the MEK to conduct terrorist attacks in Iran, makes war with Iran far more likely, and will seriously damage Iran’s peaceful pro-democracy movement as well as America’s standing among ordinary Iranians.
 
"The biggest winner today is the Iranian regime, which has claimed for a long time that the U.S. is out to destroy Iran and is the enemy of the Iranian people. This decision will be portrayed as proof that the U.S. is cozying up with a reviled terrorist group and will create greater receptivity for that false argument,” said NIAC Policy Director Jamal Abdi.

A Note on Iran and The Media

Glenn Greenwald wrote last week in The Guardian,

The US has Iran virtually encircled militarily. Even with the highly implausible fear-mongering claims earlier this year about Tehran's planned increases in military spending, that nation's total military expenditures is a tiny fraction of what the US spends. Iran has demonstrated no propensity to launch attacks on US soil, has no meaningful capability to do so, and would be instantly damaged, if not (as Hillary Clinton once put it) "totally obliterated" if they tried. Even the Israelis are clear that Iran has not even committed itself to building a nuclear weapon.

It is evident that mainstream US TV journalists are not going to challenge the bi-partisan consensus on American Foreign policy. Firstly, in the context of presidential elections foreign policy is not considered that important by most American citizens. Secondly, the idea is to get a mere statement of their position.

Both presidents aim to compete on how tough they are on Iran in order to get votes and get into office. And it is in neither of their interests nor that of major TV networks to ask fundamental questions about foreign policy nor to understand the basis of what is driving it in the Middle East and Central Asia.

One of the main reasons , of course, is that the plan to encircle and throttle Iran is part of the USA's ambition to gain hegemony over the region in order to control the oil and gas. This is something necessitated by the USA's overdependence upon it to fuel a high octane car based consumer economy.

The fact that Iran has, in Greenwald's words, 'shown no propensity to launch attacks on US soil' is, therefore, largely irrelevant. It stands in the way as the only Power that can challenge US hegemony in both the Middle East to the west of Iran ( through the support of Syria and backing Hezbollah ) and in Central Asia to the east.

In Afghanistan, the war has been mostly about the geopolitical advantages of securing the construction of the TAPI pipeline, one that will block off the rival IPI project and ratchet up the pressure on Iran's economy and society by reducing the revenue from gas exports to Pakistan and India.

If Greenwald is going to criticise Establishment journalism for not probing on foreign policy, then there should be at least some alternative attempt to understand why the USA has become so fixated on targeting Iran as the main threat to its interests in the Middle East and Central Asia. And that is something those opposed to Us foreign policy seldom often dwell on.

Populist journalism can be as tedious as Establishment journalism as it allows radical critics of US foreign policy to feel a frisson of superiority to the people in power without any recognition that if American consumer lifestyles, even of "anti-war" protesters, are to be preserved, then this foreign policy is inevitable.

The problem with those complaining about the US or Britain meddling in the Middle East and Central Asia is that, even when they criticise the US for invading Iraq for oil or targeting Iran to get 'regime change' ( also ultimately about control and protection of oil supplies ) , they seem oblivious to what actually powers their economy.

That is not to state that US foreign policy is "right" but to present in stark terms the nature of what US foreign policy has really been increasingly concerned with since the end of the Soviet Union in 1991, increased competition with Russia and China and, with the opening up of the post Soviet "stans" to investment and oil development, a New Great Game.

How to Spin it that Iran Caused the Catastrophe in Iraq.

Meir Javedanfar has attempted here in today's edition of The Guardian to draw an equivalence between the US and Iran as regards the Wikileaks reports of the reality of the US occupation.

What he writes is interesting but does not bear out exactly his partisan agenda as an Israeli-Iranian nationalist which is to prove that Iran's interests in creating further chaos was one thwarting the US agenda of bringing beneficial regime change.

Iran's concerns are understandable. There are serious allegations that could damage its image abroad, especially with its allies in Iraq and in the Shia world. One such revelation is the report about Iran supplying new forms of suicide vests for al-Qaida.

Al-Qaida is the sworn enemy of Shias in Iraq. It has been involved in the killing of thousands of Shia civilians, among them many pilgrims in holy cities such as Najaf and Karbala. Iranian co-operation with al-Qaida, even if it was aimed at hurting US forces, is not going to go down well in Shia areas of Iraq.

There is also political damage from this. How can Nouri al-Maliki persuade Iraqis, especially his own Shia constituents, that the government of Iran is a true friend?

Other revelations, such as the revolutionary guard's al Quds force training Iraqi Shia militants on Iranian soil, are also damaging. They could make the idea of tougher sanctions against Iran an easier sell to the public in Europe, since countries such as the UK have suffered numerous casualties in southern Iraq.

The evidence, from the Wikileaks that Iran supported Sunni insurgents and Al Qaida after the collapse of Iraq into bloodshed and chaos, has to take into account the status of the source, a US military document in which the filer might have assumed that what was fact was fact. It was a "threat report".

AL-QAIDA REMAINS THE STRONGEST ORGANIZATION AMONG THE INSURGENT GROUPS IN IRAQ AND DIRECTS THE MAJORITY OF ATTACKS THAT TAKE PLACE IN IRAQ, NFI. INSTRUCTORS AT THE ISLAMIC JIHAD CENTER IN TEHRAN ARE TEACHING A NEW TACTIC FOR SVIED DEPLOYMENT.

Until real evidence can be offered that Iran backed Al Qaida this remains simply an assumption whilst Iranian backing for Shia groups in far more obvious as an established part of exerting Iran's influence there, on that the US has also been prepared to collude in to defeat Sunni insurgents.

That this was done by colluding in the practice of allowing torture by Shi-ite death squads, as well as co-opting Baathists of Saddam's secular dictatorship to kill off opposition to the US client state is hardly diminished by the assumptions of the Threat Reports in the Wikileaks.

Reversals of alliances and doublethink are routine in the New great Game where the main ambition in a pathological struggle to control oil and gas and its transit between exporting nations and the overdependent nations of the West that rely on it to keep its life support machine going.

As Iran borders both Iraq and Afghanistan it has an interest in seeking to avoid encirclement by US client states. In Afghanistan, the Taliban was supported by the US between 1994 and 1996 through its allies in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan because the Taliban was anti-Iranian, anti-Shia and pro-Western.

Iran objected to this US policy as the Taliban was fanatically anti-Shia which is why it started to back the Northern Alliance against the Taliban and nearly went to war with Afghanistan after Taliban forces seized the Iranian consulate in Mazari Sharif and executed Iranian diplomats in 1998.

Just as in Iraq, where Iran has backed those forces that will serve its interests, so too has it been prepared to do the same in maintaining links with members of the Northern Alliance and even the Taliban who want to block US interests in Afghanistan, most obviously the construction of the TAPI pipeline.

Without any real mention of the geopolitical context, such an article is essentially propaganda which insinuates that had Iran not meddled, then everything would have proceeded a lot better in Iraq and that this shows Iran is a rogue state ( hence the conflation of support for terror with the nuclear issue ).

The Rferl article linked to makes this quite explicit, ( How WikiLeaks Makes Confrontation With Iran More Likely )

... what is now beyond dispute is that ( Tehran ) clearly sees itself as engaged in a war against the United States and those attempting to forge an independent and democratic Iraq.

Yet the scale of US double standards and cynicism in the Persian Gulf and the fact it bears responsibility for triggering off the collapse of Iraq into anarchy in the first place, is hardly going to be linked to a widespread sense of outrage in Iraq or in the Middle East that Iran bears the blame all along for what happened.

"Dread juggernaut of conflict with Iran is drawing closer"

Simon Tisdall, one of the Guardian's foreign affairs columnists, writes,

The US is quietly ratcheting up economic and financial pressure on Iran amid signs that talks about Tehran's suspect nuclear programme could resume next month. These two developments may be connected. But neither sanctions nor diplomacy can wholly obviate the dread possibility of military confrontation unless something fundamental changes soon at the heart of Iran's fundamentalist regime.

The USA would be crazy to think of launching a military attack on Iran. Even if Iran were to get a nuclear missile, the driving force of the US foreign policy of isolating and encircling Iran for geopolitical hegemony and energy security, exists independently of Tehran actually having nuclear weapons.

But the need for change lies not merely in Iran.

There needs to be a fundamental change in the West's over dependence upon oil and gas. To merely shift the responsibility for the aggression on to Iran only and to totally screen out what the USA wants in ramping up tensions with Tehran.

Indeed the USA and Britain's is fighting in Afghanistan is to get a rival TAPI pipeline to the Iranian IPI scheme. The US is not keen on Iran having any nuclear capacity for civilian use either, as that would mean the greater use of gas and oil as levers over neighbouring states like Turkey.

Moreover, US bases under the auspices of Centcom ( Central Command ) set up under Reagan do encircle Iran from all sides. The reason is to enforce The Carter Doctrine of 1980-that any threat to supplies of oil and gas would be considered a threat to national security and the USA's vital interests.

Ultimately, with Iraq having been invaded on the pretext of having non-existent Weapons of Mass destruction there would seem to be some logic in Iran acquiring a nuclear bomb given the threat the USA is seen to pose. The squeeze on Iran would exist independent of the particular government it has, crudely depicted as a some totalitarian theocracy.

Indeed in 1952 the decision of the Mossadeq government to nationalise Iran's oil led to the USA blackballing Iran so that no oil could flow out and subsequently in 1953 the CIA orchestrated a coup that brought to power the Shah and his repressive police state. Which in turn then eventually led to the Islamic Revolution of 1979.

This current global situation with the dangerous colliding and clashing of strategic interests is increasingly similar to that which existed in the immediate run up to The First World War. There are numerous hotspots where ethnic and religious separatism interacts with a New Great Game for oil and gas that could trigger off global conflicts.

This is desperately worrying. Corelli Barnett summarised this in 2007 ( A War Too Far ),

To achieve its targets, the Pentagon would have to unleash waves of attacks by more than 100 aircraft on the 20 widely dispersed plants of the Iranian nuclear industry. Prolonged bombing of military bases, barracks and air-defence systems, many of them in or near great cities, would be needed. We saw it all before, in much smaller and less populated Iraq.

The loss of life among civilians would far exceed the 7000 slaughtered during the "shock and awe" blitz on Baghdad that heralded the invasion of Iraq. If the bombers struck an already "live" nuclear plant, the result would be another Chernobyl. In addition, such an onslaught would inevitably mean war.

And it would mean war with a nation of 70 million people -- 65 per cent of whom are under the age of 25 -- at a time when the combined might of American, British and other international armed forces have been unable to subdue a country with a population of no more than 27 million.

Iran is a mountainous country much bigger than Iraq or Afghanistan and extending from the Caspian Sea to the Persian Gulf, from Turkey to Afghanistan.

While the Iranian armed forces (including the 120,000 men of the Revolutionary Guards and the 200,000 in the Basij militia, all Islamic zealots) may be far inferior to the American forces in training and hi-tech weaponry, they fought a bloody war with Saddam Hussein's Iraqi army for six years -- proving that they are well able to take appalling attrition without buckling.

For them, every body bag contained a glorious martyr. No one should therefore underestimate Iran's capacity for prolonged resistance. War with Iran would be like Iraq plus Afghanistan multiplied by 10.

In a fresh demonstration of "asymmetrical warfare" (where the two sides are mismatched in their military capabilities), America's colossal firepower would be countered by guerilla ambush and terrorist bombings anywhere in the world where infuriated Muslims could inflict damage on the West.

Because of the connection between the Shias of Iran -- who make up 90 per cent of the population -- those of southern Iraq, and of Hezbollah in the Lebanon, the conflict would engulf the entire Middle East, from the Mediterranean coast to the borders of Pakistan and very probably sucking in the Sunnis of Saudi Arabia as well in reaction.

What's more, such a conflict would inflict terrible damage on the global economy because of its impact on oil supplies from the Persian Gulf.

It would be all too easy for Iranian suicide speedboats to make the narrow Straits of Hormuz too hazardous for the passage of the giant tankers on which the industrialised "First World" (now including China) depends. It would be all too tempting for the US Navy to try to clear that passage by force.

In short, an attack on Iran would effectively launch World War III.

The chilling reality is that such wars seem increasingly likely due to the lethal reliance of diminishing fossil fuels in dangerous far off lands, the contradiction between the West's need for stable or falling oil prices and the need in Iran and other Islamic nations for rising prices to stave off discontent.