Give a dog a bad name and hang him—so goes an English proverb. That’s what’s happening to Iran now at the hands of Don Trump and Bibi Netanyahu.
Iran once bore the bad name of being a bomb-maker, despite having signed the NPT in 1968. India and Pakistan got away because India had refused to sign a treaty that discriminated between the world’s five bomb-haves and the remaining have-nots, and Pakistan said ditto. Yes, there are issues on which India and Pakistan agree.
Iran, indeed, was a bomb-maker. The ayatollahs did attempt to make atom bombs, apparently to guard Iran from the bombs that Bibi had kept hidden in his basement, till Barack Obama persuaded them against the bid in 2014. But come Donald Trump in 2018, the US went back on its promises of no-sanctions, and the ayatollahs returned to their bomb labs. Last July, Don and Bibi showered bunker-busters on Iran for 12 days just in the manner “the Lord rained upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah brimstone and fire” and declared that all of Iran’s atom labs have been put out of business.
Which means, Iran has been posing no nuclear threat to anyone in the neighbourhood since last July, both by Iran’s admission, and by the Don-Bibi duo’s claim. Then why are the two at war again with Iran?
Trump’s charge is that Iran is developing long-range missiles that could threaten Europe, US troops overseas, and “soon reach the American homeland”. But as any cracker-crazy kid would tell you, a 3,000-km range ballistic missile is no big threat if it carries only a conventional TNT warhead. At the end of a 9,000-km flight from Tehran to New York (as a ballistic crow would fly), an ICBM would just coast and burst like a Sivakasi rocket somewhere in a pool in Queens or Brooklyn leaving no scratch on the Manhattan skyline.
Leave alone distant New York, no mullah or ayatollah in his right senses would burn up ballistic hardware worth millions of rials just for sending burning Diwali crackers to one’s bad neighbour’s courtyard. Didn’t we see in the first Gulf war of 1991 how Saddam Hussein’s Scuds, “those inaccurate tools of terror”, as George Bush Sr called them, landed as damp squids in the sands of Israel and Saudi Arabia? They drew no blood or scald but only derisive laughter. And we are currently seeing how limited is the damage from Iran’s short-range darts that are falling in Israel, the UAE and Qatar.
So what do they have against Iran? As Israel’s charge goes, Iran has been arming the Houthis and the Hezbollah militias who have been shooting darts at Israel now and then, and at other pro-American regimes in the neighbourhood. But that’s no serious threat since Israelis have been used to life under iron domes.
The real war aim is no longer hidden. Don and Bibi have stated that they want to effect a regime change in Iran. Don’s predecessors’ bids in Afghanistan and Iraq ended up with hundreds of bodybags being sent back home. This time they want to effect a regime change from the air, leaving the dirty job of a street revolution to the Iranians themselves.
All the same, any bid to change a regime, from the earth or air—or from prithvi or akasa as Indian sages called them for DRDO to adopt names for their missiles—would end up in pataals of chaos. After 20 years of a bleeding war, the yanks left Afghanistan back in the hands of the Taliban. After prosecuting a sand-grinding war in the Mesopotamian deserts, they left Iraq, till then a progressive country with a sound techno-scientific base, in the neolithic age.
prasannan@theweek.in