Editor in Chief: Moh. Reza Huwaida Friday, March 29th, 2024

The Looming State of War

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The Looming State of War

An adventurous, tense and contentious year has just passed and an expectedly more precarious one has begun. The year 2011 brought about considerable gains for human community as well catastrophic occurrences and unpleasant events. The world was shaken by brave, pro-democracy uprisings in many Arab countries. The global democratization trend was accelerated by nations' increased awareness and the will to fight for freedom, in addition to continued international supports for democratic gains.

However, an overall picture of the global incidents still seems multitalented and versatile. Global democratic cooperation to overcome joint threats such as poverty, climate change, nuclear threats and terrorism was followed up but could not meet the promising picture it haddreamed of.

Relations between world countries remained much questionable and uncertain. Global North and South maintained the gap and a series of fresh menaces began to rise. The US and its allies remained in fight with unfriendly countries and, to some extent, the ties grew more muddled. This has led to a more unstable and wavering global status.

The longstanding enmity between the United States and its allies on one side and the Islamic Republic of Iran and its supporting groups on the other, remained at the top of world's most favored media catches, besides other blowing stories in Middle East and the Central and South Asia.

The fight on nuclear program spilled over certain other areas. More economic sanctions against Iran provoked the country to warn on closing the Hormuz Strait, the passage for one fifth of the world's oil shipment. A new phase of arms race has just begun in the region, lining up the two anti and pro-western fronts.

Iran's new missile test fires led to the multi-billion deal of highly sophisticated aircrafts and intelligence devices between the US and Arab Gulf Countries. According to intelligence reports and security experts, the region would turn more unstable and unpredictable by a tough but covert fight being carried out to maintain military supremacy across the region.

To avoid militarization of the current problem, the US and its European allies are supposed to impose new economic sanctions on the Islamic Republic. They said the sanctions would be aimed at bringing Iran back to the negotiation table following a long pause in talks on Iranian nuclear program.

With the increasingly choked economy, diplomacy and international trade ties, Iran has expressed willingness to go back to the table. On Saturday, the country declared its readiness to resume nuclear talks with world powers.

Iranian Foreign Minister Ali-Akbar Salehi declared on Saturday, December 31, that the Islamic Republic was ready to resume talks with world powers over its nuclear program. The concession came in the midst of increased tensions with western powers after Iran threatened to close a key oil shipping route by readying war missile tests near the entrance to the Gulf.

According to the US Energy Information Administration, twenty percent of the world's oil moves through the Strait of Hormuz, at the entrance of the Gulf, making it the "most important chokepoint" in the world.

The dispute over the channel flared this week after the Iran's Vice President, Reza Rahimi warned the West "not a drop of oil" would be able to pass through the strait if more sanctions were imposed over the country's nuclear program. The US responded by saying a closure "will not be tolerated."

Following the warning by Iran, the Obama administration has issued what, the experts say, amounts to a threat of war against Iran to reinforce the point, the US navy sent two of its warships—the aircraft carrier USS John C. Stennis and the guided-missile destroyer USS Mobile Bay—on a "routine transit" through the strategic waterway where the Iranian navy is currently holding exercises.

The growing tensions in the Persian Gulf are the result of provocative steps by the US and its European allies towards blocking Iranian oil exports. President Obama is about to sign a measure into law that would freeze the US assets of foreign financial institutions doing business with Iran's central bank—moves that would seriously impede Iranian oil exports. At the same time, Britain and France are pressing the European Union to adopt an embargo on the import of Iranian oil.

Some military experts have warned that US-Iranian fresh warnings are setting the stage for a dangerous slide towards war in the Persian Gulf. The press immediately added fuel to the flames by backing Washington and vilifying the Iranian regime.

An editorial in the New York Times on Thursday fully supported the Obama administration's threat of military action against any Iranian attempt to block the Persian Gulf. The editorial condemned Iran for "its recklessness and its contempt for international law," declaring, "This is not a government any country should want to see acquire nuclear weapons."

Other sections of the media went one step further, giving voice to the clamor in ruling circles in the US and Israel for a pre-emptive attack on Iran to destroy its nuclear and military facilities. The Wall Street Journal editorial seized on the tensions over the Strait of Hormuz to warn of the dangers of an Iranian regime "fortified by a nuclear threat," concluding that it would be "better to act now to stop Iran."

Intelligence reports recently disclosed a potentially waging decision made by specific ruling elites in America and Israel. The reports, including one published on Guardian, said US and Israel are already engaged in a covert war against Iran's nuclear and missile programs that involves computer viruses, bombings and assassinations.

In a report titled as "War on Iran has already begun", The Guardian on December 7, 2011 wrote, "They don't give up. After a decade of blood-drenched failure in Afghanistan and Iraq, violent destabilization of Pakistan and Yemen, the devastation of Lebanon and slaughter in Libya, you might hope the US and its friends had had their fill of invasion and intervention in the Muslim world".

The source said, "It seems not. For months the evidence has been growing that a US-Israeli stealth war against Iran has already begun, backed by Britain and France. Covert support for armed opposition groups has spread into a campaign of assassinations of Iranian scientists, cyber warfare, attacks on military and missile installations, and the killing of an Iranian general, among others".

In a sign of fearful happening in future, military experts maintain that the US has not only drawn up its own detailed war plans, but is arming its allies in the Gulf against Iran. The White House gave great media prominence on Thursday to a huge $30 billion arms sale to Saudi Arabia, including 84 of the latest F-15SA fighter aircraft.

Irrespective of how Iran is accounting for its nuclear program, one thing is sure that the relentless intensification of tensions always poses the danger of precipitating conflict, even if at a particular point in time it is unintended. Experts maintain that a war against Iran, a country that is crucial to the geopolitical calculations not only of the US, but also major rivals such as Russia and China, inevitably risks escalating into a far broader regional and international conflict with catastrophic implications for humanity.

Nasrudding Hemati is the permanent writer of Daily Outlook Afghanistan and Writes on National and International issues. He can be reached through mail@outlookafghanistan.com

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