Russian hints that US might back Israeli attack on Iran

THE IMMINENT release of yet another report from the International Atomic Energy Authority has set the rumour mills whirring that Israel is in the throes of planning an aerial strike on Iran's nuclear plants – possibly with the backing of Washington.
 
While much of the northern hemisphere has been distracted by the travails of the eurozone, the new diplomatic firestorm in the Middle East and Gulf has been largely ignored – until this weekend. A statement from the Russian foreign minister yesterday should be a wake-up call that something drastic could be about to happen in the Gulf.
 
The head of the IAEA, Yukia Amano, has let it be known that the new report on Iran's nuclear ambitions and developments will contain a detailed appendix which spells out just how much is known about Iran's attempts to acquire a nuclear arsenal over the past 10 years. Russia and China have already sent diplomatic notes to Vienna to demand he does not publish such information, which they see as threatening world peace.
 
Even the Obama administration has been unusually coy about what Amano might be about to reveal. When he went to brief the US National Security Council at the end of last month, the official spokesman barely confirmed that the meeting had taken place at all.
 
In part the nerves in Washington might be connected to the reports that the Iranians had been planning to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to the United States. US intelligence agencies say they now believe the Tehran regime was behind the murder of a Saudi diplomat in Karachi last May.
 
Last week, The Guardian's new defence correspondent Nick Hopkins put out a detailed report suggesting that the UK was working on contingency plans to support a US air and sea strike against Iran's principal missile and nuclear defence establishments.
 
The IAEA report is expected to confirm that the Iranian defence establishment has carried out successful experiments with explosive chain reactions to trigger a nuclear device and that work is going ahead on new medium-range missiles that could reach most of the eastern Mediterranean as far as Greece.  

The disruption caused by the Stuxnet virus to the software in Iran's centrifuge installations – thought to be the work of Israeli and American agents – now seems largely overcome, the IAEA appears to have concluded.
 
Sergei Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, appeared to be suggesting that America is contemplating military action when he warned that any pre-emptive strike on Iran "would be a very serious mistake, fraught with unpredictable consequences".  Speaking after a visit by Iran's foreign minister, Lavrov added, "There is no military solution to the Iranian nuclear problem – as there is no military solution to any other problem in the modern world." He then instanced the failure of armed intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan.
 
In this Sergei Lavrov may have touched the core of the latest crisis over Iran. As the Americans prepare to quit Iraq altogether next month, it is now clear that the conflict there is far from over. Once more Sunni insurgents are pitted against the Shia-dominated government of Nuri al-Maliki.

Maliki and the Shia political clans and militias are backed heavily by Iran, while the Sunni dissidents in the west of the country are backed by Saudi Arabia.
 
The Saudis and the Iranians seem now pitted in what has been called 'the new great game' across the Middle East – in Iraq, Bahrain, Yemen and Syria, where Tehran backs its old allies in the Alawite regime of Bashar al-Assad, while Saudi sends funds and materials to the insurgents.
 
Contrary to the expectations of the architects of 'shock and awe' interventionism of the George W Bush era, the invasion of Iraq in 2003 and its aftermath have led to a weakening of US influence in the region and unforeseen propaganda and political success for Iran.
 
Given the enormous expenditure of blood, treasure, and political and psychological effort in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, where the results are at best equivocal, it is surprising that Washington and London can even be contemplating yet another military adventure over Iran. It is all the weirder because the military task is so tricky  – it would be hard to strike the scatter of nuclear facilities and laboratories – and the consequences of failure would be even more dire.
 
Any military strike is likely to lead to the closure of the Straits of Hormuz within a matter of hours, cutting off the flow of about a third of the world's oil and gas consumption. The market meltdown combined with the turmoil in the eurozone wouldn't be so much a hurricane as the perfect financial storm. ·