As the war on Iran lurches towards its second month, a steady stream of voices from the intelligence communities in the US and Israel are making public their dissension with the whole project.
As a result, more details are coming out about the decision to launch the attack in February. It had, then, as little to do with negotiations with Iran in Muscat and Geneva as it has today.
While President Donald Trump has been talking up contacts with Iran – a notion dismissed by Iranian parliamentary speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf as “fake news” – flight data shows that he has simultaneously ordered the transfer of large numbers of US troops into Israel and Jordan, apparently in preparation for a ground assault and the next stage of the war.
No, the key element in the decision to attack Iran for the second time in a year was provided by an intelligence briefing that turned out to be 100 percent false. The dodgy dossier that led to this attack was written by Mossad director David Barnea.
He claimed in a briefing to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that the Mossad was so strong on the ground in Iran that it would be able to galvanise Iranian opposition forces to overthrow their government once an air war had started.
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Barnea’s confidence is confirmation, if any were needed, that Mossad had a large part to play in turning a January demonstration by currency traders in Tehran into an armed rebellion in which thousands of protesters were shot dead.
Barnea’s promise was central to Netanyahu’s pitch to Trump that the Islamic Republic was so weak, all it needed was one final push to collapse. Although Barnea’s prediction was challenged by rival intelligence agencies in Israel and the US, it convinced the credulous Trump.
Reality dawned within an hour of the air attack that wiped out Iran’s former supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, severely injured his son, Mojtaba, and killed more than 40 of Iran’s top generals. Because within an hour of that first strike, Iran started firing back – and it has not stopped since.
Asymmetrical warfare
Iran has made good on its promises to attack Israel, US bases, oil tankers, and oil and gas refineries, and to close the Strait of Hormuz, paralysing one-fifth of the global trade in oil and natural gas.
In the fourth week of this war, Iran appears no less capable of maintaining a steady flow of missiles and drones than it was in the first hours of the conflict.
Iran has surely been hammered by air strikes, and lost its navy, many Revolutionary Guard command centres, and much of its air force and air defence systems – but Iran as a whole continues to defend itself.
As it promised, its response has been asymmetrical. It has successfully widened the geographical impact of this war by making certain there are no bystanders hoping to sit this one out.
‘They are basically saying that the western transatlantic alliance, or the Europeans in particular, have fooled us – and now we have to fend for ourselves’
– Mohammad ElBaradei, former IAEA director
Trump and Netanyahu now have a regional war on their hands, which they will be hard put to end. Brown University researchers estimate that as many as 4.7 million people have died, both directly and indirectly, as a result of the series of conflicts triggered by former US President George W Bush’s decision to invade Afghanistan and Iraq in the early 2000s.
The consequences of the war on Iran could be wider still, especially if it continues as a ground invasion. If all of this sounds horribly familiar to what happened when Bush and former British Prime Minister Tony Blair attacked Iraq in 2003, that’s because it is.
To find out more, I went to talk to the man who knows: Mohammad ElBaradei.
ElBaradei headed the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) for three consecutive terms. He and the chief UN weapons inspector at the time, Hans Blix, were at ground zero in Iraq as the CIA and MI6 put together a dossier on false intelligence alleging that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.
Today, ElBaradei can only amplify the parallels with what is happening now in Iran.
“Hans Blix and I went through a very difficult time, when we saw a complete deception. We were on the ground, and we did not see any nuclear, chemical or biological weapons programme at that time in Iraq. And yet the Bush administration continued to give this flashy briefing at the Security Council,” he said.
“They went to war, destroyed a country. Hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians died because of the lack of medicine, because of the lack of food, and then later on they said ‘oops, there was nothing’. I see a lot of similarity here when I hear Mr Trump saying that Iran is two weeks away from a nuclear weapon. I get depressed, frankly, because I know the meaning of that: innocent civilians will die.”
Ignoring international law
ElBaradei did give me some answers that I did not expect to hear. He supported the current director general of the IAEA, Rafael Grossi, who said after the 12-day war last June that Iran could start enriching uranium within a matter of months, contradicting Trump’s line that he had blown up Iran’s nuclear facilities “to kingdom come”.
“To be an objective person in a subjective environment is very difficult, and everyone wants to read [into the evidence] things the way they want to read it,” ElBaradei told me. “Grossi said there is no structured, no systematic weapons programme … It is not the IAEA that is losing its impartiality; [rather], the Security Council is completely paralysed.”
ElBaradei, a veteran international lawyer, also knew and negotiated with Ali Larijani, the former head of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, who was killed this month in an Israeli strike.
ElBaradei says of Larijani: “He was one of the good people. He understood profoundly the issues and what he wants to get. And we lost him in the sense of having an interlocutor.”
But after Gaza, and indeed well before it, it has become an acceptable part of war to assassinate negotiators, politicians, philosophers and journalists. Genocide has become the toolkit of modern warfare.
ElBaradei’s most powerful point is not about history repeating itself, but about history amplifying itself.
The Bush administration at least made an attempt to ground its attacks in international law. Trump makes no effort to do so; for him, international law does not exist. The UN is an empty talking shop that seeks only to humiliate him by turning off the escalators and the teleprompter when he speaks.
By brute force, the US no longer just seeks to break and remake nations. Its ambitions are grander: it is seeking in this war to break and remake a whole region
By brute force, the US no longer just seeks to break and remake nations. Its ambitions are grander: it is seeking in this war to break and remake a whole region. For this purpose, it has jettisoned all the norms of international law on which ElBaradei was trained.
“I’ve been educated, trained in the US, in the West. I’ve lived more than half of my life in the West. I always believed that [western democracy] is not perfect, but it was the way to go,” he said.
But as European leaders and western nations like Germany continue to defend Israel – even as the International Court of Justice has determined there is a plausible case for genocide in Gaza, and the International Criminal Court (ICC) has issued arrest warrants for top Israeli leaders – the West is clearly “losing it”, ElBaradei added.
“Ask anyone in the Global South right now … they are basically saying that the western transatlantic alliance, or the Europeans in particular, have fooled us – and now we have to fend for ourselves in terms of security, in terms of economic development, in terms of values. Is that good for the world? Absolutely zero.”
Subverting the system
Since my interview with ElBaradei in Vienna, Middle East Eye revealed that Karim Khan, the chief prosecutor who issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and his former defence minister, Yoav Gallant, has been cleared of all charges of sexual misconduct by judges looking at the evidence.
Still, some members of the bureau of the Assembly of States Parties governing the ICC are determined to continue efforts to bar Khan from resuming his duties. They are seeking to block the judges’ report and to re-characterise the findings based on their own assessment of a report by the UN’s Office for Internal Oversight Services, two senior diplomatic sources briefed on a recent bureau meeting told MEE.
This is the clearest example of ElBaradei’s central message. The West, which invented the modern concept of international law and created courts like the ICC after the Second World War, are now intent on sabotaging and subverting it.
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The western attack on a rules-based international order does not confine itself to justice. ElBaradei points out that the US has walked away from the World Health Organization as it works to prevent another pandemic, and abandoned the Paris climate change agreement: “They are fighting science … When you see Gaza, when you see Iran, when you see Ukraine, where is the Security Council? It’s not there.”
There was a profound sadness in ElBaradei’s eyes when I talked to him in his flat in Vienna.
“When you just walk around and smash every rule and every expectation, and then tell the people, ‘you have become terrorists’ – when people get angry, when people feel a sense of injustice, what do you expect them to do? Go to have a glass of wine with you?” he said.
But of one thing he is sure: revolution in the Arab world is coming. ElBaradei, who was a central figure in Egypt’s democracy revolution in Tahrir Square, left the country after the 2013 Rabaa Square massacre, which marked the start of a military counter-revolution that crushed democracy and free elections, seemingly for good.
“The Arab Spring is not dead at all,” ElBaradei said with certainty. “What did the Arab Spring ask for? Equity, economic development, political freedom – these are things which are still absent in most Arab countries … History is slow, but the root causes are there, when people now see their land being taken from them, when they see they are being treated like dirt, they are being shot at.”
European irrelevance
After the Iraq War, ElBaradei recalled former US President Barack Obama saying “we need to learn when we shoot, to aim”.
“At least he was honest to say that, but it was a little bit late, because then we got ISIS,” ElBaradei added.
To whom shall we turn when our future enemies apply the same rules of war to us as we have to them?
We now have a US president who does not even pretend to consult the international community before going to war. International law, under his tenure, has ceased to exist. So have international treaties, and negotiations are only at best pauses while more force and more troops are brought to bear.
We will rue the day we allowed this to happen. Because when the American empire finally hits the dust, we in Europe will need international law and institutions, as we will not have the hard power to protect ourselves. Over Gaza, then Lebanon and now Iran, Europe has made itself irrelevant. This will come back to haunt it.
And to whom shall we turn when our future enemies apply the same rules of war to us as we have to them? To whom shall we turn when they assassinate our negotiators, our politicians, our journalists; when they bomb our hospitals and call them terrorist hideouts?
Trump and Netanyahu are burning the candle at both ends, and when their rule is finally over, everyone will have their fingers burned.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.