Iran’s mullahs must be getting increasingly worried that somebody is about to launch a military strike on their nuclear bomb development facilities or to impose genuinely tough sanctions that will bring their oil exports to a standstill. Such sanctions, if actually enforced, would cripple Iran’s economy and possibly bring on an intolerable level of civil unrest. How else to explain the statement from Gen. Ataollah Salehi, head of Iran’s military forces, in which he warned the United States not to send the USS John C. Stennis and its support vessels back into the Persian Gulf for any reason. “We warn this ship, which is considered a threat to us, not to come back, and we do not repeat our words twice,” Salehi was quoted as saying by the Iranian Students News. We think former U.S. Ambassador to the UN John Bolton was right when he told The Washington Examiner yesterday that “Iran is still trying to intimidate the White House and Europe because of concern over a possible Israeli attack on its nuclear weapons program. The U.S. should disregard the Iranian bluster, and conduct operations in the Gulf region as it deems appropriate.” There is also this fact, noted by former deputy undersecretary of defense Jed Babbin: “It would be an act of war for Iran to interfere with our exercise of freedom of the seas. American ships can, and should, go anywhere international waters are deep enough for them to sail.”
So, Salehi’s bluster likely is just that because he and everybody else in the Middle East knows Iran’s naval forces would quickly cease to exist as a result of an engagement with the Stennis task force. For decades, America has maintained sufficient military strength in the waters of the region in order to keep international shipping lanes open to all countries. That includes the strategically critical Strait of Hormuz, the narrow channel at the southern terminus of the gulf through which a fifth of the world’s ocean-going commerce passes. Iran periodically threatens to close the strait in response to real and imagined threats.
The key fact is that all of these calculations depend upon the maintenance of a U.S. military capable of projecting whatever force is required to protect international commerce, including the power to neutralize hostile forces from Iran or elsewhere. And there are grave doubts about how much longer such forces will be available to U.S. officials. Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta is expected later this week to make public his proposal for implementing nearly $500 billion in defense spending cuts over the next decade.
Experts agree that those reductions will significantly reduce U.S. military capabilities, but there is disagreement about the consequences, especially if further cuts are mandated following the 2012 election. It should not be forgotten that whenever there is a crisis anywhere in the world, the first question often asked by an American president is “where are the carriers.” Iran’s latest saber-rattling should remind Americans that we dare not risk a world in which the answer to that question is “in the scrap yard, Mr. President.”
