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O Untimely Death:

The Fourth Indo-Pakistani War, 1996-98

 

By Chris Oakley

Part 10

 

inspired by the story "Hell’s Door Opened" by David Atwell

Summary:

In the previous nine episodes of this series we looked at the 4th Indo-Pakistani War and its immediate aftermath; in this last installment of the series, we’ll review the course of world history in the eleven years since President Gore departed the White House.

 

******

George W. Bush took office in January of 2001 facing a world which was still unsettled in the wake of the Fourth Indo-Pakistani War and the Punjabi cholera epidemic. And as if the problem of trying to rebuild India and Pakistan in the aftermath of these twin disasters wasn’t harrowing enough, the incoming U.S. president also had to cope with a surge in global terrorism in the postwar era-- not to mention the fact that North Korea and Iran, apparently having learned little if anything from the horror of the 1997 Indo-Pakistani thermonuclear confrontation, were busily trying to attain their own atomic weapons capabilities. The Iranian government in particular showed a disturbing willingness(if not eagerness) to endanger the stability of the Persian Gulf region for the sake of acquiring the Bomb.

That Bush simply wouldn’t tolerate. In his first major foreign policy address as commander-in-chief, he made it crystal clear his administration would push for heavy economic sanctions against Iran; his defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, hinted the United States might launch air strikes on Iran if the sanctions didn’t have the desired effects. Statements like these naturally didn’t go over well with the mullahs in Tehran; in response to Rumsfeld’s comments Iran’s Supreme Ayatollah Ali Khamenei threatened the U.S. with “total obliteration” unless Washington backed off. This of course only served to harden the Bush Administration’s resolve to stop Iran’s nuclear program dead in its tracks.

Iran’s nearest neighbor, Iraq, was also complicating matters on the nuclear proliferation front. While his regime’s nuclear weapons development program didn’t quite have the kind of resources available to Tehran or Pyongyang, Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein was pursuing the acquisition of a nuclear capability every bit as aggressively as North Korea’s Marxist oligarchy or Iran’s fundamentalist theocracy. In fact, some intelligence and defense analysts thought he might be pursuing it even more aggressively than Iran or North Korea in hopes of avenging the Israelis’ destruction of the Osirak nuclear reactor more than two decades earlier.

In his 2002 State of the Union address President Bush further demonstrated his commitment to halting nuclear proliferation, and in the process raised a few eyebrows among the Beltway cognoscenti, by grouping Iran, Iraq, and North Korea together as what he called “an axis of evil”. To Bush’s supporters this phrase was an eloquent echo of Ronald Reagan’s famed “evil empire” address about the USSR in the final decade of the Cold War; to Bush’s critics it was a dangerously and needlessly confrontational rhetorical flourish which potentially could start the U.S. and its adversaries down the path to World War III. Bush’s vice-president, Dick Cheney, had very little patience for the critics, asserting they were doing more to lay the groundwork for World War III than anything Bush could have done or said himself.

One month after the State of the Union, the Bush White House received information that gave the administration fresh cause for alarm about Iran’s nuclear ambitions. A routine satellite pass over the Persian Gulf picked up signs of increased activity at an Iranian nuclear fuel enrichment facility 20 miles southwest of Qom; in the same week, an Iranian defector with close ties to the nuclear program warned the U.S. embassy in London that Tehran was at most just four years away from test-detonating a prototype atomic bomb. These twin revelations provoked the Bush Administration to turn up the rhetorical and political heat on Tehran.

By April of 2002 there was little debate that decisive action had to be taken to squelch the nuclear threat from the Persian Gulf-- the real argument was over what form said action should take. The hawks in President Bush’s cabinet, most notably Vice President Dick Cheney, all strongly favored going to war with Iran. The doves in the White House felt war was too risky an option, arguing instead in favor of economic and diplomatic sanctions as the better method of pressuring Iran into giving up its nuclear aspirations. The argument between these opposing camps would continue for weeks...

******

....and would be abruptly settled in the hawks’ favor in June of 2002 when the NSA picked up a massive spike in communications chatter among Iranian armed forces senior officers. The code phrases used in that chatter were suspected to be cover for organizing a pre-emptive attack on U.S. bases and interests in the Persian Gulf-- a suspicion confirmed by satellite passes over the Iranian border that picked up massive concentrations of troops and combat aircraft being assembled for what looked like an invasion of either Kuwait or Saudi Arabia. At a hastily called special session of the National Security Council the day after the Iranian troop concentrations were discovered, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld bluntly stated his belief that there was no option left other than military strikes if the White House was serious about stopping Iran’s nuclear weapons program.

Taking a page from Adlai Stevenson’s playbook in the Cuban missile crisis, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell appeared before the U.N. General Assembly on June 7th to present some of the evidence Washington had gathered regarding Iran’s plot to invade its closest neighbors in the Persian Gulf. His primary aim was to enlist the Assembly’s support for taking military action to stop the invasion as well as shut down Iran’s nuclear weapons program; his secondary goal was to send a clear message to Tehran that the United States was ready to do whatever it took to forestall Iran’s acquisition of the Bomb. When a senior French intelligence official went before the Assembly two days later to vouch for the accuracy of Powell’s report, the die was cast: the Assembly’s members voted overwhelmingly to sanction military action against Iran, with only Afghanistan and Cuba opposing the resolution. (Six nations, including North Korea and Iraq, abstained.) Even China and Russia, who the Iranian government had been on cordial terms with and hoped might come to its rescue by blocking the U.S.-sponsored resolution, voted in favor of the measure-- albeit less out of concern about Iran’s nuclear ambitions than out of fear that Muslim separatists might one day turn to Iran for support in starting rebellions in central Asia against the Beijing and Moscow governments.

Realizing that Washington was deadly serious about confronting Iran in its own backyard, the Iranian general staff hastily started to rewrite their battle plans regarding Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, seeking to guarantee Tehran would get in the first shot in its impending war with the United States. Unfortunately for the Iranian government, its generals weren’t quite hasty enough-- when their troops tried to cross the Kuwaiti border three weeks after Colin Powell’s appearance before the U.N. they immediately met with ferocious resistance from U.S. and allied troops on the other side of the frontier. In the face of what one BBC correspondent on the ground inside the war zone called “the full fury of hell unleashed on earth”, the Iranian army pulled back to its side of the border, with U.S. and other coalition forces right at their heels.

******

Perhaps it was just coincidence, but within a week after the start of hostilities between the United States and Iran Saddam Hussein went on Iraqi state television to announce that Iraq was henceforth abandoning any future plans it might have had to conduct any nuclear research activities. To those familiar with Saddam’s previous defiant attitude towards U.N. weapons inspectors, this announcement was a very radical turnabout to say the least; they barely had time to absorb the import of if before he followed it up with the equally stunning coda that Baghdad was prepared to turn over to the United States and its allies documents implicating certain Iraqi intelligence officers as having links to terrorist act against Western interests in the Middle East.

In the end Saddam’s maneuvering would do him little good; by the time the Iranians attacked Kuwait his fellow Iraqis were so angry at his oppressive regime they were taking to the streets of Baghdad and other major cities to demand his resignation as head of state. As the war between Iran and the U.S.-sponsored coalition intensified, Saddam would eventually be toppled in a coup d’etat by his generals and later hanged after a televised trial in which many of his top deputies were also condemned to death. His sons Uday and Qusay barely managed to escape Iraq with their lives and would spend the next two years on the run as fugitives before U.S. intelligence tracked them down to a high- rent luxury apartment in France, where they would die in a three-hour shootout with French police. His foreign minister, Tariq Aziz, would defect to the insurgents’ camp and testify against his former boss at Saddam’s trial.

By August of 2002 U.S. and allied combat jets were bombing military and command/control targets in Tehran on a daily basis and coalition ground troops were advancing on the oil fields of Abadan, causing the Iranian government no end of concern about Iran’s economic future and the Iranian people the first stirrings of doubt as to whether or not their country could prevail against the superpower Khomeini had once referred to as “the Great Satan”. In a late night meeting three days after U.S. and allied ground forces reached Abadan, the Iranian army general staff spent more time arguing with one another about who was responsible for the war going badly than in trying to plan any kind of coordinated response to the threatened assault on Abadan’s petroleum production facilities.

And not only was Iranian military cohesion crumbling in the face of relentless hammering from coalition forces, but the Iranian government was starting to destabilize too. Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad now found himself fighting two wars: one against the United States and its allies, the other against elements of his own government that were conspiring with Iran’s top spiritual authorities to oust him from his office as a scapegoat for his generals’ inability to direct a coherent counterattack in defense of Iran’s remaining strategic assets. And if that wasn’t enough of a headache for the beleaguered Iranian president to cope with, a modest but committed pro-democracy movement had sprung up in several of the country’s major cities and started demonstrating against the theocratic regime in Tehran.

When Abadan and its oil fields fell to coalition troops after 36 hours’ fighting, it turned out to be the straw that broke the camel’s back for Ahmadinejad’s regime. The mullahs who were the power behind the throne now proceeded to maneuver against the Iranian president in one of the most stunning coups the Middle East had seen in decades. No sooner had the last shots been fired at Abadan than Ahmadinejad found himself out on a political limb with the mullahs doing their best to saw the limb off the tree. The Iranian government began to tear itself apart as supporters of Ahmadinejad squared off with his critics in a series of street clashes that rivaled anything which had been seen in Tehran during the days before the Shah’s overthrow. Cracks started to appear in the façade of unity the Islamic regime had taken such pains to present to the outside world for so many years.

Those cracks quickly turned into chasms, and by early September the theocracy in Tehran was on the verge of collapse as Ahmadinejad’s ministers turned on each other like rabid dogs and the mullahs who had been the final arbiters of political power in Iran since 1979 were now beset by a growing and highly vocal dissident movement that demanded nothing less than full democracy for the Iranian people. On September 12th Ahmadinejad narrowly eluded an assassination attempt by a student radical whose brother had been killed in action two days earlier; the incident sharply exacerbated the Iranian president’s already intense paranoia, and after the would-be assassin was caught Ahmadinejad had him shot along with hundreds of other young Iranians by Revolutionary Guard firing squads.

Those executions effectively put the final nail in the Islamic Republic’s coffin. Outraged about the mass murder of their fellow students, undergraduates from Iran’s universities and secondary schools took to the streets to denounce the Ahmadienjad regime; in every branch of the Iranian armed forces the rank and file rose up in mutiny against Ahmadinejad and the theocrats who were keeping him in power. On September 21st, nine short days after he escaped death at an assassin’s hands, the Iranian president was overthrown in a coup orchestrated by dissident army senior officers and mutinous factions of the Revolutionary Guard. Five days later U.S. and allied advance columns reached the outskirts of Tehran; twenty-four hours after that they entered the city itself, facing only minimal resistance(most of it coming from Ahmadinejad loyalists and Islamic extremists).

On October 2nd, 2002 coalition diplomats and representatives of the new provisional Iranian government met in Riyadh to sign a peace treaty formally ending the war in Iran. As one of the key provisions of the peace accord, the provisional government opened Iran’s atomic research facilities to U.N. inspectors and agreed to refrain from any further attempts to acquire nuclear weapons....

******

...which was a very fortunate thing, because just as the Iranian nuclear program was coming to an end, North Korea’s nuclear ambitions were growing bolder than ever. Kim Jong Il, the mercurial figure who had inherited the leadership of the world’s last remaining hard-line Stalinist regime after his father Kim Il Sung’s death in 1994, hardly seemed to notice or care that his quest to make his country a member of the nuclear club was threatening the world’s stability at the very moment when other major nuclear powers, including North Korea’s main allies Russia and China, were trying to keep a lid on tensions between Kim’s regime and South Korea.

It certainly didn’t seem to disturb him that he was inflicting yet more damage on his country’s already nearly crippled economy. In spite of relentless international pressure to scale back his military expenditures and invest more in the civilian sector, Kim had continued his father’s long-standing policy of putting the army first on North Korea’s hierarchy of spending priorities; rather than admit that the regime’s rigid control of the economy was the actual cause of many of his people’s woes, Kim consistently chose to blame the United States and its allies.       But the North Korean dictator would have second thoughts about his nuclear aspirations in 2004 when China, in a dramatic reversal of its typical policies towards its ally in Pyongyang, joined the United States in calling for economic sanctions against Kim’s regime with the goal of forcing North Korea to scrap its nuclear research activities, or at least modify them sufficiently to eliminate any possibility that the country’s atomic reactors could be used to manufacture bombs. That decision would be the tipping point in the Korean nuclear crisis; just six weeks after the Chinese government affirmed its intent to support sanctions against North Korea, Kim accepted an offer from then-United Nationals Secretary General Kofi Annan to have the U.N. mediate multi- party discussions between North Korea, the United States, China, South Korea, Russia, and Japan on arms control and redirecting North Korea’s nuclear development program towards more peaceful ends. The six-party negotiations opened in the spring of 2005 and are still going on more than seven years later.

******

Also still going on today are lingering tensions between India and Pakistan. Nearly fifteen years after the two nations’ respective former capital cities were destroyed by nuclear warheads, there are still signs of distrust and antagonism between their governments. In 2006 Pakistan accused India of violating its airspace; two years later India charged rogue elements of the Pakistani armed forces with aiding and abetting the terrorist attacks against Western diplomatic offices and tourist facilities in three of India’s largest surviving cities. More recently, there have been verbal confrontations between India’s and Pakistan’s U.N. ambassadors over allegations Pakistan is working on a chemical weapons development program with the aim of having an arsenal of such weapons ready for deployment in the next four or five years.

To their credit the two countries have to date refrained from further nuclear weapons development or production since the 4th Indo- Pakistani War ended and are making substantial progress in dismantling their existing nuclear warheads. But peace in the sub-continent isn’t by any means guaranteed forever; it will take constant vigilance by the international community now and well into the foreseeable future to make sure the animosities between India and Pakistan don’t escalate into a 5th Indo-Pakistani War.

 

The End

 

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