View in browser Ever since I got my hands on a secret study conducted by an Operational Intelligence Cell attached to U.S. Army headquarters in Baghdad in 2007, I’ve been reporting that assassinating enemy leadership figures is an entirely counterproductive exercise. Based on data attendant on several hundred killings of Iraqi insurgent leaders by the U.S., the study found that such eliminations, offically known as the “HVI (High Value Individual) Strategy” immediately generated an escalation of attacks on American occupation forces - by an average of 40 percent in the immediate neighborhood, and by still significant percentages further away. Furthermore, the new leadership that inevitably and swiftly took over was invariably more aggressive and motivated. Briefing the high command, the study’s principal author offered a bleak conclusion: “HVI Strategy, our principal strategy in Iraq, is counterproductive and needs to be reevaluated.”
Needless to say, the strategy was not reevaluated, instead receiving ever greater investment from the U.S. military machine, culminating in the strike on the first day of the warthat killed the Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and a host of other senior regime figures.
The consequences were immediate, and totally predictable. Not only did a new leadership swiftly take control, but the semi-pacific policies directed by Khamenei over the course of many years were abandoned forthwith. In October, 2003, Khamenei had issued a Fatwa - a religious injunction carrying the force of law - forbidding the development and production of any weapons of mass destruction. As the U.S. intelligence community concluded in 2007, (and maintained ever since) a nascent Iranian nuclear weapon program was immediately terminated. The uranium enrichment program that continued was apparently inspired by Khamenei’s misguided notion that going through the motions of developing a weapon (by enriching) would adequately substitute for the real thing in terms of deterrence.
Fatwas die with their author, so Khamenei’s injunction is defunct. Whether or not Iran’s new rulers wish to follow the North Korean example and develop a weapon we do not know, but we do know they have deployed a weapon of mass economic destruction, one that was eschewed by Khamenei religious/legal grounds.
Given the devastating effects of closing the Straits of Hormuz, cutting off 20 percent of the world’s oil and gas supply at a stroke, thereby dragging Donald Trump to the negotiating table, it seems remarkable that Iran has not unleashed this WMD before. After all, the country has been under siege for many decades, including the eight years of bloody war with Iraq, fomented and supplied by Iran’s western enemies. The increasingly crippling economic sanctions inflicted on the excuse of a (non-existent) Iranian nuclear weapons program would have been justification enough for Iran to counter-attack with its own devastating sanctions weapon. Requiring,as recently demonstrated, little more than an announcement that the strait was closed, along with an indication that the waters had been mined - quite enough for the London marine insurance market to issue its own Fatwa against shipping in the Strait.
So why the forbearance? No one I consulted seems to know. The most informed explanation comes from Chas Freeman, formerly ambassador to Saudi Arabia and America’s most distinguished and knowledgeable diplomat, certainly on middle east affairs. “Part of the answer,” he emailed me, is “undoubtedly to be found in the Islamic legal tradition, rooted in the Qur’an, that frames the sea as a divine commons created for the benefit of all humanity. Early Islamic treaties explicitly incorporated the idea of freedom of navigation.” This Islamic tradition, he pointed out, In many ways anticipated the doctrine of “Mare Liberum” or “freedom of the sea” pronounced by the great Dutch legal scholar Hugo Grotius in the early 17th century. Adopted by western powers as a fundamental principle of international law, it forbade states from claiming sovereignty over the sea. The law of the sea imposed by the Americans and British in the 1980s, enforced much the same idea - “now in jeopardy” according to Freeman.
So there we have it: faced with a regime governed at the highest level with adherence to legal principle, the U.S. and its Israeli partner, themselves determinedly uncaring for law of any kind, did away with an obstacle that prevented Iran developing or deploying its most potent weapons.
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