Britain, Iran and the Third World War
ALAN, RAY
Euro vista BY RAY ALAN Britain, Iran and the Third WorldWar Forty Years after the end of World War II some Western Europeans are asking not only "Could it happen again?" but "What would it be...
...Nevertheless, some redeployment of staff and equipment would be essential...
...but it would disturb public morale to carry out a full scheme of hospital evacuation at a time when the government was exhorting the public by every possible means to stay put...
...Civil officials revealed that regional administrations would be established "to improvise a subsistence economy...
...it neglected to say where it would be possible to find a supply of war-service sandbags at short notice...
...It is Iraq's main arms supplier, yet it does not wish to lose its Iranian friends, who include Army officers and intellectuals as well as workers and Kurdish separatists hostile to the ayatollahs and to the Iraqi regime...
...A science-fiction scenario, with overnight devastation and a return to troglodytic conditions...
...Simply changing its name, however, won't make the Iranians go away or rid the Moslem world—already unstable enough —of the puritanical Shiite fever that has seized Iran and is scaring the high-living Saudis and other petrorulers of the region...
...Although details of the meeting have not been published, I understand participants were informed that the government envisaged "a period of some three-to-four weeks during which the necessary steps would be taken to place the country on a war footing.' It seems to me excessively optimistic, if not irresponsible, to assume that the Kremlin would kindly allow the West three weeks' grace to prepare for war, or that major cities could be put on a war basis in so brief a period...
...Iran could become a super-Lebanon of warring factions: Shiite fanatics, pro-Soviet Leftists, rival military groups, Kurdish separatists in the north, and Arab and other minorities in the south...
...The average citizen has only a foggy idea of the authorities' contingency plans...
...Further, while the collapse of the Baghdad dictator, Saddam Hussein, would be unlikely to cause more than ripples outside Iraq (and they would mainly be ripples of relief), the collapse of Iran could make the Gulf states Soviet satellites...
...but these are merely rumors...
...What would be the attitude of Europe's many immigrants, some of whom, notably France's Arabs and Africans, consider the Soviet Union a friend...
...In their opinion, World War Three might be touched off by the USSR taking advantage of the collapse of Iran or some other rickety regime in the Oil Gulf area...
...Or a wide-screen remake of 1944 featuring old-fashioned air raids, tank battles, prison camps and ration cards —except with nuclear missiles in the background, just in case...
...The next step would be either all-out war or, more probably, ascurry to settle the crisis on lines acceptable to the Soviet Union...
...Western Europeans would do their best to defend their half of the Continent if the Soviet oligarchy went mad and attacked it directly, but they are as hostile as most post-Vietnam Americans seem to be to military involvement in " faraway countries of which we know little," as Neville Chamberlain, the man of Munich, put it...
...The government still recommended the use of sandbags, as in Hitler's War, to protect official buildings, refugee reception centers and stores...
...so it ensures that Iran receives sufficient arms from East Germany, Libya and Syria to keep the carnage going...
...Despite the lack of support—outside pro-Soviet circles and sectors influenced by Saudi Arabia and the oil emirates— for measures that would aid Iraq, the Reagan Administration's bias in favor of Baghdad has been described by a British official as "logical, in a nutty sort of way...
...One Soviet nuclear warhead exploded (or nuclear device set off by Soviet-inspired terrorists) west—that is windward—of London could not only paralyze Britain's central administration and most densely populated region but discourage other European states from supporting the United States...
...By intervening to "restore order" or protect essential communications or whatever, newly appointed Party Chief Mikhail S. Gorbachev might realize the old Tsarist-Stalinist dream of an extension of Russian hegemony in (as Vyacheslav M. Molotov told Joachim von Ribben-trop) the "general direction of the Persian Gulf...
...Should skilled medical staff and vital equipment be left in likely target areas...
...Perhaps the best name for it, to avoid confusion with other gulfs, would be the Oil Gulf...
...The Kremlin is playing a perilous game...
...but no sane person over here favors involvement in the conflict...
...Muddling through remains a basic Whitehall technique...
...The credibility of the government's advice would be gravelyjeopardized...
...The President does not thus far appear to have done anything significant to persuade Iraq to stop attacking shipping in the Oil Gulf (even though he could have exerted influence on Iraq via its Arab financial backers, all of whom would depend on America for their defense and indeed survival if they were attacked...
...Some British observers worry that if the Iranians lost the War they would blame America...
...It must be assumed that, of the mass media, only sound broadcasting could continue: there would be no television, and the national and local newspapers would not be produced...
...Not surprisingly, one group of participants (privately) considered the government's measures unimpressive and perhaps futile...
...Not long ago, representatives of the British Army, Air Force, Police, and Security Service, and of two ministries concerned with civil administration and food supplies, met to study current directives on the transition to wartime conditions, should it ever be required...
...In these circumstances, they say, Britain would be foolish to stick its neck out and risk Soviet retaliation...
...Whitehall was of two minds about this...
...that whatever the United States then tried to do to prevent a humiliated and disintegrating Iran from falling under Moscow's influence would prove counterproductive...
...and that most of America's allies in continental Europe would refusetoallowitsaircraftto use their bases for a Mideastern operation that might lead to a clash with Soviet forces...
...This kind of speculation has been stimulated mainly by media-prompted memories of Hitler's War but also by events in what used to be called the Persian Gulf, a region in which successive Russian regimes have long been interested and to which the present Soviet rulers are devoting a lot of attention...
...Embassy in Teheran after the Shah was ousted, but they remember that Iraq, not Iran, started the present fighting, and that Iraq was the first to attack shipping and use poison gas...
...The West would protest and prepare some kind of dissuasive action...
...but "What would it be like...
...Would not children be better occupied at school than on the streets where they might become fodder for drug pushers and black marketeers...
...A military representative voiced the Army's concern over "possible interference with the mobilization effort from the traffic of self-evacuees," especially in southeastern England...
...The Iran-Iraq conflict leaves most Western Europeans indifferent...
...In England there are rumors that the royal family might be dispersed among the former white dominions while the government would go to the southwest, presumably to avoid nuclear fallout...
...It would be unsound to leave them...
...Europeans understand the anti-Iranian feeling lingering in America because of the seizure of hostages in the U.S...
...Presumably these blunders are now being rectified...
...The Persian Factor The Persian Gulf of pre-1980 atlases is now labeled "The Gulf' by Western politicians and publicists anxious to avoid annoying the Saudis, who call it the Arab Gulf...
...Could Western Europe's easygoing liberal societies, ravenously consuming immense quantities of food, fuel and industrial goods, adapt with sufficient speed to wartime austerity and controls...
...In the aftermath of a nuclear attack, the meeting learned, "broadcasting would be confined strictly to the dissemination of essential information...
...Might not thousands of people, fearing nuclear bombardment, rush away from Brussels, London and other probable target cities, plunging themselves into misery and communications into chaos...
...They have no objection to selling arms to one side or both, if only to recover some of the money the Moslem oil moguls have extracted from the West...
...The few people in Western Europe who are concerned about the Iran-Iraq War believe that a major Iraqi incursion into Iran or the death of Ayatollah Ru-hollah Khomeini might provoke a rift in the Teheran regime and, before long, a multiple split in the country...
...They see it as a clash between two equally repugnant tyrannies—a choice, for those rash enough to make it, between military cyanide and religious strychnine...
...The word "improvise" shocked one or two participants, as did the news that the education system would be shut down...
...The meeting discovered that meters to measure radioactivity were stored in a single depot in southern England, and that some essential food supplies were similarly concentrated...
...Such questions are rarely discussed in European legislatures, and ministerial press conferences avoid them...
...President Reagan has supplied Saudi Arabia and Kuwait with the material, technical and tactical assistance they needed to help the Iraqis (whose rulers the Saudis and the oil emirates actually distrust and fear, albeit less than the Islamic fundamentalism preached by Iran's ayatollahs...
...In other words, who cares if a few hundred doctors and nurses die, provided ministers and mandarins save their face...
...This would please the Iraqis and some additional Arabs and the Soviet leaders...
...Would they even have time to mobilize their conscripts or—in the case of the countries that do not have compulsory military service—to train recruits...
...If the Kremlin took this seriously, it might fire a warning shot across the West's bows in the form of a nuclear explosion, possibly in England if the United Kingdom proved too faithful to its American ally...
Vol. 68 • April 1985 • No. 5
