Guardians and Decoys of Hormuz

By designating itself the “Guardian of Hormuz”, as President Donald Trump did earlier this week, the US invokes the British Empire’s term for some of its colonies — protectorates. Much of West Asia was indeed under British protectorate status until the US began establishing its military bases after the Second World War. The shipping lanes of the Strait of Hormuz between Iran and Oman lie in their respective territorial waters. That a foreign power situated 11,200 km away should deem itself the “Guardian” of the Strait is a concept straight out of the colonial playbook.

Indeed, Trump is merely spelling out a long-established fact of West Asian life. The US has permanent military bases in Bahrain, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE, as well as smaller contingency facilities in Syria, Oman, and elsewhere. Media estimates put the number of US troops in the region at around 50,000. The transition from British protectorates to American hegemony was seam less, with the US taking over the British naval base in Bahrain in 1971 after the country’s independence.

After the First Gulf War in 1990-91, Bahrain began hosting the US Navy’s Fifth Fleet in 1995, and Qatar has hosted the forward headquarters of Central Command since 1996. Soon afterwards, the US attacked Iraq again and occupied the country with the world’s fifth-largest oil reserves. But the parallel ends there. The US conquered Iraq in just 20 days. The war began on March 20, 2003, and Baghdad fell on April 9. The deposed dictator Saddam Hussein went into hiding and was dragged out of a rat-hole-like bunker on December 13.

By contrast, the US-Israeli coalition, which attacked Iran on February 28, assassinating Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei, killing 120–180 schoolchildren, and targeting military installations, had to sue for a ceasefire on April 7. The relentless waves of US bombings ahead of the planned ground attack proved futile, with Iran effectively targeting American military bases. Iran suffered immense losses and survived, whereas the US could not absorb the retaliatory fire on its bases. The Islamabad Memorandum of Understanding turned out to be merely another dilatory tactic to enforce US “guardianship” over the Strait of Hormuz. 

Despite deceptive diplomatic diversions offered by useful vassals such as Pakistan, the US continued its bombing campaigns, with Trump regularly threatening to destroy Iran. Officially, the US military describes its bombings as attacks intended to “degrade” Iran’s capabilities, yet they have produced no visible results over the past five months. If, in five months, the US military cannot “degrade” a country reeling under sanctions for nearly 50 years, what does that term really mean for the world’s lone superpower? The only convincing explanation is a gargantuan intelligence failure.

By silently endorsing a news report on its botched plan to install former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Israel intelligence agency Mossad was effectively admitting to its own failures. Mossad’s flawed intelligence, analysis, and operational decisions have turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint from an open shipping lane into a closed one. Instead of degrading Iran’s military capabilities, the US-Israeli campaign triggered retaliatory attacks that had a debilitating impact on US bases, turning the Strait of Hormuz into a military quagmire. With each passing day, the US finds itself drawn deeper into this bog of uncertainty.

The biggest intelligence failure was the attempt at regime change. The primary precondition for such an attempt was to topple the government. However, the assassination of the Supreme Leader, it seems, was anticipated by the Iranian government and perhaps even embraced by Ayatollah Khamenei as a path to religious martyrdom. Whether sought or not, the outpouring of grief and reverence that followed was in keeping with the highest traditions of martyrdom as a religious symbol of a civilisational struggle for sovereignty.

Khamenei’s assassination made the Iranian government appear stronger, more credible, and even more idealistic. The Supreme Leader had laid down his life for that very government. And at the same time, the assassination portrayed the enemy as rapacious — killing an 86-year-old leader and schoolchildren on the same day in pursuit of the same objective of conquest. Once it became impossible to topple the government, the next step in the plan to install a puppet regime also failed.

And the chosen puppet, it seems, was double-crossing Mossad all along. Former President Ahmadinejad appears to have served the same purpose as the drone- and missile-manufacturing sites — they were all decoys. It is one thing to make a web series claiming that Mossad can disable Tehran’s entire traffic-signalling network, but it is quite another to repeatedly misidentify the locations of drone and missile factories over five months. No amount of support from friendly nations such as Russia or China could have helped Iran, had Mossad correctly mapped all the underground missile cities. The Americans were bombing decoys most of the time.

Then came the failure of the armed Kurdish rebels to march on Tehran. They had allegedly been armed, trained, and kept ready for precisely such an eventuality. But when the time for rebellion arrived, they either hesitated or were effectively neutralised. This represented a failure on a much larger scale. Again, the only plausible explanation may be the decoy theory. Mossad appears to have been dealing with decoys from Iranian counterintelligence rather than the real Kurdish rebels. Otherwise, five months would have been ample time for an organised uprising to materialise.

The entire sequence of special operations that ought to have brought the Iranian government to its knees ultimately failed. Mossad is admitting only to the double-crossing by Ahmadinejad, who turned out to be the star decoy. Yet his survival encapsulates the story of all other decoys, double-crossings, and the derailment of Mossad’s intelligence-gathering inside Iran. As part of its damage-control effort, Mossad has enlisted its asset in Budapest to denounce Ahmadinejad. But that is of little consequence. Ahmadinejad attended Khamenei’s funeral, where two other former presidents were not invited, and, for an Iranian leader, that is all that matters.