Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has finally launched his war on Iran, the only regional power Israel truly fears. While the United States is nominally the main partner in this illegitimate war of choice, it appears that Netanyahu is dictating the tactics and objectives, starting with targeted assassinations of Iran’s top leadership and a bombing campaign that treats the killing of dozens of schoolgirls as mere “collateral damage.”
Israel has used the same approach against Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis in recent years, also killing Iranian physicists and engineers in what were essentially Mossad-orchestrated terrorist attacks. But since Iran is a very large country (roughly the size of France, Germany, and Spain combined) with about 93 million people, something more is required, because the US – much less tiny Israel – cannot invade and keep it under occupation.
It is for this reason that Israeli “hawks” have long lobbied to break up Iran into small ethno-religious states, and for this reason their intelligence agencies have cultivated separatist movements. Having failed to devise a plan for the day after the end of this war, the US has also begun to play with this “strategy”. According to a CNN report, the CIA is working to arm Kurdish forces with the aim of fomenting a popular uprising in Iran.
It is not difficult to see why this strategy appeals to some circles in Israel and the US. Only about 61% of Iranians are ethnic Persian. The largest minority (perhaps about 24%) consists of Azerbaijani Turks – the group to which the late Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, belonged – concentrated mainly in Ardabil, in northwestern Iran.
After these “Azeris” come the Iranian Kurds, who number between 7 and 14 million and reside mainly in the northwestern border provinces near autonomous Iraqi Kurdistan. Their proximity to Iraqi Kurdistan provides a relatively easy point of entry and exit into Iran, making the Kurds a focus of Mossad and CIA efforts to foment separatism. If they were able to form a large armed force capable of attacking Iran’s already exhausted security forces, they would likely receive additional support from their Kurdish compatriots across the border.
Another group is the Baloch minority, who live mainly in eastern Iran, along the roughly 565-mile border with the volatile Balochistan province in Pakistan, from where Jaish al-Adl – a group designated a terrorist by the US – has long launched attacks against Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and Basij militia.
Finally, there are an estimated 5–7 million Ahwazi Arabs living in the oil-rich western province of Khuzestan, where they face a very difficult and oppressed life, which in many ways mirrors the situation of the Shiites who dominate the oil-rich eastern province of Saudi Arabia.
All of these Iranian minorities are forced to use Persian in official communication, and all have been subject to violent repression by the Islamic Republic's ever-active security forces. Kurds, for example, make up only 8–17% of the population, but they account for a disproportionately large share of those executed or imprisoned for political reasons.
The problem, of course, is that the United States has a very poor record when it comes to fomenting separatist unrest, as the Marsh Arabs and the Iraqi Kurds discovered after Operation Desert Storm in 1991. Time and again, “brave little peoples” have been fomented and then abandoned—left to be killed and gassed as their Western sponsors turn their attention elsewhere. In fact, that is exactly what Donald Trump has done to the Kurds of Syria, who helped the US defeat the Islamic State during his first term but whom he has now abandoned as he has grown closer to Syria’s new president, Ahmed al-Sharaa, a former al-Qaeda commander.
Israel may find it convenient to divide the entire Middle East into small states, leaving no power capable of challenging its regional hegemony. But does this serve the interests of the United States or the rest of the region?
In case Trump has forgotten, his other “strong” friend in the region, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has spent decades fighting Kurdish separatism. Having used its military might to push back the Kurds in Syria and crush the Kurdistan Workers’ Party in his own country, Turkey – a NATO member – will not stand idly by if the Free Life Party of Iranian Kurdistan (PJAK), an offshoot of the PKK, creates a small state on its border. And if Turkey were to act against such an entity, what would Israel do about it?
Here again, it might suit the Israelis to fight another war of aggression against a hostile neighbor, but it certainly wouldn't suit the US, Turkey, or the rest of NATO. The last thing they want—aside from a possibly fatal rift in NATO that any attack on Turkey would cause—is another wave of refugees heading toward Europe as a result of an entirely avoidable conflict.
These are just the most predictable problems. But there would also be “unknown unknowns.” A divided Iran would be highly unstable, exposed not only to outbreaks of ethnic cleansing but also to the depredations of greedy or nervous neighbors. Trump does not have the power to decide whether Iran will return to a “constitutional” monarchy or an autocracy under a “Shah” who has lived in the US since 1985, or whether it will remain a centralized republic or a confederation, like Canada or Australia.
Given Trump’s obsession with winning the Nobel Peace Prize, many had imagined he would heed those in his political coalition who advised restraint. But a handful of remaining neoconservatives appear to have filled the gap in his knowledge of the region, aided by an Israeli prime minister whose vision for his country’s future seems to involve one war after another, regardless of the lives lost and the economic damage inflicted on the rest of us./ BIRN
