Pointless Posturing Update

(Roosevelt said something about walking softly and carrying a big stick. Indeed. Old, but gotta love F-14s)

The pointless posturing of our title is by the Iranian regime. So it seems the Iranians backed down, and then having backed down, told the US Navy that it couldn't operate it's aircraft carriers in the Persian Gulf (or, if you want to annoy the Iranians, the Arabian Gulf - isn't language funny.)

The US Navy gave Iran a stern ignoring. Quelle surprise.

And it will carry on until the Iranians need another external mini-crisis for internal political pressures. At least President Obama doesn't have to (although the GOP do, it seems). 

Good going USN.

Umm, not the 1st of April yet...

 

(We are here. Infidels are here, here and here. Apostates over there. Good. Points? Questions?)

Those kray-zee Iranians.

Just when Christmas television looked like getting everyone down, up popped the comedy act that is North Korea* to entertain us with their choreographed grief (though believe me, if I were living in Pyongyang, I'd have cried and wailed with the best of them just in case someone decided that I had been insufficiently upset and felt that a little reeducation was in order.)

Not to be outdone by their former colleagues in the Axis-of-Evil, Iranian Admiral Habibollah Sayyari says it would be "very easy" for his navy to shut down the Strait of Hormuz (SoH) if the nasty west (and especially the nasty EU led by the confounded British, whose hand is behind everything bad in the Islamic Republic, I'm reliably informed) has the temerity to impose oil sanctions on Iran for its repeated violations of the NPT, which the IAEA noted in their 18 Nov 11 Resolution. And here's a nice piece from the good people at APM's Marketplace - they do a great daily podcast, too.

Excellent, certainly a move that's all about the spirit of the season, and likely to bring everyone together and allow us all to get along better and all of that. 

But is it feasible?

(Ah. Rather narrow then.)

The strait is about 34nm across at it's narrowest point, and more importantly, the commercial traffic goes through the two 2nm corridors marked on this helpful map. And given the major Iranian naval base at Bandar Abbas is nice and close, in principle Iran's two naval arms - IRIN and the IRGC(N) - could make a stab at "closing" the SoH if they so chose. However, this overlooks a couple of things.

First, legality. Such a blockade would be illegal (states have the right to peacefully sail through straits worldwide) - something established in customary international law and in the 1948 ICJ Judgement in the Corfu Channel case - unless it was an act of war. An Iranian declaration of war against the rest of the world seems somewhat unlikely, and so in the absence of a UNSCR allowing for Iran to close the SoH (inconceivable), then the Iranians would be acting illegally.

Second, actual capability. Does Iran really want to take on the US Navy and her allies in a shooting match in the SoH whether on the water or from shore based missile and artillery batteries (or both?)? I can't see it - the Iranians could get lucky and cause some damage to naval vessels escorting oil tankers or patrolling the Straits - but the risk of retaliation sinking the rest of your fleet (or worse, starting a broader war) is such that you'd have to be nuts to try it. And this blog (at least) doesn't think that the Iranian regime irrational - more than anything else, it is solidly focused on it's own survival.

So, nothing to see here - let's all get back to the Christmas specials on telly. But not a clever move by the Iranians, and I suspect, not one that they're going to enact, irrespective of their domestic posturing.

Finally, in the spirit of goodwill to all men, in the unlikely event that this does kick off, please don't ask the Royal Navy how many spare ships it has to send out to help out in the SoH. You may get an answer similar to asking the RAF how many maritime patrol aircraft they can quickly send. Seen from here, the choices made in SDSR 2010 are looking less clever by the month.

*As long as you don't live in it or near it, clearly.

Stuxnet: Implications of Weaponising Cyberspace?

(Ahmadinejad tries the old Jedi mind-trick: "These are not the enrichment centrifuges you're looking for....")

A couple of weeks ago, the NY Times published a remarkable article on the apparent use of an advanced computer virus allegedly developed by US and Israeli computer scientists designed to specifically target and destroy Iranian uranium enrichment centrifuges at Natanz, by targeting the Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition (SCADA) control systems.

Over on OpinoJuris Professor Duncan Hollis of Temple Law School followed this up with a discussion of whether Stuxnet constitutes the use of force in violation of Article 2(4) of the UN Charter or an “armed attack” giving the victimized state a right of self defence under Article 51 of the Charter. Interestingly, Hollis suggests that Stuxnet falls under Article 41 of the Charter, and therefore could be legal as the UN Security Council has authorised limited sanctions.

Ignoring the small point that Article 41 explicitly requires Security Council authorisation, and that it is far from obvious that a Stuxnet attack on Natanz is covered by the applicable UNSCRs, Stuxnet raises a series of very interesting international law questions - and specifically Law of Armed Conflict questions over what constitutes the use of force in the networked era.

What is the appropriate basis for determining whether or not there has been an armed attack under Article 2(4)? There is an extensive literature on this, and on the related question of the pre-emptive use of force; however, there is little to guide on us on Stuxnet. My preference is that the definition of an armed attack is by definition somewhat fluid in all but the mental elements - the specific intent of the attacker is to achieve an effect on the target, which is usually, but not limited to, destruction, damage or degradation.

On this reading, what matters is the intended effect on the target, irrespective of the of the method used. Presumably the attacker will use the method most likely to be effective at the minimum cost to him/herself - if this is a bomb dropped by an aircraft so be it, or if it is a computer virus that spins nuclear centrifuges to destruction, then what matters is the intention of those creating and releasing the computer virus.

If true, and this is a developing area of the law, then State Responsibility doctrine applies, and the right of self-defence also applies if a State developed and deployed this virus, or sheltered a non-State actor which did. Therefore, if Stuxnet did operate as claimed, targeting only specific Siemens controllers clustered in groups of 984 as in Natanz, though it is an undoubtedly massive technical achievement, it was also intended to cause the effect of slowing the Iranian enrichment programme through causing technical malfunctions of Natanz's centrifuges causing them to self-destruct - and would therefore meet the effect's based doctrine of an armed attack.

The implications of this are vast. First, if the NY Times article is accurate, then the US and Israel have conducted an armed attack against Iran, which has the legal right to defend itself. Consider the outcry if Iran responded by attacking US Navy ships in the Persian Gulf, or lobbed a missile at the Israeli nuclear facilities at Dimona? But faced with the reverse scenario of Iranian hackers successfully interdicting a critical element of the US or Israeli nuclear programme, I'm sure that the US and Israel would take the view that this constituted an attack, and would not rule out a forcible response.

Second, the State Responsibility doctrine relating to non-State actors is going to be much harder to enforce in cyberspace than in the physical world. It was straightforward to how in 2001 that Al Qaeda were based in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan: the camps were physically there, and the Taliban in effect admitted that Bin Laden et al were in territory that they controlled. This acceptance provided the legal mandate for the use of force against the Taliban who were held responsible for the actions of the AQ leadership.

However, consider the position of a group of disaffected hackers in the UK who were able to create a Stuxnet style virus which destroyed the electricity grid in China. Not sponsored by the UK Government, it is quite possibly the UK would have no idea that they were operating from UK territory. If this were an armed attack, either the UK itself would take on responsibility for the action of the non-State group (hardly appealing), find and suppress the organisation (likely to be difficult) or would have to submit to Chinese actions against the hackers on UK soil (as the UK was unwilling or unable to stop them - also unattractive.) If nothing else, this possibility raises the possibility that States will want to have better information about who is doing what on their territory, raising further challenges for civil liberties.

Finally, western infrastructure is heavily, and increasingly, dependent on automation through SCADA controllers: it is much more efficient to have a computer opening and closing valves and controlling power grids than using a telephone to call an engineer in the middle of the night. Consequently our societies are intrinsically more vulnerable to this sort of attack than those which are less technologically advanced with fewer integrated control systems.

So Stuxnet marks a legal watershed as well as a technical triumph. What follows will be very interesting to watch as the law attempts to catch up with the technological advances.

And I wonder if I've just found a PhD topic?

So what if Iran gets THE bomb....?

(Trinty Test, Almagordo, July 1945. This one actually did change the world.)

There's been more of the on-again, off-again rumblings about whether or not Israel or the US or the rest of us should attack Iran if the new sanctions fail to stop Iran producing a nuclear weapons this week Weekly Standard ,The Atlantic, and Foreign Policy proffer a range of views.

President Obama has described an Iranian nuclear weapon as "unacceptable".

To no-one's surprise, Israeli PM Netanyahu has made clear that he'd be happy to attack Iranian nuclear targets to ensure that Israel remains the only nuclear weapons state in the Middle East.

But what actual difference would a nuclear Iran make? If it achieved it, what evidence is there that Iran would attack anyone?

I should make quite clear up front that I am not in favour of nuclear proliferation by any State; quite the reverse, I applaud Obama's declared intent of working towards nuclear zero - including all of the verification challenges that go with that.

Before we begin, a definitional point: being able to conduct a nuclear test is not the same as producing an operational nuclear weapon. The initial American thermonuclear test (Ivy Mike, 1952, the darkly hilarious contemporary classified film is here) was a 62t experiment, built over several months.

And so it was with India's "Peaceful Nuclear Explosion" of 1974 (also known as "Smiling Buddha") - a 1400kg device which India could not at the time deliver to target (except in a shipping container). Therefore, even if Iran were to stage a nuclear test, this is not definitive proof that it has a deliverable nuclear weapons capability.

So, what difference would a nuclear armed Iran make?

Let's assume that Iran wishes to acquire nuclear weapons, and despite sanctions succeeds in perfecting a bomb design small enough to fit onto a domestically produced ballistic missile. Let's also assume that it manages to deploy enough - say 25 operational warheads - in hardened shelters sufficient to survive a conventional attack.

Not being an intelligence analyst, I am left as an historian to point out that this level of development was not achieved by the USA until the early-1960s with the deployment on Minuteman I ICBMs; and the US in the 1950s had considerably more weapons technology expertise than is apparent in Iran's domestic military programmes public displayed today.

And to make this doomsday tomorrow, let's assume that the Iranians can do all of this by the end of 2011.

What changes?

Well, not much until the Iranians decide to:

(i) engage in nuclear blackmail,
(ii) attack another state (e.g. Israel) or
(iii) dish them out to non-state actors (e.g, Hezbollah).

But why would President Ahmadinejad - or any other Iranian leader - want to do something as suicidally stupid as any of these options?

If the Islamic Republic is determined to do anything, it is determined to survive. And regime survival is incompatible with a nuclear counter-strike if Iran attacks someone else. But having a bomb is sensible if it means that other people don't attack you.

In other words, good ol' Cold War deterrence.

"Ah", I hear you cry - "but the Iranians are nuts! They're fanatics and have a global domination ideology".

Hmm. Didn't we say the same (& worse!) about the Soviet Union? Godless Communism and all of that?

The point for me is that though a nuclear armed Iran is unwelcome because any proliferation is unwelcome, and Iran's acquisition of a viable nuclear capability could bounce Saudi Arabia into have a Sunni/Arab bomb to deter a Persian/Shiite bomb, there is no rational reason for Iran to attack anyone with nuclear weapons. To do so would only be to invite massive retaliation.

Moreover, military action to stop an Iranian nuclear weapon is likely to shore up the (unpopular) Iranian regime, is unlikely to have UN Security Council sanction, and would therefore be manifestly illegal, and there is no guarantee of success. In short, even if military action is a "cure" (which to me seems very unlikely), it is likely to be worse than the "disease" of an Iranian nuclear weapon.

If the Iranians want a deliverable nuclear capability, they will at some point get it. By all means make this as difficult and expensive as possible, but rely on deterrence to keep the peace.

And remember, the only thing that bullies like less than losing is being ignored - how have nuclear weapons helped Kim Jong Il's North Korea? (Other than landing him a leading role in Team America, of course.... "so ronrey... so ronrey...")

I'll be back with more on the UK's SDSR in the next few days.

Update: Interesting piece from RUSI - airstrikes won't work and invading Iran is a seriously bad idea, people: