Bomb, bomb Iran

In this rather strange ABC News article that appeared on Friday, it is reported that “senior figures in the Turnbull government” claim that Washington could bomb targets in Iran as early as next month, and that Australia would assist in target identification.

Bombing undisclosed targets in a country complying with a deal that you don’t like is probably too shaky even for the Trump administration to seriously contemplate.

and John McCain’s melodic rendition of “Bomb, bomb Iran” to the tune of the Beach Boys’ “Barbara Ann”.

Or maybe November 2012, when Prime Minister of Israel Benjamin Netanyahu was reportedly ready “within hours” to strike Iran to stop it acquiring nuclear weapons. Or in 2015, when John Bolton, now the current White House National Security Adviser, wrote a New York Times op-ed entitled “To stop Iran’s bomb, bomb Iran”.

In other words, bombing Iran has been spoken of, allegedly planned and threatened, but it has never occurred. There are any number of reasons why this is the case. And if it hasn’t come to pass previously, it’s certainly not going to happen while Tehran is complying with a nuclear agreement (the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA) that everyone except Washington remains publicly committed to trying to make work.

And then there is the tricky little issue of the second-order effects of a bombing mission. Latent Iranian nationalism is a powerful force. So while much of the population is critical of the governmental system for many political, social, and economic reasons, a bombing mission against a country whose population knows it is complying with the JCPOA is quite likely to harden Iranian public resolve rather than weaken it, regardless of what Los Angeles–based émigrés tell Washington.

Let’s hope that the ABC story’s sources simply think they are part of the “ramping-up the rhetoric” campaign the Trump administration is obviously employing against Tehran in an attempt to get it back to the (re)negotiating table.

Because if they think the possibility is real, it doesn’t say much about the depth of thought in Canberra.

Dr. Rodger Shanahan is a Research Fellow at the Lowy Institute. A former army officer, he had extensive service within the Parachute Battalion Group (PBG) and has had operational service with the UN in South Lebanon and Syria, with the PBG in East Timor, in Beirut during the 2006 war, and in Afghanistan. He was the former director of the Army's Land Warfare Studies Centre, and has also been posted to the Australian Embassies in Riyadh and Abu Dhabi. Dr. Shanahan has MAs in International Relations and Middle East Studies from the ANU and a Ph.D. in Arab and Islamic Studies from the University of Sydney.