TEHRAN: Iran just wrapped up a week of hyped-up war games which the government used as much to rally local support as to send an intimidating message to detractors of its nuclear ambitions, analysts say.
Iran unveiled a wide range of weaponry such as multiple-head missiles, high-speed torpedoes and radar-evading anti-ship missiles in a week of military exercises in the strategic Gulf waters to the south.
“Iranian Missile Invisible to Radars: Fresh Nightmare for the United States, Western experts say,” ran a headline in the hardline daily Kayhan newspaper shortly after Iran said it had successfully tested an underwater ‘super-modern’ missile.
However, one western observer in Tehran said the announcements have declared ‘nothing extraordinary’ as far as military achievements are concerned and that ‘it is all largely targeted at a local audience’.
“The general feeling is that there is too much dramatic showing off,” a foreign diplomat said. “It has to do with displaying the willingness to resist the West and to look strong in the eyes of the nation.”
Nonetheless Iran’s head of the elite Revolutionary Guards, Gen Yahya Rahim Safavi on Thursday insisted that ‘the importance of the manoeuvre lies in the time and geographical place they are held as well as the arms used’.
The war games, which began on March 31 and ended on April 6, were held in the Straits of Hormuz — the narrow neck in the Gulf through which a third of the world’s oil exports passes.
This fact ‘highlights the significance of the region’, said Gen Safavi, the commander of Iran’s powerful ideological army.
The majority of the arms tested this week were anti-ship weapons, which could hit military vessels and oil tankers.
“If they sink a 500,000-ton tanker in the region, they can cripple the traffic in the Persian Gulf,” political analyst Saeed Laylaz said.
Iranian authorities ‘want to expose the Americans, the Chinese and the Europeans to their weaknesses by showing that Iran is capable of blocking the Straits of Hormuz’, he added.
The foreign diplomat, however, maintained Iran could also have intended to intimidate countries of a smaller leverage on the consequences of a military conflict.
“There is a real regional logic in saying, ‘Look how far it all can be taken,’” he said.
“Such a discourse is not likely to impress Russia or China, let alone the United States. But it could make an impression on others, so that they will not support an escalation of pressure on Iran”, he said.
The war games came as Iran faced mounting world pressure over its nuclear program, which Tehran insists is for peaceful civilian energy purposes, but which some western countries fear is aimed at manufacturing atomic weapons.
On March 29, the UN Security Council called on Iran to suspend all its uranium enrichment activities in 30 days. Tehran has so far refused to comply.
The world body has not threatened Iran with sanctions yet, but Washington has not concealed its desire to seek sanctions, nor has it ruled out a military option.
In this context, Tehran’s defiant military tone ‘does not help its cause as it provides adversaries with a pretext to isolate Iran’, the western observer said.
While the Pentagon has cast doubt over Iran’s military prowess, the State Department said Iran’s recent claims represented ‘the existence of a program for military reinforcement, (which is) a worrying motive’.
