Iran’s New Doctrine: America Will Not Intervene If We Only Knock over Its Arab Allies

King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia and Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak put their heads together urgently last Saturday, Aug. 16, at Mubarak’s summer palace in Alexandria. The king brought along his intelligence chief, Prince Muqrin Abdel Aziz. Far from the glare of television cameras and news reporters, the two worried rulers discussed Iran’s new tactics.

DEBKA-Net-Weekly’s intelligence and military sources report that the meeting was prompted by word reaching Riyadh and Cairo of a radical turnabout in Tehran’s military doctrine.

Rather than engaging America might head-on, a dangerous gamble, Iran would wage small local wars of harassment against the oil installations of America’s Arab Gulf friends. Tehran deduced from the Georgian conflict that the Bush administration would refrain from intervening militarily on their behalf. Iran could therefore safely knock America’s friends over like skittles.

Iran’s Revolutionary Guards are building small, fortified anchorages for explosives-packed speedboats, guided torpedoes and mini-submarines on the three islands of the Straits of Hormuz, ready to block the waterway if attacked.

From Alexandria, Abdullah and Mubarak posted an urgent message to Tehran through its intelligence channels, the gist of which, according to our sources was this: We are not Georgia. If Iran wages small wars against us to avoid a costly clash with the US and Israel, we will generate a crisis that will force the Americans to step in and fight you.

The content of this message was not released, but the Egyptian presidential palace spokesman, Suleiman Awwad, issued a statement the next day: “Iran should not present on a silver platter the justifications and the pretexts for those who want to drag the region down a dangerous slope.”

He referred to the case of Saddam Hussein “who didn’t adequately refute claims over Iraq’s supposed weapons of destruction,” as an example of the fate that might be in store for Iran.

Tehran responded to the warning by shooting a dummy satellite into space by a rocket with a range upward of 5,000 km, in a contemptuous demonstration to show the two Arab rulers that Iran’s war options extend way beyond the Middle East.