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The US occupation of Iraq has turned its neighbour into a new regional power. But the contagion is likely to spread far wider

David Hirst

Friday January 13, 2006

Guardian

In March 2003, before US troops reached Baghdad, Middle East scholar Volker Perthes wrote that while the risks of this “illegitimate” war were enormous, those of “a US failure to stabilise postwar Iraq would be even higher”. With those words looking increasingly prophetic, no one, in picturing the implications of such failure, is now more lurid than the Bush administration. The direness of the prospect has become its strongest argument for “staying the course”, but for others it is already a given, amounting to “the greatest strategic disaster in US history”, in the words of the retired US general William Odom.

If so, what will this disaster look like? In scale, it will surely be at least commensurate with the vast ambitions that came with the invasion in the first place, Iraq being cast as the platform for reshaping the entire Middle East.

A general US retreat from the region, with troop withdrawal at its core, is no doubt a prerequisite for, and yardstick of, the emergence of a healthy, self-reliant new Middle Eastern order. But, with the kind of ignominious scuttle from Iraq that failure would presumably entail, the region won’t just revert to the status quo ante. Instead of Iraq becoming a beacon of all good things it will become the single most noxious wellspring of all the bad ones the invasion was supposed to extinguish – and new ones to boot.

If the Middle East was a jungle before, it will be a wilder one afterwards, with most elements of the decadent existing order, in their increased insecurity, driven to even cruder methods – increased internal repression or external adventurism – to preserve themselves. And it will become even more anti-American. For while a “good” retreat would decrease such sentiments, a “bad” Iraqi one will only spur and spread the active, often violent expression of them. That is because, for the Arabs, Iraq was only the latest drastic episode in a long history of western interference in their affairs. Until the wider, pre-Iraqi consequences of that interference are remedied, the example of successful anti-American resistance in Iraq will only encourage it elsewhere, especially in Palestine.

Saddam’s Iraq was the very model of Arab tyranny – with sectarianism, in the shape of Sunni minority rule, as its main component. With American failure it will become the model of Arab anarchy, embodying the two most disruptive forces in the Middle East today. One is a sectarianism (chiefly Sunni versus Shia) or ethnic antagonism (chiefly Kurd versus Arab, Turk and Iranian) as malevolent in its new pluralist form as it was in its more familiar despotic one. The other is universalist, ideologically driven Islamism. Elections show that this is the dominant or rising force on both sides of Iraq’s widening sectarian divide. Islamism will spawn its inevitable fanatical progeny and Iraq, till now mainly a magnet for pan-Islamic jihadists, will become, Afghan-style, a main exporter of them too; it already is, in fact, as the Jordanian suicide bombings illustrated.

The Arab states will be sucked into this Iraqi maelstrom. With the world’s only superpower on its way out, who but they – along with Turkey and Iran – are left to replace it there? But they will fail disastrously in their turn. In the past the regimes more or less controlled the business of interference in each other’s other affairs, as they exerted such control over their domestic arenas. Now they will be competing with those non-state forces, primarily the ethnic/sectarian and Islamist ones, by which they also are increasingly challenged. In fact almost all these countries are latent Iraqs, especially Ba’athist Syria. Far from mastering Iraq, it is Iraq – in its death throes as a unified state – that is more likely to master them. Nor will Turkey and Iran, Iraq’s strongest neighbours, be immune from the contagion, with Iraqi Kurdish emancipation already contributing to a resurgence of Kurdish resistance in both.

If all this portends an unfathomable mess, one thing at least is already clear: Iran will be the main beneficiary of US failure and the long-overdue accession of the Shia majority, its coreligionists, to political ascendancy in Iraq. The increase in regional clout it derives from this will be used at America’s expense. The mullahs have long been readying themselves for a great reckoning. With their new president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, readiness seems to be mutating into active desire. He and those around him believe that only the US stands in the way of Iranian regional dominance and that the US, seen as defeated in Iraq, is now a “sunset power”.

For Iran, the sectarian/ethnic and Islamist factors are now potent assets. Its Kurdish vulnerabilities are more than offset by improved Shia influence throughout the region. This is a reality which, within the Sunni-dominated Arab establishment, Jordan has been most publicly alarmed about. King Abdullah warns of a “Shia crescent” stretching from Iraq, via Syria (so long as its pro-Iranian Alawite regime survives), to south Lebanon. Jordanian politicians even talk of building a “Sunni wall” through Iraq to keep the peril at bay.

In addition, non-Arab Iran is now the main state patron of radical Islamism in the Arab world, and Palestine is its most profitable arena. Long an advocate of Islamicising the Palestinian struggle, nothing could better serve its ambition than the effect that US failure in Iraq will have on Hamas, which is now close to supplanting the secular-nationalist Fatah as the dominant political force in the occupied territories.

But the thing that will really make it and Israel the most dangerous animals in the post-Iraqi Middle East jungle is Iran’s apparent quest for nuclear weapons. On the one hand, this commands grassroots popularity among the Arabs. They see it as a self-assertion that no Arab leader would dare offer against colonial-style western bullying and the hypocrisy of the west’s acceptance of Israel’s nuclear monopoly.

On the other hand, no one invested greater expectations in the Iraqi adventure than Israel. US success, it thought, would transform its strategic position. But with US failure, Israel will grow more repressive against the Palestinians, and more ready for military action against Iran. Should the US itself deal with Iran in the same violent and partisan fashion as it did Iraq, the adverse consequences of that new adventure will outstrip those of the earlier one. For there is no reason to doubt that Iran’s response, from both itself and its strengthened Shia and Islamist allies in the region, will be the devastating one it constantly promises.

David Hirst reported from the Middle East for the Guardian from 1963 to 2001

dhirst@beirut.com

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006

Comment by Moshe Machover

mailto:moshe.machover@kcl.ac.uk

Dear Friend,

Let me underline one important conclusion. Hirst predicts that “Iran and Israel will be kings of the Middle East jungle”. He also says: “[W]ith US failure, Israel will grow more repressive against the Palestinians, and more ready for military action against Iran.”

In fact, the US will do all it can to prevent Iran challenging the regional hegemony and nuclear monopoly of Israel, its local proxy and hatchet man.

This is the real reason behind the present political campaign against Iran. Significantly, it is claimed that Iran’s development of nuclear capabilities — even for perfectly legal peaceful uses — is a threat to Israel. This is sheer hypocrisy: in fact, it is Israel, with its large nuclear arsenal, that is a threat to Iran.

I repeat a prediction I have made several times in recent months. The US is unlikely to stage an invasion of Iran — the present bloody mess in Iraq is a powerful deterrent against such an adventure. Much more likely is an air/missile onslaught, spearheaded by Israel. (See item below.)

In my opinion, the left should prepare to oppose the forthcoming aggression. We should start by calling for a Middle East free of nuclear weapons.

The first step should be the nuclear disarming of Israel. This demand, coupled with the demand for immediate withdrawal from the Palestinian territories, should be backed by sanctions operated by world civil society, such as a widening boycott on Israeli exports, academic institutions, and leisure tourism in Israel.

MM

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Israel could launch air strikes if talks fail

Chris McGreal in Jerusalem

Friday January 13, 2006

Guardian

Israel has drawn up plans for strikes against Iran’s nuclear facilities with bunker busting bombs supplied by the US, but analysts say it has no intention of carrying them through while diplomatic pressure is growing on Tehran.

Israel regards Tehran as the single greatest threat, a view sharpened by the Iranian president’s call for the destruction of the Jewish state and his denial of the Holocaust.

Last month Binyamin Netanyahu, the former prime minister and leader of the Likud party, said that if he wins the general election in March he would follow the example of former prime minister Menachem Begin who ordered the Israeli air force bombing of Iraq’s nuclear plant in 1981. “The Iranian threat is an existential one. In this regard I will continue the legacy of Menachem Begin, who thwarted Iran’s neighbour, Iraq, from acquiring nuclear weapons by adopting bold and daring measures. I believe that is what Israel needs to do,” he told Israel radio.

But the government does recognise important political and military differences from the situation with Iraq 25 years ago. “I don’t think there’s a desire on any side to deal with this militarily,” said Emily Landau, director of the Jaffee Centre’s arms control project in Tel Aviv. “I think that … everybody’s looking to referring the case of Iran to the UN security council and that is what Israel is hoping for as well.”

The Israeli government has been sceptical of European efforts to pressure Tehran over the past two years, saying a more robust approach led by the US would be required. “Israel was trying to sharpen the idea that if nothing happens by March we’re really going to be a point of no return,” said Ms Landau. “Its message was more to the international community than Iran that now the international community really has to get its act together.”

There are restraining factors on Israel, including an American desire to ensure the Iranians are not able to garner support by portraying pressure over the nuclear issue as a Zionist plot. The US also controls air space that Israel would probably have to fly over to reach Iran. “It’s something that would have to be carried out at least with the knowledge of the Americans if not some kind of coordination with the United States,” said Ms Landau.

Some Israeli analysts have questioned Israel’s ability to carry out such an assault.

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006