Washington's strategic position in
the Middle East is stronger than it has ever been,
contrary to superficial interpretation. With much of
central Iraq out of US control and a record level of close
to 100 attacks a day against US forces, President
George W Bush appears on the defensive. The moment
recalls French Marshal Ferdinand Foch's 1914 dispatch
from the Marne: "My center is giving way, my right is in
retreat; situation excellent. I shall attack." To be
specific, the United States will in some form or other attack Iran
while it arranges the division of Iraq.
That
Sunni diehards and Shi'ite adventurers would prevent the
pacification of Iraq never was in question (Will Iraq survive
the Iraqi resistance? , December 23, 2003). Leaks of a
National Intelligence Estimate warning last week of
impending Iraqi civil war suggest that
Washington is thinking past the loser's game of occupation.
The phony war between reluctant Iraqi recruits and
rebels will persist past November, but something
deadly and different will follow on Bush's
re-election. Russian paratroops will be busy in the Caucasus after
the Beslan atrocity, making a Russian presence in
Iraq unlikely, contrary to my earlier forecast. (That
may have been the intended outcome of the
incident.) Nonetheless, Washington has a winning card to play,
and the decibel level of protests from Tehran as well
as from the US opposition suggests that it is well
anticipated.
If Washington chooses to dismember
Iraq rather than pacify it, who will win and who will
lose? Washington always has had the option of breaking
up the Mesopotamian monstrosity drawn by British
cartographers in 1921. The only surprise is that it has
taken US intelligence so long to reach this
conclusion. Whether America's policymakers are slow
learners, or whether Bush chose to perpetuate the farce
of Iraqi nation-building until the November elections,
we may never know. An Iranian alliance with Iraq's
Shi'ites poses a danger to this maneuver. But that
danger, in turn, drives the US toward action against
Iran.
Ahmad Chalabi, the Shi'ite Iraqi leader
closest to the Pentagon, endorsed Kurdish independence
in the following exchange with the Middle East Quarterly
(MEQ, summer 2004 issue):
MEQ: Some high-profile
American analysts, such as Leslie Gelb, former
president of the Council on Foreign Relations, have
called for Iraq to be split up into three states. Are
they right? Should Iraq be broken up? Why shouldn't
the Kurds have independence?
Chalabi: All peoples have the
right to self-determination and that includes the
Kurdish people. Why should they be any different? If
the exercise of that right leads them towards
independence, then so be it. We will negotiate with
them. The days of using violence to build this country
are over.
Iraq's Shi'ites, who comprise
nearly two-thirds of the population, have no reason to
subsidize the Sunni minority with revenues from oil
wells located in their centers of ethnic preponderance.
The simplest way to deal with resistance in the Sunni
triangle is to break off the oil-rich Kurdish north and
Shi'ite south, and let the Sunni center eat sand.
Washington loses nothing by promoting
an independent Kurdistan, except for Turkey's
dwindling goodwill. It is not surprising that Ankara warns darkly
of Kurdish plots behind US operations in Iraq's
northwest (Turkey snaps over US
bombing of its brethren, K Gajendra Singh,
AToL September 18). At the Pentagon, patience grows thin for
the crypto-Islamist government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Turkey is the new sick man of Europe (In defense of
Turkish cigarettes, August 24), and Washington
has less and less to gain from it.
For that
matter, the Kurds are more than Washington's pawns. Their
love (in Franz Rosenzweig's luminous phrase) for their
own nationhood is sweet and pregnant with the
presentiment of death; if the present opportunity for
independence passes them by, the glacial tide of
modernity will grind their language and culture
underneath (You have met the
enemy and he is you , June 29). Binding
them to Mesopotamia may prove more trouble than it is
worth. A kind of historic judgment would afflict the
Turks in the form of Kurdish independence, for Turkey
employed the Kurds to expel the Armenians in 1915,
leaving them in what used to be known as Western
Armenia.
That leaves the specter of
a greater Shi'ite entity as the main dissuasion against
an Iraqi breakup. News reports of US efforts to
destabilize the Iranian regime have been circulating for the
better part of the year, and some media (eg the New York
Times on September 1) linked press leaks about Israeli spies in
the Pentagon to internal administration debates
over possible action against that country. Iranian
officials have warned daily against US efforts to undermine
their regime, as have American opponents of the Bush
administration, for example the University of Michigan's
Middle East scholar Juan Cole on August 29 in his
"Informed Comment" weblog: "It is an echo of the one-two
punch secretly planned by the pro-Likud faction in the
Department of Defense. First, Iraq would be taken out by
the United States, and then Iran."
All of
this was so much ectoplasm until Saturday, when the US
forced through the International Atomic Energy Agency a
resolution demanding that Iran cease enriching uranium.
Now the strategic logic is as compelling as it was in
1914, when the German general staff insisted that
immediate war with Russia was preferable to waiting
until the eastern giant completed its railway network.
Washington is assembling its case for some form of
intervention against Tehran, and turned an important
corner of diplomacy with the weekend's warning.
For Iran, the emergence of a
quasi-independent entity from among the Iraqi Shi'ites presents as
much danger as opportunity, that is, as much of a channel
of US influence into Iran as a source of Iranian
leverage in Iraq. Chalabi, accused of betraying US
secrets to Iran, personifies this duality.
Personalities are less important than the layout
of the chessboard. America's next move will be to break
out of the stalemate in Iraq by widening the conflict.
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Washington is thinking past the loser's game of occupation.
The phony war between reluctant Iraqi recruits and
rebels will persist past November, but something
deadly and different will follow on Bush's
re-election. Russian paratroops will be busy in the Caucasus after
the Beslan atrocity, making a Russian presence in
Iraq unlikely, contrary to my earlier forecast. (That
may have been the intended outcome of the
incident.) Nonetheless, Washington has a winning card to play,
and the decibel level of protests from Tehran as well
as from the US opposition suggests that it is well
anticipated. 
