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The Iranian nightmare
By Michael Schwartz
In 1998, neo-conservative theorist Robert Kagan enunciated what would become a
foundational belief of Bush administration policy. He asserted, "A successful
intervention in Iraq would revolutionize 
the strategic situation in the Middle East, in ways both tangible and
intangible, and all to the benefit of American interests."
Now, over two years after Baghdad fell and the American occupation of Iraq
began, Kagan's prediction appears to have been fulfilled - in reverse. The
chief beneficiary of the occupation and the chaos it produced has not been the
Bush administration, but Iran, the most populous and powerful member of the
"axis of evil" and the chief American competitor for dominance in the oil-rich
region. As diplomatic historian Gabriel Kolko commented, "By destroying a
united Iraq under [Saddam] Hussein ... the US removed the main barrier to
Iran's eventual triumph."
The road to Tehran is mined
At first, events looked to be moving in quite a different direction. Lost in
the obscure pages of the early coverage of the Iraq war was a moment when, it
seemed, the clerical regime in Iran flinched. Soon after Saddam fled and
Baghdad became an American town, Iran suddenly entered into negotiations with
Great Britain, France and Germany on ending its nuclear program, the most
public point of friction with the US. After all, it was Saddam's supposed
nuclear program that had been the casus belli for the American invasion,
and Bush administration neo-conservatives had been hammering away at the
Iranian program in a similar fashion.
Two developments ended this brief moment of seeming triumph for Washington. As
a start, American officials, feeling their oats, balked at the tentative terms
negotiated by the Europeans because they did not involve regime change in Iran.
This hardline American stance gave the Iranian leadership no room to maneuver
and stiffened their negotiating posture.
At the time, in the wake of its successful three-week war in Iraq, the Bush
administration seemed ready, even eager, to apply extreme military pressure to
Iran. According to Washington Post columnist William Arkin, the official US
strategic plan (formally known as CONPLAN 8022-02) completed in November 2003,
authorized "a preemptive and offensive strike capability against Iran and North
Korea". An administration pre-invasion quip (reported by Newsweek on August 19,
2002) caught perfectly the post-invasion mood ascendant in Washington:
"Everyone wants to go to Baghdad. Real men want to go to Tehran."
A second key development neutralized the American ability to turn its military
might in an Iranian direction: the rise of the Iraqi resistance. During the
several months after the fall of Baghdad, the Saddamist loyalists who had
initially resisted the US occupation were augmented by a broader and more
resilient insurgency. As the character of the occupation made itself known,
small groups of guerrillas began defending their neighborhoods from US military
patrols.
These patrols were seeking out suspected "regime loyalists" from the Ba'athist
era by knocking down doors, shooting whomever resisted, and arresting all men
of "military age" in the household. As the resistance spread, its various
factions became more aggressive and resourceful. Over the next year, it
blossomed into a formidable and complex enemy that the US Army - to the
surprise of American officials in Washington and Baghdad - did not have the
resources to defeat. It was, then, the swiftly growing Iraqi resistance that,
by preventing the consolidation of an American Iraq, forced an Iranian campaign
off the table and back into the shadows where it has remained to this day.
The nuclear conundrum
The rise of the Iraqi resistance drastically changed the equation for the
Iranian leadership. The threat of an imminent US assault had reduced the long-
term Iranian nuclear option to near pointlessness, which was why the Iranian
leadership was willing to negotiate it away in exchange for a guarantee of
safety from attack. Once the prospect of a protracted guerrilla war in
neighboring Iraq arose, however, the Iranian leadership suddenly found itself
with an extended time horizon for tactical and strategic planning.
Becoming (or at least continually threatening to become) a nuclear power again
became a promising path of deterrence against future American threats - at
least if the North Korean experience was any guide. So the Iranians began
pushing ahead with their nuclear program; and while no one could be sure
whether their work was aimed at the development of peaceful nuclear energy
(their claim) or nuclear weapons (as the Bush administration insisted), their
moves made it conceivable that they might actually be capable of building a
bomb in the many years that it would take - it now became clear - for the US to
have any chance of pacifying Iraq.
The increasingly destructive, devolving American occupation in Iraq also
deflected the anger of an Iranian population that had been growing restless
under the harsh clerical hand of Iran's political leaders. At the time of the
invasion, opinion surveys in Iran indicated both "widespread discontent within
the Islamic republic" and a generally positive attitude toward the United
States. ("The average Iranian does not bear ill will against America.")
American officials interpreted this to mean that "the clerics may have lost the
upper hand" in Iran. However, this widespread discontent quickly dissipated
under the pressure of regional events; and two years later, Iranians elected as
president Mahmud Ahmadinejad, a fundamentalist militant and electoral underdog,
who eliminated the US-favored "moderates" in the first round of voting and
then, in a runoff round, soundly defeated a less radical representative of the
Iranian establishment, Ayatollah Hashemi Rafsanjani. Moreover, he ran on a
platform that advocated making Iran's nuclear program - then at a halt while
negotiations were once again underway with the Europeans - a priority. Unlike
his defeated opponent, who said he would "work to improve relations" with the
US, Ahmadinejad claimed "he would not seek rapprochement".
In other words, instead of deterring or ending the Iranian nuclear effort, the
US invasion and botched occupation encouraged and accelerated it, lending it
national prestige and rallying Iranian public opinion to the cause.
The China connection
Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Iran stand one-two-three in global estimated oil and
natural gas reserves. The Iraq invasion, which unsettled world energy politics
in unpredictable ways, set in motion portentous activities in China, an
undisputed future US economic competitor. China's leaders, in search of energy
sources for their burgeoning economy long before the American invasion of Iraq,
had already in 1997 negotiated a US$1.3 billion contract with Saddam to develop
the al-Ahdab oil field in central Iraq.
By 2001, they were negotiating for rights to develop the much larger Halfayah
field. Between them, the two fields might have accounted for almost 400,000
barrels per day, or 13% of China's oil consumption in 2003. However, like
Iraq's other oil customers (including Russia, Germany and France), China was
prevented from activating these deals by the UN sanctions then in place, which
prohibited all Iraqi oil exports except for emergency sales authorized under
the UN's oil-for-food program. Ironically, therefore, China and other potential
oil customers had a great stake in the renewed UN inspections that were
interrupted by the American invasion. A finding of no weapons of mass
destruction might have allowed for sanctions to be lifted and the lucrative oil
deals activated.
When "regime change" in Iraq left the Bush administration in charge in Baghdad,
its newly implanted Coalition Provisional Authority declared all pre-existing
contracts and promises null and void, wiping out the Chinese stake in that
country's oil fields. As Peter S Goodman reported in the Washington Post, this
prompted "Beijing to intensify its search for new sources" of oil and natural
gas elsewhere. That burst of activity led, in the next two years, to new import
agreements with 15 countries. One of the most important of these was a
$70-billion contract to import Iranian oil, negotiated only after it became
clear that a US military threat was no longer imminent.
This agreement (Iran's largest since 1996) severely undermined, according to
Goodman, "efforts by the United States and Europe to isolate Tehran and force
it to give up plans for nuclear weapons". On this point, an adviser to the
Chinese government told Goodman, "Whether Iran would have nuclear weapons or
not is not our business. America cares, but Iran is not our neighbor. Anyone
who helps China with energy is a friend." This suggested that China might be
willing to use its UN veto to protect its new ally from any attempt by the US
or the Europeans to impose UN sanctions designed to frustrate its nuclear
designs, an impression reinforced in November of 2004, when Chinese Foreign
Minister Li Zhaoxing told then-Iranian president Mohammed Khatami that "Beijing
would indeed consider vetoing any American effort to sanction Iran at the
Security Council."
The long-term oil relationship between China and Iran, sparked in part by the
American occupation of neighboring Iraq, would soon be complemented by a host
of other economic ties, including an $836-million contract for China to build
the first stage of the Tehran subway system, an expanding Chinese auto
manufacturing presence in Iran and negotiations around a host of other
transportation and energy projects. In 2004, China sought to deepen political
ties between the two countries by linking Iran to the Shanghai Cooperative
Organization (SCO), a political alliance composed of China, Russia, Uzbekistan,
Tajikistan, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. China and Russia soon began shipping
Iran advanced missile systems, a decision that generated angry protests from
the Bush administration. According to Asia Times Online correspondent Jephraim
P Gundzik (The
US and that 'other' axis, Jun 9), these protests made good
sense, since the systems shipped were a direct threat to US military operations
in the Middle East: Iran can target US troop positions throughout the
Middle East and strike US Navy ships. Iran can also use its weapons to blockade
the Straits of Hormuz through which one-third of the world's traded oil is
shipped. With the help of Beijing and Moscow, Tehran is becoming an
increasingly unappealing military target for the US. At the
June meeting of the SCO, after guest Iran was invited into full membership, the
group called for the withdrawal of US troops from member states, and
particularly from the large base in Uzbekistan that was a key staging area for
American troops in the Afghanistan war. The SCO thus became the first
international body of any sort to call for a rollback of US bases anywhere in
the world. A month later, Uzbekistan made the demand on its own behalf. The
Associated Press noted, "The alliance's move appeared to be an attempt to push
the United States out of a region that Moscow regards as historically part of
its sphere of influence and in which China seeks a dominant role because of its
extensive energy resources."
The rise of pro-Iranian politics in Iraq
The combination of a thoroughly incompetent American occupation and a growing
guerrilla war also set in motion a seemingly inexorable drift of Iraq's Shi'ite
leadership - many of whom had lived in exile in Iran or already had close ties
to Iran's Shi'ite clerics - toward an ever more multi-faceted relationship with
the neighboring power.
The first (unintended) American nurturing of these ties occurred just after the
fall of the Saddam regime, when US military forces demobilized the Iraqi army
and police, and focused their military attention on tracking down "regime
remnants". The resulting absence of a police presence produced a wave of
looting and street crime that engulfed many cities. The Coalition Provisional
Authority found a remedy to the situation by tacitly supporting the formation
of local militias to deal with the problem.
Three pre-existing groups with strong ties to Iran quickly established their
primacy in the major Shi'ite areas of Iraq. The Sadrists, centered largely in
Baghdad's enormous Shi'ite slum, now known as Sadr City, had historically been
the most visible leadership of internal Shi'ite resistance to Saddam and were
accused by the Saddam government of accepting all manner of clandestine support
from the Iranian government. The Supreme Council of Islamic Revolution in Iraq
(SCIRI), and Da'wa, on the other hand, had organized military and terrorist
attacks inside Iraq, working from bases in Iran. Both had long been openly
associated with the Iranians and were committed to an Iraqi version of
Iranian-style Islamist governance. Once Saddam fell, all three groups
immediately sought leadership within Iraqi Shi'ite communities and dramatically
increased their standing by recruiting large numbers of unemployed young men
into their militias and assigning them to maintain order in their local
communities.
The Sadrists, with their Mehdi army militia, also became the backbone of
Shi'ite resistance to the occupation, leading two major revolts in Najaf in
April and August of 2004, and highly visible non-violent protests at other
places and times. SCIRI and Da'wa took a more moderate stance, following the
lead of Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, and working, however cautiously, with
the occupation authorities. At the same time, all three groups provided much of
the actual local governance in southern Iraq, including establishing offices
where citizens could ask for individual and collective help, and adjudicate
local disputes.
As the occupation's military forces either withdrew to their bases in many
cities in the south or became completely occupied in countering an increasingly
resourceful and widespread armed revolt (mostly in the Sunni areas of central
Iraq), the militias became increasingly important parts of local life, only
adding to the ascendancy of the organizations they represented in Iraqi civil
society. Given their historical connections to Iran, this ascendancy cemented a
sort of fraternal relationship between the emerging Shi'ite leadership and
Tehran's clerical government.
As the economic situation in Iraq deteriorated under the weight of corrupt
reconstruction politics and the pressure of the resistance, Iran became an ever
more promising source of economic sustenance. Saddam had forbidden Iranian
pilgrimages to Iraqi Shi'ite holy sites in the twin cities of Karbala and
Najaf, so the toppling of the Ba'athist regime opened the way for a huge influx
of pilgrims and cash. Iranian entrepreneurs began to negotiate building
projects for hotels and other tourist-oriented facilities in the holy cities.
Iranian financiers offered to support the construction of a modern airport in
Najaf to facilitate tourism.
From this foundation, other economic ties developed, though the hostility of
the American-run Coalition Provisional Authority and its appointed Iraqi-run
successor limited formal relationships. Nonetheless, a bustling cross-border
trade involved hundreds of trucks a day carrying a variety of goods in both
directions. These relatively unimpeded highways became even more crowded as the
escalating insurgency began to threaten, or actually close, routes to Saudi
Arabia, Syria and Lebanon. When a combination of security and infrastructural
problems shut down the Iraqi port of Umm Qasr in 2004, Iraqi merchants began
using the nearby Iranian port of Bandar Khomeini to receive shipments of
Australian wheat. In one ironic twist, according to persistent rumors, regular
shipments of Johnny Walker Red and other imported American liquor brands were
being smuggled across the border into prohibitionist Iran to feed an illegal
market at bargain basement prices (as low as $10 per liter).
The Iranian-Iraqi relationship blossoms
The Iraqi elections in January and their aftermath made the growing symbiosis
between the two neighboring areas fully visible. Though the Sadrists officially
boycotted the election, the SCIRI and Da'wa parties, having asserted leadership
within Sistani's Unified Iraqi Coalition, won a majority of the seats in the
new parliament. The prime minister they selected, Da'wa leader Ibrahim Jaafari,
had spent nine years in exile in Iran.
More open and formal relationships followed as soon as the new government took
office. As Juan Cole, perhaps the foremost academic observer of Middle Eastern
politics, put it: The two governments went into a tizzy of wheeling and dealing
of a sort not seen since Texas oil millionaires found out about Saudi Arabia."
Beyond facilitating pilgrimages in both directions across the border and
formalizing plans for Najaf airport, the new government facilitated connections
that affected almost every economic realm in depressed Iraq. Among the many
projects settled on were substantial improvements in Iraq's transportation
system; agreements for the exchange of products ranging from detergents to
construction materials and carpets; a shift of Iraqi imports of flour from the
US to Iran; the Iranian refining of Iraqi crude oil pumped from its southern
fields; and a billion-dollar credit line to be used for the Iraqi purchase of
Iranian "technical and engineering services".
Though the Bush administration, with its control over both the purse strings
and the armed forces of the new Iraqi government, undoubtedly had the power to
nullify these unwelcome agreements, circumstances on the ground made it
difficult for its officials to intervene. Any overt interventions in matters
that touched on Iraqi economic sovereignty would surely have triggered loud
(and perhaps violent) protests from at least the Sadrists, who might well have
been joined by the governing parties in the regime the US had just installed.
The most spectacular agreement, a proposed mutual defense pact between Iraq and
Iran, was indeed abrogated under apparent pressure from the Bush
administration, but American officials said nothing when "the Iraqi government
did give Tehran assurances that they would not allow Iraqi territory to be used
in any attack on Iran - presumably a reference to the United States".
The increasingly desperate circumstances that constrained Bush administration
actions when it came to the developing Iranian-Iraqi relationship were
addressed by Middle East scholar Ervand Abrahamian, who pointed to a similarly
precarious American situation in Afghanistan. He concluded that the US could
not afford a military confrontation with Iran, since the Iranians were in a
position to trigger armed revolts in the Shi'ite areas of both countries: "If
there's a confrontation, military confrontation, there would be no reason for
them to cooperate with United States. They would do exactly what would be in
their interests, which would be to destroy the US position in those two
countries."
A "senior international envoy" quoted by Christopher Dickey in NewsweekOnline
offered an almost identical opinion: "Look at what they can do in Iraq, in
Afghanistan, in Lebanon. They can turn the whole Middle East into a ball of
fire, and [American officials] know that."
In light of all these developments, Juan Cole commented: "In a historic irony,
Iran's most dangerous enemy of all, the United States, invaded Iran's neighbor
with an eye to eventually toppling the Tehran regime - but succeeded only in
defeating itself."
The ironies of conquest
In a memorable insight, historian and writer Rebecca Solnit has suggested that
the successes of social movements should often be measured not by their
accomplishments, but by the disasters they prevent: What the larger
movements have achieved is largely one of careers undestroyed, ideas
uncensored, violence and intimidation uncommitted, injustices unperpetrated,
rivers unpoisoned and undammed, bombs undropped, radiation unleaked, poisons
unsprayed, wildernesses unviolated, countryside undeveloped, resources
unextracted, species unexterminated. The Iraqi resistance, one
of the least expected and most powerful social movements of recent times, can
lay claim to few positive results. In two years of excruciating (if escalating)
fighting, the insurgents have seen their country progressively reduced to an
ungovernable jungle of violence, disease and hunger. But maybe, as Solnit
suggests, their real achievement lies in what didn't happen. Despite the
deepest desires of the Bush administration, to this day Iran remains uninvaded
- the horrors of devolving Iraq have, so far, prevented the unleashing of the
plagues of war on its neighbor.
Not only will that "success" be small consolation for most Iraqis, but such a
negative victory might in itself only be temporary. Reading the geopolitical
tea leaves is always a perilous task, especially in the case of Bush
administration intentions (and capabilities) toward Iran. While there are signs
that some American officials in Washington and Baghdad may be accepting the
defeat of administration plans for "regime change" in Iran; other signs remind
us that a number of top officials remain as committed as ever to a military
confrontation of some sort - and that frustration with a roiling defeat in
Iraq, which has until now constrained war plans, could well set them off in the
end.
Among signs that a major military strike against Iran may not be in the offing
are increasingly visible fault lines within the Bush administration itself.
This can be seen most politely in various calls for accommodation with Iran
from high-profile former Bush administration officials like Richard Haass. The
director of the State Department's policy planning staff from 2001 to 2003,
Haass published his appeal in Foreign Affairs, a magazine sponsored by the
influential Council for Foreign Relations. More tangible signs of a surfacing
accomodationist streak can be found in modest gestures made by the
administration, including the withdrawal of a longstanding US veto of Iran's
petition for membership in the World Trade Organization. Beyond this, one would
have to note the rather pointed leaking of crucial secret documents, including
the Military Quadrennial Report, in which top commanders gave a negative
assessment of US readiness to fight two wars simultaneously, and a National
Intelligence Estimate - the first comprehensive review of intelligence about
Iran since 2001 - which evidently declared Iran about than 10 years away from
obtaining "the key ingredient for a nuclear weapon". And, finally, the Bush
administration endorsed a European-sponsored nuclear treaty with Iran that was
almost identical to one it had opposed two years earlier.
But perhaps the most striking sign that some acceptance of regional realities
and limitations is afoot can be found in the strident complaints by various
neo-conservatives about Bush administration failures in Iran. Michael Rubin, a
key figure in the development of Iraq policy, spoke for many when he complained
in an American Enterprise Institute commentary that the Bush administration
showed "little inclination to work toward" regime change there. He followed
this claim with a catalogue of missed opportunities, policy shifts and other
symptoms of a lack of will to confront the Iranians.
On the other hand, as military analyst Michael Klare reports, the Bush
administration has never ceased its search for an on-the-cheap,
few-boots-on-the-ground military solution to its Iranian dilemma. While the US
military (like any modern military) develops contingency plans for all manner
of battles and campaigns, and while most such plans are never executed, their
existence and persistence give credence to the claims that an attack on Iran is
still possible.
Most of the extant contingency plans evidently take into account the "immense
stress now being placed on US ground forces in Iraq" and therefore seek "some
combination of airstrikes and the use of proxy [non-American ground] forces".
One plan, for example, evidently envisions several brigades of American-trained
Iranian exiles entering Iran from Afghanistan. Other plans involve simultaneous
land and sea assaults, coordinated with precision bombing of various military
sites currently being charted by manned and unmanned aerial invasions of
Iranian airspace.
Ominously, the Bush administration appears to recognize that these sorts of
assaults would not even fully destroy Iranian nuclear facilities, no less
topple the Iranian regime itself, and that an added ingredient might be needed.
Since 2004, therefore, contingency plans authorized by the Department of
Defense have mandated that the use of nuclear weapons be an integral part of
the overall strategy. Washington Post reporter William Arkin, citing the
already adopted CONPLAN 8022, mentions "a nuclear weapons option" specifically
tailored for use against underground Iranian nuclear plants: "A specially
configured earth-penetrating bomb to destroy deeply buried facilities." Such a
nuclear attack would - at least on paper - be coordinated with a variety of
other measures to ensure that the Iranian government was replaced with one
acceptable to the Bush administration.
Recently, former Central Intelligence Agency official Philip Giraldi asserted
in the American Conservative magazine that, as of late summer 2005, the
Pentagon, "under instructions from Vice President Dick Cheney's office" was
"drawing up a contingency plan to be employed in response to another 9/11-type
terrorist attack on the United States. The plan mandates a large-scale air
assault on Iran employing both conventional and tactical nuclear weapons ... As
in the case of Iraq, the response is not conditional on Iran actually being
involved in the act of terrorism directed against the United States."
The breadth and depth of the assault, according to Giraldi's Air Force sources,
would be quite striking: "Within Iran there are more than 450 major strategic
targets, including numerous suspected nuclear-weapons-program development
sites. Many of the targets are hardened or are deep underground and could not
be taken out by conventional weapons, hence the nuclear option." Since many
targets are in populated areas, the havoc and destruction following such an
attack would, in all likelihood, be unrivaled by anything since Hiroshima and
Nagasaki.
After escaping the Cold War specter of nuclear holocaust, it seems unimaginable
that the world would be forced to endure the horror of nuclear war in a
regional dispute. However, the record of Bush administration belligerence makes
it difficult to imagine America's top leadership giving up the ambition of
toppling the Islamic regime in Iran. And yet, given that the conquest of Iraq
led the administration unexpectedly down strange Iranian paths, who knows where
future Washington plans and dreams are likely to lead - perhaps to destruction,
certainly to bitter ironies of every sort.
Michael Schwartz, professor of sociology at the State University of New
York at Stony Brook, has written extensively on popular protest and insurgency,
and on American business and government dynamics. His work on Iraq has appeared
on the Internet at numerous sites, including TomDispatch, Asia Times Online,
MotherJones, Antiwar.com and ZNet; and in print at Contexts, Against the
Current, and Z Magazine. His books include Radical Politics and Social
Structure, The Power Structure of American Business (with Beth Mintz), and
Social Policy and the Conservative Agenda (edited, with Clarence Lo). His e-mail
address is Ms42@optonline.net@optonline.net.
(Copyright 2005 Michael Schwartz)
(Used by permission Tomdispatch) |
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