End of story: Israel
triumphant By M K Bhadrakumar
In Gabriel Garcia Marquez' novella
Chronicle of a Death Foretold, virtually
everyone in the town knows that Santiago Nasar is
going to be murdered. Yet nobody can or will do
anything to prevent it. The murder is motivated
and inexorable. Yet no one quite knows why
Santiago Nasar, a rich young swashbuckling fellow,
must die.
There is a similar feeling of
unforgiving inevitability about President George W
Bush's desire to go to war with Iran. In its
carefully woven plot and its inventive, non-linear
structure that is intended to sustain dramatic
tension, Bush's Iran war leaps out of the
pages
of Marquez' metaphysical murder mystery.
But there is nothing mysterious about the
general plot outline. Seymour Hersh, an
investigative journalist for The New Yorker
magazine, has now filled in the details of Bush's
rush to war. Yet for all its sense of
inevitability, the story line still has
indeterminacies. Truth is continually slithering
away from it - like a sly serpent determined to
live for another day.
Three concentric
circles have been forming for the past six years
of the Bush presidency around the "Iran question".
Bush administration officials can draw
satisfaction that finally they are beginning to
reinforce one another. The debate henceforth is
less about the main objective; it has come down
now to the details of the timing and execution.
Of the three circles, the one outside the
perimeter concerns the various factors that the
Bush administration is compelled to reckon with
within the United States. Inside that lies another
circle involving the factors at work in the Arab
Middle East. At the center, at its very core, is
the US agenda of dominating the region. Put
another way, it is about securing Israel's
dominant position in a New Middle East.
The most important information that Hersh
put in his New Yorker article was not details of
the presence of US intelligence operatives on
Iranian territory, nor about the Pentagon
simulating attacks on Iran. It was not even about
the horrendous possibility that the Bush
administration might use tactical nuclear weapons
against buried nuclear sites. But it was the
chilling reality that any military move directed
against Iran would become a "bipartisan" matter in
the US.
According to Hersh, Bush has
included - implicated, one might say - opposition
Democrats among the select group of legislators he
has begun to brief about the imperative of
attacking Iran. That may be why Democrats are
either silent on a possible attack or are actually
trying to position themselves to the right of the
president.
The reluctance of senior
Democrats to articulate anti-war sentiments was
underscored last weekend when a student audience
at Brown University in the state of Rhode Island
heckled Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton. Being the
front-runner among apparent Democratic
presidential hopefuls in 2008, she apparently
believes she can ill afford to articulate anti-war
sentiments, even if they don't go over well on
campus.
Support for Zionism The
support for Israel among the organized Christian
groups in the US has increased dramatically in
recent years. Christian evangelicals, who
currently wield unprecedented influence in US
politics, regard the return of the Jews to their
ancient homelands as a prerequisite for the Second
Coming. No serious politician in either the
Republican or Democratic camp can ignore the
resurgence of Zionism in US politics.
Iran
has been implanted in the US evangelical
consciousness as Israel's Enemy No 1. Also, Iran
is equated with Islam, and that religion, in turn,
is identified with terrorism in Bible Belt
America. Conservative Christian ideologues
routinely indulge in shrill condemnations of
Islam, which is portrayed as a threat to the
righteousness of Christian and Zionist principles.
Many US evangelicals believe that God gave
the land of Israel to the Jewish people and that
the Palestinians who live in the West Bank and
Gaza should be removed to another Arab country.
Some evangelicals believe that God punished
assassinated former prime minister Yitzhak Rabin
for offering to trade land for peace with the
Palestinians.
Thus, curiously, the Bush
administration is presented with a political
"win-win" situation. The best way of rallying
Americans behind the Bush presidency would be to
go to war with Iran. That would boost Bush's
overall popularity with the voters, which is
currently so abysmally low that he may soon become
a lame-duck president.
Looking beyond his
own shores, Bush sees more opportunities to
promote America's and Israel's agenda. Iraq is in
the midst of a civil war that threatens to spread
throughout the Middle East - paradoxically, on
account of the mayhem in Iraq. The pro-American
Arab regimes in the region see the Iraq situation
with growing alarm.
Their vital interests
increasingly overlap Israel's. The pro-American
Arab regimes, especially Egypt and Jordan, and
Israel alike realize that there is an Arab
leadership void in the region. Egypt and Syria are
pale shadows of what they used to be. Syria is
badly isolated. And in the framework
post-September 11, 2001, something has
fundamentally changed in the previously tight
Saudi-US relationship.
These Arab regimes
(and Israel) harbor deep misgivings about the
Shi'ite ascendancy in Iraq and the likelihood of
its spilling over its borders. Also, they equate
the Shi'ite ascendancy with an expanding Iran.
King Abdullah of Jordan has warned about the
specter of an emergent "Shi'ite crescent" in the
region. Lately, President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt
has sounded a similar alarm. "There are Shi'ites
in all these countries who are significant
percentages [of the population], and Shi'ites are
mostly loyal to Iran and not to the countries
where they live," he said.
Mubarak's
statement calls attention to the heightening
sectarian divide across the Middle East. But that
is its side0effect. A seasoned politician like
Mubarak would speak with deliberation. He was
addressing Washington on behalf of fellow Arab
rulers who harbor a deep sense of disquiet over
the planned talks between the US and Iran over the
future of Iraq originally scheduled to begin this
weekend. Israel of course is perennially nervous
about any US-Iran face-to-face dialogue of any
kind.
Specifically, Arab rulers such as
Mubarak are terrified of the prospect of the US
keeping them out of the loop on decision-making in
Iraq. On April 5, Cairo hosted a ministerial
meeting of Arab countries to exchange views on
these very concerns. Earlier, the intelligence
chiefs of these Arab countries also met in this
regard. (Syria is excluded from these hush-hush
parleys.)
Israel shares the unease of
these Arab regimes that the "Sunni Arab core is
becoming a political periphery relative to the new
core, which has moved eastwards to Iran", to quote
Asher Susser, a prominent Israeli strategic
thinker. He added: "Saddam Hussein's Iraq was once
the Arab bulwark in the east, but its removal has
opened the floodgates for Iranian regional
ascendancy, for which nothing positive can be said
from an Israeli standpoint."
Furthermore,
Iraq's possible breakup is a nightmare for the
Arabs (and Israel) since southern Iraq would come
even more under Iranian influence. That could
trigger massive Arab street protests, jeopardizing
the very existence of the Arab regimes by further
strengthening the forces of radicalism such as
Hamas, Hezbollah and Muslim Brotherhood. (There is
a method after all in Iranian President Mahmud
Ahmadinejad's seemingly outrageous statements.)
Beyond these regional equations in the
Middle East lies the inner core, the first circle,
of the Bush administration's strategy toward Iran.
It is, and has always been, securing Israel's
regional dominance. Here any unfinished business
is simply impermissible since it can have
catastrophic effects on Israel's security. Let's
see what has been achieved so far since the
invasion of Iraq three years ago.
Saddam
Hussein's removal brought Syria under sustained
pressure - weakening it, containing it somewhat
and even rolling it back from Lebanon. Syria can
no longer challenge Israel on Lebanese soil.
Israel may still have some way to go to seize the
strategic initiative along its northern border,
but a beginning has been made. On the other hand,
Syria's territorial integrity remains intact, and
that is a fundamental roadblock to any redrawing
of the map of the Middle East. A fragmentation of
Iraq could have the "positive" outcome of
disintegrating Syria.
Meanwhile, Syria is
hardly in a position anymore to undermine and
humiliate Jordan. To that extent, Israel can still
hope to shape its strategic environment further in
cooperation with Jordan. But Iraq's future is
bound to affect the strategic balance in the
Middle East profoundly. This also hampers the
optimal utilization of Jordan's secret cooperation
with Israel.
Ideally, of course, if Jordan
can replace Iran as the main influence over the
Iraqi Shi'ites, that would enable King Abdullah to
wean the south Lebanese Shi'ites away from Iran as
well. In such a scenario, the Jordanian king can
be of real help to Israel in bringing the Lebanon
problem under control.
But for all this
come to fruition, Iran needs to be contained. Once
Iranian influence is rolled back, the Shi'ites in
Iraq and Lebanon will naturally gravitate to the
Hashemites of Jordan. An orderly transition
becomes possible even in Saudi Arabia.
Finally, Israel has come some way already
toward forging a new relationship with the
Palestinians on its terms. Israel no longer has
any obligations under the old Oslo agreements. But
here again, much work lies ahead. Jordan could
have helped Israel in cultivating Palestinians
willing to work with Israel in the era post-Yasser
Arafat. Instead, Israel today has to contend with
the rise of Hamas (with Iranian backing) as the
alternative to the Fatah's base of power. Any way
you look at the equation, Iran stands in the way.
Israel's interests today are, of course,
radically different from what they were in the
past. Israel has made peace with the key countries
of the "Arab core" - Egypt and Jordan. Israel has
contained its foes. But Israel is still far from
transcending the Arab-Israeli conflict and
becoming the most important element in the history
of the Middle East, which would lead to a truly
New Middle East.
M K Bhadrakumar
served as a career diplomat in the Indian Foreign
Service for over 29 years, with postings including
ambassador to Uzbekistan (1995-98) and to Turkey
(1998-2001).
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