Cry havoc, and let slip the puppies of war By Spengler
Dogs of war incline toward caution, which after all is how they grew up to be
dogs. More worrisome are puppies, who do not know what danger is. Gavrilo
Princeps, the Serbian gunman who shot Archduke Franz Ferdinand dead in June
1914, was a puppy. So are the Hamas kidnappers, who at this writing still hold
Israeli Army Corporal Gilad Shalit, and the Mehdi Army shooters who reportedly
disposed of several dozen Sunni civilians in Baghdad on the weekend. The North
Koreans, by contrast, are just nasty old dogs who long ago got loose from their
leash.
Wars start because no one wants to disown his dog. If your dog bites a
neighbor, your neighbor well might come after you with a
shotgun. Nicholas II of Russia, I observed recently, did not want war in 1914
and until the end of July insisted that no war would break out. [1] But the
Serbian puppies supported by his secret service dragged him into it
willy-nilly. The past week's events in the Middle East have a disturbing feel
of July 1914 about them.
Hamas, for that matter, cannot disown the hotheads who provoked the Gaza crisis
by kidnapping the Israeli corporal, or the rocketeers who incited the Israeli
attack on northern Gaza by targeting Israeli towns, any more than Iran can
disown the butchers of the Mehdi Army, a Shi'ite militia loyal to the
anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. It is not clear either whether Saudi
Arabia can disown Hamas, nor the Somali Islamists who seized the country from
the warlords last month. Saudi cash smuggled in through Gaza has kept the Hamas
regime afloat in the face of a boycott by Western powers, and the US State
Department complains that Saudi Arabia is funding the Somali Union of Islamic
Courts. [2]
The old dogs in Tehran and Riyadh can do nothing to satisfy the deeply felt and
long-frustrated aspirations of their pups in the Gaza strip or Baghdad's Sadr
City, no more than Nicholas II could requite the nationalist hopes of Serbia
without going to war with Austria and Germany. In fact, nothing can dampen the
Palestinians' existential outrage against the misery of their circumstances, or
fulfill the ambitions of Iraq's Shi'ites without the reduction of the Sunni
population.
That leaves Tehran in a dilemma. Iran's power rests on its ability to threaten
destabilization, especially in Iraq, and it is counting on this to keep the
Bush administration at bay. Even the greatest military autocrat, though, is
constrained by the character of his army, and the standing of the region's
little powers depends on the outcome of the puppy fights now in progress. The
logical result is continued escalation until America and Iran stand off in
earnest.
Saudi Arabia, by the same token, cannot abandon its Sunni brethren in Iraq by
acquiescing to an Iranian power play, which in the long run threatens the
kingdom's own security. Dallas Morning News editor Rod Dreher spoke to Saudi
Minister of State Abdullah Zainal Alireza on June 28, who stated "that the US
cannot allow Iran to get the bomb". Dreher asked him, "What if it happens
anyway?" The Saudi minister, Dreher reported, "repeated, firmly, that it must
not be allowed to happen. Period. The end." [3]
This declaration to a prominent US journalist should be assigned high
significance. As I observed earlier this year, "Saudi Arabia and the United
Arab Emirates have the most to lose from a nuclear-equipped Iran. No one can
predict when the Saudi kingdom might become unstable, but whenever it does,
Iran will stand ready to support its Shi'ite co-religionists, who make up a
majority in the kingdom's oil-producing east." [4]
It should be no surprise that Western governments are watching the events in
Gaza slack-jawed and confused. Not only the dogs, but the dogs' owners, have
plunged into the melee. The divisions inside Hamas make matters more
complicated still.
Hamas' military wing in Gaza takes orders from the Syrian-based Hamas leader
Khaled Meshaal, "because he distributes the funds received from Iran and the
Gulf States", as the Guardian of London reported July 4. The region's
governments blame each other for failing to persuade Meshaal to free the
Israeli corporal.
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, who has the most to lose, blames Syria for
ignoring Egyptian requests to arrange the soldier's release. But the
Palestinian negotiator Nabil Shaath told the Saudi daily Al-Watan on July 9
that both Egypt and Saudi Arabia were blocking Western efforts to convince Iran
and Syria to use their good offices to free Shalit.
Iran's President Mahmud Ahmadinejad and his Revolutionary Guard supporters are
the puppies of the Iranian revolution. Western diplomacy presumes that the old
dogs, specifically Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and former president
Ayatollah Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, will kennel their curs before the US
takes military action of some kind. But that is harder to do than some Western
analysts suppose, for Iran's influence over Shi'ite militias in Iraq represents
the Islamic Republic's most important source of leverage over the United
States.
The Bush administration needs to show progress toward stability in Iraq in the
advent of the November Congressional elections, when control of both Houses of
the American legislature will be in play. On July 8, US and Iraqi government
forces in Baghdad staged their first attack in many months on the Mehdi Army,
Tehran's most important asset in Iraq. On July 9, Mehdi Army fighters
reportedly entered a Sunni neighborhood in Baghdad and killed 42 Sunni Arabs.
The United States will not submit to Iranian blackmail, as the June 8 offensive
in Sadr City made clear, and Iranian-supported Shi'ites will not submit to the
American whip, as the next day's massacres of Sunnis make just as clear. Tehran
cannot be seen to abandon its Iraqi assets the moment American soldiers begin
shooting at them. The likely Iranian response will include more bloodletting in
Iraq, as well as the use of Iranian influence to stoke the fire in Gaza.
Tehran finds itself in a variant
of the "prisoner's dilemma". If it accepts the US proposal to suspend uranium
enrichment while negotiating with Washington - assuming that this can be
verified to Washington's satisfaction - time will be on the side of the
Americans. As the Iraqi situation unravels, Iran's leverage over Washington
will erode and Iran will have lost crucial time in creating a nuclear-weapons
capability. Iran's only logical response is the one that Ahmadinejad already
has offered: neither accept nor reject the proposal, but play for time.
Washington cannot accept this proposal. It will indicate its impatience to
Tehran through various gestures, for example by inciting Iran's national
minorities or dissidents. But the effect of such action will be to reinforce
Tehran's conviction that it has nothing to gain by accepting US terms.
In the midst of the present escalation, I cannot see Iran abandoning uranium
enrichment, and I cannot imagine Washington responding with anything but
extreme severity.
