Transplant Forrest Gump into Barbara
Tuchman's 1962 history of the outbreak of World
War I, The Guns of August, and you have a
rough idea of what is afoot in Washington.
America's slow-witted Everyman traipsed oblivious
through great events in the eponymous 1994 film,
blessed by marvelous good fortune. President
George W Bush resembles Forrest Gump, but without
the lucky streak.
US policy has turned to
dust and ashes. Watching Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice on television, it occurred to me
that she had borrowed a makeup artist from
Night of the Living Dead. On reflection, it
is more likely that she has not slept in a week.
Rather than a stable and democratic Iraq,
Bush will leave Iraq a killing field. Oil-supply
disruption will derail the world economic
recovery. Nonetheless
Washington must proceed according to the script of
the strategy, which will culminate in US bombing
of Iran's nuclear capability - just as I predicted
on January 24 (Why the West will attack
Iran) and numerous subsequent
occasions. As Will Smith said in I, Robot,
"Somehow, 'I told you so' doesn't quite say it."
In fairness to Bush, not only US policy
but the policy of all the leading players lies in
ruins. Europe's attempt to conciliate Islamist
opinion has ended in embarrassment, and even
France avers that the United Nations Security
Council must take action to prevent Iran from
acquiring nuclear weapons. Saudi Arabia's attempt
to bestride the divisions in the Arab world has
collapsed, and the monarchy has perforce taken
sides against Hezbollah.
Israeli policy
has failed miserably. The best that Prime Minister
Ehud Olmert can hope for is a return to status quo
ante 2000, when Ehud Barak withdrew Israeli forces
from southern Lebanon. Israeli ground troops no
doubt will chop up Hezbollah badly, and Israel
will obtain the same degree of security it had
prior to the withdrawal six years ago, minus parts
of Haifa and other northern cities.
Iran's
miscalculation is the greatest of all. The United
States can destroy Iran's capacity to make
trouble, and will do so with utmost reluctance and
at great cost; Europe, Japan, Russia, China and
the Sunni Arab world will condone America's
actions, with even greater regret and at even
greater cost.
Gumpishness in Washington
arose from a fallacy of composition: the belief
that if US democracy could be constructed from
immigrants of every culture and creed, then it
could be exported to countries of every culture
and creed. But Americans abandoned their cultures
to join a new one. They are self-selected to be
Americans. By adverse selection, those who clung
to their cultures remained behind.
The
cost to the United States of the Shi'ite tragedy
cannot be measured in gasoline ration cards,
unemployment rates, or even the civilian
casualties likely to ensue as Iran and its allies
seek vengeance through terror upon the Great Power
that stifled their ambitions just when they
appeared mirage-like within their grasp.
Until now, history has given Americans a
great dispensation to wander Gump-like through the
disasters that befall other folk, with bemused
curiosity about the filling of the next piece of
chocolate in the box. It will be borne in upon
Americans that the destiny of most peoples is
tragic, and there is no predicting how Americans
will react to the rude awakening out of their
complacency.
Only a delusion of surpassing
consolation could prompt the extremes of denial
that Washington has evinced over the past year. If
a stupider idea possessed statesmen than the
proposition that democracy could thrive in Lebanon
in the presence of an Iranian-controlled military
organization more powerful than the Lebanese army,
I do not know what it was. Bush believed that
drawing Hezbollah into democracy would persuade
them to abandon terrorism. In a March 16 press
conference he said:
Our policy is this: We want there to
be a thriving democracy in Lebanon. We believe
that there will be a thriving democracy, but
only if - but only if - Syria withdraws ... her
troops completely out of Lebanon ... I like the
idea of people running for office. There's a
positive effect when you run for office. Maybe
some will run for office and say, vote for me, I
look forward to blowing up America. I don't
know, I don't know if that will be their
platform or not. But it's - I don't think so. I
think people who generally run for office say,
vote for me, I'm looking forward to fixing your
potholes, or making sure you got bread on the
table.
The whole matter was so
preposterous that I framed it as a Gilbert and
Sullivan spoof, The Jihadis of Penzance
(March 22, 2005). Hezbollah fixed the potholes,
all right, evidently digging the deeper ones out
as missile silos. Syrian troops departed, but
Hezbollah remains unassailable by that summer camp
for six-month conscripts comically named the
Lebanese army. By drawing Hezbollah into the
Lebanese parliament, US diplomacy made the Shi'ite
militia legitimate. Now it cannot be displaced
without tearing apart Shi'ite communities in
southern Lebanon, at enormous human cost. That is
precisely what the Israelis will do when their
ground offensive begins early this week; there is
no other way but military to stop the missile
attacks.
Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah
Ali Khameini promised Hezbollah on Sunday that it
never would be disarmed. Iran is now in open
confrontation with the United States, and its
erstwhile appeasers stand watching slack-jawed.
Washington has never missed an opportunity to
misjudge Iran. No American analyst predicted
Mahmud Ahmadinejad's sweeping election victory in
June last year (Iran: The living fossils'
vengeance, June 28, 2005). The US
intelligence community insisted that the US could
continue to do business with Supreme Leader
Khameini and former president Akbar Hashemi
Rafsanjani despite Ahmadinejad's Hitlerian
posturing. It was all self-delusion, and it all
has come to grief.
I have been warning of
this for a year, and I am sick at heart watching
the final act of the tragedy play out. Six months
ago (on February 14), I wrote under the title War with Iran on the worst
terms:
Today's Shi'ites are the Serbs of
the Middle East. Emerging from a millennium of
oppression into majority power in Mesopotamia
and Persia, the Shi'ites have their first and
only opportunity to exact compensation for the
humiliation of centuries. They have the
misfortune to enter modern history at a point of
maximum disadvantage for the peoples of the
Middle East, who have few means to compete with
the economic powers of East Asia. In Iran, as I
have shown elsewhere (Demographics and Iran's imperial
design, September 13, 2005), they
face a devastating economic and demographic
decline one generation from now. That is why
these choose leaders such as Mahmud Ahmadinejad
in Tehran and Muqtada al-Sadr in Baghdad.
Washington does not wish to fight but
will if necessary. The Europeans, and even the
Saudis, will fight rather than allow Iran to
become a nuclear power, although they wish to
fight much less than Washington.
If
Washington were to deliver a military ultimatum
to Iran tomorrow, the results would be a painful
jump in oil prices, civil violence in Iraq,
low-intensity war on Israel's northern border,
and a wave of anti-Americanism in the Arab world
- not an inviting picture.
But if
Washington waits another year to deliver an
ultimatum to Iran, the results will be civil war
to the death in Iraq, the direct engagement of
Israel in a regional war through Hezbollah and
Hamas, and extensive terrorist action throughout
the West, with extensive loss of American
life [emphasis added]. There are no good
outcomes, only less terrible ones. The West will
attack Iran, but only when such an attack will
do the least good and the most
harm.
Islam, and Shi'ite Islam in
particular, constitutes a dimension of this
crisis. But it is worth emphasizing that Iran's
national aspirations and its presentiment of
fragility resemble those of Christian nations in
past tragedies. The Iranians are having a Serbian
moment.
After throwing off the Turkish
yoke by force of arms in 1876, the Serbs were
denied their aspirations for national unity by the
European powers at the Congress of Berlin in 1878.
Serbia's attempt to wrest historic territory out
of the Austro-Hungarian Empire provoked World War
I, in which Serbia lost more than half of its male
population and more than a quarter of its total
population, a sacrifice far exceeding that of any
other nation in any modern war. Serbs resisted
German occupation during World War II with more
tenacity and success than any other people.
Serbian refusal to abandon the historic heartland
of Kosovo prompted the North Atlantic Treaty
Organization (NATO) aerial bombardments of
1998-99.
It took more than a century, two
World Wars and an attack by NATO against the
isolated Serbs to crush their national ambitions.
What will it take to suppress Iran and its
supporters in Lebanon and Iraq? The West should
prepare itself for a war that will be prolonged
and merciless. Iran's national ambitions are in
play, but Islam is not a national movement, and
Iran's plight will attract the sympathy and ardor
of disaffected Muslims in many places, not least
Western Europe. The medium-term consequences of
US-Iranian confrontation might include civil
unrest in European countries with substantial
Muslim populations. (Copyright 2006 Asia Times
Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us
about sales, syndication and republishing
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