Page 2 of
3 More fuel on Iraq's spreading
flames By W Joseph Stroupe
acute military measures designed to
confront and damage an ascendant Iran and its
proxies, and a subsequent scaled-down strategic
supporting role in the background, the region's
Sunnis will have to play the major, foreground
role in achieving and holding in place a return to
a balance of power across the region.
British Prime Minister Tony Blair, in his
recent trip to the Middle East, called for the
formation of a Sunni grand strategic alliance to
confront Iran and its proxies. His "call to
action" made clear the
fact
that the endgame has indeed arrived in the Middle
East and that, according to him, the "moderate"
governments and factions must unite to face down
the "radical" governments and factions, lest Iran
and its supporters soon achieve a position of
regional ascendancy that cannot be rolled back. If
Iran does achieve that position, then the
energy-based geopolitical implications and
repercussions will be incalculable, especially for
the West.
A new strategy What
Blair and US President George W Bush have
obviously come up with is a strategy to pit the
region's Sunnis against its Shi'ites, backing the
Sunnis for the moment because they are in a
weakened position with respect to Iran, yet not
entirely abandoning the Shi'ites in Iraq, as long
as they remain separate enough from Iran and its
regional goals and proxies.
The more
radical Shi'ite militias, such as that of cleric
Muqtada al-Sadr, will have to be de-fanged in the
"one last push" strategy when many thousands of
additional US troops soon arrive. The policy of
supporting both sides to achieve a balance of
power (stalemate) is not new - the US pursued that
strategy for decades before 2003, supporting both
Saddam and Tehran during the Iran-Iraq War of the
1980s, for just one example.
But now the
old strategy of indirect US/British involvement
has a new twist, seeing that Iran and its proxies
have advanced on the region to such a great extent
since 2003. US and British military forces,
primarily naval forces, are being massively
increased inside and outside the Persian Gulf to
facilitate certain "measured" actions against
Iran.
These will begin with sanctions and
an embargo enforced at sea and in the global
financial arena, and clandestine support for
opposition groups and sabotage within Iran itself.
A massive air attack on Iran will be held in
immediate readiness. The US and Britain hope such
"measured" action will weaken the Iranian regime
financially and politically over a period of
months, starting early in 2007, and lead to a
West-favorable regime change later in the year
without the need to resort to massive air attacks.
Strategies destructive to Western
interests One of the fundamental problems
with the strategy of a "renewed stalemate" is that
it relies on a pointed, regionwide exploitation of
already-hot Sunni-Shi'ite sectarian rivalries to
"succeed" in restoring some semblance of a balance
of power to the region.
Across the region,
from Saudi Arabia to Bahrain to the Palestinian
territories to Lebanon to Iraq, once-pent-up
Sunni-Shi'ite sectarian tensions are already
bursting into the open, and they now require only
a spark to explode into a regional conflagration.
As King Abdullah II of Jordan recently warned,
three impending civil wars, in the Palestinian
territories, in Lebanon and in Iraq, are merely
waiting for such a spark. All three are
characterized by ever hotter and more explosive
Sunni-Shi'ite rivalries.
If the US and
Britain imagine they can play the Sunni-Shi'ite
sectarian rivalry card and somehow keep the
repercussions contained within the realm of
orderliness or "manageable chaos" by means of
their naval and other forces, they are every bit
as dense now as they were when they went into Iraq
in the first place, imagining that that strategy
would succeed.
Sectarian passions on both
sides are already running far too high across the
region to facilitate any form of manageable
transition from the current simmering and mounting
chaos to a hoped-for return to a rough balance of
power. The US and Britain are playing with the
lighting of the fuse of a regionwide sectarian
explosion.
Are the two powers any more
prepared to handle its multi-sphere implications
and repercussions than they were prepared for
those resulting from their 2003 invasion of Iraq?
No, they most certainly are not prepared - but
they are decidedly desperate to pull a "win" from
the flames of failure, even if it means
intentionally orchestrating a regional sectarian
explosion whose outcome they imagine they can
succeed in controlling.
When the US and
Britain stubbornly ignored repeated warnings and
invaded Iraq, they allowed themselves to be tied
into a Gordian knot whose compound filaments are
much stronger than high-tensile steel. The more
vigorously they have struggled to free themselves
from that self-made knot, the tighter it has
constricted their interests and goals in the
region, so at present they are near to being
crushed. The "one last push for victory before
defeat" strategies represent what they hope will
be their ingenious insight to raise the sword and
cut across the knot.
However, because
their endgame strategies rely on the core policy
of an acute exploitation of the region's explosive
Shi'ite-Sunni sectarian rivalries, their captive
Gordian knot is like one that is not only
constricting them, but also simultaneously
constraining an impending detonation of high
explosives. Cut across the knot with the sword to
free themselves and they simultaneously cause the
detonation of those pent-up explosives right in
their own faces.
Shi'ite-Sunni rivalry
inside Iraq is only being kept from a full-blown
detonation by the presence of US and British
forces. In Lebanon, the Palestinian territories
and across the region similar situations
