internally
if possible. The strategy appears to be: try to
break the country up internally, try to impel the
leadership to be as harsh and brutal as possible.
That's the immediate consequence of
constant threats. Everyone knows that. That's one
of the reasons the reformists, Shirin Ebadi and
Akbar Ganji and others, are bitterly complaining
about the US threats, that it's undermining their
efforts to reform and democratize Iran. But that's
presumably its purpose. Since it's an
obvious consequence, you have
to assume it's the purpose. Just like in law,
anticipated consequences are taken as the evidence
for intention. And here it's so obvious you can't
seriously doubt it.
So it could be that
one strain of the policy is to stir up
secessionist movements, particularly in the
oil-rich regions, the Arab regions near the Gulf,
also the Azeri regions and others. Second is to
try to get the leadership to be as brutal and
harsh and repressive as possible, to stir up
internal disorder and maybe resistance. And a
third is to try to pressure other countries, and
Europe is the most amenable, to join efforts to
strangle Iran economically. Europe is kind of
dragging its feet, but they usually go along with
the United States.
The efforts to
intensify the harshness of the regime show up in
many ways. For example, the West absolutely adores
[President Mahmud] Ahmadinejad. Any wild statement
that he comes out with immediately gets circulated
in headlines and mistranslated. They love him. But
anybody who knows anything about Iran, presumably
the editorial offices, knows that he doesn't have
anything to do with foreign policy. Foreign policy
is in the hands of his superior, the Supreme
Leader [Grand Ayatollah Seyyed Ali] Khamenei.
But they don't report his statements,
particularly when his statements are pretty
conciliatory. For example, they love it when
Ahmadinejad says that Israel shouldn't exist, but
they don't like it when Khamenei right afterward
says that Iran supports the Arab League position
on Israel-Palestine. As far as I'm aware, it never
got reported. Actually you could find Khamenei's
more conciliatory positions in The Financial
Times, but not here.
And it's repeated by
Iranian diplomats, but that's no good. The Arab
League proposal calls for normalization of
relations with Israel if it accepts the
international consensus of the two-state
settlement, which has been blocked by the United
States and Israel for 30 years. And that's not a
good story, so it's either not mentioned or it's
hidden somewhere.
It's very hard to
predict the Bush administration today because
they're deeply irrational. They were irrational to
start with, but now they're desperate. They have
created an unimaginable catastrophe in Iraq. This
should've been one of the easiest military
occupations in history, and they succeeded in
turning it into one of the worst military
disasters in history. They can't control it, and
it's almost impossible for them to get out for
reasons you can't discuss in the United States
because to discuss the reasons why they can't get
out would be to concede the reasons why they
invaded.
We're supposed to believe that
oil had nothing to do with it, that if Iraq were
exporting pickles or jelly and the center of world
oil production were in the South Pacific that the
United States would've liberated them anyway. It
has nothing to do with the oil, what a crass idea!
Anyone with their head screwed on knows that that
can't be true.
Allowing an independent and
sovereign Iraq could be a nightmare for the United
States. It would mean that it would be
Shi'ite-dominated, at least if it's minimally
democratic. It would continue to improve relations
with Iran, just what the United States doesn't
want to see. And beyond that, right across the
border in Saudi Arabia where most of Saudi oil is,
there happens to be a large Shi'ite population,
probably a majority.
Moves toward
sovereignty in Iraq stimulate pressures first for
human rights among the bitterly repressed Shi'ite
population but also toward some degree of
autonomy. You can imagine a kind of a loose
Shi'ite alliance in Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Iran,
controlling most of the world's oil and
independent of the United States. And much worse,
although Europe can be intimidated by the United
States, China can't. It's one of the reasons, the
main reasons, why China is considered a threat.
We're back to the Mafia principle.
China
has been there for 3,000 years, has contempt for
the barbarians, is overcoming a century of
domination, and simply moves on its own. It does
not get intimidated when Uncle Sam shakes his
fist. That's scary. In particular, it's dangerous
in the case of the Middle East. China is the
center of the Asian energy-security grid, which
includes the Central Asian states and Russia.
India is also hovering around the edge, South
Korea is involved, and Iran is an associate member
of some kind. If the Middle East oil resources
around the Gulf, which are the main ones in the
world, if they link up to the Asian grid, the
United States is really a second-rate power. A lot
is at stake in not withdrawing from Iraq.
I'm sure that these issues are discussed
in internal planning. It's inconceivable that they
can't think of this. But it's out of public
discussion, it's not in the media, it's not in the
journals, it's not in the Baker-Hamilton report.
And I think you can understand the reason. To
bring up these issues would open the question why
the United States and Britain invaded. And that
question is taboo. It's a principle that
anything our leaders do is for noble reasons. It
may be mistaken, it may be ugly, but basically
noble. And if you bring in normal moderate,
conservative, strategic, economic objectives, you
threatening that principle. It's remarkable the
extent to which it's held. So the original
pretexts for the invasion were weapons of mass
destruction and ties to al-Qaeda that nobody but
maybe Wolfowitz or Cheney took seriously.
The single question, as they kept
reiterating in the leadership, was: Will Saddam
give up his programs of weapons of mass
destruction? The single question was answered a
couple of months later, the wrong way. And quickly
the party line shifted. In November 2003, Bush
announced his freedom agenda: our real goal is to
bring democracy to Iraq, to transform the Middle
East. That became the party line, instantly.
But it's a mistake to pick out individuals
because it's close to universal, even in
scholarship. In fact you can even find scholarly
articles that begin by giving the evidence that
it's complete farce but nevertheless accept it.
There was a pretty good study of the freedom
agenda in Current History by two scholars, and
they give the facts. They point out that the
freedom agenda was announced on November 2003
after the failure to find weapons of mass
destruction, but the freedom agenda is real even
if there's no evidence for it.
In fact, if
you look at our policies, they're the opposite.
Take Palestine. There was a free election in
Palestine, but it came out the wrong way. So
instantly, the United States and Israel, with
Europe tagging along, moved to punish the
Palestinian people, and punish them harshly,
because they voted the wrong way in a free
election. That's accepted here in the West as
perfectly normal. That illustrates the deep hatred
and contempt for democracy among Western elites,
so deep-seated they can't even perceive it when
it's in front of their eyes.
You punish
people severely if they vote the wrong way in a
free election. There's a pretext for that too,
repeated every day: Hamas must agree to first
recognize Israel, second to end all violence,
third to accept past agreements. Try to find a
mention of the fact that the United States and
Israel reject all three of those. They obviously
don't recognize Palestine, they certainly don't
withdraw the use of violence or the threat of it -
in fact they insist on it - and they don't accept
past agreements, including the roadmap.
I
suspect one of the reasons why Jimmy Carter's book
has come under such fierce attack is because it's
the first time, I think, in
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