Snatching war out of the jaws of
peace By Spengler
Washington had the opportunity at the turn
of 2007 to isolate and neutralize the Mahmud
Ahmadinejad regime in Tehran, but through
stupidity and arrogance has made war the most
probable outcome.
Misreading Russia (see
Russia's hudna with the Muslim
world, February 21) may have been the
irreparable blunder. Meddling in the
Muslim-majority states of the former Soviet Union
and expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty
Organization prompt
Russia to step on
Washington's toes in the one place that hurts,
namely West Asia. Russia drags its feet on United
Nations Security Council sanctions against Iran to
send Washington a message of extreme displeasure
about the overall state of Russian-US relations.
But this has an unintended consequence: it has led
Iran to believe that without Russian support, the
United States will be isolated and impotent to act
against it. That is not true, for the US can and
will act to forefend a nuclear-armed Iran, alone
if need be.
A three-way tragedy of errors
is in progress. Russia can make a reasonable case
for US mistreatment given the construction of
anti-missile radar in Eastern Europe, the
increasing US military presence on its southern
border, and - worst of all - fostering what may
become hostile Islamic political movements in
Central Asia. But Moscow has misread the
consequences of a tactical maneuver to embarrass
Washington in the Persian Gulf. The Iranians, in
turn, have taken false hope from the disagreement
among the former Cold War antagonists.
America's foreign-policy establishment
dismisses Russia as a spoiler. Professor Niall
Ferguson wrote in Time magazine on February 15,
"Russia is the only major power that has an
interest in high energy prices. It is therefore
the only major power with no interest in Middle
Eastern stability. That is why Russia poses
America's biggest problem when it comes to
stopping Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons." [1]
That assessment is catastrophically wrong;
unlike the Americans, for whom the distant future
is bounded by the next presidential election,
Russia thinks a generation ahead, to the year 2040
or 2050 when Russia will have a Muslim majority.
Unlike the senescent Europeans, Islamification is
something Russia never will tolerate. The danger
of radicalizing the Muslim populations of Russia
vastly outweighs the potential benefits to Russia
of a spike in oil prices, particularly given that
the present level of oil prices puts Russia's
finances in superb condition.
Russia and
Saudi Arabia, I observed on February 21, have a
common interest in suppressing conflict in the
Persian Gulf, and for precisely the same reason.
Both are exposed to political contagion from a US
attack on Iran. That explains an unusual choice of
dinner guests in Riyadh, namely former KGB
official and now president, Vladimir Putin, on
February 11, and arch-heretic Ahmadinejad on March
3. At Saudi invitation, the Iranian president flew
to Riyadh for dinner on Saturday evening and flew
back the same night, without, however, commenting
on the subject that the Saudis had invited him to
discuss: Iran's nuclear program.
It is a
reasonable assumption that the Saudis invited
Ahmadinejad in the hope of buying him off - for
all they can do, or try to do, is to buy off
prospective adversaries - and that the effort
failed entirely. Guy Bechor wrote on March 4 in
the Jerusalem Post, "The Iranian president
essentially spurned the Saudis' hand, extended in
hopes of preventing a major crisis in the Gulf.
The Saudis themselves are also afraid of such a
crisis, with its many possible scenarios. Could
the 15% of their Shi'ite population begin an
uprising? Could Iran attack them? This scares
them."
Regime change in Tehran might avert
the crisis; Asia Times Online correspondent Pepe
Escobar on March 2 outlined one such scenario, in
which a triumvirate including former presidents
Hashemi Rafsanjani and Mohammad Khatami might
assume the position of supreme leader now held by
the ailing Ayatollah Ali Khameini. [2] European
diplomats have been trying "to talk Washington out
of an attack" by fostering such a shift in Tehran,
but assign a low probability to its success.
Woulda-shoulda-coulda is a poor starting
point for political analysis, but it seems likely
that if Washington had sat down to horse-trade
with the Russians, Iran would be isolated and the
regime-change scenario might have had better
chances for success. As matters stand, European
diplomats are gloomy about the likely outcome.
From the vantage point of Tehran, regime
change in Washington seems far more likely than
regime change at home. A Democratic administration
in January 2009 may simply walk away from the Iraq
mess, leaving Iran as the dominant power in the
region. Iran may believe that its leverage inside
Iraq will compel the administration of President
George W Bush to stand down. This negotiation has
been in play since the autumn of 2005 (see A Syriajevo in the
making? October 25, 2005). Again,
Tehran seems likely to overplay its hand. The US
wants to stabilize Iraq, but it will not do so at
the expense of permitting Iran to acquire nuclear
arms.
It is pointless to read the signals
out of Washington to divine US intentions. A
generous interpretation of the confusion on the
Potomac would be that matters have become so
complex that the moment Washington sends one sort
of signal, it is compelled by the next turn of
events to send a different one, to the point that
no one can make sense of what the US wants to
communicate. A less charitable interpretation
would be that no one is in charge, and that
different agencies of government are pursuing
their own agendas without accountability to a
central authority.
In the end it does not
matter much which interpretation we choose, for
Washington has done everything possible to destroy
the prospects for a diplomatic solution. Whether
it was possible to begin with, the historians will
have to debate. For the time being, Bush has
snatched war out of the jaws of peace.
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