THE ROVING EYE As
alliances shift, Iran wins.
Again By Pepe Escobar
It's no secret that a great deal of the
alleged success of the George W Bush
adminstration's "surge" - or at least the way it's
being spun in the US - is related to a diminished
flow of Iranian-made weapons towards militias in
Iraq. The weapons anyway were being sold by
Iranian and or Gulf black market dealers - and not
by the central establishment in Tehran.
At
the same time, the publication of the 2007
National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) in the US
virtually debunked the idea that Iran was
conducting a secret nuclear program for military
use.
These two overlapping developments
have alarmed Israeli intelligence - which believes
that Washington and Tehran have concluded a secret
deal brokered by Saudi Arabia. That's
what's
being
spun, for instance, by the Debka website - which
is basically an Israeli military intelligence
outlet.
The Bush administration, according
to this narrative, is developing a new multi-point
strategy for the Middle East (it's useful to
remember that no one even mentions Bush's
spun-to-death "democratic" Greater Middle East
anymore). And Saudi Arabia is the new strategic
go-between.
Via the Saudis, the Bush
administration will demand no more Iranian weapons
in Iraq used against the US military (as if Tehran
could order black market weapons' cartels how to
conduct their business). It will demand no more
Iranian weapons sent to Afghanistan (these weapons
are not from Iran in the first place, but bought
by the Taliban from Pakistani and Sunni Arab
sources).
The Bush administration will
also demand Iran to tell Hezbollah to allow the
election of a new president in Lebanon; as a
reward, Hezbollah will be allowed as a partner in
government (a ludicrous proposition; as if Hassan
Nasrallah, who has the numbers, the popular appeal
and grassroots organization would be ordered to
accept a Saudi-friendly and US-friendly puppet
president).
Israel seems to be concerned
of what it perceives as a Saudi Arabian "betrayal"
- but in fact the Israeli right's problems lie
elsewhere. The NIE denied any possibility of a
Bush administration push towards regime change in
Iran - not to mention an Israeli attack. To
compound the problem, Tehran does not even bother
with United Nations Security Council sanctions
anymore, even if the leadership in Tehran does not
expect the US's formidable firepower to vanish
from the Persian Gulf.
Iran's Foreign
Ministry has bluntly dismissed the Security
Council's third round of sanctions against Iran as
"based on political intentions and double
standards" - especially because it ignored the
February 22 report by International Atomic Energy
Agency (IAEA) director general Mohammad ElBaradei,
according to which the IAEA had found no diversion
of Iran's nuclear program for military use.
President Mahmud Ahmadinejad called the new
resolution "a new mistake". He may have a point.
The IAEA itself decided not to impose sanctions on
Iran.
But for the Israeli troika - Prime
Minister Ehud Olmert, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni
and Defense Minister Ehud Barak - that's never
enough. They want more, and tougher, sanctions. As
for Iran, it has demanded that the IAEA
investigate "how Israel became a nuclear
superpower".
Bush's love affair with
civil war According to a frightened
Debka, Israel's "special relationship with the
United States has collapsed amid its worst foreign
policy debacle in decades. The Olmert government
is paying the price for the military and
diplomatic mismanagement of the war against
Lebanon's Hezbollah of 2006".
This may go
a long way to explain Israel's current bombing
rampage which has killed more than 100 Gaza
residents, more than 50% civilians and most of
these women and children. Middle East diplomats
confirmed to Asia Times Online Hamas was talking
to the Saudis and the Syrians about the
possibility of a truce with Israel. But Israel
does not want anything that would legitimize Hamas
- the Israeli troika is now even floating the idea
of the reoccupation of Gaza.
The Israeli
right clearly knows what Asia Times Online has
revealed - that Bush approved a dirty Palestinian
civil war, a lethal mix of the Bay of Pigs and
Iran-Contra supposedly to be implemented by the
State Deptartment to overthrow Hamas shortly after
Hamas won the free and fair January 2006
parliamentary election in Palestine. (See
Document details 'US' plan to sink
Hamas May 16, 2007
and No-goodniks and the Palestinian
shootout January 9,
2007.)
According to this scenario,
Mohammad Dahlan - Palestinian President Mahmoud
Abbas' head of the National Security Council -
awash with US weapons, was anointed leader of the
"revolution", to the delight of the Israeli right.
It didn't work - of course; Hamas, as a
popular resistance movement, would rather have all
its supporters dead than surrender. The State
Department has declined to comment, although
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has just
offered a spirited defense of US aid for Fatah,
playing once again the same old scratchy tune: it
is imperative to counteract Iran.
Ahmadinejad, the
not-accidental tourist Israel's
concern also centers on a few key, recent
developments such as Ahmadinejad's visit to Saudi
Arabia a year ago, Iran-Egypt talks in Egypt (the
countries had had no formal relations since the
1979 Iranian revolution) and the invitation for
Ahmadinejad to sit at a key Gulf Cooperation
Council meeting - a first for an Iranian leader.
This year, at an Iran-Saudi parliamentary
friendship meeting in Riyadh, Saudi Foreign
Minister Saud al-Faisal stressed all sorts of
efforts should be made to solidify Saudi-Iranian
relations. And, more tellingly, both should "stand
vigilantly against all conspiracies".
Abdel Monem Said, director of the al-Ahram
Center for Political and Strategic Studies in
Cairo, has interpreted the process in terms of
"Saudi Arabia did what people have been asking the
US to do for so long, which is to extend a hand
out to the Iranians". The detente, of course, is a
work in progress, but any Saudi realist will see
that it certainly does not entail the end of
Iran's nuclear program.
The Bush
administration had been promoting a Turkey-Israel
axis, then a Sunni Arab "axis of fear" (Saudi
Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, the United Arab
Emirates) and then a Saudi-Israeli axis, always
trying to isolate Iran. None of these concoctions
seems to have worked.
Hanif Ghaffari,
writing in the Farsi-language, conservative
Iranian daily Resalat, has pointed out how the
recent, very successful Ahmadinejad trip to Iraq
had to be considered in the context of "Iran after
the Iraq war" and "Iraq after occupation by
America". The message could not be more graphic.
When Bush went to Iraq he saw an ultra-fortified
military base, and that was it. Ahmadinejad went
everywhere in broad daylight, welcomed like a
brother. This is how Tehran sees itself - as the
ultimate victor of the US war on Iraq. And no
"surge" or spin - not to mention Israeli paranoia
- can or will make it go away.
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