SPEAKING FREELY A last throw of the dice ...?
By Bob Rigg
Speaking Freely is an Asia Times Online feature that allows guest writers to have
their say. Please
click here if you are interested in contributing.
When President George W Bush was sworn in as US president in the first year of
a new millennium and a new century, the United States appeared to be at the
height of its powers - astride the world stage like a colossus. Some time
elapsed before it was realized that Bush had entrusted his foreign policy to a
group of mostly unelected conservative ideologues whose world views had been
shaped during the Cold War. Playing on the imperial associations of the Roman
and British empires, they aimed to lay
the foundations for a century of unbroken American political, military, and
economic pre-eminence to be known as "Pax Americana".
The US had played a key role in the Middle East since the Central Intelligence
Agency (CIA)overthrew an elected Iranian government in 1953, replacing it with
a monarch whose universally unpopular reign was terminated in 1979, when Iran's
warring factions united to exorcise him. Iran's oil resources were the
touchstone for the CIA intervention, even then. US domination of Iran and its
oil, together with its strategic partnership with Israel, enabled it to call
the shots throughout the Middle East until the Iranian revolution left it
without either a regional powerbase or direct control over Middle Eastern
energy resources.
The vacuum created by the Iranian revolution had to be filled by a new outpost
guaranteeing US influence over the region and its vital energy resources. Iraq
and Iran were in the sights of US strategic and military planners. Foremost
amongst them were the neo-conservative architects of the Project for a New
American Century, including luminaries such as John Bolton, Dick Cheney,
Richard Perle, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz.
The neo-conservative scenario was clear: a devastating military strike would
knock out Iraq's powerful armed forces, and its population would welcome US
liberators with open arms. The US would then immediately strike at Iran,
considered to be as weakened by the Western-backed Iraqi war as it was by the
draconian and unilateral US trade embargo. Before the world could collect its
wits, both Iraq and Iran would have been under direct US control. But the best
laid plans of mice and men ...
The rationale for the US attack on Iraq has in the meantime been unmasked as a
patchwork of deceit. The phrase "shock and awe", coined to describe the US
blitzkrieg, came to describe the faltering responses of the US military to the
chaos and confusion of occupied Iraq. Incompetence, maladministration and
corruption were the hallmarks of the heavy-handed and inept US response to
Iraqi assertions of sovereignty.
The Iraqi parliament has so far resisted immense US pressure to hand over the
exploitation of Iraqi oil to US and other foreign companies, and to guarantee
more than 80 long-term US military bases on its soil. The US government has
been seen to repeatedly trample on internationally accepted legal, human rights
and ethical standards, sacrificing truth and honesty on the altar of expediency
and self-interest.
While the US is bogged down in Iraq, it is losing more and more ground to a
revitalized Taliban in neighboring Afghanistan, with more US troops now
stationed in Afghanistan than in Iraq. Pakistan is increasingly being sucked
into the vortex of this expanding regional conflict, prompting even
president-in-waiting Obama to threaten it with possible military intervention.
Iraq and Afghanistan are now barely under the control of an awesome US military
panoply including ground forces, navy, air force, nuclear-armed submarines, and
covert operations.
Long before the US occupied Iraq, France and Britain covertly helped Israel to
develop a nuclear capability of about 200 warheads, backed up by sophisticated
missiles. Germany is about to provide Israel with nuclear capable submarines.
In a worst case scenario, Israel's underwater missiles could wipe much of the
Middle East from the map.
Although the United States and Israel are the main destabilizing factors in a
region whose militarization and arms races are the product of their own failed
policies, they relentlessly demonize Iran as a malignant cancer threatening
regional and world peace - even though the chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of
Staff, who has consistently opposed military intervention in Iran, recently
said that the US could crush Iran like an ant. And the recent US National
Intelligence Estimate found that, with a high degree of probability, Iran has
no plans to go nuclear at present.
Iran has more than once formally offered to enrich uranium on its soil at a
facility jointly owned and operated by an international consortium. In such a
context the diversion of nuclear materials for non-peaceful purposes would be
rendered impossible by a process of shared inspection and verification. When
this promising proposal was initially accepted by the European Union about
three years ago, the US applied so much pressure that it was dumped.
The new American century has so far lasted less than one decade. Although the
US is still by far the most powerful international player, its pre-eminence has
been eroded by misguided neo-conservative adventures in the Middle East, and by
the emergence of a new international constellation of powerful and assertive
states, including in the region. Their assertiveness has increased in
proportion to the decline in the political and moral standing of the US, which
is now less in control of the world and the Middle East than at any time since
the turn of the new century.
While one key neo-conservative survivor is entrenched in the White House, and
as long as it is possible for a US president to go to war without the assent of
Congress, war against Iran is always conceivable as a final apocalyptic
manifestation of Pax Americana, before its time runs out. Such a war would, in
addition to transforming the Middle East into a "fireball", in the words of
Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, merely
hasten the already striking decline of the US in terms of power, influence, and
moral authority.
New Zealander Bob Rigg has written extensively on nuclear and chemical
weapons, the United Nations and the Middle East, with special reference to
Iran. He was formerly senior editor for the Organization for the Prohibition of
Chemical Weapons and chairman of New Zealand's Consultative Committee on
Disarmament from 2003-2006.
Speaking Freely is an Asia Times Online feature that allows guest writers to have
their say. Please
click here if you are interested in contributing.
Head
Office: Unit B, 16/F, Li Dong Building, No. 9 Li Yuen Street East,
Central, Hong Kong Thailand Bureau:
11/13 Petchkasem Road, Hua Hin, Prachuab Kirikhan, Thailand 77110
