Engagement
And Confrontation
In The Middle East
By Nicola Nasser
01 March, 2007
Countercurrents.org
Two-pronged U.S. tactics of confrontation
and engagement unfolded last week and described by some media as "turnabouts"
in the strategy of containment of what Washington perceives as adverse
regional roles in the Middle East, but in the Iraqi context and in historical
perspective these tactics are revealed only as old diplomatic manoeuvres
in the drawers of the State Department.
In remarks before the Senate
Appropriations Committee on Tuesday Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice
said the Unite States will engage Iran and Syria, previously condemned
by President George W. Bush as two pillars of the world "axis of
evil," in two meetings of Iraq neighbours and the veto-wielding
members of the United Nations Security Council (UNSEC) next March and
April and expressed hope they "will seize this opportunity."
In face-saving remarks Rice
noted her administration was just responding to a "new diplomatic
initiative" by the Government of Iraq because "Prime Minister
(Noori) Maliki believes and President Bush and I agree that success
in Iraq requires the positive support of Iraq's neighbours." She
did not miss the opportunity to remind that, "This is one of the
key findings, of course of the Iraq Study Group." In fact this
finding was also recommended recently by Prime Minister Tony Blair,
German Chancellor Angela Merkel among other world powers, mainly Russia,
and by friendly Arab states as well as the U.S. bipartisan James Baker-Lee
Hamilton Iraq Study Group.
However Rice stressed that
this seemingly "turnabout" was just an "additional component"
to an U.S. "diplomatic offensive" aimed at cementing concrete
action on the ground, including upgraded military naval presence in
the Arabian Gulf ("Persian" to Iran) and a surge of 21.000
troops in Iraq, to guarantee "the security and stability of the
Gulf region" and the success of the recently-launched "security
plan" in Iraq. (1)
Two weeks on, the U.S.-Iraqi
"Baghdad security plan" unfolds as pursuing an elusive enemy
(2) amid an exacerbated insecurity, while revealing an evasive non-committal
Iraqi government. It is antagonizing the so far allied "Shiite"
militias and at the same time showing indications pointing to what the
prominent investigative reporter Seymour M. Hersh described as a "redirected
strategic shift" by the Bush administration, within the context
of an "open confrontation with Iran," towards realignment
with what he also described as "Sunni extremist groups that ...
are hostile to America and sympathetic to Al Qaeda." (3) This second
"turnabout" on the ground has yet, if ever, to be officially
confirmed.
Gradually but emphatically
the facts of the U.S. policy of first igniting the sectarian divide
in Iraq then playing the emerging sectarian protagonists against each
other are unfolding by the day to reveal the context as well as the
real goals of the American strategy in the occupied country, which the
anti-occupation national resistance is rendering more elusive than in
any time since the invasion of the country in 2003, in as much as the
alleged WMD and the al-Qaedi links to the Sddam Hussein-led Baath regime
had unfolded as merely lies of a covertly planned propaganda campaign
drawn to mislead the American public into supporting their country,s
devastating invasion of another people.
The Washington Post highlighted
the elusiveness of the "enemy": "I don't know who I'm
fighting most of the time. I don't know who is setting what IED,"
it quoted Staff Sgt. Joseph Lopez, 39, a soldier based in the northern
outskirts of the capital. (4) The evasive commitment of the Iraqi government
to the "security plan," which Bush announced it was an "Iraqi"
one, was highlighted by a widely reported leaked confidential letter
Prime Minister al-Maliki sent to the leaders of two of the most notorious
militias warning them of the impending American crackdown and advising
them to go underground or abroad to outmanoeuvre the coming storm, especially
the powerful Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr whose whereabouts are still
unknown; al-Sadr is the main ally of al-Maliki and is represented by
30 members of parliament and six cabinet ministers in the government
in whose name the security plan is carried out.
The instrumental role played
in Baghdad,s security plan by the pro-Iran militias who dominate the
army, police and security agencies of the Iraqi government (5), could
only be interpreted as using the American involvement to serve their
own ends, i.e. to "clean" the Iraqi capital from both the
national resistance and their sectarian foes alike. Once that is done
Baghdad would be secured as their pro-Iran sectarian capital.
Meanwhile it looks unrealistic
that Bush,s reported "strategic shift" could win over their
Sunni counterparts. His shifting of focus from one side of the extreme
sectarian divide to the other aims first at containing then revoking
Iran,s regional role in Iraq either per se or as a prelude to confronting
the Iranians inside their own country.
"The White House is
not just doubling the bet in Iraq, it,s doubling the bet across the
region. This could get very complicated. Everything is upside down,"
Hersh quoted the director of the Saban Center for Middle East Policy
at the Brookings Institution, Martin Indyk, as saying. "The Middle
East is heading into a serious Sunni-Shiite Cold War," Indyk warned.
The Iranian Factor
Ironically Iran has gained
her prominent role in Iraq thanks to the U.S. Washington has adopted,
financed, equipped and promoted pro-Iran militias as the alternative
to the Saddam Hussein-led regime, knowing beforehand they were without
exception nurtured militarily, financially and logistically by Iran
and were either drawing on sectarian or ethnic divides for recruitment
and support against the secular and the Pan-Arab ideology of the ruling
Baath party, the only ideology other than the Islamic one that could
secure a national majority consensus uniting all sects and ethnicities
against foreign threats. The aim was to neutralize an Iraqi pro-Iran
Shiite base as a tactic to buy Iranian collusion with the invasion.
That aim was fulfilled, but entailed the current Iranian prominence,
which has become a counterproductive U.S. burden that should be removed.
Ironically also Iraq,s regional
role was one of the main targets of the U.S. occupation. The sectarian
power struggle in Iraq in the post-Saddam era was exactly the US-sought
pretext to stay in the country and use the divide as a realistic excuse
to promote federalism as solution and accordingly install a weak central
governing authority that depends internally more on regional federal
security than on a strong national central source of authority and externally
on the U.S. occupying power, which entails both a small Iraqi army and
a weak federally-divided economy, thus dooming a major Arab state that
was a founder of the League of Arab States and the United Nations to
a minor regional role or no role at all in regional, especially Arab,
politics.
Five months ahead of the
invasion, Michael Eisenstadt, a senior fellow military and security
expert at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy said: "A
government organized along federal lines would rely on local law enforcement
for internal security, alleviating the need for a large army or security
apparatus. Such changes could foster a less aggressive Iraq that is
less likely to assert a leadership role in the Arab world. The United
States, not Iraq, will ensure regional stability and provide a counterbalance
to Iran." (6)
Like many Arab governments,
Iran has converged with the U.S. strategy of containing the Iraqi regional
role. Tehran maintained armed formations, such as the Badr Corps, inside
Iraq prior to the U.S. invasion. In 2004, the assistant commander of
the Iranian Republican Guard announced, during his visit to London,
that Iran has two brigades and other militia in Iraq in order to protect
the national security of Iran. Tehran anticipated and welcomed the U.S.
invasion since it would destroy her chief enemy in the region. Now that
the Iraqi enemy has been destroyed as a state irrespective of the ruling
regime, "Iraq is considered to be the first line of defense for
Iran against any foreign invasion." (7)
Containment of Regional Roles
All U.S. administrations
whether Republican or Democrat have been always ready to confront the
regional roles of non-Middle Eastern powers, like Russia, or of Arab
and Islamic states in Middle East in two cases: When those roles are
in conflict with the Israeli security prerequisites and when they could
compromise the American free access to the "vital" oil interests.
Late Saddam Hussein and Jamal Abdul Nasser of Egypt did both. Now Iran
and Syria are also portrayed as threats to both U.S. interests. The
American diplomatic rhetoric about defending their regional "moderate"
friendly and allied governments against the regional roles of both countries
is merely meant to be sold to American voters, Arab public as well as
to other unforthcoming world powers and public opinion.
The Iranian hosts of the
Syrian President Bashar al-Assad during a two-day visit to Tehran last
week said the U.S. and Israel are trying to undermine the regional positions
of Iran and Syria by questioning their roles in Iraq, Lebanon and with
Palestinians so they remain the sole players in the region. When the
U.S. bipartisan James Baker-Lee Hamilton group recommended engaging
the regional roles of both countries where those roles are mostly felt,
particularly in Iraq, the Bush Administration opted instead for containment
through confrontation with both countries, encouraged both overtly and
covertly, directly and indirectly, by Israel and other regional players
who are adversely affected by their cross-border influences, in a pattern
that reminds historians and observers of a similar reaction to the over-borders
political and military roles of late Iraqi and Egyptian presidents Saddam
Hussein and Jamal Abdul Nasser during the second half of the twentieth
century.
However the U.S. case against
Iran and Syria this time is essentially flawed. When Saddam Hussein
crossed the American red line and pushed Iraqi forces to sit on the
Kuwaiti oil fields in 1990, in retaliation to what he perceived as a
U.S. and regional ungratefulness after eight bloody years in a war,
during which the only human fodder were Iraqis, to contain a perceived
Iranian military and political threat to the historic American regional
"sphere of influence" in the Arabian Gulf as well as to Iraq,
both countries stood pragmatically firm on the opposite side.
Syria in particular is promoting
a regional role to gain a better negotiating position in pursuit of
peace with Israel as "a strategic option" since 1971 when
late President Hafez al-Assad assumed power to end a split in the ruling
Baath party early in the seventies of the last century over the issue
of peace with Israel, but Israel nonetheless has been unforthcoming.
The U.S.-.initiated current crisis with Syria has everything to do with
her containment strategy than with the U.S. allegations that Damascus
is a "terrorist-supporting" country regionally. Syria,s regional
leading role is the target. Once this role is neutralised Washington
will certainly leave the Syrians to their internal potentially Iraqi-style
divides. The same U.S. strategy applies to Iran.
As for the U.S. oil interests
the self-sufficient Syria and Iran are not and never have been a threat.
Moreover Syria in particular has been a regional stabilizing factor
particularly to the U.S.-allied GCC oil-producing countries as well
as through her close coordination with them. Her military intervention
in Lebanon, which ended the first civil war there, was supported diplomatically
and financially by those same countries, green-lighted by the United
States and grudgingly accepted by Israel, though unexpectedly it had
become the incubator that nurtured another extension of Iran,s regional
role.
The "containment strategy"
has been always a national bipartisan U.S. strategy against what she
labels as "rogue" states, which do not identically fall in
line with the American strategies abroad. This strategy has become dangerously
destabilising worldwide after the collapse of the balancing and deterring
power of the former USSR and the emergence of the United States as the
world,s only super power because the military intervention has been
added as a feasible risk-free addition to sanctions within the containment
strategy.
The United States however
tolerates even military regional roles played by strategic allies like
Israel and encourages political roles regionally by friendly allied
Arab states, which move and act within the U.S. strategy in the Middle
East.
Nicola Nasser is a veteran
Arab journalist based in Ramallah, West Bank of the Israeli-occupied
Palestinian territories.
Notes
(1) Remarks by Secretary
of State Condoleezza Rice Before the Senate Appropriations Committee,
Washington, DC, Feb. 27, 2007.
(2) The Washington Post,
Feb. 26, 2007.
(3) Seymour M. Hersh, The
New Yorker, Issue of 2007-03-05, Feb. 25, 2007.
(4) Ibid (2)
(5) Mounir Elkhamri, "Iran,s
Contribution to the Civil War in Iraq," Jamestown Foundation, Jan.
2007. Elkhamri is a former aide, "cultural adviser" and translator
for Major General Rodriguez, the commander of Task Force Freedom, General
George Casey, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and U.S. Ambassador
to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad.
(6) Michael Eisenstadt, Washington
Institute for Near East Policy, POLICYWATCH, NO. 681, Nov. 25, 2002.
(7) Ibid, Mounir Elkhamri.