Countdown
For Iran
By Ramzy Baroud
10 February, 2007
Countercurrents.org
The
relationship between Iran and the United States is one of peculiar temperament:
intense but accommodating at times, barefaced and seemingly self-destructive
at others.
Currently, the latter estimation
rings truer: the US naval military build up in the east Mediterranean
and the Gulf, conjoined with an intense and sinister propaganda campaign
that is being drummed up at home, among other signals, are all pointing
to one ill-fated conclusion: the Bush administration, entranced in its
foolishness, has decided to discard, and in its entirety, the Baker-Hamilton
recommendations; instead of engaging Iran politically, the US is opting
to engage it militarily.
Is it possible that the increasingly
prevailing analyses are true, as fluently communicated in a recent commentary
by Australian journalist John Pilger, that the Bush administration is
gearing up for an attack against Iran as a way of "buying time
for its disaster in Iraq"?
Pilger suggests another motivating
factor for Bush's new possible war: "As the American disaster in
Iraq deepens and domestic and foreign opposition grows, neocon fanatics
such as Vice-President Cheney believe their opportunity to control Iran's
oil will pass unless they act no later than the spring."
But how can attacking Iran
buy the 'Bushites' time, if they, more than any one of us know the deeply
entrenched Iranian presence and influence in Iraq, often directly over
prominent elements of the pro-American Shia government: one of whom
is the indestructible Abdel Aziz Al Hakim?
"Al Hakim spent 20 years
in Iran prior to the fall of Saddam and is clearly allied to the Mullahs,"
writers US commentator Mike Whitney. "His militia, the Badr Brigade,
was trained by the Iranian Republican Guards (as well as the CIA) and
is perhaps the most feared death squad in all of Iraq. Al Hakim's militia
operates out of the Iraqi interior ministry and is deeply engaged in
the purging of Sunnis from Baghdad."
Isn't it rational to envisage
that an attack on Iran would upset the cozy relations that the Americans
have cultivated with al-Hakim and such disreputable characters, thus
lead to further destabilisation of Iraq, to more of the same unmitigated
violence, where well over 3,000 US soldiers, nearly 1,000 contractors
have met their doom, not counting the 45 thousand who were evacuated
due to injuries and other medical emergencies, as indicated by Iraqbodycount.org?
US sources claim that innumerable
Iraqis receive their salaries from Tehran (that is aside from the alleged
40,000 Iranian agents in Iraq, which the US media ceaselessly talks
about), an indication of Iran's incessant efforts to obtain the loyalty
of many of Iraq's Shia, and to dig into such valuable human reserves
whenever needed, such as in the case of a war with the United States.
Considering Iran's "natural
affinity with the Shia majority of Iraq", as accurately depicted
by Pilger, by provoking a military showdown with Iran, the US is condemned
to broaden its military confrontation in Iraq, which would then include
Shia as well as Sunni, in a most imprudent barter to achieve an impossible
military mission in Iran. Since airpower and commando style 'surgical'
operations inside Iranian territories -- that would most likely involve
some Israeli special army units -- are all that the US can conjure up
at the moment, for ground troops are no longer a palpable option (half
of the recently announced US military surge of 21,000 troops in Iraq
will constitute from the same soldiers who are already serving in the
country, simply by prolonging their tours and cancelling some vacations)
one can safely conclude that any US military adventure in Iran will
bring an indecisive outcome, at best, if not a wholesale disaster, a
most likely possibility.
How about the other suggestion,
that neocon fanatics believe their opportunity to control Iran's oil
will pass unless they act no later than the spring?
This suggestion would also
seem doubtful, for the neocon's war architects are still scrambling
to avoid the blame of the Iraq fiasco and are at odds with Bush himself
and his war generals, using their wide sway over US mainstream media
to blame the president for all the ills that have befallen the country
-- ills that were born mostly from their own ominous war stratagems
and their unwarranted commitment to Israel's security at the expense
of their country's own. How can such a group of intellectuals still
effectively hold sufficient clout to lead the US into another ill-advised
war? Moreover, how can Cheney and his discredited ilk even contemplate
the seizure of Iran's oil if Iraq's oil industry is still in shambles
and has proven ineffective to settle the heavy bill of war, which is
moving its way toward the half trillion dollar mark?
Considering these difficult
questions, one must assume that any attack on Iraq is both irrational
from a military viewpoint and self-defeating from a political one. However,
the quandary with any political analysis of this subject that consults
reason or even Machiavellian realpolitik is that it fails to consider
history, and in this case, recent history which taught us that the Bush
administration functions in a vacuum, separate from commonsense or any
other kind of sense. It was around this time, some four years ago, that
many hoped that the American military buildup in the Gulf region was
aimed at strengthening the US political position against Iraq, to simply
convey to former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein that the US 'means business'.
It was clear from the outset to any even-headed observer that a war
against Iraq would destabilise the region and harm the United States'
overall interests in the Middle East. I stated that numerous times on
American radio programmes, receiving all sorts of censure for being
anti-American and unpatriotic.
Now, we stand at the same
critical junction, four years later, as US news networks are readying
for another awesome fireworks show, this time over Tehran; dehumanisation
of the Iranians has already begun; the public is being fed with all
kinds of half-truths and all sorts of rubbish about the Islamic Republic
and its people; insanity has returned and the voices of reasons are
again, labelled, shunned and marginalised. But for obvious reasons,
this time around, war is an evident mistake, a fact that should irk
and make every sensible American, every Congressman, every commentator
question the wisdom of a new war while the country is on the verge of
defeat in another.
Such a reality suggests that
the Bush administration is working against the interests of his own
people and makes Pilger's analysis the more poignant; indeed, as irrational
as it may seem, the US could very much be on its way to war with Iran.
But as explained by Joschka
Fischer, Germany's foreign minister and vice chancellor from 1998-2005,
"getting into Iraq and defeating Saddam was easy. But today, America
is stuck there and knows neither how to win, nor how to get out."
Fischer writes: "A mistake is not corrected by repeating it over
and over again. Perseverance in error does not correct the error; it
merely exacerbates it."
But this is exactly the key
trait that has defined the current Bush administration since its early
years in office. It's committed to duplicating failures; instead of
abandoning the Iraqi ship, it insists on setting sale in the same tumultuous
sea, another defected one.
Indeed, the US is again back
on the same self-destruct mode, in the name of national security, regional
stability, staying the course, and all the rest. Reality cannot be any
further from the truth, however. A war against Iran will further exasperate
the instability of the region and compromise the security of the United
States, at home and abroad. It might also be the end of American military
adventurism in the region for some time, but at a price so heavy, so
unbearable. If Iraq's cakewalk has cost the lives of 650,000 Iraqis,
how many more must die in broader war before Bush bows to commonsense
and brings the grinding wheel of war to a halt?
Ramzy Baroud
teaches mass communication at Curtin University of Technology and is
the author of The Second Palestinian Intifada: A Chronicle of a People's
Struggle. He is also the editor-in-chief of PalestineChronicle.com.
He can be contacted at: [email protected]
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