A Last Throw Of The Dice ...?

By Bob Rigg
June 10, 2008
Courtesy Of Asia Times Online

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.

(Copyright 2008 Bob Rigg.)