Next We Take Tehran

News: The confrontation with Iran has very little to do with nukes—and a lot with the agenda of empire
By Robert Dreyfuss
July/August 2006 Issue

President Bush may or may not order a massive aerial bombardment of Iran later this year. Or he may wait until 2007. Or he may simply escalate a risky confrontation with Iran through covert action and economic sanctions. But whatever the next act in the crisis, don’t be fooled by the assertion that the problem is Iran’s pursuit of nuclear arms.

Iran is a decade away from gaining access to the bomb, according to the administration’s own National Intelligence Estimate, and despite all the talk about the ugliness of the theocratic regime in Tehran, the likely showdown is, at bottom, driven by the geopolitics of oil. With one-tenth of the world’s petroleum reserves and one-sixth of its natural gas reserves, Iran sits in a strategic geographical position that makes it the cockpit for control of the entire Middle East. It straddles the Persian Gulf’s choke points, including the Strait of Hormuz; it has important influence among Shiites throughout Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and the Gulf states; and it borders highly contested real estate to the north, from the Caucasus to the Caspian Sea to Central Asia.

The logic of the Bush administration is inexorable. Its ironclad syllogism is this: The United States is and must remain the world’s preeminent power, if need be by using its superior military might. One of the two powers with the ability to emerge as a rival—China—depends vitally on the Persian Gulf and Central Asia for its future supply of oil; the other—Russia—is heavily engaged in Iran, Central Asia, and the Caucasus region. Therefore, if the United States can secure a dominant position in the Gulf, it will have an enormous advantage over its potential challengers. Call it zero-sum geopolitics: Their loss is our gain.

Of course, the idea of the Persian Gulf as an American lake is not exactly new. Neoconservatives, moderate conservatives, “realists” typified by Henry Kissinger and James A. Baker, and liberal internationalists in the mold of President Carter’s national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, mostly agree that the Gulf ought to be owned and operated by the United States, and the idea has been a cornerstone of U.S. policy under presidents both Republican and Democratic. Its adherents justified it in the past, however thinly, because of the exigencies of World War II and then the Cold War.

But if the administration’s goals are congruent with past U.S. policy, its methods represent a radical departure. Previous administrations relied on alliances, proxy relationships with local rulers, a military presence that stayed mostly behind the scenes, and over-the-horizon forces ready to intervene in a crisis. President Bush has directly occupied two countries in the region and threatened a third. And by claiming a sweeping regional war without end against what he has referred to as “Islamofascism,” combined with an announced goal to impose U.S.-style free-market democracy in southwest Asia, he has adopted a utopian approach much closer to imperialism than to traditional balance-of-power politics.

By inaugurating a war of choice against a nation that had not attacked the United States, and by justifying his actions under a new doctrine of unilateral, preventive war, Bush shattered the U.S. establishment’s policy consensus while alienating America’s closest allies, angering its rivals, and provoking a storm of anti-Americanism in the Muslim world. Now, like a high-stakes blackjack player doubling down, the president is letting the world know that he is ready to do it all over again in Iran.

A SUCCESSION OF U.S. presidents, from Franklin Roosevelt to Dwight Eisenhower to Jimmy Carter to George H.W. Bush, literally and figuratively planted the American flag at the heart of the Persian Gulf. F.D.R., who met Saudi Arabia’s king aboard a warship in 1945, had proclaimed two years earlier: “I hereby find that the defense of Saudi Arabia is vital to the defense of the United States.” Carter, in 1980, restated the doctrine even more forcefully: “Let our position be absolutely clear. An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States.”

Since 2001, President Bush has radically revised the rules of the game. From the beginning, the neoconservative architects of Bush’s policy intended for the war that began in Afghanistan and expanded to Iraq to go on, in a dominolike series of forced regime change, revolution, and even war, to Iran and Syria, Saudi Arabia, and beyond. Iran, in particular, was always seen as the next step after Iraq. The original idea was that if the United States toppled Saddam Hussein and installed in Baghdad a regime dominated by Kurdish and Shiite puppets, Iran would be caught between U.S. forces to its west in Iraq and to its east in Afghanistan. And because both Shiites and Kurds have allies inside Iran, and because Iraqi Shiite religious leaders have intimate connections with the ruling Iranian theocracy, the skids would be greased for a U.S.-inspired overthrow of the Iranian government—or so Bush and Cheney believed.

Needless to say, things haven’t exactly gone according to plan. Still, it’s far too early to write off the impact of 130,000 U.S. soldiers in a country the size of Iraq, backed by a president convinced that he can still pull out a victory, especially if the troops stay for another five years or more. And if the United States launches the sort of bombing campaign against Iran that is being considered—involving attacks against not just nuclear research facilities but also airfields, command and control centers, and other intelligence and military targets—to say that the consequences would be unpredictable is an understatement. The administration and many of its supporters are apparently ready to take the gamble that after an armed confrontation with Iran, a moderate, pro-American regime might emerge from the wreckage. Reuel Marc Gerecht, a former CIA officer and fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, is explicit on that score. “I don’t disagree [about] the convulsive effects that a strike would have. I actually think that it would be in the end a healthy thing for Iran internally.” >>>cont

Link Here